Benevolent Creator God?

[R00tKiT]

Is not the truth. It's difficult for you to say it because you don't know what you're talking about.

Joseph Smith was a conman who came from a family of con artists. Before he was a "prophet" he was using the seer stone(the very same he supposedly used to translate the BoM) to scry for buried treasure in the countryside of New York and New Jersey. The scam goes like so: you find some land and the mark that owns it. Then you place something there beforehand, like a feather or a piece of metal, underground a little ways. Then you convince your mark that you saw some treasure protected by spirits on his property. You get some sort of deposit or payment beforehand and then set up a time and place to find the treasure. You gotta kill a goat on the spot, shedding its blood, to bind the spirit(theatrics). Then while the seer keeps an eye on the treasure underground, the mark and whatever men you've hired to dig, start to dig. They find something! A feather! Or a chunk of metal! Hoo-boy! We're cookin' now! Gonna get tha treasure! Keep digging. Then, oh no! What's this? The seer says something has gone wrong. The guardian spirit that is protecting the treasure has broken free of its binding somehow! And now it is sinking through the earth with the treasure! Oh, gosh darn! that treasure sure is slippery.

It's called money digging and Joseph Smith was arrested and taken to court three times for doing it. And he was known as a storyteller as a young boy, regaling his family with tales around the fire at night. The Book of Mormon was not just plagiarized from the Bible but several books made and popular around that time, including a children's history book of the war for independence in New York and View of the Hebrews, which also told stories of ancient Israelites traveling by sea to the Americas, eventually becoming the Natives that colonists found here when they arrived. And guess how polygamy among the Mormons started? Joseph was caught screwing the 16 year old nanny, Fanny Alger, and told his wife, "No, god wanted me to do this. It's uh....revelation! Surprise! I'm bringing polygamy back!"

So, don't kid yourself that he was "inspired" or spread misinformation about the nature of where the Book of Mormon came from. It was a scam run by the Smith family from the beginning attempting to accrue wealth without doing labor or working the land to get it(Joseph Smith Sr. was a failed farmer).

I am not really well-versed on Mormonism. I am of course open to the possibility that the guy was a conman. Now, what's preventing me from dismissing all you said above as anti-Mormon propaganda, or concocted stories to undermine Joseph Smith's noble message?

Without delving into any uncharted territory, it's enough that the Book of Mormon is clear plagiarism. If we establish that, then nothing else about Joseph Smith should matter, whether he was a conman or not.

As meaningless as you presenting pascals wager, apparently.  If you don't need to check other religions, I don't need to check them either.

In the end, it's just an exercise in whether or not you can manage to think clearly - since neither of us is in any danger of hell.

That's not really pascal's wager. Back to my example of 50 doors, would you mindlessly keep checking doors after you stumble upon the one with the prize?

There is clearly an asymmetry between a theist and a non-theist. The theist picked an answer (valid or not) and went with it, the non-theist is still looking for possible answers. This asymmetry exists in more mundane contexts: if you want to go out, you won't necessarily pick the best clothes or mindlessly try all your closet after you wore something, the important thing is not to go out naked..

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Exactly, for a threat to be credible, the person making it has to be believably capable of carrying out the threat. I wouldn't be afraid of the president due to the US prez not being able to unilaterally nuke anyone, let alone individuals; but if the scenario was a madman with a suitcase nuke and their possession of the nuke was verified, I would be well-advised to run.

But in this scenario you're not the president or the madman with the nuke. You're a rando telling me the president or a madman with a nuke is going to atom bomb me if I don't heed your admonishments. The threat is not credible because the source of the threat has no means of carrying it out and their source is not only hearsay, that hearsay is contradicted by other hearsay and there are other randos yelling I better listen to them because it's really their dude who has the suitcase nuke and will nuke me if I don't heed them.

I don't believe any of them, so the threat does not intimidate me.

Well, I am not sure prophets are really random people. They didn't just claim we will be atom bombed if we don't believe them, they also came up with very impressive miracles that violate the way the universe works. Pretty compelling.. isn't it?

If we were to accept religious stories, Jesus raised someone from the dead, that still wasn't enough for some people as evidence he is sent from God.. It's true that, absent miracles, we need a very compelling reason to accept grandiose claims, but any theist will naturally argue that this is exactly what prophets provided.

At least one human must have received some guidance from God does not logically follow from 'God exists'.

You're right, we need the additional assumption of benevolence. Not much (nothing?) can be said if we assume the deity is malevolent, we could be brains in a vat meant to be tortured with the hope of meaning, or that existence means smth, etc.

Now, I would argue that the state of affairs in this world does tilt towards benvolence. A creator who wired us with maternal instinct and a moral compass clearly cares about justice and benevolence. There are many arguments in literature along these lines.

If I saw the Sun rising up from the West from where I live, I would certainly doubt my senses, it's physically impossible. I understand that the sun appears to go through some antics at or near the poles, so I wouldn't be so sure it was my senses or brain that was acting up. I know the direction the earth rotates, which is a very good reason to diminish my personal experience as delusional in that situation.

If I ever see the sun rise in the West I should get my head examined, and if you see that, so should you.

Actually, it's possible to experience that, I quote from a Quora answer I found after a quick search:

"If you set out shortly after sunset, and you fly more than 2000km/h (entirely possible in a supersonic jet) towards west, you'll fly faster than the rotation of earth, so you will “catch up” with the apparent movement of the sun across the sky. So after a while you'll have a beautiful “sunrise” in the west"

Thanks to modern technology, many things that we would otherwise dimiss as impossible are now possible or even mundane (like watching live TV, for example). If you were to go back some centuries ago in time with a TV, and tell people they could watch what happens now in another country or continent, they might think you are insane or delusional.

Why is it then a stretch to say an all-powerful God sent some entity to communicate a message. There is nothing impossible a priori about this, assuming of course that an omnipotent deity exists.