When you say you know the church is true, I have no idea what you’re telling me. : r/mormon

When you say you know the church is true, I have no idea what you’re telling me. – Great reddit post and discussion about the oft-repeated statement, “I know the Church is true.”

This oft repeated phrase was recently offered to me once again recently by a dearly loved relative. So banal is this phrase, I rarely gave it much thought as a faithful member. But what struck me this time is how little life-long members know about the religion. I began to ponder if she meant any of the following:

1. Everything the prophets ever taught has been correct. Polygamy, priesthood ban and racism? Maybe she believes in all that. Adam-God, blood atonement and masturbation causes homosexuality. No way she believes that.

2. The founding of the church is divinely instituted. She must be telling she knows the 1838 version of the FV story is true even though she knows nothing of JS handwritten version. That means she knows that the angel Moroni came to Joseph Smith. She can’t know that since JS claimed his whole life the angel was named Nephi. Small detail, I know but so are the details about just how many persons showed up and his motivation for praying. And Professor Anthon, a scholar of Latin and Greek, could not have corroborated the translation of the BoM since neither he nor anyone of the time knew anything about translating Egyptian. BY said blacks would receive the priesthood only after all the white people. GAS said we would never reach the moon. She’s claiming knowledge of things that cannot be true.

3. The scriptures are the word of God. But which version. The trinitarian BoM of 1830 or one of the heavily edited versions since. Did D&C s20 become true only after its third complete rewrite or was it correct in its previous two versions where it mentions nothing about the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods. How many rewrites of canonized…