Introduction

           Over the past couple years, my worldview has undergone a few major turning points with regard to religion.  I’ve learned about many fascinating topics and have been willing to change my position when encountering new pieces of evidence.  This journey has led me from Mormon orthodoxy to fundamentalism, from fundamentalism to canonicalism, and from canonicalism to irreligion.  Many of you will find it shocking, but I’ve made the decision to leave the LDS faith.  I no longer believe the fundamental claims of the LDS Church, and I haven’t for over a year now.  Because of the circumstances surrounding my education at BYU, I continued to practice the religion until I graduated.  I hope you’ll read the rest of this blog to understand how I came to this conclusion and what I believe now.

A Few Things First

Some of you may be wondering why I'm telling you this.  As a youth in the Church, whenever I would see people speaking out against the Church or criticizing its teachings, I would just assume they were misinformed, full of hatred and deceived by Satan.  "Why don't they just leave us alone?" I thought, "Why do they keep persecuting us?"  I would ignore what they had to say and take their persecution as a sign of the truthfulness of the Church.  You see, when someone goes out of their way to dissuade Mormons from their beliefs, it's called persecution.  But if a Mormon does the same thing to them, it's called missionary work.  Now I realize that they were just making some valuable information more accessible, and they wanted us to know the truth.  I sincerely appreciate those who have gone through the trouble to study the Church's scriptures and historical documents to bring this information to light.  By writing this letter, I hope to do the same thing.

Also, before you jump to any conclusions, let me tell you some reasons that aren’t the reason I’m leaving the Church.  I’m not leaving because I was offended by someone.  This is probably one of the least valid reasons for someone to stop believing in the Church.  It could only make sense if they based their faith on the condition that everyone at church is nice to them.  The truthfulness of the Church’s fundamental claims has nothing to do with people being nice to you, as long as the Church doesn’t use that as evidence for itself.

            I’m also not leaving because I want to justify sinful behavior.  I was keeping the commandments of the Church to the best of my ability both before and after I started to have doubts.  Also, disbelieving something because you don’t want it to be true is just as unsound as believing something because you want it to be true.  It’s just wishful thinking, and it doesn’t help you find the truth.

How It All Began

            As many of you know, I have always been active in the LDS Church.  I believed its teachings and obeyed its counsel.  I publicly sustained its leaders as prophets, seers, and revelators on a regular basis.  I served a full-time two-year mission.  In recent years I’ve become interested in apologetics.  After watching a video about evidences supporting the Book of Mormon, I was fascinated.  I had always been taught that searching for evidence of religious truth was not God’s way, and that we should not expect to find any.  God had specifically set everything up so that we would not have any physical evidence, and our faith could be tested.  This never seemed quite right to me, so I was glad to find that faithful people had searched and found some evidence in support of the Church’s claims.  In addition, around January of 2015, a Book of Mormon apologist friend of mine also introduced me to Creation apologetics.  Studying the Creation in this light really changed the way I looked at the world.  I had always been taught that humans, animals and every other living thing had come about by the slow process of random mutation and natural selection, and no one at Church or home had ever countered it.  I had believed this from my childhood, up through my mission and into my second year of college.  However, after watching many creation-evolution debates, and seeing that the evidence for evolution was largely based on circular reasoning, and certainly not as conclusive as my teachers had always taught, I became a Creationist.  I had always claimed to believe that God created everything, but now I actually did believe it.

            One day, I was watching a video made by a Christian apologist, and he was talking about Mormonism.  I was aware of some of the arguments that people had against the Church, which I felt like I had satisfying answers to.  “Mormons used to practice polygamy!”  Well, God said that’s okay sometimes under his direction (Jacob 2:27, 30).  “Mormons used to deny Black men the priesthood!”  Well, that must be what God wanted the prophet to do at that time, and a lot of other churches did the same thing.  “There’s no evidence for the Book of Mormon anywhere in Central or South America!”  That’s because it didn’t happen there.  However, this apologist didn’t even touch on those topics.  The things that he said really caught me off guard.  However, I didn’t feel the least bit threatened.  I saw it as a challenge, and I gladly accepted it.  I had so much confidence in the Church that there was no doubt in my mind that I would find answers to his arguments if I looked in the right places.  I was pretty busy at that time, and I didn’t get to it right away, but I planned to do a little searching.

