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Most Trinitarians know that God is three persons but one God. They know Jesus is God. They know the Holy Spirit is God. They know the Father is God. They know the three are distinct, yet they are one. So, when LDS ask questions like, "But was Jesus praying to himself in the Garden?" the answer is, "Of course not!" "Oh, so you agree with us that they are separate?" Confusion arises very quickly at this point. I'll lay this out again: Muslims/Jews/Jehovah's Witnesses: God is one and Jesus is not God. Modalists: God is one. Jesus is God. He reveals himself in 3 modes--as Father, Son or Holy Spirit. (Some summarize this as God being 1 in 3). Trinitarians: God is one. Jesus is God. So is the Father. So is the Spirit. They are distinct, but still they are one all the way down to their essence. How this is so is beyond us, but there it is. LDS Godhead: God is one. Jesus is God. So is the Father. So is the Spirit. They are separate. What unites them is their purpose. Yet, this unity of purpose is so strong we can be called monotheists. Modalists have a hard time explaining how the different persons can exist simultaneously and interact if they are all just Jesus. Trinitarians have a hard time explaining how God can be 3 and 1 at the same time. LDS have a hard time explaining how 3 beings can exist at the same time--in different bodies--and still be so one that it qualifies as monotheism. The difficulty is compounded by the doctrine of exaltation. Of course the Muslims, Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses think Trinitarians aren't truly monotheistic either.

Most Trinitarians wouldn't say he was a heretic. Most Trinitarians who have a nebulous understanding of the Trinity might say he was a heretic. The question isn't that there are 3 individual personages in the Trinity as it is the exact same personages as the LDS Faith. It is what each of the personages would look like. But since the LDS actually only have a testified understanding of a body of flesh of bone (because there's no such thing walking around the world that we can point to as - that, that's how that looks like, we simply base our understanding of it from what Joseph Smith saw) and with the Holy Spirit not having flesh and bone, how he would look like would also be just testimony. So we are in the same boat as the Trinitarians on that account who base their understanding of how the personages would look like from testimonies in scripture. Where Trinitarians and LDS differ is HOW the 3 personages are One God. In LDS understanding - what makes them one is not their physical substance - so it's not something we can see. In Trinitarian understanding what makes them one is their God substance. But since there is only one entity in the entire existence that has that substance and we can't see that substance unless we actually get to be sanctified for the beatific vision of the One God (and not just a manifestation of a personage of that God), then Trinitarians have no idea what that substance actually is - not even by testimony. It all hinges on Faith alone. So, the Trinitarians and the LDS are also in the same boat on that one. The Five Solas is not what makes him a Christian. The Five Solas is what makes him a Protestant. And just FYI: I'm a Roman Catholic convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who was born to a Trinitarian family but had to go through self-discovery in Catholic Schools to understand the Trinity.

I have an unpopular belief, and that is that Fanny Alger was not a plural wife. I believe she was accused of an affair with Smith, and that the rumor was false, and it ended up being elevated to the status of her being his first plural wife, but the timing is all wrong. One bride years before any others? No, I think whatever went down with Alger, it had nothing to do with plural marriage.

I grew up in the 80's music scene. Nobody called Van Halen metal. They were hard rock. Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Ozzy, among others were the metal bands. Very different sounds then your VH. Aerosmith and AC/DC, Bon Jovi or Ratt.

Both of you enough of your *The Sky Is Falling* nonsense. Neither one of you even went to Ancestry dot com to research what they do and do NOT do with the DNA information. I did. Before I even purchased the DNA kits. @Just_A_Guy I actually expected more from you. Such as Due Diligence. And just because you BOTH really pissed me off, here is AncestryDNA Privacy Statement in its ENTIRETY.

I don't see anything in Genesis about the Lord being upset at Noah's kids...

Van Halen is rock, not metal.

I appreciate this; though my questions were whether Sylvia made any other statement construed as having had relations with Joseph and whether Joseph’s diaries ever referred Sylvia as his wife (as opposed to merely noting her existence as a person). It looks like the answer to both of those questions is “no”? In the name of pedantry, and not because I’m disputing that a sealing took place, I would note the following: —The article you cite is awesome, though I note it dates from 2008 and Hales at that time took at face value the claim that Joseph was indeed Josephine’s biological father (the DNA analysis wasn’t done until 2016). He has since reversed his position and notes that a younger daughter of Sylvia—conceived long after Joseph’s death—was apparently also told that she was a daughter of Joseph Smith. http://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/sylvia-sessions/#link_ajs-fn-id_9-5660. —Similarly, the “official Church records” noted in that article are unsigned affidavits, partially mutually contradictory, that were drafted roughly twenty years after the sealing. They hardly indicate a sexual relationship between Joseph and Sylvia.

