also see: Is Mormonism Christian?
and: Mormonism Exposed Part I: False god(s)
In this second section, it is important to first discuss what the Bible itself says about testing false prophets and then demonstrate from his own words that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism was indeed a false prophet.
I. The Biblical Tests for a False Prophet“And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost, And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.” Moroni 10:4-5“with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ”, and Jesus will confirm it’s truthfulness to me by the power of the Holy Spirit through some subjective experience.If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.endure a trial, not to know whether the BoM is true or whether Joseph Smith is a true prophet of God. Therefore, Christians need to look at what the Bible itself says about recognizing false prophets and what the New Testament specifically says about avoiding and rejecting them.
1st John 4:1 says, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” dokimazo, which according to the world’s premiere New Testament Greek dictionary means, “to make a critical examination of someth[ing.] [T]o determine genuineness, put to the test, examine“. [Bauer, Danker, Arndt, & Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature, 3rd Ed., (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 255, entry 1.] So, 4:1 tells us that we must “put to the test, examine” and “make a critical examination” of “the spirits to see whether they are” truly “from God because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
The Book of Mormon gives us a promise,
According to the Book of Mormon (hereafter BoM), if I want to know whether it’s message is true or false, I simply have to read it
Mormon missionaries have explained this confirmatory experience to me and described it as “a burning in the bosom”. They said that I should also look for this same idea reflected in Moroni 10:4-5 in the following verse from the Bible:
KJV James 1:5
Of course, the problem is that James 1:5 is speaking in the context of getting wisdom from God that is needed to
The word “test” in 1st John 4:1 is the Greek word
Question: So how exactly do we test them? . . . .
Test # 1: If they make a prediction that fails to come to pass.
NAU Deuteronomy 13:1-5 “If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, 2 and the sign or the wonder comes true, concerning which he spoke to you, saying, ‘Let us go after other gods (whom you have not known) and let us serve them,’ 3 you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for the LORD your God is testing you to find out if you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. 4 “You shall follow the LORD your God and fear Him; and you shall keep His commandments, listen to His voice, serve Him, and cling to Him. 5 “But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has counseled rebellion against the LORD your God who brought you from the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery, to seduce you from the way in which the LORD your God commanded you to walk. So you shall purge the evil from among you.“
Deuteronomy 18:20-22 says, ‘But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.’ 21 “You may say in your heart, ‘How will we know the word which the LORD has not spoken?’ 22 “When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him.
Test # 2: If they try to lead you after other gods even though their prediction came true.
So, we have two Biblical standards for testing prophets and spirits: (1) When the prophet or spirit gives a prediction about the future that does not come to pass he is a false prophet, and (2) when a prophet or spirit makes a prediction that comes true yet they try to get us to worship other gods and follow other teachings not found in the Bible, that is a false prophet or false spirit that is trying to lead us away from the truth. With that in mind, we will now “test” Joseph Smith, the founder and first prophet of Mormonism, and prove that he was indeed a false prophet. . . . .
read the full article here.
Here is the English version of an article on science and Mormonism that I published awhile ago in my blog “Interlingua multilingue”:
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Science and the Mormons
The Mormons are a religious sect that emerged from Christianity in the United States in the Nineteenth Century. They added to the Bible their own scripture, the Book of Mormon, translated by Joseph Smith from an original text in a language he called Reformed Egyptian. According to the mythology of the Mormons, in 1827 the angel Moroni gave Smith these texts, which were engraved on golden tables. Smith could understand them without learning their language through the divine magic of two special lenses that he used to read them while he translated them.
Smith and his followers were persecuted by traditional Christians, who forced them to travel slowly and with great sacrifices until they reached what is now Utah, where their descendants dominate the religious and social life of this American state.
According to the Mormons, the Indians of the Americas came from Egypt more than 2,000 (two thousand) years ago. They used this myth to convert many Indians to their religion. “We were taught that all the blessings of our Hebrew ancestors made us a special people,” said Jose a Loyaza, a lawyer in Salt Lake City, the capital of Utah. “And this identity gave us a sense of transcendental affiliation, a special identity with God.” But Loyaza gradually learned that there was another outrageous irony to his faith.
He rejected his religion after learning that evidence provided by comparative DNA studies between American Indians and Asians conclusively proved that the first humans that migrated to the Americas came not from the Middle East but from Asia.
For the Mormons this genetic confirmation of the origin of the Indians in the Americas is a fundamental collision of science against religion. It is in direct conflict with the Book of Mormon, which, according to their religion, is a completely error-free historical work that must be interpreted literally.
The Book of Mormon is also fundamentally racist. It narrates that a tribe of Hebrews from Jeruselem went to the Americas in 600 B.C. and split up into two groups, the Nephites and the Lamanites. The Nephites carried the “true” religion to the new world and were in constant conflict with the Lamanites, who practiced idolatry. The Nephites were white (in 1980 the Mormons changed the word to “pure”), and the Lamanites received from God “The curse of blackness.”
The Book of Mormon also narrates that in 385 A.D. the Lamanites exterminated all the other Hebrews and became the principal ancestors of the American Indians. But the Mormons insist that if the Lamanites returned to the “true” religion (Mormonism, quite naturally), their skin would eventually become white like the skin of the Nephites that their ancestors had exterminated.
But despite these outrageous racist insults, many Indians and Polynesians (who also, according to the Mormons, are the descendants of the Lamanites) converted to Mormonism instead of telling the Mormons to go fuck themselves. (Through some perverse mechanism in human psychology, these converts are like homosexual priests who support the Roman catholic church or other gay people who support any type of Christianity.)
“The fiction that I was a Lamanite,” said Damon Kali, a lawyer in Sunnyvale, California, whose ancestors came from Polynesian islands, “was the principal reason that I converted to Mormonism.” He had been a missionary for the Mormans before he discovered that genetic evidence proved that the Lamanites were only a religious myth, and he could not continue his efforts to convert others to Mormonism.
Officially the Mormon church insists that nothing in the Book of Mormon is incompatible with the genetic evidence. Some Mormons are now saying that the Levites were a small group of Hebrews that went to Central America and after many generations of marrying with the natives they met, their Hebrew DNA disappeared into the DNA of their neighbors.
In 2002, officers of the church started a trial to excommunicate Thomas W. Murphy, a professor of anthropology at Edmonds Community College in Washington, an American state at the extreme northwest of the continental United States.
His trial attracted a lot of attention in the American public communications media, which ridiculed the church and insisted that Murphy was the Galileo of Mormonism. The general contempt provoked by this publicity seriously embarrassed the officers of the church, and they stopped the trial.