Archive
LDS Church Faces Gays
Over 27,000 letters were delivered to the LDS Church Headquarters this week, all protesting the LDS Church's support of the ban on gay marriages in California. As a former Mormon and more-than-disinterested observer, I am watching this process closely. In the past,...
Reason #24: Why I Won't Return to Mormonism–Karl Butcher
Karl Butcher was "born into" the LDS church, and served a mission. However, he left it and here explains why: Why do I not want to go back to the Mormon church? Criticism isn't accepted there. If your priesthood leader does something wrong, you aren't allowed...
Reason #23: A Prophet with No News
"Prophet" Gordon B. Hinckley once answered a reporter from Time Magazine, August 4, 1997: "On whether his church still holds that God the Father was once a man, [Hinckley] sounded uncertain, `I don't know that we teach it. I don't know that we emphasize it... I...
Reason #22: Compartmentalized gods
One of the difficulties involved in leaving Mormonism is that you leave a view of the Godhead that is very compartmentalized. Mormonism's depiction of what it says is the completely separate nature of God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit -- these are easy...
Reason #21: Multiple Versions of the First Vision of Joseph Smith
At the Nauvoo Christian Visitors Center in Nauvoo, Illinois, a nine-square quilt hangs that depicts each of nine different versions of that first vision. Edmond C. Gruss and Lane A. Thuet have identified eleven versions. Richard Abanes, in his...
Reason #20: Problems with Joseph Smith's “First Vision”
Joseph Smith's own accounts of the first vision must be viewed with some reservations. No mention of his "First Vision" "”which supposedly took place in 1820"”was ever made in print, until twenty years later when Orson Pratt, a longtime friend of Joseph Smith,...
Reason #19: The Inordinate LDS View of Joseph Smith
Brigham Young once stated that Joseph"'s consent was required for a person to be able to enter into the celestial kingdom of heaven, because Joseph was now reigning there, like God. He also said that Joseph "was a god to us" and that he himself was "an apostle of...
Reason #18: LDS Resistance to Appraisal
"The callow chestnut of Mormonism that says if you want to know about Fords, then you don't ask a Chevrolet dealer, and if you want to know about Mormonism, then don't ask a non-Mormon, is both wrong and lacks critical judgment. Groups like Consumer Reports prove...
Reason #17: The Organization of the LDS Church
Many unwary church-goers have become Mormons after accepting the lie told them by Mormons: that the Latter-day Saint Church is organized just like Christ"'s church as described in Ephesians 4:11. Since this verse mentions apostles, prophets, and (in some versions)...
Reason #16: Janis Hutchinson talks about prophets
From Janis Hutchinson: Another good reason for not returning to the Mormon Church, is the church's insistence that for a church to be God's, it has to have a head prophet. Because they do, along with twelve apostles, this is supposed to prove the divine approval of...
Reason #15: The Big Picture
Sometimes in writing about why I left Mormonism "” and can"'t go back "” I forget to let people see the really big picture. Here"'s the question that Mormonism cannot and never will satisfy: If God sent His only Son to earth to redeem us, and we cannot be saved...
Reason #14: Mormon Hit Lists
Anyone familiar with LDS history -- not the sanitized version of Mormon Sunday School -- knows that people who follow Joseph Smith (that includes members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as well as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of...