"When asked what advice the two men had for members of the church with friends who are “struggling with their faith” due to doubt and questions of church history, Mr. Ballard claimed the church has never hid “anything from anybody”.


https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2017/11/26/commentary-the-gaslighting-within-mormonism-must-stop/?fbclid=IwAR1x0graiM3lThR-xxHwmyhd0HmRFkT2mf427XhNxKoSKSIy3m4LW_MhtGU

I've heard this line of reasoning from paid Mopologists, like Daniel Peterson, who told me that if I didn't know about Joseph Smith and Brigham Young practicing Polyandry, that was my fault, not the church's fault, because he's known about it for 20 years. But I expect that from somebody with the integrity of a Tobacco Industry Lawyer.
So now I guess this is the level of integrity I should expect from so-called "General Authorities" since there is no way to actually defend their founders behavior, they just whitewash it and pretend it was always common knowledge.
Unfortunately I spent my first 40years in the abusive Doomsday CULT that claimed 4 generations of my family before me and I never heard a word uttered about Joseph and Brigham having sex with their follower's wives and teenage daughters. I still have yet to hear an honest explanation for that history from a Mormon. The closest I've seen is from a BYU Professor who claimed Polygamy didn't involve sex, which is bullshit, since Brigham Young had a child with Zina Jacobs, wife of Henry Jacobs, after sending him overseas on his 8th mission to get him out of the picture so he could have his way with poor Henry's wife Zina.

Imagine being a descendent of that child and finding out the history as a young Mormon father of 3 beautiful tiny little children.

"1. Adam was a prophet, first one that we know.
In a place called Eden, he helped things to grow.
Adam served the Lord by following his ways.
We are his descendants in the latter days."
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/music/library/childrens-songbook/follow-the-prophet?lang=eng&_r=1

ADAM: "I heard thy voice and hid myself, because I was naked."
http://mit.irr.org/mormon-temple-endowment-ceremony

Prophets don't hide things from church members. Only god gets to do that....like with DNA, pre-columbian horses, chariots, steel swords, and stuff like that.

Meant to reply to OP.

Okay, let's assume that they are right and they didn't hide anything (that assumption is wrong, but I don't have time to deconstruct it all right now).

They know and accept the basic facts about Joseph Smith's manner of practicing plural marriage. That's a good start.

Now, do they think it was okay for Joseph Smith to abuse his office to have sexual relations with his followers? Was it okay for Mr. Smith to send men away on missions in order to marry their wives? Was it consistent with LDS doctrine (then or now) to offer salvation to women (and their families) if they became Mr. Smith's plural wife? In what way is such a promise consistent with the Gospel as articulated in the New Testament?

Why is this subject not covered in Seminary, Institute and BYU religion courses--that is in the textbooks--not up to the discretion of the instructor? Do they think instructors, who covered these kinds of subjects in detail could have avoided being terminated? (The experience of former instructors like Ken Clark and Grant Palmer suggest that is not so).

Was it okay for Mr. Smith to pursue intimate relationships with girls as young as 14 years old? Would you expect someone to remain a member of this church if the current prophet made a similar request of their daughter?

Upon reflection, this is a common thing in the LDS Church. They don't provide the basic education in a subject that will allow you to ask the questions that get you to the answers you need. The leaders will then turn it against you and say you could have always ask. That is something I felt acutely during my mission when I was called as a branch president. There were a lot of things I felt like I should know, but I also felt like they didn't have any sort of training in place to learn the basic ropes that would lead you to ask questions from an adequate baseline of knowledge. But...they were free to scold you for not doing something right, but just assumed you know what to do. Unwritten order of things and all that. This is more of the same pattern.

When you make up the religion you get to make up the rules. Smith and Young were making it up as they were going, so want to do something, have a revelation and make it a rule.

Easy as pie.........

He's a paid liar. The rock and the hat were hid up from me. I was church schooled in the sixties. Joseph Smith wore magic spectacles from the Bible to translate directly from the gold plates. Black people were not yet human, and Coca Cola was considered an addictive drug by most Mormons. No one told me about Smith's bank and counterfeiting. They bragged about him smashing a newspaper press. He was jailed, they claimed, with no charges against him and died an unarmed martyr.

I was thaught that JS died as an innocent lamb.

