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And once again, you show the lurkers, the inability to defend the indefensible (LDS doctrine).

I do not have to “spin”, I speak from experience.

The LDS church, however, are masters of “spin”, as evidenced by how they handled the Mark Hoffman situation. They paid all this money to Hoffman, to buy forged documents they believed were real, and were accepted by the membership in general (at least in Utah), then had egg on their face when it came to light that he was a forger and a theif, and a murderer.

Joseph Smith would have been SO proud! Hoffman was a man after his own heart.

BTW, if the LDS first presidency supposedly has powers of discernment, how come they didn’t recognize the documents were fraudlent at the beginning??

This just tells me you do not understand how revelation works but it should not surprise me!

Are Prophets Infallible?

The premise of the question about Gordon B. Hinckley, and many related questions about other prophets, is that a prophet should continually act under direct guidance from God so that nobody could ever deceive him and that no mistakes could ever be made. However, there is no Biblical basis for such a belief (See Are Prophets Infallible?). Prophets are mortal men who have been ordained and chosen by God to be a mouthpiece for revelation and guidance, but that revelation only comes when God wills it, making it somewhat sporadic in both ancient and modern times. There is no expectation that every act, every decision, and every purchase by a prophet will be divinely and infallibly guided. As Joseph Smith said, “a prophet is only a prophet when acting as such.” Critics of the Church say this is a cop out, but it is true and Biblical.

The Bible gives examples of prophets and apostles who were mortal and fallible, with obvious mistakes having been made by Jonah (shirking his duty), Moses (not circumcising his son), and Peter (denying Christ three times). But can real prophets be fooled by deceivers? Certainly. Joshua was fooled by the men of Gibeon, who came in disguise as if from a distant country when they were locals who normally would have been treated as enemies. In that story, given in Joshua 9:3-27, Joshua was deceived. He was a prophet, but he fell for the trick of the Gibeonites.

An even more dramatic example of a prophet being deceived, and of the mistakes that prophets can make, is given in 1 Kings 13. In that chapter, we read of a man of God with prophetic power and the gift of healing who was given an assignment by God and who was told by God not to eat or drink in that place. After having performed a great miracle, another “old prophet” wanted to meet the man of God and have the man of God eat and drink at his house. To achieve his vain desire, the old prophet told a lie, saying that an angel of God had told the old prophet that the man of God was indeed to come eat and drink after all. Sadly, the man of God - a powerful prophet - believed the lie. He was deceived (1 Kings 13:18). He joined the old prophet at his home where he ate and drank, disobeying the instructions he had received from God. God then gave a revelation to the old prophet - the one who had lied! - saying that the man of God would be punished for his disobedience, that “thy carcase shall not come unto the sepulchre of thy fathers” (1 Kings 13:21,22). That prophecy was fulfilled as the man of God was killed by a lion on the way home. It seems pretty harsh to me, and anti-LDS critics would delight in attacking this story if it were in the Book of Mormon, but the story does illustrate that prophets can be deceived (and that they can sin - though I hope the old prophet repented in great sorrow). We do not believe that prophets are infallible - and neither do they. But we trust the Lord’s promise that He will not let His properly chosen and anointed Prophet to lead the Church astray.

As a final example of prophets not receiving direct revelation for everything they do and say, in one of Paul’s discussions of marriage in the New Testament, he speaks of an issue for which he had received “no commandment of the Lord: yet I give my judgment” (1 Cor. 7:25-28). This seems to indicate that Paul was just giving his best judgment but did not feel that he had direct revelation from God on the topic. This passage made it into sacred scripture. Surely there were many other things Paul did, said, and even purchased that were not guided by infallible, direct revelation from God. But when God chose to give revelation to Paul, then he was acting as a true prophet and those revelations can be trusted (to the extent that they have been properly preserved and translated in our modern Bibles).

http://www.lightplanet.com/mormons/response/qa/salamander.htm