Hi all, I've met with the missionaries 4 times. I have enjoyed the discourse and I will not get baptized after many pressure discussions. My question is the following. (I read the BOM) Was Lehi and family Jewish??? Why write in reformed egyptian? Makes no sense to to me. Also, why does the church need my 10% when they have like 100 billion?

Thanks,

Erik

> Was Lehi and family Jewish???

Turns out they were tribe of Joseph, but according to mormon theological stomach rumblings, The Tribe of Joseph was split in two, his sons Ephriam and Manassah, so that there'd still be 12 Tribes after Levi's Tribe was scattered to 'service' the other 11 tribes.

We know this now because the good mormons (White) are from the Tribe of Ephriam, while the nasty Brown bastards (me) are from the Tribe of Manassah, even though my skin is white under my wristwatch...



> Why write in reformed egyptian?
> Makes no sense to me.

Join the crowd! One of the purposes of Reformed Egyptian was it's brevity, but then why write "...and so it came to pass..." 3,000 times?  And "Adieu", and "windows" in the Jaredite 'which way is up?' submarines?  

Ever so many people think that JoJu (short for Joseph Smith, Jr.; use it to really piss off the TBMs) cribbed it all from writings extant in his region at the time.



> why does the church need my 10%
> when they have like 100 billion?

Well, they don't!  It's just a test of your faith; they don't need the money, but you need to want to give the money ... or else!  

But fear not, they'll give it back if you ever need it!

You still wear a wristwatch ?

How gauche !

Mormon body armor. Musket balls always hit Mormons in the watch, like magic.

Thanks. I needed that laugh today.

the church has more than $100 billion. that's just what was in the ensign peak account.

And that reported amount has since grown.

It sounds like you have it figured out! Answers:

1 and 2. They make stuff up.
3. They want your money.

"Was Lehi and family Jewish?"

No, because they didn't exist.

But pretending that they did, as Israelites living in Jerusalem, they would have been culturally and religiously Jewish even if they weren't part of the tribe of Judah itself.

----

"Why write in reformed egyptian?"

Because Elvish hadn't been invented when Smith dictated the BOM.

Smith needed a fake language that only a "prophet" could translate. Using Hebrew would have defeated the purpose, since any number of scholars could then have read the so-called plates without resorting to a hat and a magic rock.

----

"why does the church need my 10% when they have like 100 billion?"

And that's the $100B question. They don't need it, at all. But they really want it. It adds to the sense of sunk costs into the church; the more you put into it, the less likely you are to walk away.

Also, the 100 B is just one slush fund investment account. It was at 100 B quite a while ago and no doubt is a lot more now. They have much much more and they don't share. Their "charity" work is a joke, a lot of it is a tax scam. If you would like more info in the $, I am sure people here would be happy to give you more details.

The $100 billion is just the start. That portfolio was stocks, bonds, small alternative investments, etc.

It does not include the church's own businesses nor its enormous real estate portfolio. The real estate alone should dwarf the Ensign Peak fund. If that surmise is correct, the church's overall net worth would be at least a few hundred billion.

Your name reminds me too much of a power hungry mean angry bald old lawyer man who is like a Crown Prince waiting for an old feeble senile Heart Doctor to die so he can become King but he's so angry that its taking so long and he's getting old and feeble himself. I can't trust you Mr Ox because of your name.

Dallin Ox Wrote:
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>
> "Why write in reformed egyptian?"
>
> Because Elvish hadn't been invented when Smith
> dictated the BOM.


Hahahaha!
Best laugh of my day!

Welcome! Ask as many questions as you like -- we would be happy to help you.

Mormon Think is a good website that discusses both the apologetic (church) side of things, along with what church critics have to say about various issues.

http://www.mormonthink.com/

I'm with you on the 10%. I read in the past that most churches in the U.S. get by just fine on 1-3% donations. Plus, those churches spend about half of their donations on salaries for ministers, youth ministers, organists, church secretaries, etc. -- expenses that the Mormon church does not need to cover at the local level. Another problem with the Mormon church is the lack of financial transparency. Not even the members know where the money is going.

Lehi and his family were as Jewish as Jarjar Binks. The Book of Mormon is a synthesis of the mythologies available in New York in 1820. In the Mormon Universe, the church may be "true". However, do you want to live in that Universe? It's like being a Trekkie (original series) in 2022.

The missionaries are sent out by parents who remember a church that no longer exists. There was a time that church was fun. Now it's a drag because upper management grew increasingly authoritarian. Even Russians were complaining that the church was too authoritarian. The church founded by Joseph Smith the lovable rogue is anything but the freewheeling lovefest he started. In fact, after he was assassinated at Carthage (some say by his own people), Brigham Young founded a breakaway sect that thrived by outrunning its self-created enemies and establishing a theocracy in Utah. Brigham Young himself died unexpectedly. Some suspect he was offed by one of his 56 wives. Regardless, those fun times are gone. The church is now confronting the undeniable evidence that Joseph Smith really did make it all up himself or with a ghostwriter. He had the gift of gab and the right mental disorder to believe his own stories. That is how he acquired over 30 wives. I mean, besides sending away on missions the husbands of those cuties who were inconveniently married. He was a practical one, that Joseph.

