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Thanks for posting this. I have read it all and right now my mind is spinning. I have read most of this before but again the church puts out something that half explains where we stand today that contradicts where we stood in the past. Heaven help us. Limited geography is the only model that makes sense – and it does make sense based on the actual book. I’ve believed a lot of what’s in this article since I was a teenager. I’m very happy this is now published.
Curtis wrote:Limited geography is the only model that makes sense – and it does make sense based on the actual book.
I’ve believed a lot of what’s in this article since I was a teenager. I’m very happy this is now published.
It doesn’t make sense with what I have been taught all my life and we are about the same age. I have never even heard to limited geography until a few years ago.This is yet another essay that throws former prophets under the bus. The real question members should be asking today is what are the current beliefs that will be disavowed 100 years from now. Curtis wrote:Limited geography is the only model that makes sense – and it does make sense based on the actual book.
I’ve believed a lot of what’s in this article since I was a teenager. I’m very happy this is now published.
Limited geography may fit but it is a long way from what I was taught, what Joseph taught and what we all believed for 150 years. To me it is just an other example of how the story shifts when the evidence refutes the current storyline.Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
Sheldon wrote:This is yet another essay that throws former prophets under the bus. The real question members should be asking today is what are the current beliefs that will be disavowed 100 years from now.
I agree that a lot of these essays undermine the things said in the past by leaders. It even seems to undermine some of our scriptures.
I’m quite enjoying it. It teaches me that I should have a lot more confidence in this approach:
Quote:“Latter-day Saints are not asked to blindly accept everything they hear. We are encouraged to think and discover truth for ourselves. We are expected to ponder, to search, to evaluate, and thereby to come to a personal knowledge of the truth.”
Elder Uchtdorf
http://www.lds.org/broadcasts/article/ces-devotionals/2013/01/what-is-truth?lang=eng It makes it difficult when I hear people expressing the sentiment that we should just listen to our leaders/trust in the prophets etc.
Curtis wrote:Limited geography is the only model that makes sense – and it does make sense based on the actual book.
I’ve believed a lot of what’s in this article since I was a teenager. I’m very happy this is now published.
I agree that a close reading of the Book of Mormon makes a lot more sense as a smaller geography than as a hemispheric geography. I’ve also thought the same since my teens.
But… that’s not what the majority of leaders and some scriptures have taught for the last 180 years. I don’t mind because, like I said in some other previous posts and in the Joseph’s vision thread, church leaders make a lot of assumptions and are apparently making unknown false-assumptions. None of us are immune.
But it does mean that when the prophets speak we should continue our thinking as long as we need to.
Sheldon wrote:The newest Church Essay is out on
DNA and the Book of Mormon.After you read it, check out this
rebuttalSome of the quotes on i4m are pretty absolute:
Quote:“We believe that the existing Indian tribes are all direct descendants of Lehi and his company, and that therefore they have sprung from men all of whom were of the house of Israel.”
– Apostle James E. Talmage, The Articles of Faith, p.293Quote:“We can pray to the Father, in the name of Jesus, to convert these Indian tribes around us … that they shall be instructed not only in relation to their fathers and the Gospel contained in the record of their fathers… because they are of the blood of Israel”
– Apostle Orson Pratt, Journal of Discourses Vol. 17, p.301, (1875)Quote:We must always remember, we only have the authentic record which furnishes the true origin of the American Indians, their history and God’s work and gospel teachings among them.
– Elder Delbert L. Stapely, Conference Report, April 1956, p.56I worry a little though that the majority of people who read the article might look at the clever marble photos and, knowing little about genetics, conclude: “Well the church says it’s ok, I won’t worry about it then.” I don’t know enough myself to reach a conclusion either way on the DNA question. It brings to mind a couple of quotes from the two deep thinkers of the early 20thC in LDS leadership:
Quote:Yet how often may we hear from our pulpits, usually however when they are occupied by the little-great men, scathing denunciations of science, which is represented as a bundle of vagaries, and of scientific men, who are but Will-o-the-wisps enticing the traveler into quagmires of spiritual ruin. Would it not be better for those who so inveigh to acquaint themselves with at least the first principles of the doctrines of science? So general has this practice become amongst us, that the most inexperienced speaker feels justified in thus indulging himself, and in the minds of many the conclusion is reached, none the less pernicious in its present effects because unfounded, that the higher development of the intellect is not a part of the Gospel of Christ.
James E. Talmage
The Methods and Motives of Science, by Dr. James E. Talmage, Professor of Geology at the University of Utah. This address was delivered in the Logan Temple about 12 years before he became an apostle.