That's not the only thing they can do. Basically, Ancestry now OWNS your DNA sample and can do whatever they want to do with it. For example - and I'm just pulling this off the fringes of my brain - it can use your DNA sample to give to a research outfit that is working on a biological weapon to wipe out your entire family tree. This is most especially a concern to Jews because they have had that specific experience of people trying to wipe them out of the face of the earth. But, in the case of convictions - relative DNA has big DNA marker commonality such that, a relative of yours - including distant ones - that have specifically avoided giving DNA samples can now be identified by your DNA sample. So, you may be free with your closet but that doesn't mean your relative wants his closet opened even if he doesn't have skeletons in it either. Having grown up in a political family, I know for a fact that the lack of skeletons in one's closet doesn't mean it will be skeleton free when someone opens it. There are a lot of reasons somebody would contrive to put a skeleton in there. Especially with what we now know about Fake News and the seedy activities of Intelligence Agencies.

The title of this thread made me think of Ahmad ibn Fadlan's prayer at the end of The 13th Warrior.

Not off the top of my head except Official Church History. There are many stories and some which are founded by anti-Mormons themselves. One of the ones that you are troubled by probably deals with Fanny Alger. Joseph stated that the situation with Fanny Alger was not one of an adulterous nature. Even Oliver Cowdery (who many will also point out that he talked about a dirty little affair, though at the time would probably have indicated a distasteful situation that they dealt with, not necessarily an affair as in adultery) admitted that Joseph had never said it was adulterous. Whatever the relationship between Joseph and Fanny Alger, it did NOT produce children (an interesting side note, for anti-Mormons that insist there is no DNA evidence of JEWISH [which does not mean Hebrew or even those of SW Asia found in SE Asia descent] descent among Native Americans, they certainly like to ignore DNA evidence in relation ship to Joseph Smith and Polygamy) nor any evidence thereof. An alternate story is that Fanny Alger claimed that she would be happy to be merely a servant in the Celestial Kingdom wherein Joseph stated that this was nonsense. He then was sealed to Fanny Alger. There is no concrete evidence that there was a sexual relationship except from sources that, at the time, were contrary and against the newly budding religion that I know of. In fact, if it were physical, then Joseph and Fanny must have gotten a rapid divorce of some sort for Fanny then left soon thereafter and eventually got married Solomon Custer. This married couple (for time on this earth) HAD children. They had a total of nine children. A current LDS source of information is found here (which anti-Mormons will be quick to tell you it is full of lies or ignores other statements, but overall it is pretty complete and addresses the general origin of some of the stories that talk about Cowdery and the supposed statement he made). Fanny Alger topic on LDS.org One excerpt from it in that relation...

I am okay with that like I said - Husband and I don't have any skeletons in the closet.

Yeah that's definitely pretty embarrassing.

When I put "Are Catholics Christians?" -- Most of the reasons given by the counter-cult ministries that Catholics are not Christians seem rooted in the 5 solas. As Anatess notes, that's more about being Protestant -- not necessarily Christian. Maybe an interesting side note -- listening to Erwin Lutzers radio show a week or so ago, during the Q&A portion, he fielded a question from someone who pointedly asked if Catholicism is a cult. What I thought was interesting is that he did not simply say, "no." His answer was more about it depends on how you define cult and if you define cult certain ways then Catholicism may indeed be a cult. I don't think I understand the nature of God very well. 3 in 1, 1 in 3, perfect unity but separate beings/personalities. Whatever the exact nature of God is, it seems so far removed from my own mortal experience that I'm not really sure I like the way we tend to argue and try to exclude each other over something that seems so difficult to really understand.

Last year I volunteered to help watch (guard) my son’s father-in-law’s guitar collection that was on display in the St. George Parade of Homes. He has an extensive guitar collection and Van Halen’s signature is on one of them. Kind of cool. The guitar I really kept my eye on was a Fender Strat, Serial Number 0003. If you know anything about guitars you can make an educated guess on it’s worth.