But as I said, that church is gone. Today's church is a real estate empire using religion as a tax shelter.

As a Christian sect, Mormonism is pathological and overpriced. Week-old sushi that costs triple the fresh stuff. It doesn't mean Christianity itself is bad.

Joseph wrote his story in 1830--ish when all his tales were still believable. Nowadays, he would be laughing his ass off that the dumb ass Mormons are still buying into his scam when it is clear that is exactly what it was. Geez--some are still trying to figure out where Zarahemla was. My mother still wonders that.

Great way to get women and money starting a church was. Still is if you've got some charisma and no conscience whatsoever

But, like me, most learned that Mormonism was the One True Church from the people I trusted the most, our parents. Who was I to doubt them? I couldn't believe my luck to born into the one true church. Then later I couldn't believe my bad luck to be born into the "one true church".

Bradley said: "Today's church is a real estate empire using religion as a tax shelter."

Perfect definition.

TSCC also has 150 attorneys to make sure that it keeps it's empire status.

There’s hardly any mormonism in the book of mormon. The book does not teach a preexistence, the proxy work for the dead, or a three degrees of glory after the resurrection. The book teaches there is one God, namely that Jesus is both the father and the son, but the missionaries will tell you they believe the Godhead to be three separate beings and by implication three separate gods. Most of Mormonism’s unique beliefs come from its two other books: the book of Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. The reason for all this contradiction is that Mormonism doctrinally developed over many decades, but it started as something between methodist and presbyterian protestantism.

I used to be a missionary, and I baptized one man who was livid at all the mormonism I didn’t share with him up front. I had given him a book of mormon, and he argued that that was dishonest, that the book of mormon does not represent what the two young men in front of you actually believe. He was right.

The book is itself weird. The Smithsonian Institute will tell you that the book of mormon has never been used to verify a single point of precolumbian American history. Yes, Mormons believe the indigenous Americans to at least partly Jewish, the tribe of Mannesah specifically. Old time mormons who have their heads more firmly fixed up their butts believe the Indians are all Jewish and that their dark skin is because of some skin-turned-black-for-sin bs. The book of mormon is little more than a creative regurgitation of the King James Bible mixed with Moundbuilder myth and scrying superstitions. It may appear impressive on the face of it, but once you are familiar with the circumstances surrounding its “translation” it starts to look more like the fraud that it is really is.

Regarding the status of the mormon church and its connection with "Truth," the OP had to know what type of responses quizzing us on this issue would be generated.  After all, if you want to know how bad the Yankees are, you don't quiz Yankee fans; you ask Red Socks fans.

Which immediately raises the issue, "who should the OP trust?"

There ARE happy mormons out there...  Go to dental school, get rich finding and filling cavities, get called to be a bishop, then a stake president, then the stake patriarch; live a life full of service and ski boats!!

What a love feast your funeral will be...  Yay,mormonism!!  Yes, there exists a class of human beings for whom mormonism works all to well.  

From my perspective, said class of human beings is shrinking, although the power of the individuals may be growing.  But I don't see them as being influential in the long run because it's very apparent that they need an impoverished, ignorant underclass propping them up.

After all, chapels don't clean themselves, do they?

Answers.

Yes.

Because Egyptian was unknown at the time but from the Middle East.

They don't need your money. They need your time and your family.

Zombie Jesus needs your brains.

Mormonism is a high-demand religion (cult actually) that gives you busy work so you have skin in the game. You are never enough because there is always more to do. I remember the hamster wheel and all that running. Running where? To heaven? It was all for nothing. The best thing I did was shirk my member-missionary responsibilities, thereby limiting the church's toxic spread.

investigatorgen22 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------Was
Lehi and family Jewish??? Why write in reformed
egyptian? Makes no sense to to me.


Because there never was, or is, or ever will be Reformed Egyptian.

But wait, wasn't Joseph an expert in Egyptian translation. He was such an expert that when professional Egyptologists compared the Book of Abraham to its source papyrus scrolls they called Joe's work an impudent fraud. You talk about being ahead of the curve.

Many Mormons don't know that Joseph Smith claimed to be able to translate Egyptian.

https://mormonr.org/qnas/Rqa6Tb/book_of_abraham_translation?gclid=Cj0KCQiAm5ycBhCXARIsAPldzoUlIuLurMmO2QTlaVdgY76Ov95D-M6zF5B-Z08L45k8Set2nz9QBfUaAqXXEALw_wcB

Joseph was a self-taught expert who "translated" by the spirit. That's why the church calls the BoA an "inspired translation".

What differentiates that from inspired storytelling? He spun more yarns than his sweater-knitting "spirit wives". How is that inspired? But suppose the church is right. Would you trust a work channeled by a sex addict?

> why does the church need my 10%
> when they have like 100 billion?

