u/nephite_neophyte

Hello. I'm a critic of the church and so are most of you. Well, there's something my fellow critics do that annoys me.

Besides historical/factual critiques, many criticisms of the church are of a moral nature. Polygamy is the most prevalent example but there are others, like gaslighting, abuse, and authoritarian behavior.

One thing I've noticed is that when critics dish out moral condemnations of the church, they often intentionally avoid using moral language. Instead of using words like "bad," "evil," "heinous," critics will use "problematic," "harmful," "controlling." These words are descriptors of the church's behavior rather than direct moral condemnation, but in this context these words are meant to have a moral connotation.

When someone says "polygamy was harmful" the implied but unstated meaning is that polygamy was evil. But the mere observation that polygamy is harmful is just an observation of fact, and it is meaningless until you put that through a moral framework that thinks that harm is bad and that we should try to reduce harm.

I think the reason people do this is because it allows the critic to condemn the church while still seeming objective and also has the added benefit of avoiding the subjective nature of moral judgements, especially since many critics are of the moral relativist persuasion and don't have the balls to appeal to moral law.

So yeah, this bothers me and I wish people would just say what they mean and have the courage to use moral language.

Recently I finished watching Breaking Bad and I was thinking the whole time how well a Breaking Bad-style TV series about Joseph Smith would do.

Joseph Smith's life is really crazy and exciting but the Church's official media about him always keeps the more colorful stuff out of sight. We need a series that tells the whole story.

It would be similar to Breaking Bad in how it would be about how one man's ambition and deception catches up with him and ends in tragedy.

Joseph would start out as a charming treasure digger, meet Emma, try to reform his ways but end up as a pious fraud composing the Book of Mormon, and as the religion began to take shape he would become more and more power-hungry, reckless and corrupt until he is killed in the Carthage shootout. Obviously the series would touch on the cloak-and-dagger nature of Polygamy.

please can someone just make this

In Mormon apologetics recently there's been a lot of hullabaloo about how God as conceived in Mormonism is more plausible than the God of 'classical theism.' I'm not here to try to settle that particular debate but I am going to make the case that God as conceived in Mormonism has weaknesses that make him implausible and unnecessary.

For a brief overview, the God of Mormonism is an exalted human being. He is a material, biological entity that is located inside the universe.

The God of classical theism is a more abstract kind of being. In fact, he is not a being, but rather Being itself. He does not exist within the universe (except in the person of Jesus if you're a christian) but is rather the conscious spirit which all things take place within.

To be reductive: Mormonism's God lives within the universe, whereas in classical theism the universe lives within God.

Because of their different natures, these two different God concepts are meant to answer different kinds of questions about existence. The God of Mormonism is supposed to answer the question "Why are things like this?" The God of classical theism is more geared toward answering the question "Why does anything exist at all?"

Similar to scientific materialism, Mormonism takes existence to be a brute natural fact that doesn't need a metaphysical explanation. The material universe is eternal. It just exists. The question Mormonism is more interested in is Why are there humans? Why is there life and order rather than chaos? It isn't trying to answer why there is something rather than nothing.

The problem is that our scientific understanding of the universe has progressed to the point that we don't need a demiurge to organize matter. Science has discovered how matter self-organizes according to its own inherent properties and the laws of physics. We understand how galaxies, solar systems, and planets form. We understand more or less how life emerges from non-living material. And we understand how life can complexify into all the diverse forms we see today by natural selection. At no stage in the process do we need to postulate intelligent intervention by a demiurge or alien. That gap has been filled.

On the other hand, the ontological gap of existence vs nonexistence has never been filled and can't really be filled by scientific investigation. It is a philosophical question, and it is just a matter of whether you think that its a question that needs to be asked at all.

Classical theism can deal with the aforementioned scientific discoveries because the whole material universe, including all its laws and self-organizing principles, is held to be an artifact of God.

The weakness of the God of classical theism is philosophical. It is vulnerable to philosophical arguments like the Problem of Evil and many others. But the escape hatch for this version of God is that philosophical arguments are kind of squishy and abstract and there's always a way out.

The weakness of the God of Mormonism is empirical. The very problem that he is supposed to solve has been shown empirically, scientifically to not be a problem in the first place. Put another way, if the God of Mormonism was real, our scientific models would show that the current state of the universe is inconceivable without outside intervention. The theory of evolution wouldn't exist, the theory of planetary and stellar formation wouldn't exist, the Big Bang wouldn't exist. Mormon God would be solely responsible for shaping formless chaos into the forms we recognize today.

Hello guys, I'm working on a website aimed at compiling and answering every single "How could Joseph Smith have known X" question posed by apologists and believers.

I've already got a few of them, but it would be helpful if you guys could throw some of those questions/arguments in the comments. You dont need to provide a refutation for me (although that would be helpful), I just need a big fat list of those arguments.

You people make all these posts about degoogling but haven't degoogled your OS for some goddamn reason.

"I switched from Chrome to Brave" good for you bro but your entire phone is still at the mercy of Google and its still constantly sending them telemetry and data. For the love of god just degoogle your OS and finish the job