My mom was seminary teacher for several years and she had no idea about polyandry. My mom said I was falling for internet lies JS did not practice polyandry. My aunt my mother's sister did not know about polyandry but her husband did. Why are the lds finances not open to view like they said members could?

When these issues were brought up they were labelled anti Mormon lies. Now they are arguing they were open and knew about them all along and it is the member's fault if they were not aware of them just as they were.

Here's his quote.

"Some are saying that the church has been hiding the fact that there’s more than one version of the first vision, which is just not true. The facts are we don’t study, we don’t go back and search what has been said on the subject. For example Dr. James B. Allen of the BYU in 1970, he produced an article for the church magazines explaining all about the different versions of the first vision. ... It’s this idea that the church is hiding something, which we would have to say as two Apostles who have covered the world and know the history of the church and know the integrity of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve from the beginning of time, there has been no attempt on the part in anyway, that the church leaders trying to hide anything from anybody [sic]."

I grew up in the heart of the heaviest period of the church's correlation and whitewashed education system. All the stories were thoroughly white-washed and faith promoted. I went on a mission under the banner of the church's newest missionary program: The Missionary Guide (1988). This program with sappy mormon videos "Together Forever" manipulated people's emotions to join the church. The guide had several chapters of resolving people's concerns (doubts) about joining the church. Nowhere was there any mention of dealing with multiple versions of the First Vision. While polygamy and Brigham Young was addressed, polyandry nor JS polygamy was addressed. Moreover, there was no mention of seer stones or rock in the hat stories. Many times, people would ask about the gold plates story and their translation, and we missionaries repeated the church sanctioned story of the U and T.

That's why some of us are damn mad about these lying scumbags. How dare they deny their mormon doctrine past and their gaslighting of others that lived the lie!

They certainly hid a lot from me when I was growing up in the Morg.

15 plus years of Primary, Sunday School, Seminary and then a 2-year mission and you know what? During that entire time I never heard a single word about Joseph Smith using a rock in a hat to "translate" the golden plates. Imagine my surprise when, as a university senior, one of my professors let it slip that Joseph Smith actually did most of his "translation" performance art using a peepstone that he plopped into a hat that he then plunged his face into...so that he could then pretend that he was reading glowing words that appeared in the stone. They certainly hid that. (I'm pretty sure that the BYU professor who told me that subsequently got into trouble with the church following Packer's "Mantle" campaign.)

The "Teachings of the Presidents" series of OFFICIAL lesson manuals that were used for several years portrayed each of the polygamous prophets (Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor and Wilford Woodruff) as monogamous, one-at-a-time husbands. None of their plural wives or offspring by plural wives were mentioned or shown. Family photos only showed the legal wife and her children. Any investigator/prospective convert who read through those manuals would not have gotten even the slightest hint that any of those Presidents of the church had been polygamists who had dozens of wives. Looks like they were hiding something.

But I guess we have to remember that Ballard was a car salesman before becoming a GA, so when he says that they never hid anything it's just occupational rhetoric.

"We never hid the odometer. It was right there. If you suspected tampering, you could have hired an expert to examine it. The fact that you didn't do that is why you didn't discover the tampering until after you purchased the car. That's all on you. The evidence was always there to find if you weren't so lazy."

If you listen closely in the COB, you can hear whirring sounds.

wormpoo, friends;

the dearest thing to the hearts/minds of the GAs is $$$$$

Until / Unless they disclose finances,


salaries, wages, stipends, benefits

Revenue/income, business & donations

expenses & investments, etc.

they're fooling EVERYONE who 'believes'

So Joseph Fielding Smith, or one of his close associates, tearing the pages out of Joseph Smith's letter book, which contained the 1832 version of the so-called first vision, and hiding those pages in a safe in Joseph Fielding Smith's office for 30+ years does not constitute church leaders trying to hide anything?! Ballard made a blatant and provable lie, and he knows he did. What a dick.

liar
liar
pants on fire

Careful. That got Bill Reel excommunicated.

How many decades was it the truth about the "White Salamander" was hidden? Not even mentioned until Dallin Oaks taught us the truth - that it was normal for Joe to be attacked by one.

In the 50 years that I was an active TBM, I never once heard about the rock in the hat magic trick. I heard about BY and his polygamy, but not JS's polygamy and polyandry. I never heard about the Wildcat Bank he created. I was taught that JS went like a lamb to the slaughter at Carthage Jail, not fighting for his life in a shootout.