            A couple months went by, and I still hadn’t gotten around to my searching.  However, one day, in February of 2016, I was pondering some things as I worked, and the unthinkable thought popped into my mind: What if the Church weren’t actually true?  Although it was somewhat distressing, this wicked little thought made more sense the more I thought about it.  I realized at that moment that I had just been coasting through my life in the Church, and that I didn’t have any substantial reason to believe in it.  I just snapped out of it, and suddenly, all the little questions that I had been repressing through the years started to make sense.  I felt relieved and enlightened, but at the same time I felt worried.  What will my friends and family think?  Who would I marry?  Will I get to stay at BYU if word gets out?  I had built my whole life up to that point on the Church, and I wanted it to be true.  I decided that it was time for that much-needed searching.  I knew that I would come out of this experience with a satisfying level of certainty that the Church is either true or it is false, and I really hoped I would find the former.

            When I began my search, I understood that Joseph Smith’s claim must be falsifiable in order for it to be verifiable.  There would have to be a way to know if he weren’t a true prophet.  Otherwise we would just think he was whether he actually was or not.  If he were a true prophet, we would expect to see in him the signs of a true prophet and not the signs of a false prophet.  As far as praying about things, it didn’t seem like this methodology left any room for answers that went against the Church.  If you pray about the Church and you feel good, then it’s true.  If you pray about it and you don’t feel good, then you didn’t pray right and it’s still true.

            At that point, I had never received that special witness from the Spirit while praying about the Book of Mormon, although I had tried many times.  But that had never bothered me.  The Church seemed true, and I chose to believe it.  When I began my search, I started praying again to know if Joseph Smith was a true prophet and if the Book of Mormon was true.  The only other time I had prayed so earnestly and sincerely was at the beginning of my mission when I was starting to have doubts.  I had only been in the field a couple weeks when I was suddenly not completely sure if I believed in the Church.  We were very busy, and there was no time for me to just sit and think things through.  I began to desperately pray for God to tell me the truth.  I couldn’t bear to spend the next two years telling people things that I knew I didn’t believe.  But I also didn’t want to face the shame of going home early.  After all, the only alternative to an honorable release is a shameful one.  I asked God if the Church was true, as well as a few other religions, to see if I could feel the least bit of a difference.  But as always, I felt nothing.  Somehow I managed to put my doubts aside and obediently finished out my mission.

            However, this time was different.  I had no girlfriend, no demanding callings and plenty of time to think and study.  It was the perfect time to figure out, once and for all, if Joseph Smith really was a prophet, and I was ready to accept either answer.  Part of me was hoping that I would find the answers that I was looking for and that this would ultimately serve as a faith-strengthening experience that I could look back on for many years to come.  I looked up a Mormon-Protestant debate online and listened to the first few minutes.  In his opening statement, the Protestant mostly dwelled on how Mormonism teaches that there are multiple gods, whereas the Bible teaches that there is only one God.  I decided to stop there and thoroughly study this question before moving on.  I knew very well that Mormon theology was henotheistic, which is the kind of polytheism where you believe in the existence of multiple gods, but you only worship one of them.  I had been taught since I was young that, someday, I could be a god and create an earth.  Although this teaching is alive and well today, I decided to pinpoint its origin, just so I could make sure that it had actually been taught by a prophet and wasn’t just some kind of speculation that had developed over the years.  Sure enough, this doctrine was taught by Joseph Smith in the King Follett Discourse, where he said:

I am going to tell you how God came to be God.  We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity.  I will refute that idea, and take away the veil, so that you may see ... He was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ Himself did ... and you have got to learn how to be gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all gods have done before you.

During this sermon, Joseph Smith keeps reassuring his audience that this teaching comes from the Bible, and I used to think it did too.  To support his claim, he uses John 17:3, in which Jesus states, “This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”  It doesn’t take a Bible scholar to see that this verse is pretty much saying the exact opposite of what Joseph Smith is claiming.  He’s claiming that there are many gods, and that we should become gods, whereas Jesus is saying that there is only one true God, and that is our Heavenly Father.