Also published in The Improvement Era 1900, Volume 3
http://www.archive.org/stream/improvementerav01assogoog/improvementerav01assogoog_djvu.txt Quote:“Suppose your youth receive their impressions of church history from ‘pictures and stories’ and build their faith upon these alleged miracles [and] shall someday come face to face with the fact that their belief rests on falsehoods, what then will be the result? Will they not say that since these things are myth and our Church has permitted them to be perpetuated …might not the other fundamentals to the actual story of the Church, the things in which it had its origin, might they not all be lies and nothing but lies? … [Some say that] because one repudiates the false he stands in danger of weakening, perhaps losing the truth. I have no fear of such results. I find my own heart strengthened in the truth by getting rid of the untruth, the spectacular, the bizarre, as soon as I learn that it is based upon worthless testimony.”
Elder B. H. Roberts(Defender of the Faith: The B. H. Roberts Story, p. 363)
Quote:“Mental laziness is the vice of men, especially with reference to divine things. Men seem to think that because inspiration and revelation are factors in connection with the things of God, therefore the pain and stress of mental effort are not required; that by some means these elements act somewhat as Elijah’s ravens and feed us without effort on our part. To escape this effort, this mental stress to know the things that are, men raise all too readily the ancient bar-“Thus far shalt thou come, but no farther.” Man cannot hope to understand the things of God, they plead, or penetrate those things which he has left shrouded in mystery. “Be thou content with the simple faith that accepts without question. To believe, and accept the ordinances, and then live the moral law will doubtless bring men unto salvation; why then should man strive and trouble himself to understand? Much study is still a weariness of the flesh.” So men reason; and just now it is much in fashion to laud “the simple faith;” which is content to believe without understanding, or even without much effort to understand. And doubtless many good people regard this course as indicative of reverence-this plea in bar of effort- “thus far and no farther.”…This sort of “reverence” is easily simulated, and is of such flattering unction, and so pleasant to follow- “soul take thine ease”- that without question it is very often simulated; and falls into the same category as the simulated humility couched in “I don’t know,” which so often really means “I don’t care, and do not intend to trouble myself to find out.”
Elder B.H. Roberts, The Seventy’s Course of Theology, vol. V (Salt Lake City: The Deseret News, 1912)
(Partial reference)
http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?hideNav=1&locale=2&sourceId=078046581c79b010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&vgnextoid=024644f8f206c010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD#footnote10 BH Roberts full book that this is quoted from is here:
All these quotes and more can be found inour friendly quotes threadon a blogI know it’s not what previous people believed, but I am completely fine with that. I’ve never believed in infallibility, and I’ve always believed in evolution of understanding. (further light and knowledge)
I’d rather have something that I believe is correct than something I believe is incorrect. This is another example of the Church moving in the direction I want it to move. For me, therefore, it is a good thing. Period.
Curtis wrote:I know it’s not what previous people believed, but I am completely fine with that.
I’ve never believed in infallibility, and I’ve always believed in evolution of understanding. (further light and knowledge)
I’d rather have something that I believe is correct than something I believe is incorrect. This is another example of the Church moving in the direction I want it to move. For me, therefore, it is a good thing. Period.
Further light and knowledge or stumbling about in the dark like the rest of us?
Yes, moving towards a limited geography is a progress away from some of the elitism that the hemespheric model supported in Mormonism.
It is also useful because it provides yet another example of being able to show how the church changes. Leaders of the past (some of those I cited above) turn out to be wrong. How many “wrong” leaders before we just ditch the whole building block of a church being lead by revelation?
I’m glad we’re following the science at least, and that basically they are cautioning those trying to “prove” it as much as those trying to disprove it. Quote:The real question members should be asking today is what are the current beliefs that will be disavowed 100 years from now.
Anything anti-science (including creationism, being gay is a choice and gender essentialism) and anything that elevates a 1950s ideal to “eternal” status.
mackay11, if even Paul (an apostle whose calling began with a vision of the resurrected Jesus) saw through a glass, darkly – and if he used the word “we” – I am okay with every one of us seeing through a glass, darkly – and I care but don’t care that not all members (including leaders) see it the way I do. I believe there has been, is and will be “bitter fruit” in the vineyard from the beginning right up until the end, so its existence doesn’t rock my world. I also believe it will be pruned right up until the end, and I LOVE that the pruning is occurring faster right now than at any other time in my life.
Curtis wrote:mackay11, if even Paul (an apostle whose calling began with a vision of the resurrected Jesus) saw through a glass, darkly – and if he used the word “we” – I am okay with every one of us seeing through a glass, darkly – and I care but don’t care that not all members (including leaders) see it the way I do.
I believe there has been, is and will be “bitter fruit” in the vineyard from the beginning right up until the end, so its existence doesn’t rock my world. I also believe it will be pruned right up until the end, and I LOVE that the pruning is occurring faster right now than at any other time in my life.
I hope so Ray. I hope it’s pruning and not going to seed. I hope the glass is getting clearer not darker.
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