User:InProgress/SWDN/Swedish questions/9

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A FairMormon Response to Questions Asked in Swedish Fireside with Elder's Jensen and Turley

1: BoM translation—2: Polygamy and Polyandry—3: Polygamy forced?—4: Book of Abraham—5: "Lying for Lord"—6: Mark Hofmann—7: Blood atonement—8: First Vision—9: Sanitized history—10: "Not all truth is useful"—11: Angelic affidavits—12: Blacks and priesthood—13: Temple concerns—14: Evidence of Vikings—15: Adam-God—16: Kinderhook

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Question:

• I discovered that the church as an organization had systematically deceived me by only telling a carefully selected, one-sided version of church history.
• Do the leaders of the church really believe that they are actually inspired by God to act in such a way? Just to tell a selected, nice version of the church—the history of the church—in order to get more converts? Do they believe they are inspired to do this?

Short Answer:

Let me just restate what you’re saying. You’re basically saying that the way the story is told, the way you’ve heard it traditionally, differs from what you see in the historical sources....That kind of thing does happen, and what we’re trying to do as a department—the Church’s department—is to bring the curriculum in conformity with the sources. Let me just give you an example, one that Elder Jensen mentioned. Last week or the week before…last week we went to the church leaders and we said to them, our historical research about the restoration of the priesthood and where it was restored is different from what our curriculum teaches. For example, the curriculum says that John the Baptist, if you look at the headnote to section 13 of the Doctrine and Covenants Section 13, the headnote at the beginning says, “Ordination of Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery to the Aaronic priesthood along the bank of the Susquehanna river.” Bank. Do you understand the meaning of the term “bank”? We went back to the original sources, and Joseph Smith says the restoration occurred in the woods, and Oliver Cowdery said it occurred in the bush, meaning, we think, a sugar maple grove. They used to call sugar maple groves the sugar bush. And if you look at the Susquehanna River, here, and Joseph Smith’s home here, the grove is probably up here, not here on the banks. So, our historical research shows that the restoration doesn’t occur here, it occurs here, so we’re going to change information to make it conform with the church history. So you’ve identified a genuine problem. Often the way stories have been told over time don’t conform with the history. And so our goal is to try to make them conform more closely.

—Elder Turley's answer to this question at the Sweden fireside