I realized a few decades ago that my faith, the religion I was born into, was probably quite problematic and disreputable.

What helped put things in perspective was the realization that any intellectually honest person looking at the life and deeds of Joseph Smith should be seeing not just a few red flags, but an entire sea of red flags.

In other words, it is easy to formulate a large number of very simple, straightforward, brief declarative sentences concerning the founder of the religion I was born into, that are each well-supported in the historical record and, for all practical purposes, can reasonably be regarded as historically factual statements, with each such historically factual statement by itself being enough to raise huge, bright red flags in the mind of any sane and well-adjusted individual.

Just a few examples of such short statements:

(1) Emma looked into the barn and saw her husband, Joseph Smith, having sex with Fanny.

http://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/fanny-alger/

(2) Joseph Smith put the rock into his hat and then pressed his face into the hat, claiming that the rock was showing him the correct translations of inscriptions that were on a set of golden plates that he had placed elsewhere for safety and concealment.

(3) Joseph Smith asked God to tell him whether it was okay for Joseph Smith to have marital relations with an unspecified number of women other than his wife Emma, who was still living and to whom he was still married...and God told Joseph Smith that it was more than okay. It was a commandment.

(4) Joseph Smith claimed that God had revealed to Joseph Smith a very important set of guidelines intended to safeguard and improve the health of the members of his church. Unfortunately, the set of guidelines did not provide any ideas that were not already being discussed and circulated in society at large and, more unfortunately, in its misguided emphasis on favoring cold drinks, rather than hot, the guidelines appeared to be based on a complete lack of knowledge about the germ theory of disease transmission and therefore failed to advise the members of the church to boil their drinking water and frequently wash their hands with soap as an economical and efficient way of preventing the transmission of deadly diseases.

(5) Before being selected to be the Prophet by God and Jesus, and before being led to buried treasure (in the form of golden plates) by a being who glowed in the dark and claimed to be someone who had lived for a time in Joseph Smith's area about 1,400 years ago, Joseph Smith claimed that he had a magic rock that gave him the ability to help the locals find buried treasure. Unfortunately, even though he could frequently help them find the exact location of the buried treasure, there were invisible ghosts and spirits (whom only he could see) that had the power to make the buried treasure slide away further underground and out of reach.

(6) Joseph Smith claimed that he had learned some special handshakes and passwords that spirits would need to possess after they died in order to enter heaven. He also had the inside information on the type of underwear that you needed to wear in this life in order to be found worthy of entering heaven.

(7) Joseph Smith told the general public that he did not believe in plural marriage and had no involvement in plural marriage...at a time when he was in fact secretly introducing and practicing a doctrine of plural marriage, based on a "revelation" he claimed to have received, and then he went and destroyed the printing press of the Nauvoo Expositor, a newspaper that seeking to report the truth about Joseph Smith and the practice of polygamy. Very prophet-like.

(8) Joseph Smith bought some old Egyptian papyrus writings and a mummy and claimed that the writings were the "Book of Abraham" written by Abraham himself, even though they have since proven to be nothing more than very common funeral texts used in accordance with Egyptian funerary customs and have zero connections to Abraham.

Reading "In Sacred Loneliness" was a turning point in my investigation, because it changed my assumption about Joseph Smith. What the book revealed to me from the journals and letters of the women, who were his plural wives, was a pattern of abuse of spiritual authority.

It seemed to undermine the whole notion of salvation as a serious concern, because apparently people could just be saved by being related to a woman who is willing to become a secret wife of God's prophet. Huh? It also brought into focus the roots of high pressure tactics in Mormonism to get people to do something they might not do otherwise by dangling eternal threats/rewards at you is nothing new.

From that point forward, I didn't operate under the assumption that Joseph Smith was a good person or well-intentioned. That even made some non-traditional books like Dan Vogel's pious fraud notion hard to swallow.

I agree, Snowball, that book is a shocking read, even though it was written by a TBM. Those women had such awful lives, all because of the men surrounding them. Nothing "blessed" about it.

Well, sure. When you put it like that it sounds sorta bad.

Perhaps the best way to handle that information is to put your fingers in your years and sing tra-la-la very loudly. Like my family does.

What you don't know can't hurt you. True principle.

When local church leaders told me that good members don't read the well researched and fact based "No Man Knows My History" by Fawn Brodie the alarm bells crying CULT went off.

Yeah, but when you’ve invested your whole life in bad ideas shouldn’t you protect your investment?

My way out was totally life experience. As I look back now, though, I realize I never really believed in JS or the BofM, though I tried. I believed in God and Jesus Christ, but the rest was not important enough to me.

I have been rather shocked to find out what I have since coming here 15 years ago. Icing on the cake. It is insane how this church was started and people still believe.

obviously!

That's where the prophet found fanny. And that's where the prophet's wife found fanny...and the prophet doing whatever it was that caused Oliver Cowdery to be disgusted, but I digress....

Where were we? Oh yeah....fanny.

I fully understand why Mormons are so proud of being Mormon...or at least were until their prophet told them that they weren't Mormons.