Re: Are Mormons really honest about explaining what they believe?

On Feb 8, 10:00=A0am, Jeff <jeff_...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> How many Latter-day Saints on this newsgroup believe the answers to
> questions 1, 2, and 3 are speculative instead of real doctrines of
> your church?

Interestingly, when addressing this question very directly with John
(runsrealfast), he has removed my final comment in our discussion
here:
http://hubpages.com/hub/Article-of-Faith-1-Of-The-Church-Of-Jesus-Chri=
st-of-Latter-Day-Saints

The gist of the comment thread was thus:

rrf: "God created all things."

me: "In that case, there's nothing left for any other god to have
created."

rrf: "You have to be careful when speculating. Maybe we don't
understand what 'all things' means."

me: "Ergo, Mormons don't know what they mean when they're claiming to
believe that 'God created all things'."

This is really a striking thing. LdS will speak of belief in other
gods as speculative. On the other hand, they will speak with apparent
certaintly of how "God created all things." Yet when the implications
of the certain thing and the speculative thing collide ("if God
created all things, then there's nothing left for other gods to have
created, in the case that they might exist"), many LdS will not reject
the speculative thing. They will not say "well then, this proves the
wisdom of calling it speculative that other gods might exist.
Apparently the thing we certainly believe -- that God created all
things -- rules out what some of us have speculated on so
irresponsibly." No, that's not what many Mormons will say. Instead,
they will carefully hedge by lowering their confidence in what they
even MEAN by saying that God created all things. "No, it remains
possible that there could be many gods -- we have a stake in
preserving these speculations we publicly wax so cautious about. So in
order to preserve the prerogative of engaging in speculations we
publicly pretend to regard with suspicion, we'll cast suspicion on
what we say even when we're at our most confident and least
speculative. Therefore, when we say we believe that God created all
things, we're obliged to speculate that we may not know what we mean
by that."

:-/