Oh, as an aside: The proposition that “The mainstream LDS church is not true, but the truth is had by one of the handful of splinter groups that split off from the LDS church and still believe in the Book of Mormon” does in fact fall under possibility a, though considering the legal troubles surrounding some of these groups, this seems rather unlikely to me. After all, Joseph Smith published this as one of our thirteen Articles of Faith: “We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates; in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law.”
I don’t understand this—why would legal troubles make their beliefs any more or less likely to be true? Seems like an entirely irrelevant issue.
I think the point is that not getting into legal trouble is an important tenet of Mormonism (since obeying the law was one of those 13 “Articles of Faith”), so that a group that’s got into a lot of legal trouble is unlikely to be The One True LDS Church.
I don’t understand this—why would legal troubles make their beliefs any more or less likely to be true? Seems like an entirely irrelevant issue.
I think the point is that not getting into legal trouble is an important tenet of Mormonism (since obeying the law was one of those 13 “Articles of Faith”), so that a group that’s got into a lot of legal trouble is unlikely to be The One True LDS Church.
Cheers. I understand what he means now, but it still seems like a particularly peculiar belief.