FAIR is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing well-documented answers to criticisms of the doctrine, practice, and history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Category:Letter to a CES Director
The following wiki pages are included in the response to "Letter to a CES Director."
Pages in category "Letter to a CES Director"
The following 67 pages are in this category, out of 595 total.
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- Question: Why was Joseph fined if he wasn't found guilty of anything?
- Question: Why was the name "Cumorah" originally spelled "Camorah" in the 1830 Book of Mormon?
- Question: Why were the gold plates needed at all if they weren't used directly during the translation process?
- Question: Why would a loving God kill the firstborn of Egypt?
- Question: Why would a loving God would kill innocent children in the flood of Noah's day?
- Question: Why would God send poisonous serpents to kill the Children of Israel?
- Question: Why would Joseph be sealed to the wife of someone who was not only married to someone else, but pregnant with her husband's child?
- Question: Why would Joseph Smith incorporate Masonic elements into the temple ritual?
- Question: Why would Joseph Smith use a non-religious vehicle for presenting a temple ordinance?
- Question: Why would Joseph Smith use the same stone for translating the Book of Mormon that he used for "money digging"?
- Question: Why would Martin Harris use the phrases "eye of faith" or "spiritual eye" to describe his visionary experience?
- Question: Why would the Church remove or alter elements of the temple ceremony if these ceremonies were revealed by God?
- Question: Will God really deny us eternal salvation simply because we do not practice a set of, as some critics put it, "archaic medieval Masonic rituals" in Mormon temples?
- Question:Did the Jaredites bring swarms of bees across the ocean in their barges
R
- Revelations in Context on history.lds.org: "Cowdery was among those who believed in and used a divining rod"
- Reverend Taggart (1833): "Joe Smith...told them he had seen Jesus Christ and the Apostles and conversed with them, and that he could perform miracles"
- Robert D. Hales (2013): "Gaining a testimony and becoming converted begins with study and prayer, then living the gospel with patience and persistence"
- Roper: "archaeologists have discovered a carburized iron sword near Jericho"
- Roper: "Critics of the Book of Mormon have claimed that the limited geography is only a late, desperate attempt to defend the Book of Mormon"
- Roper: "For example, an iron knife was found in an eleventh century Philistine tomb showed evidence of deliberate carburization"
S
- Seminary Manual (2013): "Joseph Smith emphasized different aspects of his vision in his multiple accounts"
- Seminary Teacher Resource Manual: "We have no knowledge that plural marriage will be a requirement for exaltation"
- Sorenson: "By 1400 BC, smiths in Armenia had discovered how to carburize iron by prolonged heating in contact with carbon"
- Sorenson: "Iron use was documented in the statements of early Spaniards, who told of the Aztecs using iron-studded clubs"
- Sorenson: "Lumps of hematite, magnetite, and ilmenite were brought into Valley of Oaxaca"
- Sorenson: "The Miami Indians, for example, were unfamiliar with the buffalo and simply called them 'wild cows'"
- Sorenson: "There is an animal which they call chic, wonderfully active, as large as a small dog, with a snout like a sucking pig. The Indian women raise them"
- Sorenson: Horse bones in Yucatan "considered to be pre-Columbian on the basis of depth of burial and degree of mineralization"
- Sorenson: Linen and silk textiles in ancient America
- Sorenson: The grain "Amaranth" in Mexico
- Source: David Whitmer literal experience quotes
- Source: Hyrum Smith's character
- Source: Martin Harris literal experience quotes
- Source: Oliver Cowdery literal experience quotes
- Source: Testimony of Eight Witnesses
- Source: Testimony of Three Witnesses
- Source:David Whitmer Three Witness statements
- Source:Hiram Page Eight Witnesses statements
- Source:Hyrum Smith Eight Witnesses statements
- Source:Jacob Whitmer Eight Witnesses statements
- Source:John Whitmer Eight Witnesses statements
- Source:Joint Eight Witnesses statements
- Source:Martin Harris Three Witness statements
- Source:Samuel Smith Eight Witnesses statements
- Southerton (2008/2014): "It's true that if a small group (say 10 people) entered a massive population (say 1 million), that it would be hard to detect their mitochondrial or Y chromosome DNA"
- Statement by The Council of the First Presidency and The Quorum of the Twelve on Church Discipline
- Stephen Burnett on Martin Harris: "But he never saw them only as he saw a city through a mountain"
- Stephen E. Robinson: "Yet another way in which anti-Mormon critics often misrepresent LDS doctrine is in the presentation of anomalies as though they were the doctrine of the Church"
T
- The Apocalypse of Abraham: "Go out from thy father Terah, and get thee out from the house, that thou also be not slain"
- The Joseph Smith Papers: "Several later documents suggest that several women who were already married to other men were, like Marinda Hyde, married or sealed to Joseph Smith"
- The Joseph Smith Papers: "The historical preamble to the 1830 'articles and covenants,'...appears to reference JS’s vision in speaking of a moment when 'it truly was manifested unto this first elder, that he had received a remission of his sins'"
- The Palmyra Reflector (1831): "Jo Smith had now received a commission from God...Cowdery and his friends had frequent interviews with angels"
- The witness of Christian Whitmer
- The witness of Joseph Smith Sr.
- The witness of Peter Whitmer Jr.
- Truman Madsen: "Among readers who came to the Book of Mormon with hard, skeptical assumptions, B.H. Roberts is notable"
W
- W.W. Phelps (1833): "through the aid of a pair of Interpreters, or spectacles—(known, perhaps, in ancient days as Teraphim, or Urim and Thummim)"
- Wikipedia: Amaranth and the Aztecs
- Wikipedia: Bighorn sheep "crossed to North America over the Bering land bridge"
- Wikipedia: Mammoths "were members of the family Elephantidae"
- Wilford Woodruff (1869): "We had the privilege of beholding the face of the prophet...and seeing the workings of the Spirit of God with him, and the revelations of Jesus Christ unto him and the fulfilment of those revelations"
- William Smith (1883): "he escaped to the house and brought the plates with him, wrapped up in a tow frock. He could not permit us to see them, because he said the angel told him not to do so"
- William Smith (1884): "When the plates were brought in they were wrapped up in a tow frock. My father then put them into a pillow case. Father said, 'What, Joseph, can we not see them?'"
- William Smith (1893): "I did not see them uncovered, but I handled them and hefted them while wrapped in a tow frock and judged them to have weighed about sixty pounds"
- Woodruff (1842): "The Lord is Blessing Joseph with Power to reveal the mysteries of the kingdom of God; to translate through the urim & Thummim Ancient records & Hyeroglyphics as old as Abraham or Adam"