Modern Evangelicals and other "Mainstream Christians" have many apologists among their ranks. For millennia they have defended the church against heretics, agnostics, and atheists. Biblical apologists, however, devised new tactics when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Joseph Smith came on the scene in the 1820s. The main goal of these “mainstream Christian”apologists is to discredit Joseph Smith in any way they can.
The earliest apologists defended basic belief in God and Christianity against agnostics and atheists to divert their attacks in order to protect the church against claims and allegations that might destroy the faith of the weaker believers. As the Christian faith aged along, heresies also developed within the ranks of those claiming authority or scholarship, and likewise had to be rooted out.
It has been some 200 years now since Joseph Smith made his first claims as a young man proclaimed to have seen the Father and the Son in a vision. He sought to know the truth about religion as he faced the many different sectarian churches of his day. The attacks that followed his professing to communicate with God sought to malign his character, the Book of Mormon and his claim of a restored church and gospel that contained authority directly from God. His life was one continuous slander and persecution of him and the church eventually resulting in his death at age 38 in 1844.
The growth and progress of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been slow and steady in all parts of the world. The critics of the church have sought to discredit it everywhere the missionaries go and extensively on the internet in the modern era.
What are the arguments against the church? They include unfounded and unproven allegations claiming Joseph Smith was a false prophet or not a prophet at all. They claim we believe in a "non-biblical" Jesus. There is a multiplicity of defamation against Joseph Smith started by his earliest enemies. These tropes and allegations are used today without context, often without reliable source documents. Yet they persist in the world of modern Christian apologetics as weapons of misinformation and lies that throngs of non-critical thinking biblical believers accept as spoken by their respective sources of congregational leaders.
Most of the arguments by biblical scholars and apologists regarding doctrinal teachings are fundamentally flawed in logic. They omit facts and comparisons as to the fundamental implications of modern divinity school theology The key factor in the arguments against doctrine is that the critics never compare the foundational doctrines and implications of systematic theology that have become the basis for modern evangelical teachings.
Many efforts and attempts are to demonstrate or prove that Joseph Smith was not a prophet and that his teachings are not biblical. What does it even mean to say that something is biblical when even "biblical Christians" don't even agree on what something means.
The fact is biblical teachings today are a matter of opinion in the multitudes of denominations and sectarian churches that claim the Bible as their source.
These modern protectors of the "Christian faith" have applied a non-Christian label to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These intellectuals that preside in the halls of Evangelical, Catholic depend on false labels and false premises to hold their arguments up. This narrative has been cunningly devised and disseminated to multitudes of churches whose pastors are trained in theological seminaries and seminars.
What is the fatal and fundamental flaw of Evangelical theology theory? They claim that God is all-knowing, or omniscient. They also claim that a deity is a genderless and incorporeal being and by some stroke of deduction would be all-powerful or omnipotent to a degree incomprehensible to mankind. The fundamental ability of such a being is to magically create out of nothing anything it can whimsically imagine. They are guessing with their imagination what God can or can't do. Ancient philosophers Like Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas determined the basic nature of God. Their teachings are the foundation of classical Christian thinking.
As an all-knowing and all-powerful being or force, there is no guessing as to who will be in heaven and who will be in hell. If the Trinity deity already has this knowledge, and all people were made out of nothing, and are simply like pawns, there is no need for creation, or a fall, or for suffering, or an eternal hell. This Godly power acknowledged by Biblical scholars is engaged in a moot process and should and could have just created the saved souls. As it is now it has to govern both heaven and hell forever.
To compound these flaws we also see that modern biblical philosophy is built on a foundation of a non-eternal Christian narrative. It is temporary Christianity. God just started making up all this biblical teaching stuff, creation, and things related to salvation about 6000 years ago. The modern Christian God is a one-time creator, doing all of this on a first-run trial basis. Out of this process they, those special souls who claim that they are saved because of the Bible, get to be with God forever doing nothing that they can explain.
Sin, commandments, laws, punishment, and salvation did not exist on any level, except possibly in the mind of God until the book of Genesis. In other words, biblical apologists and their claim for a moral argument for God is simply hot air. Their doctrinal theories imply that God is making up the rules of creation and salvation as he goes along, not based on any eternal law or promise of salvation.
