I tried to come up with the top 3 (but taking into consideration things like no provable offspring from JS polygyny, the teentsy-tiny chance that evidence may yet be found yet in Mesoamerica and "Prophets speaking as men" give apologists and church officials wiggle room) settled on the Book of Abraham: greek-based "Egyptus", creative astronomy, introduction of "uh-oh" damning church doctrines, horribly bad guesses at what the "facsimilies" represent; at the end of the day, the best the apologists can come up is "Joseph was inspired" and "the papyri were a catalyst."

What's top thing that the church & its spokesman come out sounding like total spin-dorks trying to defend?

Thanks for flying and have a nice day......

The outer space stuff:

1. 7' tall Quakers on the moon who would be converted in the latter days.

2. Profit proclaiming that man would never set foot on the moon.

For me it was:

Book of Mormon DNA

Book of Abraham

Various First Vision accounts

GBH was taken out of context on the God was a man, man can become a God thing.

He said it two or three different times, and he's careful enough with words to get it right the second time, even if it was a mistake.

trying to pretend they were NOT duped, after buying tons of forged documents and souvenirs from Mark Hofmann. They were just squirrelly squirrels, busy buying up stuff to squirrel away so the rank-and-file would never ever see it, and then the whole pile of nuts turned out to be hand grenades that blew up in their faces.

LOL! I still get a good laugh out of that—the swindlers got swindled! Inspiration my @$$!

Book of Abraham

Journal of Discourses

Changed revelations from God (who changeth not nor doth He vary in his paths) in the Book of Commandments and D&C.

First Vision/D&C 130/D&C 122 vs All the original mormon scriptures.

A prophet is proved by the Standard works vs living prophet more important than the scriptures.

The stark contradiction between D&C 137 and 138.

Before Joseph said the plates were an ancient record deposited by an Angel, he told his treasureseeking family and friends that it was revealed through the stone to be a "key" to securing the slippery treasures.

Spencer W. Kimball's claim that Navajo children were turning white. What a sick mind f*** to put on children. He even said that their own siblings who were not in the placement program were darker than them. Talk about creating an impossible standard to measure a child with.

His words of that October 1960 General Conference seem like child abuse to me. And when it was realized that skin color was not really changing, the church simply changed the words in the BofM that Kimball had gotten this wacky idea from.

The racist and PH for blacks are the biggest to me.

For me, the number one fraud is polygamy, and more specifically the prolonged secrecy, deception and coercion surrounding it. Certainly, not God like qualities one would expect of a living prophet. More fundamentally, if JS were to engage in this behavior today, in light of how the Catholic priest abuse scandal kicked open the doors to sexual predatory behaviors of clergy, there would be civil lawsuits for abuse, criminal investigations, and a mass media expose of the entire episode. This behavior simply would not survive scrutiny in today's climate.

Yet, people in the church simply are not aware of the details behind polygamy or if they are, it is rationalized that 1840 had a different historical context.

Personally, when I think too much about how those women were treated, I get ill.

It wasn't until after the church's defeat of the ERA, the bogus revelation of 1978, and the Hofmann affair, that I learned of Joseph Smith's marital affairs.

I, like most mormons, was unaware of pre-emigration polygamy, and completely unaware of polyandry. When I read NMKMH in the mid-90s, I was just astonished to learn that JS married other men's wives, among the many other things the book revealed as fraudulent.

After reading NMKMH, no reasonable, critically thinking person could possibly see Joseph Smith and the whole stinking legacy as anything but fraudulent. (And this book is overly kind to him.)

I originally left the Church for the following reasons:

1. Book of Abraham papyri translation hoax put on by Smith.

2. Polyandry and Smith's underage wives.

3. Smith's use of the same peepstone for both his treasure hunting cons and the "translation" of the Book of Mormon.

There are others, but those were at the top of the list. However, there are other problems that I should have left the Church over as soon as I learned about them, but I did not. I'm not very proud of that fact. That list includes:

1. Smith's public denials about his practice of polygamy, meanwhile he was crafting a revelation contained in D&C section 132. In order to keep believing in Mormonism, that means that I must believe that God commands his prophets to flagrant lie and violate marriage covenants in order to perfect the saints. To believe in Mormonism, one must also believe in that. I didn't, but I remained in the Church nonetheless. I regret that.

2. The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Whether or not Brigham Young ordered it, he clearly approved of it. This means that God perfects his saints by turning them into vicious murderers and cutthroats, and remnants of this existed clear into the 1980s when I received the temple endowment and witnessed the "penalties." I should have instantly left the Church when I learned about the MMM. In fact, I should have left after receiving my endowment.

3. The lack of transparency in financial accounting in the Mormon church. That's a recipe for corruption, and I knew that. If the Church is so trustworthy, then they should make a full accounting of their finances, otherwise they aren't trustworthy. It's as simple as that. There's no reason for them not to make a full accounting to the membership.

There are other problems. There's a lot of Mormon fraud to go around.

Especially the fact that the one they claim as the official version is the one written almost 20 years after the fact, by someone other than JS, which totally contradicts the earlier ones written in his hand. "Oh wait, did I forget to say that God and Jesus Christ both appeared to me? How stupid of me. I've just had so much on my mind these 20 years. But y'all know what I meant."

The real clincher for me, though, was Dallin Hoakes' apologetics for it, "well, it was the same story he told all along, he just picked different parts of it to tell depending on his audience."

B-I-N-G-O! Absolute, air-tight fraud!

have personal revelation, and have discernment--let alone, they are closer to God than we are so we should listen to their advice over our own intuition.

