Equality wrote:What I find fascinating about the Meldrum situation is that we don't have a case of a crackpot believer claiming some revelation that is clearly at odds with established doctrine. Just the opposite is true. His personal "revelation" is simply confirming the things taught by all the prophets from Joseph Smith to Gordon B. Hinckley (Tommy Boy has yet to weigh in, I think). So the usual refrain of "personal revelation must be measured against the scriptures and the prophets" doesn't work. At the same time, if the apologists tried to claim revelation for their ideas, they would be going against established doctrine. That's the beauty of it, really. It just puts into such stark relief the fact that the apologists are the ones out of step with Mormon doctrine. You can't really believe literally in the LDS scriptures and the prophets and at the same time believe in science. That's the great dissonant fact that apologists just can't seem to face squarely.
You can't believe in all of the prophets at the same time either, nor have their revelations been internally consistent. Certainly the Meldrum hypothesis is in line with what was taught in the early Church and by fundamentalists like Joseph Fielding Smith, but I never once heard Hinckley commit himself to a specific geography... he was a smart fellow.
Mormon doctrine is a very pliable material, and it is shifting slowly toward the apologists.