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AngelRho
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21 May 2010, 7:34 am

mgran wrote:
Most people wouldn't believe that someone is a Christian who thinks Joseph Smith is going to sit at the side of God the Father, and judge the living and the dead, and who also believes that Jesus Christ is the spiritual brother of the devil... not to mention believing that Black and White people are physical manifestations of different classes of angels. Or come to that believe that God the Father was once a human being, and he populated the earth by having lots of babies with his spirit wife... and that humans males can attain to godhood. Not meaning to be rude, just pointing out that calling satan's spirit brother Jesus doesn't make it the actual Jesus of the historical Christian church, or of the Bible.


Agreed. Much of LDS doctrine is historically unsubstantiated and contradictory to the Christian Bible. It's amazing to me that Mormons also claim the KJV as holy, authoritative scripture when it does nothing to confirm some of the unique articles of faith within their religion.

I also fail to understand why it is the text of the Book of Mormon would have been hidden for so long had it been true. The OT has accumulated a few scribal errors because of the tradition of copying it over the millennia, yet the overall meaning of it remains intact. Why couldn't the book of Mormon have similarly been widely distributed at the time of its writing--that is, extending beyond the lifetime of Moroni? At least with OT, you had wide distribution of a sacred text that hardly deviated at all from one manuscript to the next. We can even compare the Masoretic Text with the Dead Sea Scrolls to get an idea of its accuracy. No other written book in ancient history has been so well regarded in terms of copying accuracy and number of surviving manuscripts.

The NT has entire collections of books being copied from the early AD 200s, representing one of the shortest times from the actual, recorded historical events to publication with hardly any copying errors worth mentioning.

My point is that if the Bible can be passed down throughout the millennia with little question of its reliability, clearly something God intended, why couldn't the Book of Mormon have had same treatment? Granted, the book is copied with 100% accuracy. But at what expense? That its words and wisdom are completely lost for several generations? If we are, as per the "Great Commission" to "go forth and tell," it makes no sense that an important religious text would have ever been covered up.



Rochendil
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21 May 2010, 2:42 pm

mgran wrote:
Most people wouldn't believe that someone is a Christian who thinks Joseph Smith is going to sit at the side of God the Father, and judge the living and the dead, and who also believes that Jesus Christ is the spiritual brother of the devil... not to mention believing that Black and White people are physical manifestations of different classes of angels. Or come to that believe that God the Father was once a human being, and he populated the earth by having lots of babies with his spirit wife... and that humans males can attain to godhood. Not meaning to be rude, just pointing out that calling satan's spirit brother Jesus doesn't make it the actual Jesus of the historical Christian church, or of the Bible.


1. not only men can become gods
2. black and white people are not different classes of angels, black people were cursed with a dark skin (not that they are still cursed)
3. God was not a human on this earth but on another earth.
4. Also, it has been scientifically proven that every single human being is related. Which means that you (and I) are related (however distantly) to one another as well as every other person on the planet. Gandhi and Hitler were both related (most likely very distantly)

Quote:
Agreed. Much of LDS doctrine is historically unsubstantiated and contradictory to the Christian Bible. It's amazing to me that Mormons also claim the KJV as holy, authoritative scripture when it does nothing to confirm some of the unique articles of faith within their religion.

I also fail to understand why it is the text of the Book of Mormon would have been hidden for so long had it been true. The OT has accumulated a few scribal errors because of the tradition of copying it over the millennia, yet the overall meaning of it remains intact. Why couldn't the book of Mormon have similarly been widely distributed at the time of its writing--that is, extending beyond the lifetime of Moroni? At least with OT, you had wide distribution of a sacred text that hardly deviated at all from one manuscript to the next. We can even compare the Masoretic Text with the Dead Sea Scrolls to get an idea of its accuracy. No other written book in ancient history has been so well regarded in terms of copying accuracy and number of surviving manuscripts.

The NT has entire collections of books being copied from the early AD 200s, representing one of the shortest times from the actual, recorded historical events to publication with hardly any copying errors worth mentioning.