To classical theologians, the sacrifice of Jesus wasn't a necessity because God's power should have been sufficient to have saved souls in any way he pleased. Jesus was simply God's reaction to the fall, a plan B, which counters modern biblical theorists that mankind was intended to live in the Garden of Eden. If that was the case why did God let them choose to to opt out of it?
They claim free will is why sin exists. But, who made the laws on which sin is based knowing man would not keep them? Also, free will cannot exist in beings created spontaneously by the will of God. The true reason there was a fall is because that was the plan. The plan was to have salvation through Jesus Christ and that required a fall first.
Let's go ahead and look at some of the other arguments and tactics that confuse Latter-day Saints who have not prepared to deal with the spin and conjecture used by biblical apologists and critics of the Church of Jesus Christ.
A reason people criticize the church is because they have doubts about their own faith. They may suspect tampering of some nature that didn’t give a clear picture of some element of church history. When was history ever written down and representative with absolute clarity as to what happened?
Even if it was written with accuracy, when was it compiled, repeated, and disseminated? Were those doing the telling and teaching perfectly representing what they had? A comprehensive retelling of history is a difficult task. Do some actually think that the success of the Church of Jesus Christ is based on successive lies and telling false stories? That narrative never holds up under scrutiny and critical analysis.
The key thing I remember is that the critics are not concerned about the eternal nature of my soul. Whatever arguments that exist of a critical nature against the Church of Jesus Christ or that you have heard, they are offset by a greater number of arguments and evidence that you may not be aware of. The most oppressive and obnoxious flaw of modern Christian Bible scholarship is that it describes a deity that condemns billions just to save a few. This is what a Christians today accepts by implication based on how they think people are saved, that is by a simple confession and doing nothing to follow it up. It is salvation without discipleship.
Our critic's arguments are based on limited narratives of limited scholarship and limited facts. Their version of events in Church history is mostly conjecture. Their narratives are false. Their errors are exposed by the fallacies they use which can be discovered with a little bit of critical thinking, study, and fact-finding. Many of the narratives rely on overtones of mocking that get repeated by even less informed internet readers and listeners. These become parrots of misinformation.
The more prominent modern critics of the church seem to operate on an elevated level of self-importance. They present arguments and their methods of presenting are full of fallacies. An informed listener can recognize them as such.
Something we could assume is that academics' main goal is to seek after truth. Yet it seems acceptance by peers is the primary goal. A search for truth is below their ambition for recognition. There is a lot of context a person needs to understand to properly evaluate the competing arguments between Church history and doctrine and how the nay-sayers tell it.
Critics of the church are seeking to do one thing. They would like you to think that they can undermine the message of the restoration of the Gospel which includes the testimony of Joseph Smith and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. They allege that the church has either not told every instance of church history or limited the narrative to a few details. They refer to this as whitewashing and create a huge controversy to imply impropriety.
Because of the burden of proof to discredit Joseph Smith and the fact that for almost 200 years critics have examined the Book of Mormon and all of their theories to discredit it have failed. They still seek to foment hate and distrust towards the church.
Some former members allege that the missionaries are sent out to deceive people because a very small number of converts join and then lose their faith quickly saying that there was no talk about the temple or detailed analysis of the church’s history. These are things that all people learn about and have to study to gain their own understanding.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized in 1830. The members in the various stages of its existence have sought to be good citizens in their communities and markedly so in the current day and age. They are known for striving for family unity and the values that sustain it.
Every teaching in the church revolves around the gospel and doctrine of Jesus Christ. Our message is and always has been that he is the Son of God, our Savior, and Redeemer. The church as an organization spreads charity and service all over the world. Our religion is to covenant with God and live to have the Holy Ghost as our companion in life.
There is an indeterminate number, perhaps a few dozen or so, possibly a few hundred, vocal people that go around speaking out against us. They don't like the theology, leaders or culture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some of them are anonymous and some are not.
The more public protagonists that aggressively promote their agendas are often professional speakers or conduct ministries with a financial incentive attached to them. Some are atheists and others are modern-day Christian scholars and apologists.