Another verse that often comes up in connection to this question is 1 Corinthians 8, which states, “... as there be gods many and lords many.  But to us there is but one God ...” (1 Corinthians 8:5, 6).  I used to use this verse as evidence that there are multiple gods and that there is only one whom we are to worship.  However, when you read the verse in context, things start to look a little different:

As concerning therefore the eating of those things that are offered in sacrifice unto idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is none other God but one.  For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,) But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him (emphasis added).

So it turns out that these “gods many and lords many” are actually idols, not gods of other planets.  The gods that it’s talking about here are only called gods, and they are believed to live in both heaven and earth.  The gods that Mormons tend to think this passage is referring to are real and live in distant galaxies.  The “us” it’s referring to is not juxtaposing us earthlings from them aliens, but rather us Christians from them idol-worshipers.  It could not possibly be any clearer.  One verse that really shot Joseph Smith’s theology out of the air was Isaiah 43:10, where the Lord states, “before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.”  This is literally the exact opposite of what Joseph Smith taught about God and what Mormons believe to this day.  In the aforementioned sermon, Joseph Smith states, “We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity.  I will refute that idea ...”  Now wherever did we get this naive notion that God was God from all eternity?  Maybe the Bible? (Psalm 90:2)  Maybe the Book of Mormon? (Moroni 8:18)  Maybe the Doctrine and Covenants? (D&C 20:17)  I just kept finding one doctrinal contradiction after another, and I was still on the first question.  Things weren’t looking very good for Joseph Smith.

            However, I will admit that there was one thing that was a little bit of a stumbling block to the idea that Joseph Smith was not a prophet.  I remembered all that time I had spent learning about the the presence of Haplogroup X mtDNA in North America and the Book of Mormon model based on that premise.  However, this evidence isn’t conclusive, and there are ways to understand it without Joseph Smith being a prophet.  For example, Joseph Smith wasn’t the first person to come up with the idea that the Native Americans are descendants of Jews.  In 1823, an American Protestant minister named Ethan Smith published a book called View of the Hebrews; or the Tribes of Israel in America, in which he proposes the idea that Jews anciently sailed to America, developed into a civilized and an uncivilized group, and that the uncivilized group destroyed the civilized group through warfare.  In addition, some of the evidence for Jews in ancient America proposed by Book of Mormon apologists doesn’t quite fit the Book of Mormon timeline.  For example, many of their artifacts with Hebrew writing on them (which could very well be hoaxes) are written in block letters, which wouldn’t have existed until after exile, as it was in exile that Hebrew came to have block letters.  Also, the Hanukiah mound in Ohio, which depicts a nine-branched hanukiah, is championed as a Nephite mound, yet hanukiahs, candelabras with nine branches instead of the traditional seven, didn’t come about until after the Maccabean Revolt in the 2^nd century BC, commemorating the fact that the lamp in the Temple burned for eight days instead of one.  The Lehites and Mulekites are supposed to have come out of Jerusalem in the 6^th century BC, and they would have only had seven-branched menorahs.  In any case, if Joseph Smith was a prophet for knowing that Jews lived in ancient America, then so was Ethan Smith.

            At one point, I remembered that the Dead Sea Scrolls contained a complete Isaiah scroll that was written before the time of Christ.  Seeing as all these changes to the Bible were supposed to have been made by the Great and Abominable Church after the time of Christ, as the Book of Mormon says (1 Nephi 13:26-40), I thought, “Hmm, I wonder ...”  If the corrections Joseph Smith made in the Book of Isaiah match what I find written in the Isaiah scroll, which was penned before the time of Christ, then that would be a major piece of evidence in support of Joseph Smith.  Luckily, there was a complete photocopy of this scroll on the Internet, so I looked up the verses that Joseph Smith had edited, looked them up in the Mishnaic Hebrew text that the Old Testament is normally translated out of, and compared them with the corresponding passages on the Isaiah scroll.  However, to my waning surprise, the Isaiah scroll matched the Mishnaic text down to the exact word.  Not a single word had been changed after all these years.  It looks like the only one changing the Bible is Joseph Smith.

