a little deeper

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkKblIMfmjI

This week I will be looking at another Mormon Messages video on youtube and the responses it garners. The Mormon Messages video I will be focusing on is called, “A Testimony of the Book of Mormon”. This video is made up of pieces of the testimony of Elder Jeffery R. Holland (of the quorum of the twelve) which he bore at the October 2009 General conference in a talk called, “Saftey for the Soul”. It is more doctrinal than the video I used last week (which many people, religious or not could agree on) this one, however, is very specific to the restoration.

My main question for this week was whether or not the type of comments left by non-members be different now that some heavier doctrine is introduced. Would the non-members that were drawn to a more serious video already have a better understanding of the doctrine and principles of the church and would the responses to the questions of non-members go into deeper doctrine?

There were the standard jabs:

1. Mormons are not Christian

2. Taking out the second "m" in Mormon and Mormonism.

These, as is the norm, did not get any real response or attention. The LDS believe that truth comes from God and you can know of the truth through personal revelation given by the Holy Spirit, but contention is of the devil (3 Nephi 11:29) and the spirit cannot dwell in an unholy temple therefore debating is useless as the person could never come to the truth and dragging yourself into that debate could harm you. 

The reactions that got the most response were:

He DID show it to 11 people whose witnesses can be found in the very front of the Book of Mormon, it's true that some later fell away, yet all maintained that they had truely seen the gold plates. go to mormon.org to request a free copy. --The overwhelming majority of responses went along those lines there were a few, however, which deviated from the script. 

yupyup22100 responded that you must walk by faith and did not mention the eyewitnesses at all.

TheCompassion101 says that God told Joseph not to show the plates to people because of their sacred nature. 

 This also gets a lot of attention and the responses are also very uniform. Nobody asked about his "don't use the humble approach" thing and I have no idea what he means by that. People pointed out that we do use the Bible quite often but that the Book of Mormon is newer, it is something unique we have to offer, because it is newer and was only translated once to English it did not loose as much as the Bible has.

The responses to this were split yet united. Some said that through faith we can gain a knowledge of all things and truth that comes from God is stronger evidence than history and science. The other half argue that there actually is a lot of history and science that supports the Book of Mormon and not that much that contradicts it. Every single response that I read urged him to actually read the Book of Mormon.

The three most responded to comments did not show a better understanding of the church and responses didn't go too far into doctrine in responding to them, but deeper doctrine was mentioned when the conversations were between two church members.