God is poor, but he likes a rich church :D

God supposedly can do anything yet mostly He seems to need money. The miracle is that people keep forking it over.

Apparently, the loaves and fishes trick now involves compound interest.

Keep investigating... We don't know these things [since the book and storyline isn't real anyway]. You've got a long way to go and plenty of time to get there. Investigate for a year or more. What's the rush? Take your time. There's no hurry.

Did you read the bom backwards yet?

That's how you know it's not true.
Because then, the good guys win!

That's where you also learn that 'more-morons' drink caffeine! You really aught to try it! It is much faster too, usually finishing in about 10 minutes!!!

And VIOLA. You have no more questions of Mormonism and all the answers.

On your question of so-called tithing: TSCC takes it in IF you shell it out. Let them do the shelling and selling and you just don't buy it.

Next time they contact you, and they will, tell them you will only talk to them if they are completely honest and don’t try to hide things from you about past history or doctrine.

Then conduct this test to see if they are lying to you, ask these questions nobody ever bothered asking me on my mission and I wish they had, it might have woken me up from the God Delusion I inherited and just accepted without question,

1. Why did the Mormons discriminate against blacks prior to 1978, by denying them entry into your temples, when you obviously don’t need the priesthood to enter a temple, when women have never had the priesthood and they have been admitted all along? (Because the founders of the religion, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and every Mormon leader who followed them up until the late 70’s, were extremely racist and thought whites were superior to black people.)

2. How many wives did Joseph Smith have? (34)

3. How many of them were teenagers while he was in his 30’s? (11)

4. How many of them were already married to his followers when he married them? (11)

5. What law allowed him to marry women who were really married to their real husband? (There is no law that allows that practice, polyandry)

6. What did Joseph say God told him about that practice, polyandry? (He told him it was adultery, punishable by damnation in The Law of the Priesthood D&C142:61-65)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/01/2022 09:29PM by schrodingerscat.

How does a person who is being hit up by missionaries know to call himself an Investigator? I know Mormons call people taking discussions investigators, but does the person know that is what he is being called?

Missionary: Hi. Lets meet to discuss my cult. From here on, you will be known as Investigator.

Agreed. And OPie has not come back.

Opie investigates themselves...
And finds they are not true

The post was from a time of the year when BYU students are home on Thanksgiving break, and sometimes prone to play with the exmos. Yet, it was a straight forward question, so I treated it as such. If the OP doesn't benefit from the responses, someone else might.

Maybe the mishies told them to quit posting here.

Right!  As in, doubt the doubters...

elderolddog Wrote:
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> Right!  As in, doubt the doubters...


SELF DOUBT, as opposed to MD&T (Mormon Doubt & Trust). Be scared of yourself. You are not sacred!

THEY are the doubters. Mormons doubt their 'church', just like JOSEPH SHITTY did. (If spell check spelled Smith [shitty] do I have to go back and check it? Probably not since it's called spell check, and it should do a better job, if possible, before they cash it...)

OP doubts and we doubt it.
That's what doubt's about!

Nightingale Wrote:
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> Maybe the mishies told them to quit posting here.


If they do what the missing aries tell them to they are probably mormone material anyway.

Maybe they aren't real... Or aren't really themselves, anyway.

I try to present the Church as honestly and encouraging as possible for you to get yourself assimilated into it so you too can be like the rest of sucked in and now trying super hard in every way to be good obedient sheep who will never again focus on thinking about questions that the top leaders of the Church haven't approved us to think about.

It's looking troubling that you haven't decided to be baptized. Thanks to how the Church programs me to think its impossible for me to think of any reason why you wouldn't get baptized. All we know to do is just get you assimilated into the Church. And then once you've promised to get baptized then we've got you hooked like a fish on the end of the line who is headed to the fisherman's ice bucket and then home for his family's supper. Except in your case there is nothing to fear as its a nice ice bucket and the meal will be good. So, don't forget to tell the missionaries that you are going to get baptized. Then at baptism you will make a lifelong commitment to obedience. An then you will be hooked :)

Of course, Lehi/family were Jewish. If not then the Book of Mormon is a fraud. However, I could never ever dare to think seriously on that as the top Church leaders have never approved us to think about this.

On why to write in reformed egyptian I really don't know. That question makes no sense to anyone who has been baptized. What question we are supposed to ask is this "instead of thinking about Reformed Egyptian, what can I do to be more obedient to the leaders".

On 10% of your income, that's just the start :) You will get to do free labor on chapel cleaning assignments because Heavenly Father is too poor for janitors. Then there are temple cleaning assignments. You will also have callings. You will need to donate fast offerings. You may need to serve missions. You will need to spend a lot of money and time on obedience.

On 100 billion, the top church leaders have never told us to ask about the money they control. So, I have nothing to say on that.

Good luck on your next meetings with the missionaries. But, don't forget to get baptized ASAP. Then you can be happily hooked and put in the right bucket of happiness instead of being one of those free moving fish in the big scary waters.