            The more I studied, the more certain I became that Joseph Smith was not a true prophet, and that the LDS church was not what it claimed to be.  This frustrated me for a number of reasons.  I was learning things that were turning my world upside down, and I couldn’t even tell anyone about it.  I had read stories about students getting expelled from BYU, being evicted from their apartments and having all that they had worked for go to waste simply for losing their faith in the Church.  I imagine that they resigned from the Church while they were still enrolled at BYU, which is not a smart move, and I had no intention of doing that.  But still, I was afraid of being too outspoken, getting myself into trouble and putting my education in jeopardy.  I was taking a D&C class at the time, and that was a little rough.  Religion classes were pretty hard as it was with teachers being subjective and grading harshly.  In fact, that’s probably why they called it D&C, because those were the grades people got.  If that weren’t hard enough, I also had to heavily filter the things that I said and wrote.  I don’t like to pretend.  I’d rather be authentic.

            During this period, I started going to other churches and looking for alternatives.  I would spend hours and hours some weekends at church activities.  On Saturday I would go to a Jehovah’s Witness meeting for two hours, and on Sunday I would visit a Baptist church for a couple hours, and then I would attend the full three-hour block at my LDS ward.  I realized that the truthfulness of God and Jesus did not hang on Joseph Smith, so I continued to read the Bible and study its teachings.  There were things that I liked and disliked about both the Baptists and Jehovah’s Witnesses.  The theology of Jehovah’s Witnesses seemed to align better with the text of the Bible, whereas the Baptists believed a lot of traditional doctrines such as the Trinity and the conscious state of the dead, which are not taught in the Bible.  However, the Baptists were more authentic in their worship of God, while Jehovah’s Witnesses, like the Mormons, believed that their group is special, and that there is no salvation outside of their group.  I continued worshiping God on my own and studying the Bible, but I never found any religious group whose views perfectly aligned with mine.  All the while, I continued to participate in LDS church activities.

            In April of that year, after having studied this information for a couple months, I grew tired of questioning the Church.  I loved the Church, and it was central to everything I had ever wanted to do or be.  I did not think I could be happy outside of it.  I wanted to be with my people.  I decided to find some way to reconcile all of the contradictions.  I told myself that the devil couldn’t have inspired Joseph Smith, because the Church led people to Christ.  It had produced so much good fruit that it simply had to be true, despite all of the problems I had discovered.  So I repented and went back to my old way of thinking, but it wasn’t long before all of the contradictions started to bother me again.  If there really were only one true God, then there couldn’t be many true Gods.  If God were God from all eternity, then he couldn’t have ever become God.  This was the beginning of my Mormon Canonicalism.  I decided that whenever I would encounter a disparity between the statements made by modern prophets and the text of the scriptures, I would always side with the scriptures.  I found quotes by a couple different prophets who had said to do just that.  With the LDS canon as my basis, I went through the scriptures, topic by topic, and made a few changes to the way I understood Church doctrine.  The scriptures clearly teach that there is one God (Alma 11:28-31, Moses 1:6), that he is Jehovah, our Heavenly Father (D&C 109:4, 34) and that he was God from all eternity (Moroni 8:18, D&C 20:17).  The scriptures also teach that where you go in the spirit world depends on your righteousness, not on whether or not you've been baptized, and you can’t move from hell up to paradise (Alma 40:12, Luke 16:26).  From now on, my theology would be completely backed in scripture, and I would not simply rely on things that I had heard at home or at church.  I was well aware that some of my views went against the current teachings of the Church, but I also knew that these teachings had changed over time.  I held this position from about April to October of 2016.