Depends on your time frame... Joseph Smith was secretive about it.. And many people think part of the outrage that drove the mobs that killed him and others was based on it. (Which shows he had very good reason to be secretive about it.) Once the church was settled in Salt Lake they were open about it.. After all no one else was around to try to kill them over it... Until the US started cracking down on them. Putting them in the bind of following God or following the laws of the land. So some secretiveness was apart of that too. Then came the manifesto. For the RLDS I do not think secretive is the right word... I think Denial is better. They denied Joseph Smith practiced it and blamed it all on Brigham Young. I am not a historian... but I would guess that once they broke off the RLDS did not practice it at all.

You really need to look at Brian Hales’s work. He wrote a three-volume examination of all known historical sources documenting Smith’s polygamy and then, with his wife’s help, distilled that into another short and very readable book called “Joseph Smith’s Polygamy” that breaks down what we do know, and what we don’t. Regarding the two issues you cite specifically, in a nutshell Hales’s positions are as follows: —Joseph Smith was *not* having sex with women who were cohabiting with lawful husbands. Sealings to married women were either platonic “eternity-only” sealings to men who the women themselves didn’t believe they could be yoked with in the hereafter, or marriages to women who had obtained a “frontier divorce” from their husbands and were no longer socially regarded as “married”. —It is just plain a lie for anyone to suggest that Smith was sealed to anyone younger than fourteen. One of his wives, Helen Mar Kimball, was fourteen at the time of their sealing; the sealing was done at her father’s request and Kimball herself a) hints that the marriage was never consummated, and b) lived to a ripe old age and always looked back at her sealing to Smith as a point of pride, rather than a source of exploitation. Another, Nancy Winchester, we know next-to-nothing about; other than that a Church historian around the turn of the 20th century listed her as having been sealed to Smith sometime before his death (Winchester was 15 years, 11 months old when Smith died). Given that (IIRC) we have no record of Smith being sealed to any additional woman after 1843, it is popularly assumed that Winchester was sealed to Smith before then and that therefore she was 14 at the time of her own sealing. The rest of Smith’s wives were older—a few in their late teens, the rest running the gamut from their twenties to their mid-fifties. —Hales’s overall theory, based on the sealing dates (insofar as we have them—and often, we don’t)—is that after Emma’s reaction to Smith’s first plural marriage to Fanny Alger, he desisted from further sealings for nearly ten years. When instructed by the Lord to resume them, he attempted “half-compliance” in a way that wouldn’t anger Emma by engaging in platonic “eternity-only” sealings with married women; those women’s marital statuses would have assured a jealous Emma of the chaste nature of the sealings. When God again sends a messenger to Joseph saying that these sealings are to be “marriages” in the full sense of the word Joseph finally begins marrying thitherto-unmarried women; with a couple of “dynastic sealings” (Helen Kimball, Nancy Rigdon) along the way. Incidentally, two future LDS Apostles were the offspring of plural wives of Smith and therefore, spiritually considered to be his children: Orson F. Whitney (son of Helen Mar Kimball) and Heber J. Grant (son of Rachel Ivins).

As a teenager I really believed backmasking was a thing . . . (for the uninitiated, this was the Christian urban legend that rock bands were imbedding backwards messages in their music calling for the worship of Satan. The theory was--supposedly psychologically based--that because the message was heard backwards we could not filter it, but the words would fall in place in our subconscious). Now that I read it...wow...yeah...that really is embarrassing.

Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that this was not yet another, "I met this really cool person, but s/he happened to be Baptist . . . "

A single woman has so many options. There are so many people in this world who are in need of mothering. There are tons of career paths to take such as teaching, daycare, nursing, social work, etc., etc., etc. What is her job? There may be opportunities there to mother. If not, there are so many volunteer opportunities. She could look on justserve.org to find volunteer opportunities in her area.

Do you have a preference as to whether your fees are paid in a lot of off-brand root beer or less of the artisanal stuff? Just in case I am ever in need of your services.

Come on, tell us the rest of it. You were the voice actor for the unicorn, right?

I like @MormonGator

HAY I M OFFENDED BCUZ I M A DM AND I M NOT A SATANIST I DEMAND U TAKE IT DOWN AND U SHULD APOLOGIZE (WICH I WONT ACCEPT ANYWAY) AND U SHULD BE N JAIL BCUZ U R A NAZI