long ago ideas

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago." - Friedrich Nietzsche. Long ago, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery conquered false claims that the Book of Mormon was fiction or that it came through a stone in a hat. But these old claims have resurfaced in recent years. To conquer them again, we have to return to what Joseph and Oliver taught.

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Church cliques, peer reviews, D&C 9 and 10, etc.

The biggest problem with Scripture Central is the divisions it creates by insisting on promoting the personal opinions of its founders instead of recognizing and accommodating the full spectrum of thought among faithful Latter-day Saints. Instead, Scripture Central excludes the rational views of many faithful Latter-day Saints, solely because their founders disagree with those views.

We'll discuss this more in the next post.

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Updates over the last few days:


1. I posted a discussion of the Come Follow Me lesson on D&C 10:


2. I posted another peer review of Scripture Central, this time of Kno-Why #431, here:


People are sending me various videos from Scripture Central to review, which I'll do in upcoming posts to that blog. Some of those videos are astonishing...

3. I posted more suggestions for improvement in the Joseph Smith Papers.


4. An interesting X user posted an insightful comment about groups within the Church that claim special knowledge, etc. 

Readers here know that I strongly value transparency and openness, particularly in academia. That's why I post these blogs for anyone to read. And that's why I don't agree with the Scripture Central approach of enforcing a particular set of personal opinions, especially when those opinions don't at least follow the FAITH model (as we'll discuss soon).

Like Paul, Nephi, and both early and modern Church leaders, we should all "use great plainness of speech," "delight in plainness," and "glory in plainness" because "the Lord sent forth the fulness of his gospel, his everlasting covenant, reasoning in plainness and simplicity." (Doctrine and Covenants 133:57)

Hopefully, we will not be those who "will not search knowledge, nor understand great knowledge, when it is given unto them in plainness, even as plain as word can be." (2 Nephi 32:7)

The post is here (and the value of the post doesn't depend on who posted it):


The poster says, "I currently belong to no closed group, either on X or otherwise. It is best for me to stay completely 100% in the open and equally accessible to all LDXers."

That's good advice to follow. 

The whole post is worth reading and thinking about.





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