            Although this canonical view of Mormonism was satisfying at first, I couldn’t get around the fact that it went against the teachings of the latter-day prophets.  According to the Doctrine and Covenants, we’re supposed to take all of the prophet’s teachings and commandments as if they came from the Lord himself (D&C 1:38, 21:4).  So either all the modern prophets are wrong about the nature of God, or all the ancient apostles and prophets, including Jesus himself, were wrong.  When I started studying these issues again, I learned that there were a whole bunch of other problems with Joseph Smith and the Church, some of which I had never even heard of before.  Besides teaching us to worship a vastly different God than the one we read about in the scriptures, Joseph Smith made multiple time-specific prophecies which were not fulfilled.  He also made verifiably false translations and abused his authority over people in ways that a man of God would not.  I realized that Joseph Smith showed all of the Biblical signs of a false prophet, and I decided that I should probably stop putting my faith in him.  I made this decision in about October of 2016, and have never gone back.  All the while I continued to actively participate in the Church.

Monotheism

            As discussed above, the scriptures teach that there is only one God--not just that we are supposed to worship only one God, but that there is only one God.  In His own words, He says, “I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God. ... Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God, I know not any” (Isaiah 44:6, 8).  “Before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me” (Isaiah 43:10).  “There is none other God but one” (1 Corinthians 8:4), “the only true God” (John 17:4).  He could not possibly make it any clearer.

            Despite this, Latter-day Saints believe that there are many gods.  This doctrine was taught by Joseph Smith on many occasions.  In Volume 6 of History of the Church, Joseph Smith states:

“I will preach on the plurality of Gods. I have selected this text for that express purpose. I wish to declare I have always and in all congregations when I have preached on the subject of the Deity, it has been the plurality of Gods. It has been preached by the Elders for fifteen years” (HC 6:474, June 16, 1844).

Fulfillment of Prophecy

            I used to consider the Church’s humanitarian efforts, the righteousness of the people and the good feelings we sometimes feel about the Church to be the good fruits that Jesus said to look for.  However, these aren’t Biblical signs of a true prophet, or very logical ones for that matter.  There are other churches that exceed the LDS Church in these regards.  The Lord tells the Children of Israel how they are to know a true prophet from a false one in Deuteronomy chapter 18, where the Lord says:

When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him. (Deuteronomy 18:22)

So when examining the validity of a prophet, the first question we need to ask ourselves is: have this prophet’s predictions come true?  Some prophecies won’t be fulfilled for many years, such as the prophecies specifying the exact birth place of the Messiah and details of his life, which weren’t to be fulfilled until hundreds of years after it was made.  However, other prophecies have a specific time frame.  For example, the Lord told Moses that Pharaoh would refuse to let the Children of Israel go after the first nine plagues, and that’s what happened every time.  Then, before the tenth plague, the Lord told Moses that Pharaoh would not only let them go, but would “thrust [them] out hence altogether” (Exodus 11:1), and that’s exactly what Pharaoh did (Exodus 12:31-32).

Applying the same standard to Joseph Smith, we find some disappointing results.  For example, on one occasion, when the Church was facing some rough financial times, Joseph Smith predicted that the people of Salem would give him money.  The heading to D&C 111 states:

At this time the leaders of the Church were heavily in debt due to their labors in the ministry.  Hearing that a large amount of money would be available to them in Salem, the Prophet, Sidney Rigdon, Hyrum Smith, and Oliver Cowdery traveled there from Kirtland, Ohio, to investigate this claim, along with preaching the gospel. 

The Lord confirms this claim in the first few verses of Section 111, when he says:

I have much treasure in this city for you, for the benefit of Zion, and many people in this city, whom I will gather out in due time for the benefit of Zion, through your instrumentality. ... And it shall come to pass in due time that I will give this city into your hands, that you shall have power over it, insomuch that they shall not discover your secret parts; and its wealth pertaining to gold and silver shall be yours.  Concern not yourselves about your debts, for I will give you power to pay them. (D&C 111:2, 4-5)

It sounds a lot like they are going to receive money from the people of Salem so they can pay off their debts.  That’s what the Lord is promising them through Joseph Smith.  However, when we read the rest of the section heading, we find that that’s not quite what happened: “The brethren transacted several items of Church business and did some preaching.  When it became apparent that no money was to be forthcoming, they returned to Kirtland.”

