LDS

[RandFan]

Here's some trivia, about why hot drinks were discouraged in the 18th and early 19th century. Those trying to find an evidence-based reason for things in the Word of Wisdom generally look toward modern medical advice, but to see where Joseph Smith was coming from, it helps to look at medical beliefs of his day and see how he was offering what would have sounded like typical evidence-based advice:

From a summary of observations on influenza, from a Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine, 1833 London:

From Observations on the Ill Health of American Women, Virginia, 1839, talking about "the diseased appearance and premature decay of our teeth":

Health and beauty advice from 1834:


Elements of Pathology and Therapeutics, 1829:

Much earlier, London 1765:

More health advice from Edinburgh, 1739:

So hot drinks were behind everything from decayed teeth, to skin eruptions, to increased symptoms of influenza, inflammatory diseases and poor health in general. It's no wonder God discouraged them.

Yes, and doesn't this fit with Feynman's view that religion is provincial. It mirrors the culture within which it is founded? I was looking for some of these sources. Thanks.

 

[Cat Tale]

By the way, welcome to Cat Tale.

Thanks!

On the other hand, if you do have faith, Cat Tale is also right that faith itself is the only argument for it, and (as I had hoped briefly Janadele had figured out) attempting to argue faith as if it were open to evidence or proof is a very sticky tar baby indeed.

What I don't get is how so many LDS are quick to quote Hebrews 11:1 about faith being about things hoped for, without evidence, and then try so desperately to tie their beliefs into evidence, which simply doesn't work. Been there, done that, got the tee shirt.

 

[Cat Tale]

Jesus The Christ was written by Elder James E. Talmage, a member of the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, within the sacred walls of the Salt Lake Temple. in a Council room on the fourth floor under request and appointment from the Presiding Authorities of the Church.

The completed work was read to and approved by the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve and is published by the LDS Church.

Yet, his word is no greater than that of Lorenzo Snow, who was President of the 12 when he talked about meat in a meeting with the 12, and who's words were also recorded in LDS history. Is it not an eternal principle that animals have spirits? So why would refrigeration make a difference? If the WoW is a commandment, shouldn't all of it be equally important? Isn't it better not to eat meat also from a scientific viewpoint? I mean, the calories, the fat, the cholesterol... I've never given much thought to this before, but now I'm seriously wondering if I want to change my eating habits to limit meat. (Not an easy thing to do as I love Subway oven roasted chicken breast subs!) I know my doctors would be thrilled since I have both high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Personally, the 19th and early 20th century was a time when meat and potatoes was all the rage. I'm betting it was easier for the early Saints to give up alcohol and tobacco than it was meat.

 

[tsig]

Are you assuming that when I say that it would make a difference that I mean it would shake my faith? No. It's just when people are having a little friendly discussion and one says that the "public record is clear," and yet there is no public record that shows the result, they get called on it. Just like the LDS members have been called on our statements.

And, since I love history, it would change the way I view facts, though my faith isn't based on evidence.

So if Joesph Smith appeared to you and said he was a fraud your faith wouldn't be shaken?

 

[Vic Vega]

Mormons like anyone else can be very prideful and stubborn. What I don't get is why bother to try and convert people if you are just going to be rude? What's the point of coming here and an annoying people?

It seems like passive aggressive behavior to me.

 

[eight bits]

Howdy, Pup

But the way the above is worded makes it seem like, if no other sources could be found, it just might be divine inspiration.

Well, divine inspiration is one of the hypotheses actually being discussed in this thread. If I rise to disagree with that explanation, then it is entirely reasonable to ask me what alternative could there possibly be. As it happens, I can offer an alternative, with some evidence behind it, too.

The fact that he said God and angels came to him seem to be even stronger evidence that he was less than candid about his life.

Not really. About one-third to one-half of adults in the US and UK tell Gallup every few years that they have had at least one instance of what many people call religious or spiritual experiences (with different percentages based on how the question is worded). That's a hell of a lot of people. Not everybody interprets such experiences the same way, but some of these people seem honestly to think that God or angels have spoken to them. I may disagree with their interpretation of their experience, but I can hardly fault their candor.

He may have believed, in some sense, that they did, but he was clearly trying to present his life as more mythic than reality.

And he was apparently none too scrupulous about what parts of the reality he cared to share. I'll never know what he believed, but I can see for myself that when he explained something, his explanation left a lot to be desired by being incomplete in a self-serving way. Mythic? Other qualities he was clearly trying to present were persecution (people were wrongly calling him a money digger) and trustworthiness (nothing to that namecalling but honest manual labor).

Again, this just seems like rearranging the deck chairs, if its purpose is to address the dispute. If the purpose is to understand him and his times better from a historian's view, sure--it's a great nugget of information.

If we're waiting for the LDS to sink because of a mere collision with inconvenient facts, then I think we're going to be here for a while. Almost two thousand years ago, Paul evdently told the first Christians that they were never going to die, and that Jesus was coming back before they had much time to die during the wait. We know how that worked out, but Christianity is still here. Almost two thousand years...

So, if it's all the same to you, yes, I would like to move my deck chair someplace comfy, and definitely closer to the snack bar. I don't see any conflict at all between addressing the dispute and better understanding the only witness to much of it.

 

[The Norseman]

The response goes AFTER the quote to make it easier to read!

One could report them as rule six violations -- disruptive formatting which makes it difficult for people to read the forums. I know some people use text-to-voice translators and it probably makes it hard to follow the thread conversations.

