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drethelin comments on The elephant in the room, AMA - Less Wrong
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How do you reconcile the multitude of religions with the certainty of your belief? What exactly convinced you that only in 1830 did the one true faith come into existence, and the multitude of others existing before and after were simply foolish or lies?
I'm not a Mormon, but my understanding of Mormon beliefs is that a Mormon would no more consider pre-1830 Christianity foolish lies then a modern physicist would consider pre-20th physics foolish pseudoscience.
ok, let's say that lets christianity off the hook. What about zeus, odin, shiva, allah, judaism, or coyote? It also doesn't serve to explain why he would consider his, out of all the flavors of christianity, to be more uniquely convincing.
Even as an atheist, I don't understand your question. What do you mean by "reconcile the multitude of religions with the certainty of your belief"? What do you mean about the falsehood of religions before or since?
If you're asking why God didn't make revelations until then, then the Mormons most definitely believe God and his angels spoke to prophets long before 1830. To Abraham, to Moses, through Jesus to the Apostles, etc, etc. If you're asking why God has permitted false religions to exist, then couldn't you have phrased it more clearly than you did?
there are hundreds of religions. In general, they contradict one another (there are exceptions but enough do that I don't think it's relevant), and no more than one can be true. How does it make sense to strongly believe in any of them? To start believing in LDS, I would have to be strongly convinced that it has truth beyond each and every one of the hundreds of religions ranging from very similar to starkly different. What exactly would make you home in on Mormonism in the existing beliefspace? What rules out every other religion, and leaves mormonism as the only one that can possibly be true?
The question wouldn't be why god permits false religions (though that's another valid and separate question), but why he makes many of them almost indistinguishable from the true one.
What ArisKatsaris said is true and answers half the question. The other half I will answer in a new thread.
To elaborate on this point, from your point of view there is one true religion and a myriad of false ones. Why is the evidence presented for the true one nearly indistinguishable from the false ones? Why is story of the revelation of the golden plates to Joseph smith the same as what would happen if Joseph smith made up the plates, and then didn't want to come up with plates and so claimed that they could not be shown to everyone (I know there are witnesses but showing it only to his selected few does not actually make it much more plausible that they existed) and then that they vanished away for ever?
Assuming god exists and wants you to worship him, there should NOT be any doubt at all about it. He can write the bible on the side of the mountain, on the moon, or in the minds of every man alive should he so desire. Why would he reveal his will in the least convincing way possible (private revelations to human prophets)?
You would have to ask first whether he truly believes that "only in 1830 did the one true faith come into existence, and the multitude of others existing before and after were simply foolish or lies" - the impression I got from what he said in other threads was that he didn't believe that. But I might be wrong, he's best placed to tell.