            Another time-specific prophecy that Joseph Smith made had to do with the New Jerusalem and the construction of the temple at the Temple Lot.  In D&C 84, the Lord states, “… the city New Jerusalem shall be built by the gathering of the saints, beginning at this place, even the place of the temple, which temple shall be reared in this generation” (D&C 84:4).  Today, this lot is owned by a splinter group, and is covered with one big empty lawn.  It’s just as void of any temple as it was when Joseph received this revelation, and we’re constantly drifting further and further away from what we could call Joseph Smith’s “generation.”

Joseph also received some interesting revelations about the time frame of the Second Coming.  According to the official History of the Church, the Prophet called a meeting by divine commission and revealed how much longer it would be until the Second Coming:

“President Smith then stated that the meeting had been called, because God had commanded it; and it was made known to him by vision and by the Holy Spirit. He then gave a relation of some of the circumstances attending while journeying to Zion--our trials, sufferings; and said God had not designed all this for nothing, but He had it in remembrance yet; and it was the will of God that those who went to Zion, with a determination to lay down their lives, if necessary, should be ordained to the ministry, and go forth to prune the vineyard for the last time, or the coming of the Lord, which was nigh--even fifty-six years should wind up the scene” (HC 2:182, Feb 14, 1835).

Joseph Smith made this prophecy in 1835, and said that the “coming of the Lord” would be in “fifty-six years.”  This would put the Second Coming in 1891.  This date is confirmed eight years later, when Joseph “was once praying very earnestly to know the time of the coming of the Son of man,” and the Lord said to him, “Joseph, my son, if thou livest until thou art eighty-five years old, thou shalt see the face of the Son of Man” (D&C 130:14, 15).  Joseph was born on December 23, 1805, so he would have been 85 in the year 1891.  Jesus gave us a clear picture of what the Second Coming would look like in Matthew 24.  This did not happen in 1891.  If you ask me, that sounds a lot like “the thing which the LORD hath not spoken” (Deuteronomy 18:22).

Diversions from Biblical Doctrine

            Occasionally a false prophet might perform a miracle or be very compelling in some other way.  In order to tell a true prophet from a false prophet in this situation, the Lord gives us a second test:

If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: (Deuteronomy 13:1-3).

In other words, if someone appears to be a prophet, but his teachings are not in line with those of previous prophets, then you can know that he is a false prophet.  The God of the Bible is completely unique (Isaiah 43:10, 44:6), has been God from all eternity (Psalm 90:2), created absolutely everything (Genesis 1:1, John 1:3), and is invisible to everyone except Jesus (John 6:46, 1 Timothy 1:17, Colossians 1:15).  The God that Joseph Smith taught is not unique, was not God from all eternity, is himself a created being, only made this little corner of the universe, and that he, Joseph Smith, had seen Him.  Could this be one of the “other gods” that the Lord is warning us about?

            Joseph Smith presents a different epistemology than the Bible.  According to him, we are supposed to discern the truth through our feelings (Moroni 10:4-5, D&C 9:8-9).  The only thing the Bible says about listening to your feelings is that “the heart is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9).  Appealing to feelings in order to convince people to join a religion is not unique to Mormonism.  For example, while I was in Jordan, I walked into a park to do my daily speaking assignment.  I found a young man sitting on a bench and decided to sit with him and talk to him.  He was from Syria, and he was around 20 years old.  As we conversed, the topic of religion came up very quickly, as it often does with Muslims.  He asked me if I had ever read the Qur’an, and I said I had read most of it.  His follow-up question sounded strangely familiar: “And how did you feel when you read the Qur’an?”  I thought to myself, “Okay, I’ve played this game before …” Mormons feel good when they read their scriptures, Christians feel good when they read the Bible, Muslims feel good when they read the Qur’an, and Atheists feel good when they read Richard Dawkins.  This isn’t evidence that the book is true.  It’s just evidence that you like what you’re reading.  I had a similar experience while visiting a Scientologist church in Taiwan.  The main floor was sort of a visitor’s center with big screen TVs to watch informational videos on, and there were sister missionaries who were eager to talk to you.  I asked one missionary what made her so sure that Scientology was true.  She said that she had read the books, undergone dianetic interviews and had a peaceful feeling about it.  Feelings can tell you important truths about yourself, such as whether or not you love someone, whether or not you believe something, or whether or not something makes you happy.  However, it stops there.  Feelings cannot tell you objective truths, and the Bible has never claimed that they could.