My point is that if the Bible can be passed down throughout the millennia with little question of its reliability, clearly something God intended, why couldn't the Book of Mormon have had same treatment? Granted, the book is copied with 100% accuracy. But at what expense? That its words and wisdom are completely lost for several generations? If we are, as per the "Great Commission" to "go forth and tell," it makes no sense that an important religious text would have ever been covered up.


The Book of Mormon was hidden until the time was ripe and the world was ready for it

And anyways, what about the Roman Catholic Church that is actually a polytheistic religion (you can pray to any number of saints in addition to God)?



AngelRho
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21 May 2010, 3:28 pm

Rochendil wrote:
The Book of Mormon was hidden until the time was ripe and the world was ready for it

And anyways, what about the Roman Catholic Church that is actually a polytheistic religion (you can pray to any number of saints in addition to God)?


I see. Our American predecessors weren't good enough for Jesus' message. God is perfectly content to just let generation after generation wander off into Hell when the Gospel has been made available to them hundreds or even thousands of years before Spanish missionaries planted churches in America. No problem. It makes perfect sense. :?

And what ABOUT the RC Church? I'm not Catholic, so it makes no difference to me.



mgran
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21 May 2010, 3:39 pm

[quote="Rochendil"]
1. not only men can become gods
2. black and white people are not different classes of angels, black people were cursed with a dark skin (not that they are still cursed)
3. God was not a human on this earth but on another earth.
4. Also, it has been scientifically proven that every single human being is related. Which means that you (and I) are related (however distantly) to one another as well as every other person on the planet. Gandhi and Hitler were both related (most likely very distantly)


Thank you for proving my point. I'll counter your points one by one.

1) According to historic Christianity, as it has been understood for two thousand years, there is only ONE God, and He has existed eternally. Human beings, of either gender, do not become gods. Strangely enough, Islam is closer to Christianity on this doctrine... there is no God but God. The Christian understands God the Father to be present perfectly in Jesus Christ, and to be manifest in the Holy Spirit... Jesus says, "He who has seen me has seen the Father." God is a mystery, outside of the constraints of our dimensions, spacial and temporal. That being the case, He didn't have to evolve into godhood. He was ALWAYS God.

2) Secondly, Mormonism teaches that white people are incarnations of angels that fought bravely next to the mormon "jesus" against satan, while black people are incarnations of cowardly angels who didn't pick a side, while demons are angels that fought with Jesus's brother satan. This is absolutely counter to what the Bible teaches. The Bible never says that humans are incarnations of angels, never says that humans are divided into two classes of beings, and not for one minute suggests that Jesus, "through whom all things were made" is a spirit brother of the devil.

3) This was covered in my response to the first point. God was God from all eternity, He lives outside our little temporary boxes. He is Alpha and Omega, nothing exists without Him, and there is nothing that was not by Him made. God did not evolve out of some finite human being on an as yet undiscovered planet somewhere in the distant past.

4) I'm not quite sure why you threw this one in, but I suppose you had to make at least one concretely correct statement. Yes, science has proven that we're all related. The Bible pre-empted this. Paul said that all men were created by God "of one blood", and we are all descended from Adam and Eve. As I pointed out before, the Mormon religion teaches that people with non Caucasian skin are "cursed" because in spirit form, before they were born, they sat on their hands and refused to fight. This particular fantasy was not born of any fact, but the racism of the founder of the Mormon religion.

I know that Mormon's introduce themselves as Christian, but basically, you're in a cult. If you actually sat down and read the real Bible you'd realise that there's no way Mr Smith's ramblings could be aligned with either the Old or New Testaments. And I would like to point out, that having studied textual transmission of biblical texts I can state, categorically, that I trust the Bible. Your book is so obviously false that it really pains me, almost on a physical level, when I really sit and think how many people believe this cr@p (which you so clearly defined in your comments above.)[quote]



aloneinacrowd
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22 May 2010, 5:09 am

Soooo..... anymore Christians?



kx250rider
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22 May 2010, 12:28 pm

Born and baptized Methodist, but really have a hard time with trusting the many, many translations of the Bible over the millenniums. I have a firm belief in a supreme intelligence (which I will continue to call "God"), and that this whole universe isn't an accident. I also have a firm belief that mankind has bent the Bible, and religion in general, to suit various ideals.

