You really need to ponder what I highlighted above and then ponder it again and then try and look objectively at Joseph Smith and what he did and the scholarship that has come out as to his sources, like http://jur.byu.edu/?p=21296MG 2.0 wrote: ↑Sat May 11, 2024 4:21 pmRepeating a quote I posted earlier:Quoting something drumdude posted as a quote on another thread:There are two layers of reality. There is the objective reality of what happens, and there is the subjective reality of how what happened is seen, interpreted, made meaningful. That second subjective layer can sometimes be the more important layer. As the Yale psychologist Marc Brackett puts it, “Well-being depends less on objective events than on how those events are perceived, dealt with, and shared with others.”
An extrovert walks into a party and sees a different room than an introvert does. A person who has been trained as an interior designer sees a different room than someone who’s been trained as a security specialist. The therapist Irvin Yalom once asked one of his patients to write a summary of each group therapy session they did together. When he read her reports, Yalom realized that she experienced each session radically differently than he did. She never even heard the supposedly brilliant insights Yalom thought he was sharing with the group. Instead, she noticed the small personal acts—the way one person complimented another’s clothing, the way someone apologized for being late. In other words, we may be at the same event together, but we’re each having our own experience of it. Or, as the writer Anaïs Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.
Cognitive scientists call this view of the human person “constructionism.” Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don’t passively take in reality. Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That’s not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It’s to say that we have only subjective access to it. “The mind is its own place,” the poet John Milton wrote, “and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”As I’ve gone through the years it becomes more self evident that the “how we” component as to how we approach things makes a huge difference in life paths and outcomes.The world we choose to live in determines, among many other things, how we read scripture. Those who have chosen to live in God’s world read a different Bible and Book of Mormon than those who have chosen to live in a godless world. Dan Vogel and Dan Peterson do not read the same Book of Mormon. For Vogel, the Book of Mormon is a purely naturalistic product of Joseph Smith’s nineteenth century. For Peterson, the text has both ancient and nineteenth century provenance, being composed anciently and translated in the nineteenth century. For Vogel, Joseph Smith was the sole, purely naturalistic, human author of the book. For Peterson, the book has multiple authors and, since most of those authors are prophets, God strongly influenced the book’s construction and content.
We literally construct our reality. But that doesn’t negate that there is an objective reality out there that we can’t quite wrap our minds around.
In my way of thinking the only possible way of knowing even a portion of what is ‘real’ in the objective sense in regards to what might be termed ultimate reality is if we receive that information from a source other than human beings.
Human beings are pretty creative at making stuff up. Until and if there is a point in time and space where ultimate reality is objectively known I think we ought to be cutting each other a lot more slack.
Regards,
MG
Also, your desire to have people here respect your decisions as to religion are fine. You do you. However, you come here preaching, not respecting others and their decisions to not believe yet another made up religion.