The “anti-Mormon” messages don’t really have too much of an impact on most members. They don’t stop temple construction or missionary services.
The critics will take the minimal amount of evidence, the maximum amount of conjecture and speculation, and mold it into a narrative in an effort to make Joseph Smith appear as bad as a person can be. Their bias and motive are plainly evident. That Is why I don’t trust their judgments or the perspectives they promote.
With some imagination, it is possible to think that these few dozen of protagonists and a few hundred other disaffected people have dissuaded an indeterminate number of members out of 16 million to disavow the church for a period in their lives. What they don’t tell you is that many of them have come back to the church after discovering the dead-end trail the critics with their false narratives and philosophies have blazed.
It pretty much stands to reason that generally the primary objective to is demonstrate that Joseph Smith was not a prophet. They dig up what they consider evidence and then orchestrate narratives around it. These critics have yet to come up with an explanation to demonstrate how Joseph Smith was a liar and how he managed the whole development of the Church and the Book of Mormon as a hoax. Do they claim he was some incredible genius con man? How is it that the church has been perpetuated by other like-minded deceivers that somehow control people and extract money from members and limit the fun they have in life?
They will claim the church is a cult even though the person who supposedly was the character and reason the church came to be has been dead since 1844? They will claim that the church is racist, non-diverse, or otherwise exclusive of other cultures when the church's major growth is outside of the United States, and growing African and South American nations.
These critics with their attempts at scholarly opinions and conclusions based only on their personal evaluations want to convince their audiences that the doctrines of the church and us as members are not Christians.
They create “straw-man” fallacies and call it a Mormon Jesus. They also create their own false version of Joseph Smith with fictitious speculation and conjecture of historical events.
They do this by claiming that we worship and follow some being other than the Jesus that is historically referred to in the Bible. While This simply isn’t true they pursue this objective in a variety of ways, all of them are opinion-based conjecture with no basis in fact.
They sometimes start their monologues with an observation of how nice members of the church are as well as being family oriented. This is somehow the result of their being deceived by the false teachings of the church.
I attended my first anti-mormon presentation shortly after I was baptized. The interesting thing about it and the subsequent negative information I encountered had an effect on me that I did not anticipate. It strengthened my faith. I could see the tactics they used were not constituent with people that are attempting to tell the truth. As I studied their messages and saw their fallacies and false premises it was easy to see that these people could not make a point against the church without resorting to one tactic or another that had had its foundation a lie.
The tactics they use in the process of making their arguments and points of contention known are easily identifiable. They consist of conjectured narratives of past historical events, conjecture, and fallacies based on doctrinal distortions of Latter-day Saint theology. They often simply resort to mockery of those same events and doctrines when they don’t have a logical explanation for them.
The basis of their points of contention or arguments against the church starts with an unprovable premise. They don't think Joseph Smith was a credible example of a prophet of God. Do they think a more polished person would have been more to their liking? Their goal is to convince others that because of any human flaws that he had, or any of the historical events like polygamy, they think shouldn't have occurred discredit him.
They do not know many facts. It isn’t always what they say but what they don’t say in order to misinform their audiences.
They say millions of nice, reasonable, successful, and believing people that apply the teachings of Jesus Christ and have accepted Joseph Smith's testimony are deceived. These members of the church have seen the power of God in their lives. Their testimony of Jesus Christ is the same that Joseph Smith expressed, and is taught in the Book of Mormon. Our Savior’s love, atonement, and mercy are the focus. They may not state that as the case but that is the foundation they must demonstrate as not being valid.
These critics I have observed are a combination of biblical apologists and may have some financial incentives pertaining to their “ministries", former disgruntled members of the church, and others that listen to their messages and also created their own ministries with financial incentives to confuse members whose faith may be weak at a particular moment.
The uninformed listeners fail to investigate or think critically about the information they are receiving. The purveyors of the messages don’t care if their information is correct or not. Since the message supports already existing bias in their minds the audiences can and do share the message using the same false premise, fallacies, and conjectured narratives they heard.
They often combine this with mocking as well since the critics have made some successfully creative delusions that do not make sense, and attribute them to the Latter-day Saints. The reality is they are not true but they manage to support the deceptions the critics purport to be exposing.
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