By their fruits ye shall know them...

[babe]

IMV, you either believe JS met angels, found gold tablets, and reestablished gods church on earth or you don't.

It sounds like you have been dancing around/struggling with the question that is central to all this for you personally. You are under no obligation to answer to anyone but yourself. Do you believe in the BoM, JS story, and the LDS as the one true church?

Seems to me, offhand from various impressions of your own remarks, that this struggle is your own, as well.

So here is my take on all this. I have sympathy for all of green's questions, as I've entertained them myself to some extent. I note that he says he reads the scriptures regularly, which places him in the class I call the sincere LDS conscientious scholar. If you're like that, you will torment yourself with serious questions your entire life. You might never get all the answers lined up in a neat little row, but you'll always be an honest man.

That said, how could God ever line up all His truth in a neat little package we could just take whole cloth and never see a defect in the fabric? I mean, given that it is placed in human hands and explained by mortals at one point or another?

 

[babe]

Agreed. I think the husband and wife were also separated, although probably not in the legal sense given what divorce law would have been like back in those days. Pretty sure the wife did not consider herself to still be married, though, in any sort of religious sense.



I hadn't heard that before. Where's that info from?

This is my second reply to this response. I have found proof, once again, of my sincere ignorance in matters I am too casually willing to spout off about professing some unattained wisdom. . . . here is a compelling, to me, article on the subject at hand, which I urge all to read through from beginning to end. Most appropriate in a thread originally entitled as this one is. . .

https://jared.pratt-family.org/parley_histories/parley-death-stephen-pratt.html

Thank you, Colton, for provoking me to seek some reference to the subject that would satisfy your standard of truth.

 

[babe]

For those too pressed to indulge in reading the whole story, here is the upshot:

Looks to me like Parley P. Pratt conducted himself honorably through a long course of events, over years of evolvement of circumstances.

Looks to me like the husband was abusive in the extreme, across many years of "marriage", and was indeed violent and dangerous in the extreme. A modern court would have issued restraining orders and terminated his marriage and parental rights, and would have several times put him in prison for assault and battery.

 

[♪alt13]

Seems to me, offhand from various impressions of your own remarks, that this struggle is your own, as well.

No, it's really not. I don't know if I have something that is that important to my identity that I'm struggling with. I tried to think of something but I can't think of anything on that level. I have things that I struggle with for sure but there's nothing that I have internalized deeply that I currently question, nor do I expect to. Perhaps what makes me me is too straightforward and simple. I love my kids and try to enjoy life. Big cosmic questions are fascinating but I don't think I'm really defined all that much by the answers.

So here is my take on all this. I have sympathy for all of green's questions, as I've entertained them myself to some extent. I note that he says he reads the scriptures regularly, which places him in the class I call the sincere LDS conscientious scholar. If you're like that, you will torment yourself with serious questions your entire life. You might never get all the answers lined up in a neat little row, but you'll always be an honest man.

That said, how could God ever line up all His truth in a neat little package we could just take whole cloth and never see a defect in the fabric? I mean, given that it is placed in human hands and explained by mortals at one point or another?

Is that not the mundane existence you get to look forward to in the afterlife?