Reason #132: New Archaeological Site for Manufacturing Weapons
A newly-excavated archaeological site in Mexico shows a sophisticated Mayan manufacturing center devoted to weapons and tools. No metal weapons at all. For more information, see The Mormon Mirage 3rd Edition: A Former Member Looks at the Mormon Church Today(Zondervan, 2009). Also available as an audiobook and as an expanded-text E-book for Nook, Kindle and other reading...
Reason #131: Because Joseph Smith Could Cut and Paste
A reader recently sent me a section of an article that’s being circulated among Mormons. Its premise is that the Book of Mormon reflects Semitic peculiarities. The original article is here. (Update: Apparently Sami Hanna left the LDS church and here is a retraction of his statements that once supported Mormonism, as seen below. Interesting!) It says that a native Arabic speaker saw Semitic features in the Book of Mormon, and my friend sent a list of them and asked me to respond. Obviously what Joseph Smith did was a nineteenth-century version of cutting and pasting from the Bible. Here’s what I said in my letter to my friend: I am delighted to respond to this one. Since you’re from the South you’ll understand when I say that this is like...
Reason #116: Testimony Sleight of Hand?
At the most recent LDS conference, LDS leader Jeffry R. Holland held up a copy of what he claimed was the actual Book of Mormon that was read by Joseph and Hyrum Smith the day they died in a jail cell in Carthage, MO (related in D&C 135:4- 5.) Mormons would like to depict the death of Joseph Smith as a martyrdom of an innocent man, when in fact both Mormons and non-Mormons who knew Joseph Smith were angered by his aspirations to the presidency of the United States, his Bernie-Madoff-like bank failure, and his sexual escapades with young girls and other women already married to his friends. But Holland’s impassioned waving of a copy of the Book of Mormon has problems, according to “Danna” on the Recovery From Mormonism web site 10-06-09....
Reason #110: Oahspe
While Mormons may claim that the Book of Mormon is unique, consider the case of a book called Oahspe: A New Bible. This very long book (twice as long as the Book of Mormon) was written by a single individual in a year’s time. According to ex-Mormon Richard Packham, this book was: . . .written miraculously by an angel using the hands and typewriter of a devout dentist named John Newbrough (1828-1891). He claimed that an angel had appeared to him and told him that he had been chosen to bring forth a new scripture. He was to spend the next few years as a period of testing and probation. At the end of the probationary period, the angel told him to buy a typewriter (at that time a fairly new invention) and a quantity of paper. Newbrough objected that he did not...
Reason #98: Changes in LDS Doctrine regarding Freemasonry
Alexander Campbell once noted that the Book of Mormon managed to comment on a surprisingly large percentage of the religious issues of their time.[1] In addition to infant baptism, authority and ordination, the nature of the Trinity, free agency of man, the fall, and the resurrection, here is a more complete listing: freemasonry (Helaman 6:21-29; 3 Nephi 4:7), spiritual regeneration (Alma 5:14-21), rights and responsibilities of civil governments (Mosiah 29:11-17), church government (Moroni 4:6-9), the atonement (2 Nephi chapter 9), eternal reward and punishment (Alma 41:3-7), Catholicism (1 Nephi chapters 13 and 14), fasting (Alma 17:3), repentance (Alma 5:49), “religious experience” (Mosiah 27:24-29), and transubstantiation (3 Nephi 18:28-30). Not...