Right after high school graduation, I worked in the COB, of all places in the Historical Department. Never knew about seer stones, rock in the hat, polyandry, nothing. I think my boss knew some things, though, because Leonard Arrington would come in to my boss's office a couple times a week and have some quiet talks with him. Shortly afterward, Leonard Arrington's boss would come storming in our area, in a straight beeline to my boss and you could hear him shouting at him.

The Church does it's very best at keeping secrets, but with internet information available now, the cat's out of the bag.

....and Hinkley, Oaks and company were buying the Hoffman forgeries because they knew they were fake and so wanted to hide them from the world...yeah right.

Once again--- Tell a big enough lie often enough and a percentages of the hearers will fervently believe it

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."

But as most politicians know...and as the Mormon Church leaders have always known, you don't need to fool ALL the people ALL the time. You can still make a lot of money and have a lot of power by fooling a large number of people most of the time.

I will never reveal the sign and token .... rather than do so, I will suffer my life to be taken.

Mr Ballard will hide behind the semantic position that not publicising something, or not promoting something, is not the same as hiding it.

Of course, he’s being mealy mouthed. He knows it, we know it.

Mr Ballard and his colleagues would do well to refresh themselves on the Church’s definition of “Lying”.

“Lying is intentionally deceiving others. Bearing false witness is one form of lying. The Lord gave this commandment to the children of Israel: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour” (Exodus 20:16). Jesus also taught this when He was on earth (see Matthew 19:18). There are many other forms of lying. When we speak untruths, we are guilty of lying. We can also intentionally deceive others by a gesture or a look, by silence, or by telling only part of the truth. Whenever we lead people in any way to believe something that is not true, we are not being honest.“
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-principles/chapter-31-honesty?lang=eng

Ballard just wants everyone to eat the sausage and enjoy it. He does not want people going into the manufacturing facility to see how it's made and what the ingredients are.

Ballard used to sell cars. You focus on what the potential customer would like about the car. You don't talk about the problems.

The church runs like Jimmy Dean or a car dealership.

No lie flowing out of these assholes should surprise me anymore. MORmON Leaders are all pro liars.

I agree that Ballard is lying when he says the Church and its leaders never hid anything.

But I also think that Ballard is trying to distract people from the real issue. Blame for misdirection is a separate question from whether the Church is true or not.

Suppose he is right that the only reason we never knew all the facts that now cause us to disbelieve the Church's truth claims is because we didn't fully investigate (spoiler alert: he's not right). If I foolishly failed to do due diligence before joining the Church at age 9, or before going through the temple and on a mission at age 19, does that mean I am forever locked into the Church when I find out it's false?

The truth remains that if I had discovered the uncomfortable facts about the Church, I wouldn't have joined it, I wouldn't have gone through the temple, I wouldn't have gone on a mission. Because those facts convincingly contradict the Church's truth claims. The question is not when I learned the facts, but what I do about them once I learn them.

If I meet Ballard on the road and ask for directions to Phoenix, and the directions he gives point me to Salt Lake City, of course I'm going to turn around as soon as I find out the truth, even if he says I shouldn't complain because I had access to Mapquest.

If Ballard gives me ice cream contaminated with feces, and I spit it out after the first bite, I am not obligated to finish his treat, even if he says I should have found out about the contamination before I tried it. He can be hurt by my ungratefulness all he wants, and he can eat crap all he wants. I choose not to.

These old men confuse the map for the territory. They blind themselves to say they are seers.

You're right, it is a distraction from the real issue at hand, which is that there's a mass exodus out of Mormonism going on because Mormons are being confronted by historical facts that Mormon leaders failed to disclose.
If Ballard was selling a house and failed to disclose the fact that there were massive structural integrity issues with the foundation, he'd get sued for fraud and he'd lose his shirt. He couldn't say, "I never hid anything from you." He lied by omission about the massive structural integrity issues with the foundational claims the entire house of cards is built upon. When honest people encounter those failures and faults they try to really understand how they could have been so deceived. We trusted liars just because our friends and family trusted them and they appeared to be men of integrity, when they were in realityjust con men.

I have in my files a copy of a letter from an area president in Europe who said essentially the same thing; I wrote him a letter asking him to clarify, my main focus was church finances.

Erich W Kopische letter over his signature, 4/10/2012

He never replied....



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/12/2019 01:35AM by GNPE.