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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3084 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 19, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Just finished Bowman's The Mormon People. The book filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge about how the Mormon religion operates and the history of Utah, which is helpful. But I'm still left with that feeling of "why do people believe this?"

This is not unique to my relationship with the Mormon religion. I grew up Methodist, loved it, and wish I could continue to be part of a religious community. I just couldn't get over the hump of having to believe things that quite clearly seemed not to be true (or didn't have any convincing evidence for me to think them true). The LDS church seems to turn that up to 11, requiring members to believe that this guy (who had a career as a treasure hunter) found golden tablets in NY that only he could translate and which then disappeared. And that afterward he continued to have divine revelations about the nature of the universe that would dictate how they live their lives.

I know we have practicing Mormons in our community here, and I'm so curious if they actually believe these things or just find that the religion provides a useful guide to living and a foundation for a well-functioning community.

Yep, it's an actual, earnest belief; I don't see the Book of Mormon as a wise fable or well-intentioned story but as historical record.

The treasure hunter thing is very stupid, and Smith himself later confessed that it was nonsense he had been fooled into believing was real. The plates are less of an issue with me due to the witnesses backing them up. At the end of the day though my own belief in the church is based on my personal experiences with God rather than historical details. Not to deny the importance of the latter but they are pretty tough to evaluate one way or another relative to evaluating firsthand experience.

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