Easy to be Entreated

I just had to say this after reading a post on NOM, but I cannot say it there because I don't want to be offensive or confrontational to the nice person who wrote the post. She is Catholic, but had to attend a ceremony at an LDS Church. She wrote: "I was singing the closing hymn, which was "True To the Faith," and the words at the beginning of the third verse jumped out at me. "We will work out our salvation." Well, I had to stop singing after that. It seems to me that if we could work out our own salvation we would have no need for God, Christ, the Church, other people, we'd just do it ourselves." My response: There is nothing to be saved from. Not death, for we will all die and none of us will be resurrected. Not hell, because it doesn't exist. Not our fallen natures, because we are not fallen. It is so liberating when one realizes that the bind Christianity sets (that one is fallen and helpless and needs to be saved, which salvation can on...

This is the second part of my reply to Stan Barker. To read part 1, go here: http://entreated.blogspot.com/2007/04/my-reply-to-stan-barker-book-of-abraham.html . The following is from "Examining the Book of Abraham" by Kevin Mathie (http://tinyurl.com/349hu5 ). "LDS author Grant Palmer explains: The astronomical phrases and concepts in the Abraham texts were also common in Joseph Smith's environment. For example, in 1816 Thomas Taylor published a two-volume work called The Six Books of Proclus on the Theology of Plato . Volume 2 (pp. 140-146) contains phrases and ideas similar to the astronomical concepts in Abraham 3 and Facsimile No. 2. In these six pages, Taylor calls the planets "governors" and uses the terms "fixed stars and planets" and "grand key." Both works refer to the sun as a planet receiving its light and power from a higher sphere rather than generating its own light through hydrogen-helium fusion (cf. Fac. 2, fig. 5). LDS ...