Another Response

 I know I said I was going to critique the second post from the anti-LDS poster (I am) but I almost didn't.  If there's a point to be made in all this, I think that's been done.  The source used by our friend was shown to be poorly researched and unreliable... and that's a charitable assessment.  I'm not calling anybody a liar, because I'd like to think they aren't, but it isn't like that's unheard of.  

But there is another post, and since it isn't nearly as long, I decided to just go ahead and address its claims just in case it matters to anybody.

The post I'll be responding to is right here.

After another intro we get to the first section.

"The backstory is riddled with "dated" flaws and logic issues.

One of the key reasons I believe Mormons are believers in a lie is that it was very clearly a product of its time. It bears a lot of artifacts of Joseph Smith's day and age that would have made sense by the knowledge then but by contemporary standards the cracks are beyond obvious and the contradictions beyond resolving."

Sounds like we're going to see some very ironclad arguments.  Let's take a look.

"The Book of Mormon claims the true Jerusalem is in America, specifically, the North American continent. In fact, this focus on North America as special is not a new idea. Further, the Book of Mormon hinges on this concept to make sense of itself. If any physical location on the planet is ultimately important in the long run to God's agenda, then they might have a point."

It's hard to know exactly how to approach these claims because no support of any kind is given.  I guess we'll just take each sentence one at a time.

• The book of Mormon makes no such claim about North America.  It also doesn't talk about a "true Jerusalem."  There's no indication as to the source of that claim.  (Get used to that.)
• This is not a new idea?  Source?  I'm not saying whether it's a new idea or not, but it would have been nice to get some kind of source for this statement.
• What concept?  A true Jerusalem in North America?  The Book of Mormon can't really hinge on an idea it doesn't present.
• Not sure what he means in that last sentence.  Would we have a point if physical locations are important?  How so?  Why?  Genuinely asking. 

Maybe we'll get some insights about this in the next sentence.

"The problem is that their own doctrine states before we were born, we existed in a spiritual state of grace we need to return to and that their idea of Heaven is multi-tiered, with this world and its physical environs nowhere near the top of the list of places you want to be in their concept of the afterlife."

What this has to do with North American geography is not clear to me.  Again, some details would be nice here.  We do have doctrine about the state of the Earth after the Second Coming but it's about the Earth as a whole.  I don't know what connects that to the idea of a new Jerusalem... wherever.

We continue.

"Of course, Mormon doctrine also does not believe this world came from nothing, essentially rejecting the idea God willed this world into existence. In fact, according to their own theology, everything existed in some form before it attained a physical substance as we know it now."

Source, please?  It's true that we existed in spirit before being born, but what that has to do with this planet isn't presented here.  The Earth was created.  Who said otherwise?

"To be fair, the Big Bang theory postulates a similar concept to explain why all we have all physical reality as it exists today, ironically the invention of a Catholic in 1927."

This sentence doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  I'd really have appreciated some kind of explanation of these statements.

"The problem is that their logic smashes headfirst into how both God and his Son made clear this reality is temporal, as is our mortal shells, and even the heavens and earth as we know them will one day pass away to be replaced by something else. This renders their concept of how this world fits into their concept of an afterlife patently absurd."

How?  How does he think our concept of how the world fits into the afterlife?  Why is it absurd?  No details.  Again.

"Worse, it also just recycles the early geocentric theory (which stated Earth was at the center of everything and everything else was in orbit around it) differently. Rather Mormon doctrine states this reality is but one ring in a multi-tiered afterlife, yet oddly places God's own place in the universe near a star called Kolob."

I don't see anything in LDS teaching that has anything to do with Geocentrism.  If anything, LDS theology goes away from such a thing.  Now, what he gets pretty close to right here is the reference to Kolob.  But since he hasn't provided any context, I'll do so here.

In the canon of LDS Scripture is a work called the Pearl of Great Price.  It's basically another collection of ancient writings that are regarded as scripture.  The most relevant verse to this, which I assume is what that last sentence is talking about, is in the book Abraham 3:2,3:

2 And I saw the stars, that they were very great, and that one of them was nearest unto the throne of God; and there were many great ones which were near unto it;

3 And the Lord said unto me: These are the governing ones; and the name of the great one is Kolob, because it is near unto me, for I am the Lord thy God: I have set this one to govern all those which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest.

