1 hand raised high in the air here.

When I read the so-called "anti-Mormon" stuff on sights like this, I didn't necessarily believe it but I KNEW I had to find out for sure if it was true or not. Being a good Morgbot, I went right to those sites and found out the information that disturbed me was, in fact, absolutely true. But FAIR and FARMS had some lame-@ss reason why it shouldn't matter to me. Sorry, but I can decide from the facts whether or not something should matter to me. I just needed the facts confirmed by an opposing source. Those sites kindly did that for me and killed my shaky testimony. And I am grateful to them for that.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2010 02:56PM by CA girl.

Not me, but my husband has researched my findings ONLY using those kinds of sites because he is chicken to go to anything that isn't church approved.

Another brick in my testimony crumbled when I read FAIRs rebuttal to the Lawrence Girl's inheritance. As I recall, FAIR focused on the money (e.g., Joseph didn't steal the money) but just ignored the fact that he was boinking 2 sisters. WTF?!!!!

I went looking for answers to a few troubling bits (polygamy, PoGP, etc.) and came away with enough additional questions to destroy my testimony entirely.

Prior to exploring FARMS/FAIR, I had read Nibley's "Abraham in Egypt" and was astounded at his problematic reasoning. I assumed that the issue was me-- that I didn't have the brains to figure out how it all made sense. I was disappointed (at the time) to find that, like Nibley, other defenders of the church just aren't very good at being reasonable.

I was also shocked to find out about Joseph Smith's practice of polygamy and polyandry (I had been taught that polygamy started with BY). When I found out about teenage "wives," and the lies the church published about the practice, I started running skeptical scenarios and reconsidering LDS epistemology entirely.

I owe my apostasy, in large part, to the folks over there. If it hadn't been for them, I would have been troubled, but not well-informed enough to realize that I wasn't the crazy one.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2010 03:42PM by angsty.

or watch one of their DVDs, I always find myself asking, "That's the BEST answer they've got?" About 95% of the material is insubstantial fluff. I'm not sure whether it is being included to take up space or to mask the 5% that's misleading.

Probably the most telling criticism of FARMS and FAIR is that their materials are not used to explain Mormonism to non-Mormons. Their target audience is made up of believing Mormons, who simply want to be reassured that somewhere, somehow, there is somebody who has made sense of it.

I had a slight suspicion the 'anti's' might be misleading etc so I double checked and quadruple checked everything with FAIRS, FARMS, SHIELDS and MORMONFORTRESS! Hehe
They were all a great help for me. lol

A few years ago, I was looking at the section called: "answers to media questions" I'm not even sure they still have that. Anyway, "This looks interesting" I said to myself and read two articles about dna and the bom. At that time I was unaware of a dna issue (i already "knew" the landbridge theory came from satan) but I could definately smell bs answers when I saw them. I thought to myself: "Wow! I don't even know anything about this issue but those answers sure suck!"

I read more and more over the next few months until I very timidly and tentatively entertained a new thought: "What if, JS was a fraud?" Not hypothetical like I had entertained before but an actual real-life fraud?

My mind raced over all of my prior questions:

Book of Abraham.

Kinderhook.

Zelph (come on! JS and his friends hiking around, they find a pile of bones and turning to the smartest one there he says: "oh yeah, that there pile of bones is actually Zelph who served under the Great Onendagus..." BS, BS, BS). I have friends that act like that, like they know everything about everything.

Temple Change. The implication of changing the temple ceremony in what I felt was a substantial not just a cosmetic way. Brigham Young said I needed to be able to give the signs tokens AND PENALTIES to gain admittance into gods kingdom. Not only were the penalties gone but so was the final "5 points of fellowship" needed to get past the veil into the celectial room!

Fanny Alger, polygamy.

Suddenly it all fell into place and my world hasn't been the same since.

@onendagus ... just a day or two ago, I read their take on zelph ... they argued that all the witnessess didn't really agree on what JS actually said -- FAIR just ignored the fact that 6 people said JS said SOMETHING ABOUT A FRICKIN DUDE NAMED ZELPH. ARGHH. Very weak.

In my testimony's last, dying gasps, I read a ton of Nibley to try and find a reason to believe. That worked for a while, but then reading "An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon," by Sorenson (?), that was the final nail in the coffin.

Yep. That was precisely my experience.

I realized that those sites were nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

I saw them while still a believer and was amused at how they could go on and on without ever saying anything. One time I came across Nibleys work on the BoA and was baffled by his BS- it was obvious that he had no idea what he was talking about.

I came across this site:
http://www.the-book-of-mormon.com/main.html

And while I knew these guys were really very silly, it was what the church wanted me to hear. That should have raised serious flags, but my brainwashed mind couldn't see through the suds.

But- when I sought diligently to rescue my test monkey from sertain death, they were the poison that helped finish it off. Like I said, they can go on and on spinning and spinning fantastic webs of non-answers in an obvious attempt at clouding the issues and confusing the faithful.

One thing they did do was to show that the critics have valid points. And then they went on to show that the church had the exact response as the guilty- start talking as fast as you can to make the situation look different.