To clarify, I don't disown Christianity in any way, and I do pray. I'm probably, if I need to be put into a pigeon hole, an Agnostic.

Charles



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22 May 2010, 1:22 pm

kx250rider wrote:
Born and baptized Methodist, but really have a hard time with trusting the many, many translations of the Bible over the millenniums. I have a firm belief in a supreme intelligence (which I will continue to call "God"), and that this whole universe isn't an accident. I also have a firm belief that mankind has bent the Bible, and religion in general, to suit various ideals.

To clarify, I don't disown Christianity in any way, and I do pray. I'm probably, if I need to be put into a pigeon hole, an Agnostic.

Charles


I agree that the Bible has been interpreted in enough varying ways and bent to suit too many agendas and used to hurt too many people for many reasonable people to trust organized religion. The trouble I see is that organized Christianity often centers its tenets on Biblical truth, which leaves the APPEARANCE that the Bible says this thing or that thing when it ACTUALLY says nothing of the sort. The Bible never explicitly condemns abortion, for example, and there are those who claim that it does. But because it does not name abortion as a sin, the pro-choicers will counter that the Bible tacitly approves abortion.

What the Bible DOES say is that murder is wrong, and in so saying and in related passages, the Bible upholds the sanctity of human life. The real argument should be whether life happens at conception, for which there is no evidence either way, and probably the best safe solution is to allow all pregnancies come to term as long as there is no direct threat to the mother (the Bible also allows us to protect our own lives and that of our loved-ones, even if the threat is unintentional, but also exalts those willing to die for someone else's life. Ultimately it is a judgment call on the part of the person). The Bible also forbids practices associated with idolatry, and it is known that prostitution was part of temple ceremony in Canaan. An unwanted child could always be a candidate for sacrifice. Taken in this sense, abortion is nothing more than modernist child sacrifice, and the only difference is that there is no invocation of a deity.

Such a view is not inconsistent with the rest of Biblical teaching. However, certain Catholic practices have NO sanction whatsoever in the Bible. A lot of this has been challenged and changed throughout the course of history--the sale of indulgences, for example. The Bible clearly states that one cannot work to attain one's place in heaven. Likewise, it follows that your place in heaven cannot be BOUGHT. I also find praying to canonized saints and the Virgin Mary for their intercession on the part of the sinner to be objectionable: There is no Biblical basis for that. The Catholic church also included OT apocrypha in part to justify prayers for the dead. You'll notice many Bibles in protestant churches omit those books because other than that exception, those books historically never had any part in the OT, were clearly not divinely inspired texts, and had no place in the early worship of 1st and 2nd century Christians.

The commonly used Masoretic Text manuscripts, when compared with OLDER manuscripts found within the Dead Sea Scrolls, show that the OT has been reliably copied throughout the generations with nothing more than a few scribal errors that effectively change NOTHING about the meaning of the books. The NT was in wide circulation by the early 200's, the shortest amount of time of any text from the time recorded events happened to the time it was transmitted.

With few RARE exceptions, virtually all Bibles in print now are directly translated from these ancient Hebrew and Greek texts. I use a copy of the Holman CSB, which I absolutely LOVE. It carefully compares various manuscripts, showing where passages have been included in some ancient manuscripts and left out of others. It also shows where obscure Hebrew words were used and how they've been translated by examining the context in which they were written. It even compares differences between certain manuscripts and the LXX (the Septuagint, or the Greek Bible). If ANYTHING you hear said about the Bible is questionable to you, translations like this one are great for study and determining whether there is any truth to what you've heard. The plain English is also easy to understand, which is a big plus in its favor.

