Because I Feel The Need To Clear The Air On My Take On The Beliefs of Mormons Part 2
In my last post on the Mormon faith, I established why I consider their doctrine heretical, inconsistent, and so full of contradictions I believed it and still believe it to be lies. In that post, I mostly pointed out where it contradicted the Bible it claims its own literature is deuterocanonical too.
This post is going to point out the flaws in in it's "brick and mortar" arguments, specifically, the real-world facts it does not line up with as regards historical plausibility and where it cannot possibly make logical sense when compared to its own logic with real-world fact.
For the Mormon reader, no, I am not going to going to go for the low-hanging fruit and attack Joseph Smith as a charlatan (though I believe he was). I will not go after any "picky points" about real-world Mormon practices, we could argue the validity of that for years and get nowhere.
Instead, I'm going to show why, by Mormonism own logic and that of the Christian faith it claims to be a perfection of, it cannot be as it claims.
1. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
2. Their claims their deuterocanon and the Bible match up are absurd due to basic knowledge of history.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Now, I am but an amateur scholar. For a far more in-depth analysis of Mormon documents by someone who did far more extensive scholarly analysis, I would highly recommend the following link, they go into exhaustive detail comparing Mormon source documents and claims to actual reality, written by someone in that faith who, while I do not agree with some of their conclusions, nevertheless points out far more logical errors that make a hash of all it claims.
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