 

[RandFan]

As for faith. It's like the toxoplasma parasite. It rewires the host's brain so that the organism will put the life of the parasite ahead of the organism. Once infected mice are no longer afraid of cats. Turns out that to replicate the parasite must get into the stomach of a cat.

Religion is the same. It rewires human brains so that the faith is protected. The faith becomes more important than the host. See: The Law of Sacrifice. And it is impervious to facts and reason. Works for all faiths. Works so well that people like Muslim freedom fighters will gladly die for faith.

"I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves." --Harriet Tubman

For anyone interested in sources for the claim: Daniel Dennett on Religion & Memes

Toxo: Robert Sapolsky.

 

[Cat Tale]

So if Joesph Smith appeared to you and said he was a fraud your faith wouldn't be shaken?

If he appeared to me and told me that he was a fraud yeah, I'd be shaken. It ain't gonna happen though, on so many different levels.

 

[Pup]

So if Joesph Smith appeared to you and said he was a fraud your faith wouldn't be shaken?

If Joseph Smith actually appeared to me, for real, verifiably, not a vision or hallucination or trick, I'd start to believe he was carrying actual messages about life after death, whatever they were. With that kind of concrete evidence, who needs faith?

 

[RandFan]

If Joseph Smith actually appeared to me, for real, verifiably, not a vision or hallucination or trick, I'd start to believe he was carrying actual messages about life after death, whatever they were. With that kind of concrete evidence, who needs faith?

Bayesian statistics dictate that if you couldn't verify that it was a vision, hallucination or trick, it would still likely not be supernatural. It would be more likely that aliens with a technology you could not detect were perpetrating a fraud.

A natural answer, no matter how far fetched, is still far more likely than a supernatural one. Supernatural explanations by definition violate parsimony. It's more likely that Joseph Smith becomes a time traveler using laws of physics than it would be that you were visited by a dead person.

In every instance where we found an explanation for something that was thought to be supernatural it turned out not to be supernatural. Run the statistics.

 

[dafydd]

If he appeared to me and told me that he was a fraud yeah, I'd be shaken. It ain't gonna happen though, on so many different levels.

It could only happen on one level, JS appearing before you.

 

[DragonLady]

For anyone interested in sources for the claim: Daniel Dennett on Religion & Memes

Toxo: Robert Sapolsky.

Wow. Just wow. I'm suddenly looking at our pain-in-the-ass cats in a whole new light.

 

[RandFan]

Wow. Just wow. I'm suddenly looking at our pain-in-the-ass cats in a whole new light.

I know. RedBull might give you wings but Toxo will make you a super hero (in your own mind).

 

[jsfisher]

So if Joesph Smith appeared to you and said he was a fraud your faith wouldn't be shaken?

A point that could be made is that being the talented con-artist some of us believe him to have been, he would have had a very useful set of interpersonal skills needed to deliver the Word of God^tm to the unwashed masses in a convincing way. God words in mysterious ways, and He may have chosen Joseph Smith for those qualifications.

 

[tsig]

If he appeared to me and told me that he was a fraud yeah, I'd be shaken. It ain't gonna happen though, on so many different levels.

First I'd like to thank you for your open and direct answers, they're like a breath of fresh air.

I will post more later but I wanted my thanks to be timely.

 

[abaddon]

Jesus The Christ was written by Elder James E. Talmage, a member of the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, within the sacred walls of the Salt Lake Temple. in a Council room on the fourth floor under request and appointment from the Presiding Authorities of the Church.

The completed work was read to and approved by the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve and is published by the LDS Church.

Your reply is null and void, because you did it upside down. Any and all upside down replies will henceforth be regarded as moronic spam.

 

[ddt]

No... not "wine" as the word means today. but the pure fruit of the vine. Not fermented nor alcoholic.

Is that from the original Greek? If it's been mistranslated for the past 2000 years, I think that the world's linguists should be made aware of it.

Another apologist who doesn't know the Greek? Here is John 2:3 in the Westcott-Hort edition:

και υστερησαντος οινου λεγει η μητηρ του ιησου προς αυτον οινον ουκ εχουσιν

The highlighted word (*) οινος means wine, not grape juice, since the time of Homer, i.e., the oldest Greek we have on record.

(*) the first highlight is a genitive singular, the second a accusative singular. See also the Interlinear bible.

 

[Pup]

Bayesian statistics dictate that if you couldn't verify that it was a vision, hallucination or trick, it would still likely not be supernatural. It would be more likely that aliens with a technology you could not detect were perpetrating a fraud.

A natural answer, no matter how far fetched, is still far more likely than a supernatural one. Supernatural explanations by definition violate parsimony. It's more likely that Joseph Smith becomes a time traveler using laws of physics than it would be that you were visited by a dead person.

In every instance where we found an explanation for something that was thought to be supernatural it turned out not to be supernatural. Run the statistics.

Uh, I think you're taking this far more seriously than I meant it. It was a joke about the fact that if one has evidence, one doesn't need faith, and the paradox of a skeptic suggesting a hypothetical situation where the strongest imaginable evidence against the faith would in fact confirm some of the faith (the existence of life after death). It was just a comment about a funny paradox, and wasn't meant to be any deeper than that.

 

[tsig]

Uh, I think you're taking this far more seriously than I meant it. It was a joke about the fact that if one has evidence, one doesn't need faith, and the paradox of a skeptic suggesting a hypothetical situation where the strongest imaginable evidence against the faith would in fact confirm some of the faith (the existence of life after death). It was just a comment about a funny paradox, and wasn't meant to be any deeper than that.

Be careful with comedy, some using it have stepped into depths unaware.