What I don’t get is how you can dismiss/discard established Scriptures, which say not to add to or take away from Scriptures and so easily replace it with someone who claims what he’s added is “right,” even though it contradicts what was established Scripture.
And then you say, that’s okay because HE said established Scripture was found to be “wrong.”
So, according to that philosophy, EVERYTHING he says must be RIGHT.
But when what he’s said was proven wrong, he’s still right....because you believe he’s still right.
We don’t believe it does contradict scripture. We believe it illuminates the Bible. You must admit that the Bible is ambiguous on many points. Otherwise you wouldn’t have so many different Christian sects. Heck, the Bible is ambiguous on the nature of God. That’s why they had to have the Councils of Nicea.
So as far as belief in “established scripture,” the question has to be, “Whose interpretation of established scripture.”
It’s well established that the “don’t add anything” language in Revelations, just like the same language in Deuteronomy, refers to that book, itself. Many of the books of the New Testament were written after Revelations.
Sometimes I think we Mormons are the only ones who really do believe in the Bible. We are the only ones who believe that God still sends us prophets, just like in the Bible. I think it’s a whole lot easier to say you believe in prophets from a distance of thousands of years, than to say you still believe that God deals with us in the same way that he did in the Bible.
I believe it because I have asked for spiritual confirmation, and I have received it at various times, usually depending on my obedience to the commandments.
I also believe it because I know as a person who makes her living writing, that the Book of Mormon could not have been written by Joseph Smith. He was a barely literate farmboy who dicated the book in about two months, in one draft. But it is rich and complex, internally consistent, and full of details that have since been confirmed, but which he could not possibly have known about. In the last 20 years, the anti-Mormon seminar people have had to continually revise their talking points as evidence of the Book of Mormon has been discovered.
I also believe it because its fruits in my life have been unambiguously good.
But, I know I won’t convince you of anything. You just asked, so I told you.
Sometime when I’m at home where I have my great-grandfather’s autobiography handy, I’ll quote you some of it. He was a part-time Methodist preacher in South Africa who knew the Bible backwards and forward. He recognized Mormonism and Mormon doctrine as a fulfillment of the Bible. It helped him understand it better. He recognized it as the “restoration” of the church established by Christ, which he and his fellow Methodists believed was required. I think this particular doctrine of Protestantism has since been suppressed.