I believe you are projecting but I'm not posting these things to debate with you. These posts are for those who hear.Arenera wrote: ↑November 3rd, 2017, 8:59 amYou are so biased you aren’t making sense. If you want to evaluate something to make a reliable decision, you need to put your bias aside. The statement from the Apostles pertain to the Sections, not the LoF.Finrock wrote: ↑November 3rd, 2017, 8:45 am
You are free to believe what you wish. The LoF were produced in legitimacy and added to the canon of scripture by a legitimate process of the Church. The individuals in the committee, which included JS, were called and set apart and blessed with all rights and privileges to do what they did and they had God's help in accomplishing their goals. Joseph Smith was involved, he knew what was going on. The Twelve apostles were involved, they gave the call, and knew what was going on. The committee responsible were blessed by Joseph Smith. The General Assembly of the Church was approved and supported by all leaders of the Church at that time. The LoF were added to our canon of scripture by a legitimate, righteous, and planned manner and their approval was sustained unanimously by all quorums of the Church at that time. You clearly don't believe that God was with his Church back then, or that apostles had authority, or that Joseph Smith was inspired by God. But, I believe that the committee had all of the authority they needed to produce the work that they did. They were called by God, approved by the leaders, and their work was inspired. Only if you believe that the Church was in apostasy and did not have legitimate authority at that time to commission the committee responsible for the LoF can you contend that this was some sort of rogue operations. As I've said before, your reliance on a single, flawed essay by Noel Reynolds is misplaced. Noel Reynolds is wrong and trusting in his work, which was not approved by the Church, not commissioned by a high council of the Church, not blessed by the Prophet, and not called by God as opposed to what the Church of Jesus Christ did in the 1830's is called being in a state of cognitive dissonance.
-Finrock
Some other things to consider:Lecture 5 is incomplete doctrine and does not stand on its own.The rhetoric and the formatting of the Lectures were borrowed from contemporary Protestant discourse and that they also include some doctrinal assumptions that are most easily recognized in a Protestant context.
Nor is there consensus on the standard claim that the Lectures as such have never been officially canonized.
- Joseph Smith was not present.
- The 12 Apostles were not present.
Several writers have found much in the Lectures and in the Church's eventual separation of them from the scriptural canon with which to embarrass Latter-day Saints.
Dan Vogel uses Lecture 5 as his principal evidence for an evolving Mormon concept of God that in 1835 reflected "Sidney Rigdon's Primitivistic background and not the [later] orthodox LDS view of three distinct personages in the godhead."
The committee to review the D&C, included senior apostles George F. Richards, Anthony W. Ivins, Melvin J. Ballard, James E. Talmage, John A. Widtsoe, and Joseph Fielding Smith. They made the recommendation to remove the LoF and the presiding quorums of the Church approved that action soon thereafter.
Our ability to penetrate and understand the proceedings of the December 1834 Kirtland School is severely hampered by the scarcity of clarifying contemporary statements about the lectures or their authors.
McLellin describes a school that was already devoted to "the sciences of penmanship, arithmetic, English grammar and geography,"
The History of the Church appears to have a few helpful entries. But since they were interpolated by later secretaries, not drawn from original records like the Prophet's journals, they cannot be used to establish the Prophet's authorship of the Lectures.
But the statement itself may not reflect Joseph Smith's own words at all. His original diaries and journals, which for some periods provided most of the source material from which the History of the Church was later compiled, have a fifteen-month gap which spans the period in which the lectures were delivered and prepared for publication.
My belief is based on information, not bias. I can do that because I haven’t spent months and years trying to make the LoF something that it isn’t.
Rejecting something because "anti's" use it, is fallacious.
Rejecting something because an apostate group use it to justify their apostasy, is fallacious.
Rejecting something because you don't understand it, is fallacious.
Depending on a single, demonstrably flawed essay is fallacious.
Special pleading, is fallacious.
Making arguments of irrelevance, is fallacious.
Yes, we can make decisions using all of these fallacious methods and perhaps we come to the right conclusion, but not likely and in the end we stand on shaky ground.
I took a weekend to read the LoF by the power of the Holy Ghost and that is all it took. Years of believing the scholars, believing the explanations apologist gave to explain away the LoF, etc. were resolved in a few hours.
-Finrock