Does the Book of Mormon contradict the Bible?

ICANT, there is actually a difference between a gift and a reward, but I'm not sure you're seeing that... On the contrary: If no one had stood up and walked over to you, no one would have received the "gift" and nothing would have been "given away." If instead you had walked over to one of the people listening to you and put the $20 into that person's hand, for no other reason than deciding on your own to do so, that would have been a gift. Do you see the difference?What you did was to provide a reward for the performance of a requested action -- even though the action you requested seemed trivial and insignificant. The distinction speaks directly to the nature of "salvation": it isn't a "gift" -- it's a transaction.I know how easy it is to get the terms confused, what with our various media being swamped with ads that offer "free gifts" that are actually incentives to perform particular actions, such as going into a store, responding to a "survey", providing contact information, or accepting a service that involves monthly payments by the "gift recipient" (though of course "you can cancel at any time, even before making the first payment" -- I always "cancel" such services during the initial presentation, without accepting the "gift").Edited by Otto Tellick, : clarified who I was talking to in opening sentence

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

I always figured that it's more a matter of what compensation the church gets (i.e. the community of participants, and/or the organizational hierarchy) from the individual being saved -- that's the important thing. What God gets from the transaction is immaterial. (pun intended) But seriously... I am having a little trouble following your rhetorical device here. You are a Mormon, and you are asking non-Mormons to tell you what Mormons believe. So this implies the answer should be self-evident or somehow obvious, but I'm sorry to admit that it leaves me stumped.Is there some compensation (to God or to anyone/anything else) to be provided by the person receiving salvation? Is there any substantive purpose for having salvation, apart from the pure self-interest of desiring eternal life with various pleasant attributes?Speaking as someone with a purely non-theistic basis for moral action, I'm perfectly content with the notion that I should do good works because this yields an overall benefit to me, my family, my friends, the people with whom I share my neighborhood, my city, my country and this planet. The wider I can expand (both geographically and temporally) the scope of beneficiaries of my good deeds, the better -- bearing in mind that I have personal and material limitations on my ability to expand this scope.From this perspective, the Christian pursuit of "salvation" has tended to sound (to my ears, at least) pretty self-centered, and it would be refreshing to hear that there's some benefit of a broader and more practical nature involved.I realize my train of thought here is somewhat orthogonal to the thread topic, and I apologize. In hopes of making up for that, I'd like to say (as an outsider to the debate) that some of Bluejay's comments about the status of alternate interpretations of scripture have been very enlightening for me. I especially like the point in Message 173 about how the Bible actually seems to go both ways on the matter of whether "works" are needed for salvation. I was also impressed by this point from Message 189: Finally, this point, from Message 247, is honestly inspiring, and gives me great hope:

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.