The Book of Abraham is, without a doubt, the single most damning piece of evidence against Joseph as a seer and translator.

Additionally, his conviction for glass-looking destroys his credibility and covers all of his claims in a thick dark mist of doubt. Why would God choose a known conman as the founder of the One True Religion?

Archaeology has been a very useful way of dispelling myths perpetuated by religion. No serious scientist views the BoM as a legitimately ancient document, and thus no unbiased research group has attempted to corroborate the Mormon account of Hebrews in America. On top of that, the folks with a vested interest in finding evidence of the historicity of the BoM have yet to find ANYTHING to support their claims.

DNA evidence against Hebrew ancestry amongst native Americans is another giant nail in Mormonism's coffin.

The nature of Mormon apologetics is also pretty telling. The church carries the burden of proof for their frankly bizarre claims, yet they can't substantiate their beliefs with any concrete evidence, just a whole bunch of "maybes" and "what ifs."

But it's all supposed to be a matter of faith, right? See, Truth is a slippery thing: you can dig for it for days or months or even years, but just when you think you have it, some tricky little imp just pushes it further into the mud. Some of us keep digging ourselves in deeper, certain that eventually we'll find It, until we realize that all we have for our labor is a giant, gaping hole in our backyard. The Faithful man simply trusts that his big ol' pot of Truth is where he was told it was and goes about his business, knowing in his heart that he is a wealthy man. And you're the damned fool if you don't believe it!

While I was already out, the thing that slammed the door shut on Mormonism was DNA. We use DNA to convict or exonerate murderers today. It's hard to think of a more important category of evidence in our criminal justice system than DNA. Documents and signatures can be forged, fingerprints are less reliable, but find someone's hair at a crime scene and you know they were there.

When Southerton tied American Indian DNA to Mongolia, he destroyed the Book of Mormon as a historical document. There is no way that Lehi's family ever left Jerusalem and came to the Americas except in a work of fiction. JS's own intro to the BoM called the Lamanites "the principle ancestors of the American Indians." DNA proved JS made it up.

As if that wasn't enough, the LDS Church responded not by refuting the evidence, but by exing Southerton and redacting JS's Intro to make the Lamanites "among the ancestors of the American Indian". They were tacitly stating that JS was wrong, and that they could not defend his bold statements. They might as well have changed JS to author and moved the book to the fiction section of the library.

The LDS Church's failure to address DNA evidence in a straightforward, honest manner proved they are cowards, liars and they know their Gospel is false. That they continue to ask so much of their membership without providing honesty and frankness shows them to be a giant fraud. I had serious doubts about Mormonism before this, enough to stop going to church, but since reading Southerton I can safely say that Mormonism is fraud based on a 19th C. piece of fiction masquerading as scripture and history.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/07/2011 02:23PM by axeldc.

in No Man Knows My History that the idea of an Asian origin of "Lamanites" was known and could have been adopted by JS. Instead, he pulled from the Bible, which was more appealing and well-known, as well as more emotionally gripping, than the distant Asians to the New Englanders he was writing for.

Everything posted so far and much more and also including 'Zelph'!

FAIRS and FARMS etc after claiming Horses could be Tapirs try
promoting the Limited Geography Theory stating that the Hill Cumorah Battles likely/must have been miles away from Hill Cumorah New York, somewhere in Meso-America?

So what about Zelph the White Lamanite Warrior who Joseph Smith revealed through 'revelation' whilst on a walk about with the Sanits in Illinois?

Why was he thousands of miles away from the battle scene?

http://www.utlm.org/onlineresources/zelph.htm

For me the fraud award goes to revisionist history of TSCC.

I knew that BY had more than 1 wife. I couldn't remember exactly how many so I went to the newly issued BY manual, and there in plain print it stated that he had 1 wife and remarried after she passed away. No mention of his polygamy.

That's what started me questioning everything.

Book of Abraham

How members can ignore the facts is totally beyond me.

Its not that the members are ignoring the facts about the BofA, its the fact that the church keeps its members in the dark about it. One actually has to do their own research in order to find out the truth about what the BofA actually is.
The church has known about the BofA fraud since the late 60's, and they perpetuate it. To me, the BofA takes the top fraud award.
Second Place for fraud in the opinion of this judge is all the anachronisms and protestantisms in the Book of Mormon.

For me it's the Book of Abraham and the temple ceremony that JS copied word for word from the Masons.

That was a big WTF for me. Book of Abraham 'translation' nonsense was the smoking gun evidence for that TSCC is a hoax.

...3 have been proved fraudulent:

The Greek psalter

the Kinderhook plates

and the BOA.

The only one that hasn't been 'proved' a completely bogus translation (according to mo's anyway) is the one that was 'taken back' by god.

How convenient.

(oops.)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/07/2011 07:11PM by wine country girl.

You don't see Jesus practicing the so called principles and ordinances of the gospel. Jesus would be practicing them the New Testament and Book of Mormon, and they simply aren't there. These would not be fleeting little side notes either, but would be part of his main teachings. Instead you see things that really matter, like how you treat people, and care for others less fortunate. This is the main thing that made me start realizing the church was not what it claimed to be.

Oh one more thing.....all of the reasons mentioned in here too;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1mFdO1wB08

38 year old man involved with 14 year old girls- deal killer from the get go.

The BS award goes to this figure of Mo speak

"The Real Estate Arm of the Church"

I forget...did Jesus have a real estate arm of his church?

The BoA was the smoking gun for me, but had I still been in by the time of the Hofmann affair, that would have done me in.