If you can de-convert a Mormon, then they weren’t a Mormon in the first place. A testimony is a personal revelation from God, not from some slick salesman. If a slick salesman got to somebody, they didn’t have a testimony at all.
On the contrary, the Mormon in question may very well have had this so called “revelation”, but as made very clear in the Holy Bible, evil will come in the guise of the light. Once exposed to the information and using the mind God gives us for discerning which spirits are true to his purpose and those distorting same our now free Mormon learned this “revelation” came from another source, not God.
The “Burning Bosom” was heart burn, just not gastrointestinal...
A testimony is nothing more than a WFF (i.e. warm fuzzy feeling). Every cult and false religion (JW's, Muslims, Hindus, Christian Scientists, etc.) has numerous adherents who will sincerely claim this type of personal revelation. Some even sacrifice their lives based on it. Obviously, they can't all be right.
That is one of several reasons why there can be no substitute for hard evidence. Period.
listen, even though I do not go to Mass much, and am very disenchanted with my religion, when you grow up in such an environment, its almost impossible to completely deny it....
I'm sure Mormons feel the same...afterall, its a culture thing too....all your early experiences and family experiences and all your friends when you were little centered around being Catholic...
Of course, the "flip side" of my last post is this:
A very high % of the Mormons you encounter served a Mormon mission.
We need to note those 9 things I listed in my last post (post #12)... and then ask former and present Lds missionaries another question:
“If you can de-convert a Mormon, then they weren’t a Mormon in the first place. A testimony is a personal revelation from God, not from some slick salesman. If a slick salesman got to somebody, they didn’t have a testimony at all.”
But the revelation of God is not an emotional warming of the heart, as in the Mormon “burning of the bosom.”
We know from scripture that the heart itself is very deceptive:
Jer_17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
God is a reasoning God, who calls us to understanding and repentance. Even though His logic is indeed higher than us, and His knowledge far greater and often incomprehensible, and His truths spiritually revealed, nevertheless these all take rational forms in our minds that have received them, and are not characterized by good feelings, but by awakened understanding.
Isa_1:18 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
I call you to reason with me, to defend your religion’s claims, to deal honestly with the issues, not running from them with drive-by posts.
Where do you find polytheism in the scripture to justify Mormon belief? Do you know how one is actually saved according to the scriptures? Why do you deny the existence of hell as the scriptures teach them? Do you know that the Book of Abraham, which Smith claimed to translate word for word from the reformed Egyptian, has been translated by Egyptologists and has been found to be a standard Egyptian burial rite? Why is it Joseph Smith predicted New Jerusalem would be built by Mormons within his “generation” in Missouri, which not only was not built, but which contradicts the scripture which says that New Jerusalem will literally float down from heaven on a new Heaven and Earth at the end of the age?
Your soul is on the line, and these are not things you play with or fight over like we fight over politics or football teams. Come, let us reason together.
Nice re-tread of a OSAS Baptist saying: "If they wuz backslidin'; then they wuzn't saved to begin with."