The KJV is very well written and is very "pretty sounding," but it gives me a headache. There are also the NIV, the ASV, and others that are also easily readable and comprehensible like the HSCB. Most of these I'm aware of are carefully derived from ancient manuscripts, so you have no reasonable need for fear that the writings themselves are in error.

The Jehovah's Witnesses use a unique translation, the NWT (I think it's called). It appears to support the views of that sect, with certain key passages altered to reflect that. No one else in mainline Christianity recognizes or accepts that as legitimate scripture.

You should certainly give the Bible a good read and ask questions. Personally, I wouldn't mind people sending me PMs if there is an issue you don't understand. I love this stuff!



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22 May 2010, 1:51 pm

The NIV is probably the most accurate to date. Though it has some gloss overs. The best thing is to learn the original Greek. I had to do a lot of that as I spent a few years in Bible college. Fun stuff. lol



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22 May 2010, 1:55 pm

aloneinacrowd wrote:
The NIV is probably the most accurate to date. Though it has some gloss overs. The best thing is to learn the original Greek. I had to do a lot of that as I spent a few years in Bible college. Fun stuff. lol


Also the Hebrew and Aramaic.

By the way the KJV is a sh***y translation.

I will give you a test. Turn to Isiah 7:14. If you find the word "virgin" there toss the translation into the flames. It is a false translation. The correct translation of "almah (hebrew)" is "young woman" or "young woman of marriagable age"

ruveyn



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22 May 2010, 2:46 pm

ruveyn wrote:
aloneinacrowd wrote:
The NIV is probably the most accurate to date. Though it has some gloss overs. The best thing is to learn the original Greek. I had to do a lot of that as I spent a few years in Bible college. Fun stuff. lol


Also the Hebrew and Aramaic.

By the way the KJV is a sh***y translation.

I will give you a test. Turn to Isiah 7:14. If you find the word "virgin" there toss the translation into the flames. It is a false translation. The correct translation of "almah (hebrew)" is "young woman" or "young woman of marriagable age"

ruveyn



:lmao:

If I didn't already know you to be a Christian-hater, I might take offense to that.

My understanding of the Hebrew word "'almah" is "young woman before the age of marriage." According to the law, a woman given in marriage found NOT to be a virgin is to be put to death.

I'm checking out the context of that verse. So you say a "young woman" will be pregnant and name her son Immanuel. If this isn't Messianic, then who might this "Immanuel" be? King Hezekiah? lol

If your translation has "virgin" in the place of "'almah," I assure you it's just fine.



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22 May 2010, 8:44 pm

AngelRho wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
aloneinacrowd wrote:
The NIV is probably the most accurate to date. Though it has some gloss overs. The best thing is to learn the original Greek. I had to do a lot of that as I spent a few years in Bible college. Fun stuff. lol


Also the Hebrew and Aramaic.

By the way the KJV is a sh***y translation.

I will give you a test. Turn to Isiah 7:14. If you find the word "virgin" there toss the translation into the flames. It is a false translation. The correct translation of "almah (hebrew)" is "young woman" or "young woman of marriagable age"

ruveyn



:lmao:

If I didn't already know you to be a Christian-hater, I might take offense to that.

My understanding of the Hebrew word "'almah" is "young woman before the age of marriage." According to the law, a woman given in marriage found NOT to be a virgin is to be put to death.

I'm checking out the context of that verse. So you say a "young woman" will be pregnant and name her son Immanuel. If this isn't Messianic, then who might this "Immanuel" be? King Hezekiah? lol

If your translation has "virgin" in the place of "'almah," I assure you it's just fine.


Actually it is not alright. "Almah" means young women (in the age range of being able to bear children). Virgin in Hebrew is "b'toolah" meaning a women who has not had intercourse with a man. Virgins can't have male children. It is biologically possible for a virgin to have a haploid female offspring if the egg splits and reproduces cells. The only way for a Y chromosome to get in there is to be put in their by a male. Virgin Births indeed. Nonsense.

And I don't hate Christians. I just think their religion is a superstition. But then again so is mine.

