Here is an example of lies from and/or by top men in the church (that's redundant, I guess, because there are no women at the top, are there?).

Some years ago--before the 1978 "revelation" about African Americans and the priesthood--I was reading McConkie's "Mormon Doctrine". The section on "Negroes" contained all sorts of McConkie nonsense (sorry, again, for the redundancy) about why they were barred from the priesthood.

Then, some years after 1978, I picked up that same book, so that I could make a photocopy before the church or McConkie altered that section and erased the nonsense he'd written (aaah, another redundancy...).

Funny thing: all the nonsense was gone. WHAT??? How...??? It didn't make sense to me.

I checked the copyright info, and the copyright date was *"1966, Second edition".

WHAT??? If this is the second edition, and that section is missing, then shouldn't the copyright date be later than 1978?

I puzzled over that for a little while, then dropped it without ever understanding it.

--Until a few months ago, when I realized that this was another typical example of top-ranking Mormons rewriting history! (Anyone who has any interest in "the LDS 'church' re-writing history would get a real charge out of reading thefirst 5 pages of Orwerll's *1984*.)

In particular, McConkie was re-writing church history so as to let readers think the church had never prohibited African Americans from holding the priesthood--and that he'd never written the nonsense he did.

Boy, does this incident reveal a lot about the so-called church.

"I realized that this was another typical example of top-ranking Mormons rewriting history!"

In case you weren't aware, that's been done since the very beginnings of Mormonism. The earliest and most egregious example being the changes in Joseph Smith's "revelations" between their original publication in the 1833 "Book of Commandments" and their re-publication just two years later as "The Doctrine & Covenants." Here's an article about the subject:

http://www.utlm.org/onlinebooks/changech3.htm

As the early Mormon leader David Whitmer wrote:

"Some of the revelations as they now appear in the Book of Doctrine and Covenants have been changed and added to. Some of the changes being of the greatest importance as the meaning is entirely changed on some very important matters; as if the Lord had changed his mind a few years after he give [sic] the revelations, and after having commanded his servants (as they claim) to print them in the "Book of Commandments;"...

Are there any original copies of "Book of Commandments" available?
Have the Tanners published any?