Joseph Smith's Translations

            I used to think that the original text to everything that Joseph Smith had translated was either lost or otherwise not verifiable except through spiritual witness.  However, we actually do have the originals of two of the texts that he translated: the Book of Abraham and the Kinderhook Plates.  The scroll that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham from was thought to have been destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire.  However, only part of the scroll was destroyed.  The rest was taken to a museum in New York, and was rediscovered by members of the Church in 1966.  The scroll came with an affidavit by Emma Smith certifying that this was indeed the scroll that was in Joseph Smith’s possession.  The facsimiles and characters Joseph had copied from his Abraham scroll matched this scroll as well.  There was no doubt that this was the same scroll that Joseph Smith had translated into the Book of Abraham, and the Church purchased it and has it in their possession to this day.  By that time, unlike Joseph Smith’s day, Egyptologists were able to read Egyptian hieroglyphs.  Members of the Church had experts come and read the scroll, and it turned out to have nothing to do with Abraham.  It was just a common funerary text, pronouncing blessings on a priest named Osiris Hor, the son of Taikhibit, who it was buried with, and recounting little bits of Egyptian mythology.  The Church knows all about this, yet they continue to assert in their teaching manuals that the scroll was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire, and as a result, most Latter-day Saints are completely unaware that such a thing exists.  They are starting to be more transparent about these issues, but I had always been taught in Sunday School that the scrolls had been destroyed.  A translation of the remaining portions of this scroll can be found in the Wikipedia article entitled “Joseph Smith Papyri.”

            The other verifiable translation that Joseph Smith made was the Kinderhook Plates.  In his own words, Joseph states:

I insert fac-similes of the six brass plates found near Kinderhook, in Pike county, Illinois, on April 23, by Mr. Robert Wiley and others, while excavating a large mound. They found a skeleton about six feet from the surface of the earth, which must have stood nine feet high. The plates were found on the breast of the skeleton and were covered on both sides with ancient characters.

I have translated a portion of them, and find they contain the history of the person with whom they were found. He was a descendant of Ham, through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the Ruler of heaven and earth. (HC 5:372, May 1st 1843)

In 1879, a man by the name of Wilbur Fugate confessed to have forged these plates.  Scientists have chemically analyzed one of the plates and found them to be a 19^th century hoax.  The characters on them are nonsensical and look made up.  Fugate forged these plates and gave them to Joseph Smith to test his ability to translate.  If he were a true prophet, he would have known that the writing on the plates was just nonsensical scratches, and he certainly wouldn’t have come up with a translation for them.  Either that or he was such a gifted translator that he could even read random scribbles.  In any case, if Joseph Smith failed miserably with his translation of the Book of Abraham and the Kinderhook Plates, how can we have any confidence in his translation of the Book of Mormon?

            In response to this issue, some have made the argument that perhaps the plates and the papyri were just objects that Joseph used to receive revelation through, and that the scripture he produced from them didn’t necessarily have to match what was written on them.  The problem with this argument is that that’s not what Joseph Smith was claiming.  In his own words, Joseph Smith says, “I commenced the translation of some of the characters or hieroglyphics, and much to our joy found that one of the rolls contained the writings of Abraham” (HC 2:236).  It looks a lot like he was claiming he could actually translate the hieroglyphs on these scrolls into English, and it looks a lot like his translation was completely off.

Idolization of the Church

            Another doctrinal problem is that the Latter-day Saints look to the Church for their salvation and not to Jesus Christ.  This might sound ridiculous at first, since the Church teaches the Atonement of Jesus Christ as a fundamental doctrine.  However, the power of the Atonement to cleanse people of their sins can only be administered through the Church.  No matter how strong your faith is in Christ, you will certainly be damned unless you are baptized by a worthy holder of the LDS priesthood, receive your endowment, and are sealed in an LDS temple.  Salvation and forgiveness are not administered by Christ, but by this one little church.  In a way, their mediator with the Father is the Church, not Jesus Christ, who, according to the scriptures, is the only mediator between God and man (1 Timothy 2:5).  You can believe that God is real and that Christ died for your sins without appealing to the LDS Church.

