Sethbag wrote:...a lot of people who were previously strong believers, when confronted with the unvarnished history, did doubt, and stopped believing. The unvarnished history can promote doubt without 100% of those who hear it starting to doubt. I was pointing out that a lot of people do turn to doubt.
So why in the world would the church actively promote doubt by getting involved in apologetics? The church sees itself as having a three-fold mission...not four.
The unvarnished history promotes doubt, period.
I'm not arguing that this can be the case. So why would the church want to be in the business of promoting doubt?
But the defenses [for the church being true] are lame. You can argue this is just my opinion, and that is true, but in the end, I'm right about this.
That's debatable.
...the fact [is] that the church is essentially a mind virus remains unchanged.
Again, that's debatable.
Let's see. Joseph Smith claims to have some golden plates. With the plates buried in a hollow log or whatever out in the woods (or so it's claimed), Joseph Smith can still "translate" the words recorded on the plates, by pressing his face down into a hat, at the bottom of which he has placed a stone he found while digging a well for some guy. This stone shows Joseph Smith the translation of the plates, and he has it recorded as the Book of Mormon. Now, someone who doesn't require for this to be true, will look at something like this and think wow, that's pretty crazy.
It does seem weird. But that doesn't negate the possibility that the Book of Mormon, when all is said and done, was translated by the gift and power of God. That's really all we have from Joseph Smith himself in regards to the translation process.
Father Abraham writes a record. Eventually, an Egyptian priest who is familiar with this record decides, for whatever reason, to write his own version of record, but rather than actually include the words of the record, instead he writes about other things which nevertheless he intends to bring to mind to someone the words of the original story. It just so happens that this other thing that the priest uses to tell (or remind us of) the story of Abraham is in fact a set of magical statements intended, in the Egyptian belief system, to enable a dead person to resume the functions of a living soul in the afterlife. Not only this, but in fact the priests then take this story (the story of Abraham, remember, which happens to also look just like an Egyptian religious afterlife-enablement spellbook) and bury it with a mummy as if it were merely the run of the mill Egyptian funerary spellbook. But then when Joseph Smith gets it, he "translates" this all back to the original words of Father Abraham. It's a miracle I tell ya!
Go read some of Kevin Barney's stuff on this.
http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publica ... chapid=168It's a long read. Have you read it? It may be worth your while.
The way I look at it is that if the Book of Mormon shows plausibility in being what it purports to be then there are going to be some reasonable explanations that hold water in regards to Book of Abraham issues and the Kinderhook Plates incident.
MG, it's stuff like this that demonstrates precisely the claim I'm making, ie: that the apologists simply aren't willing to exercise critical thinking about these things. The Book of Abraham fiasco, for instance, just happens to look exactly like one might expect it to look if Joseph Smith really did make it all up, and looks next to nothing like one would expect if the writings of Father Abraham really had been preserved for us to have in the latter days.
Is Kevin Barney a prime example of the type of apologist you're describing here?
Regards,
MG