Make what you will of these verses, they don't do a lot to support the idea of a geocentric model of the universe.  Let's keep going.

"This leads me to question their entire premise because the logic here is tortured. By their own logic, they claim the Bible (at least in its KJV form as clarified via Mormon deuterocanon) is true. They also claim God has a physical reality, so does his Heaven, which by their own logic is on another plane higher than this physical reality (where Earth sits), but somehow exists in the same tangible universe we do. If both Jesus and God made clear this world is a temporal thing and God made it exist by saying, in the very first verse of the Bible, that the heavens and earth as we know them did not exist until He willed it be by His own effort, then how did God exist in a mortal plane like us before it existed by His own words?"

I'll ask:  The logic here is tortured?  GethN7, you haven't presented any logic to evaluate.  So far, this post seems like a random collection of scraps that seem to be intended to prove something about LDS doctrine, but so far I have to imagine that if I were somebody who knew nothing about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I'd be more confused by these blog posts than informed.  

The last part of that paragraph seems to be asking an actual, good question.  It's a topic worthy of study and research.  That's all beyond the scope of this rebuttal, but it would be a good topic.  I just don't see how the fact that the question exists should somehow serve as evidence that the LDS Church's doctrines are false.

So... the first section seems to be a criticism of Book of Mormon geography and LDS cosmology at the same time, but doesn't really present anything in a way that someone could follow the reasoning being used here.  Is it that he knows more stuff that should have been written down?  That would be helpful.  Otherwise it just feels like a quick overview of things Protestants don't believe and therefore must be false for no reason other than... he doesn't believe it.  He keeps saying it's illogical and absurd but isn't showing us how that is so.  The reader is just expected to take his word for it, I suppose.

So we move on to Section 2.

"Their claims their deuterocanon and the Bible match up are absurd due to basic knowledge of history."

So he uses the term "deuterocanon" a lot and I admit I had to look it up.  What that word refers to is what is often called the Apocrypha.  So presumably he's using it in the same wy one might call the LDS canon of scripture (other than the KJV Bible) as "pseudocanon" maybe.  

"Mormon doctrine states everything after the original apostles of Christ died cannot be trusted. In fact, all of the early church history past the original disciples of Christ is a crock. Catholicism and Protestants until Joseph Smith got it wrong until Joseph Smith filled in the blanks to fix that.

With this premise in mind, they oddly, for some reason, still trust the Bible as truthful, albeit it must be accompanied by their deuterocanonical Book of Mormon and other related Mormon-specific additions."

So this was addressed already in my previous critique of his first blog post.  That whole first statement is inaccurate.  So it isn't odd that we'd regard the Bible as reliable.  Yes, we have additional sources of canon, but that's hardly a secret.  So what's the issue?  Let's read on.

"The translation of the Bible favored by Joseph Smith was, like many others, the King James Version. This presents the first logical problem.

The King James Version was compiled in 1604 by King James I for the use of the Church of England. This is a synthesis of earlier efforts dating back to 1525, with at least one of those earlier efforts being Roman Catholic in origin.

Bear in mind, in turn, that the KJV version is based on earlier efforts dating back to the Council of Nicea. Mormons do not consider anything by the Nicean councils valid, nor do they accept anything from any other Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant sect valid. To them, the Church was a podperson parody of itself until Joseph Smith restored it."

So the argument he seems to be making is this:

• Mormons don't believe in the validity of anything that happened more than five seconds after the last of the original Apostles died.
• The KJV Bible was compiled in 1604.
• The KJV is based on canon decided on at the Council of Nicaea.

...Therefore Mormons are wrong.

That first premise is false, as I discussed in more detail previously.  Not sure why it matters what year the KJV was compiled but okay.  And then we get to the meat of the criticism which, stated more concisely, is If Mormons don't trust the Council of Nicaea why do they trust anything that came out of it, like the Bible?

