Okay, so just to make this easy for me to understand in a general sense:
Adam----------->Noah---->Moses-->Jesus>Jesus->Mohamed->Joseph Smith
OK, I'll use this as a starting point in dealing with your previous several posts, for clarity.
I "believe" in the Bible as a basis for theological opinions. It has survived as an accurate text across some incredible time spans because some folks take it seriously and try very hard to keep it consistent with the original or earliest known texts. Some folks spent or gave their lives to keep it sacred. The Latin Vulgate was the life work of one scholar who went to live in the Holy Land, Martin Luther helped with getting out a good German text, and several Englishmen including Tynsdale gave their lives to get an English text out so people could read it.
I also believe humans have been living on this planet at least fifty thousand years, and the story of Adam and Eve, and the lives and generations given in Genesis, are more or less old wives' tales, no better than the current issue of the Ensign magazine, because people with a mind to piety have gravitated towards popular beliefs or notions as "proof" of faith.
For example, the earliest Hebrew texts of the five books of Moses were produced during King Solomon's reign, at his insistence, from scraps of old texts. Solomon wanted a State Religion, and he sent his soldiers around the land to wreck the local temples and force everyone to go to his place in Jerusalem. Those texts should not be trusted any better for faithfulness to the original teachings of Moses than our present products coming out of the Church reflect the beliefs of Joseph Smith. Everybody has a point of view, and over a few hundred years everything can change.
So, anyway, personally I don't believe people who lived before will be treated unfairly by a "Just" God, and I don't think "God" is bound to respect our imperfect notions or traditions. The medieval notions of Hell have no mention in the Old Testament, and I don't trust the New Testament treatments of the notion either. Joseph Smith, and whoever wrote the Book of Mormon, attributed those notions as figures of speech portraying a mental anguish of regret and remorse for miss-spent lives when people realize their loss and the damage they've done to others in life.
I believe almost all direct "revelation" God has ever given Mankind has been subsequently twisted and turned, to the extent it would be a marvel of patience that He should venture to speak to us at all.
But the Biblical narrative still portrays a God that operates on just or virtuous principles in dealing with man, a "One God" as YHVH in the Old Testament from Adam onward. Some Christians made it out that Jesus was God somehow, although still the Messiah and somehow also the Son of God, and later generated the Trinity mystery to maintain a claim of monotheism. Only the Mormons ever came out with an inclusive theory on how the earliest references to "God" in the Bible are presented in the plural form in Hebrew, and clarified the teachings of Jesus that He is in fact not Jehovah, but the Adonai "Lord" referred to in Psalms 110:4, the OT text that was used by Paul in his epistle to the Hebrews. Mormons, however, found clarity uncomfortable and set James E. Talmadge up to bring Mormonism back to the confused notions of Christendom since Constantine's committee to make Jesus everything.
Anyway, confused living generates confused thinking. . . . so here we are.
