Mormon Heretic

I just finished the book Saint Peter: A Biography by Michael Grant.  I think it is misnamed.  I don’t feel like I know Peter any better, but it is a good book for learning about early Christianity.  The author describes how tough it is to really understand Peter both at the beginning, as well as the end.  From the Epilogue, pages 175-6,

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Bishop Rick has mentioned a few times that he believes the apostle Paul invented Christianity, so I thought I’d create a post to address this specific issue.  In my previous post on the Strangite Church, he said in a few comments,

I believe Paul invented Christianity, not Jesus. There are only a couple of last minute, thrown-in scriptures that Christians use to claim Jesus intended to start a new church, but the overwhelming evidence points to Jesus merely trying to reform Judaism.

He went on to say, Read more…

I received a surprising resurgence of activity from one of my oldest posts, Book of Mormon Geography.  In the latest discussion, Bishop Rick asked, “Why would HF send a revelation that would not be understood?”  Then he clarified it further stating, “Why would HF send a revelation to HIS “Prophet” (as opposed to any “prophet”) that would not be understood by HIS “Prophet”?”

This seems to be a common theme in the Bloggernacle–but not just here.  Other religions have similar questions, and even agnostics/atheists ask similar questions.  In the book Powerful Prayers, Larry King asks Rabbi Irwin Katsof, “Why can’t God speak English?”  Let me quote from the book for a moment.  From page 163, Read more…

I’ve been having a heated discussion over at Christian Forums.  Someone there linked to my article on Theosis.  I was a bit nervous, as these types of forums can be not only heated, but strongly biased against our church.   I decided to jump into the fray, and while there are some people there with some strong knowledge of ancient church history and the Bible, there are quite a few that seem intent on distorting and misrepresenting LDS theology.  So, I don’t really recommend participating there.

I did learn that it’s not just the LDS that are picked on, so at least they have that going for them.  When I complained that another person by the handle of Pheobe Ann posted a distorted view of LDS theology, another person there by the handle Skylark said,

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I received a pingback from my previous post on Theosis from someone at Christian Forums.  I have another post on President Lorenzo Snow’s famous couplet, “As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may be.”

I’ve had a few exchanges with people over there.  Since I spent so much time, I thought I would highlight some of these exchanges here and show a Biblical basis for Exaltation.
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For my birthday, my wife gave me Dan Brown’s newest novel, The Lost Symbol.  I don’t typically read novels–I prefer sports, history, religion, or biographies–but I read The DaVinci Code and loved it.  Angels & Demons was pretty good.  I had heard rumors that Dan Brown’s book was going to deal with Masonry and Mormonism, so I was looking forward to see a good conspiracy novel.  Well, it turns out the Masonry part was right, but the Mormon part was pretty benign.  There were only 2 obvious–but benign references–to Mormonism.  Some of the plot has some indirect parallels to Mormon thought, though the book focuses more on seeming pagan practices than Mormon ideas.  Anyway, this was fun to read, and I thought I’d try to give a few nibbles from the book, without giving away too much plot.  So, here’s a taste of how related it is to Mormonism (which isn’t much).  I’m not going to give away too much that relates specifically to the main plot, but if you want to read it fresh, you should quit reading now.

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I came across this recent article at Christianity Today describing meetings between evangelicals and Mormons.  Here are some interesting excerpts from the article:

LDS president Thomas S. Monson and his two counselors permitted Standing Together, an alliance of 90 Utah evangelical churches, to use the historic Salt Lake City Tabernacle for a September 13 revival meeting. Throngs of evangelicals and Mormons enjoyed gospel songs and prayed together.

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A friend of mine let me know about this news item at Signature Books.  Apparently, one of their authors (David Wright) has a new book published by Oxford University Press.  For those of you who don’t know, Oxford is known as a pretty tough place to publish.  They have pretty high scholarly standards, so getting published there lends one some great credibility.  So, the original press release at Signature stated that the Ten Commandments were plagiarized from Hammurabi.  The old quote from the site is below.  However, David Wright brought to my attention a correction in the press release.  I will show both of them.

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Thanks to FireTag for letting me know about a recent statement by the current prophet of the Community of Christ.  He talks about scriptural literalism.  The videos can be found on the CoC website, and this quote comes from Chapter 4.  Let me quote from Pres. Veazey directly: Read more…

Ok, comparing these two books might seem a bit odd, but let me explain.  First of all, I’ve already done a few posts on Abraham.  In the first, I compared the Book of Abraham to the Koran, and wondered if Joseph might have translated an Islamic text, because the story found in the Book of Abraham where Abraham destroys his father’s idols is quite similar to a Koranic tale.  Then my second post on Abraham, I learned that this story is also found in the Jewish Midrash, so there is another non-biblical source for this story.

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The Faithful Dissident asked a very interesting question in my last post.

Back to Joseph Smith and theocracy, there’s something that puzzles me about Quinn’s claim. If JS truly intended on establishing a theocracy in America, wouldn’t that be in complete contradiction to what his religion proclaimed (i.e. that the US Constitution was a God-inspired document)? I never took American history, so I’m no expert on the Constitution, but how could it have been upheld in a theocracy?

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I recently made the acquaintance of Morgan Deane, who runs a blog called Warfare and the Book of Mormon.  Morgan is a scholar in Military History, and has used some of his expertise in analyzing some passages in the Book of Mormon as related to warfare.  Here’s what he says about himself on his website.
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I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the number of positive responses of the Malay Theory in my previous post.  In discussing the post with Ralph Olsen, the author of this theory, he has given me permission to post his unpublished manuscript!  Ralph is looking for a sort of “peer review”, where people give honest feedback about how the article could be improved.  He would also like to further promote the theory.  So, feel free to download it here, and post your comments, questions, thoughts, or concerns here.  (Please be patient!   The document is about 300 pages long, and nearly 20 MB in size, so it will take some time.)

Check out this map, and a few other links! Read more…