That's a weird argument coming from someone who claims the Bible to be perfect and inerrant when it's an edited version of the canon that came from that council.  Remember the Apocrypha?

But let's not just fall back on "Well, YOU TOO!" as an argument.  As I said in my previous rebuttal, we don't disregard the validity of the early church.  What we maintain is that, over the centuries, the early church gradually fell to apostasy.  I don't see why that means we can't trust the Bible as a primary source.  I'm not an expert on the details of scriptural history so I don't know why, exactly, the Apocrypha was removed from the Bible.  In any case, when Joseph Smith restored the Church, the KJV was presumably the best version available at the time.  It makes sense to use that, doesn't it?  It's worth mentioning that Joseph Smith was working on a new translation of the Bible when he was murdered, but hadn't gotten very far.  Would GethN7 have been happier if we'd gotten a complete translation and didn't use the KJV?  

We next get a quick comment about LDS scriptural canon.

"Unfortunately, the Book of Mormon and other documents like the Pearl of Great Price quote mine the KJV extensively, with the Book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price being a largely recycled version of Genesis as dictated by God to Moses according to said source."

Is there a reason these other writings telling a story that's consistent with Genesis a problem?  Do the 4 Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) not also tell largely the same stories?  I fail to see why this is supposed to be a bad thing.  I guess because Protestants don't have it it must be bad... for some reason.

"This leads me to one basic question: If Joseph Smith was not lying about the Church being invalid after the original apostles and we cannot trust the Catholic nor any other Protestant take on things, why did he base his own work on the KJV Bible written for the Church of England which in turn forked off Catholicism?"

This would have been a better question if it weren't based on that same false premise that the church was invalid after the apostles.  

"One would think he'd rewrite the original Bible to be correct instead of using a translation from a church he declared illegitimate to base everything else Mormons believe on."

Well, he tried to.  (See above.)  So... I guess GethN7 would have been happier.

"Frankly, just these two points alone massively undermine the very idea their beliefs are in any way consistent and effectively dismantle the validity of everything else by proxy."

He keeps talking about these points as if they were super-powerful armor-piercing arguments that fatally wound the reasoning behind LDS theology.  And yet, as before in the first blog post I responded to, they're based on an incorrect premise.  

He closes out his post by endorsing that badly researched website I talked about before.

So I really didn't find this post to be very coherent.  It didn't build its accusations around reliable information and provides precious little detail to help the reader follow his line of reasoning.  I suppose if the reader is predisposed to accept what he's saying then it doesn't matter much, but it presents itself as a scholarly approach to "prove" the falsehood of LDS teachings but really comes across more as a rant.  

This post touched on a lot of concepts and ideas that go WAY deeper and are much, much more nuanced than can be reasonably discussed in a single blog post.  If you're curious about what Latter-Day Saints really believe, I'd urge you to avoid agenda-driven writings and just go to the source.  Just to to the LDS website and see what we actually believe and why.  If you want to criticize us, at least criticize us on what we actually believe in and teach. 

If you're interested in learning about a Ford Mustang (even if you aren't looking to buy one) where would you go to do that?  A Ford dealership or a Chevrolet dealership?  It's that simple.  

Is that unreasonable?

To GethN7 I say this:  Brother, however well-intentioned you may be, you are not qualified to speak authoritatively about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  I mean no offense, but I think between this post and my previous series about your blog I've shown plenty of examples of that.  I am not saying this to accuse you of dishonesty.  I've given you the benefit of the doubt.  If you're as objective a person as you say, then I'd urge you to look into it and see what the truth is about what we believe.  You don't have to convert to at least know where we're coming from.  If you can't or won't do that, then... It is what it is, I guess. 

Last thought and then I'll close this post out.  I'm not doing this to embarrass GethN7.  I know sometimes I chose my words in such a way that they come off sarcastically or derisively.  I'm not perfect, but then, I'm also not the guy who sat down and wrote out attacks against a church whose people have never caused him any harm and who aren't a threat to him.  

Anyway, that's all I've got.  I leave it to the reader to decide which set of arguments is more reasonable.