For 29 years of my life I didn’t know some of the most basic historical facts about my own religion. This has been one of the most disturbing issues for me. Apologists will excuse this by suggesting “milk before meat”, or rather, share the good happy bits before overwhelming people with questionable and strange teachings. It’s more like, “a spoonful of omission helps the dogma go down”. Either way, I think it’s important to eventually be taught the “meat”. If I had never gone looking for it, I never would have been taught some truths by my own church. Like a dishonest car salesman, I’m convinced to buy into a baptism covenant and then later I realize the car was previously owned by a child pedofile. Omission of the truth is a form of lying.
“Recognizing that today so much information about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can be obtained from questionable and often inaccurate sources, officials of the Church began in 2013 to publish straightforward, in-depth essays on a number of topics.” - lds,org
Here is a link to the Gospel Topic Essays that I encourage all Mormon member to research, don’t worry, it’s not “anti-Mormon” if it’s published by the church.
Does anyone remember when these essays were released or openly published back in 2013? No? That’s because they didn’t want to draw attention to these controversial issues. In my opinion, this was an attempt to cover up or excuse some of the dirt in church history. I would now like to summarize some of my favorite eye-rolling church excuses.
Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon by looking at a rock in a hat. A rock that he found as a kid. Often the gold plates were in another room and covered with a cloth. God provide Joseph with some cool glasses, but he was like “Naw, I’ve got this cool rock I found as a kid, but thanks anyway God”. Makes me wonder why Joseph even needed to dig up the plates and glasses if he wasn’t going to use either.
The church was commanded by God to practice plural marriage. Later, the government realized polygamy should be illegal. Then the church decided the government was more of a threat than God and they conveniently received a new revelation saying that God changed his mind.
Also, as recently as 40 years ago in church history, they received another convenient revelation putting an end to their decades or enforced racism. Early prophets of God were taught that black people can’t have the priesthood or go to the temple which is the only way to get into heaven. “Today, the Church disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse, or that it reflects unrighteous actions in a premortal life; that mixed-race marriages are a sin; or that blacks or people of any other race or ethnicity are inferior in any way to anyone else.” The official position of the LDS church is that the prophecies of the past are simply disavowed theories now. God changed his mind. However, the new revelation wasn’t put into action until it was up for vote by the members. Makes me wonder which present prophecies of today will be disavowed theories in the future as voted by the members.
Another concern that many Mormons have voiced is that the Egyptian papyri Joseph Smith used to ‘translate’ into the book of Abraham is entirely wrong. Mormon and non-Mormon scholars have studied the papyri and the book of Abraham and there is no match whatsoever. The church excuses this mistake by saying that Joseph Smith might have used the papyri as a conduit of revelation for the actual book of Abraham. And yet the church continue to publish Joseph Smith’s version of the canonized scripture that states “The writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus.” And they continue to stand by the other mistranslated facsimiles.
As you might guess, there is a LOT more “meat” that would take me many more pages to discuss. For now, I will leave with you a satirical commercial for the Gospel Topics Essays.
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