ACCUSATION: "Mormons believe that God still speaks to people and gives them new revelations!"
Well, yes, we do. And we are not shy about that fact.
As John Taylor once said:
I do not wonder that so many men treat religion with contempt and regard it as something not worth the attention of intelligent beings, for without revelation, religion is a mockery and a farce.
No man can use conjecture or scientific observation to come up with valid answers regarding the meaning of this life, the origin of the universe, the mission of humanity, or the fate of a person after death. There is nothing wrong with philosophizing and making conjectures, but anyone who parades his personal philosophies and conjectures as spiritual fact is a charlatan.
Religion must come from God, because God is the only one who knows the truth of all things. Therefore, any religion that is not established, directed, and supported by God is just a collection of vacuous triflings, having no authoritative basis whatsoever. Like John Taylor, I think that there is nothing at all vexing about the fact that so many atheists and agnostics reject religion altogether, because I completely understand how continually encountering religionists claiming to know things that they cannot know would make one lose all interest in religion.
There are many Christians who claim that revelation has ceased, and that all the revelation we need can be found in the Bible. However, as I've mentioned in previous threads, this is a quintessentially Pharisaic mindframe. Just because God does not reveal new doctrine or clarifying interpretation of old doctrine to you, that doesn't mean He does not reveal it to someone else.
In truth, the claim that the Bible is the end of revelation is intrinsically contradictory. As Joseph Smith so aptly put it:
From what we can draw from the Scriptures relative to the teaching of heaven, we are induced to think that much instruction has been given to man since the beginning which we do not possess now. This may not agree with the opinions of some of our friends who are bold to say that we have everything written in the Bible which God ever spoke to man since the world began, and that if He had ever said anything more we should certainly have received it. But we ask, does it remain for a people who never had faith enough to call down one scrap of revelation from heaven, and for all they have now are indebted to the faith of another people who lived hundreds and thousands of years before them, does it remain for them to say how much God has spoken and how much He has not spoken? We have what we have, and the Bible contains what it does contain: but to say that God never said anything more to man than is there recorded, would be saying at once that we have at last received a revelation: for it must require one to advance thus far, because it is nowhere said in that volume by the mouth of God, that He would not, after giving what is there contained, speak again; and if any man has found out for a fact that the Bible contains all that God ever revealed to man he has ascertained it by an immediate revelation, other than has been previously written by the prophets and apostles.
Many people claim that John the Revelator said that there would be no more revelation given after the Bible, but that is ludicrous. What he actually did was warn those who would be copying and distributing the Book of Revelation in generations to come (for the Bible did not yet exist) that changing the text of the Book of Revelation would constitute an affront to God--as is true for all holy scripture. Likewise, those who have changed books of scripture while translating or transcribing and those who have purposely omitted scriptural books like the Book of Nathan from Christian canon have committed the same affront.
The Bible was meant to testify of a living God, but sectarians preach a gospel of a dead God, in that they have come to reinvent Him as a being who has lost the power, will, and desire to speak to mortals as He was so prone to do in those times.