Eventually, you will catch onto the fact that the Scriptures (and the Gospels and the Q'ran) are works of fiction. I am sure they have their literary merits but they are not factual.

ruveyn



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22 May 2010, 9:52 pm

ruveyn wrote:
AngelRho wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
aloneinacrowd wrote:
The NIV is probably the most accurate to date. Though it has some gloss overs. The best thing is to learn the original Greek. I had to do a lot of that as I spent a few years in Bible college. Fun stuff. lol


Also the Hebrew and Aramaic.

By the way the KJV is a sh***y translation.

I will give you a test. Turn to Isiah 7:14. If you find the word "virgin" there toss the translation into the flames. It is a false translation. The correct translation of "almah (hebrew)" is "young woman" or "young woman of marriagable age"

ruveyn



:lmao:

If I didn't already know you to be a Christian-hater, I might take offense to that.

My understanding of the Hebrew word "'almah" is "young woman before the age of marriage." According to the law, a woman given in marriage found NOT to be a virgin is to be put to death.

I'm checking out the context of that verse. So you say a "young woman" will be pregnant and name her son Immanuel. If this isn't Messianic, then who might this "Immanuel" be? King Hezekiah? lol

If your translation has "virgin" in the place of "'almah," I assure you it's just fine.


Actually it is not alright. "Almah" means young women (in the age range of being able to bear children). Virgin in Hebrew is "b'toolah" meaning a women who has not had intercourse with a man. Virgins can't have male children. It is biologically possible for a virgin to have a haploid female offspring if the egg splits and reproduces cells. The only way for a Y chromosome to get in there is to be put in their by a male. Virgin Births indeed. Nonsense.

And I don't hate Christians. I just think their religion is a superstition. But then again so is mine.

Eventually, you will catch onto the fact that the Scriptures (and the Gospels and the Q'ran) are works of fiction. I am sure they have their literary merits but they are not factual.

ruveyn


Hey, you're the one who brought it up.

We are, of course, under the assumption that God can do as He wishes and bounded only by His own nature. In our minds, there is possible and then there is impossible. What little we know about the mind of God is that all things are possible (such that God doesn't contradict Himself, of course). We as Christians know that spontaneous conception, at least in human beings, is not possible or at least has never been demonstrated to have happened. However, even the Conception (of Jesus) was not spontaneous--the NT reports that Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit, basically God Himself, and not through sexual contact.

I find it difficult to understand why it is you're party to an amazing tradition and you opt out of any deep spiritual devotion to it (that is, believing it's more than fairy tales). I've met from time to time Christians that came into the faith from Judaism but feel strongly about their cultural heritage that they still observe the feasts and keep kosher--it's more like their old traditions have taken on new meaning for them, and they always tell me not to get involved and to look to my own family heritage and tradition. But even that small change is enough that their parents don't really want much to do with them. I asked about that, too, and they said that it's kinda like if I were to convert to Mormonism how my family would react--basically the same thing.

Personally, and honestly, I do hold to a lot of some of the objectivist views many express in this forum, except I've only simply come to different conclusions than what many seem to believe. Even you've said that science and religion have nothing to do with each other. So what gives? What's so WRONG with thinking maybe the conflicts between the two, not being able to see God face-to-face for any affirmation that He's there, and other things are just simply things only God can know at this time? There's nothing wrong with accepting that things appear to be a certain way for reasons we can't objectively understand. There's no need to reason God out of the picture. Why make your own religion into a silly fairy tale?



mgran
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23 May 2010, 3:04 am

I think the OP wanted Christians to answer?



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23 May 2010, 1:06 pm

Thank you, and yes I did. I asked specifically that this not be turned into a debate or a bashing session. I don't care what you believe or do not believe, I was just asking who here was a Christian. If your doctrine disagrees with someone elses, it's actually ok to let it go because no one can agree on anything *and* God is the only one who truly knows them that are his.



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23 May 2010, 1:28 pm

Exactly Randomgirl, and I'm sorry if earlier on I disrupted the thread somewhat. :oops:



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23 May 2010, 3:29 pm

My mistake. Sorry!