Book of Mormon Theology

            Latter-day Saints believe the Book of Mormon to be a true history of some of the ancient inhabitants of the Americas.  However, they don’t believe the theology it teaches, and many of them don’t even realize it.  The Book of Mormon reflects the kinds of doctrines Joseph Smith heard and taught in the 1830’s, such as the existence of only one God (Alma 11:28-31) and his immutability (Moroni 8:18).  It teaches that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are the same God (2 Nephi 31:21), and that the Son is an incarnation of the Father, they being the same person (Mosiah 15:2-4).  It teaches that there is no repentance after death (Alma 34:32-35).  It teaches that white people become black-skinned and unattractive when they are disobedient (2 Nephi 5:21), and black people become white and delightsome when they repent (Jacob 3:8, 3 Nephi 2:15).  Joseph Smith taught these doctrines in the 1830’s, but no Latter-day Saint believes them today.

Polygamy

            Many people have been distressed about the practice of polygamy in church history.  I personally have known about this issue, or at least part of it, since I was young, and I never fully understood what was wrong with it.  Ancient prophets whom we revere and look up to, such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, had more than one wife.  I considered the fact that we don’t practice it today to be a temporary break, so that we could have the right to continue to function as a Church.  I figured that the practice would be brought back someday, perhaps in the Millennium or the Celestial Kingdom.  But whenever a non-Mormon would ask about polygamy, I would get very defensive and insist that polygamy had nothing to do with our beliefs.

            The Church’s problem with polygamy goes beyond the simple fact that some men had more than one wife.  In D&C 132, the eternal law of plural marriage is defined and set forth.  In verse 61, the Lord states:

And again, as pertaining to the law of the priesthood—if any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him; for he cannot commit adultery with that that belongeth unto him and to no one else.

In this verse, we see two main stipulations for taking second wives: the first wife must “give her consent,” and they must be “virgins,” having “vowed to no other man.”  Joseph Smith broke both of these rules.  He married his first plural wife, Fanny Alger, who was 16 years old at the time, and he did it behind Emma’s back.  He married a lot of women without Emma’s consent.  In total, Joseph had over 30 wives, and 11 of them were already married to other men, some members of the Church.  10 of these wives were under 20 years old when he married them, and two of them were 14.  One of these 14-year-old girls, Helen Mar Kimball, was reluctant to accept the Prophet’s proposal, but did so after Joseph warned her that her family’s salvation was at stake.  These girls spent their whole youth in service to the Prophet, unable to go to dances, court young men, or do the things that they wanted.  It sounds a lot like Joseph Smith was using his authority to obtain more sexual partners.  Detailed historical information about each of these forgotten women can be found on the site wivesofjosephsmith.org.

            Under the first few presidents of the Church, polygamy was not simply allowed.  It was necessary for salvation.  In the first few verses of D&C 132, the Lord introduces this revelation as “the principle and doctrine” of “having many wives and concubines” (D&C 132:1).  He calls it “a new and an everlasting covenant,” and warns that “if ye abide not that covenant, then ye are damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into [the Lord’s] glory” (vs. 4).  Some people try to disconnect verse 4 from verse 1, but that’s not how President Brigham Young read this passage.  In volume 3 of the Journal of Discourses, Brigham Young states, “Now if any of you will deny the plurality of wives, and continue to do so, I promise that you will be damned” (JD 3:266).  If that wasn’t clear enough, he also says, “The only men who become Gods, even the Sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy” (JD 11:269).  What was once a requirement for salvation is now grounds for excommunication.

The Adam-God Doctrine

            Another significant doctrinal change is what's known as the Adam-God Doctrine.  Brigham Young taught that Adam was Heavenly Father.  According to this doctrine, Elohim and Jehovah were two gods from some other part of the universe, and they taught Michael, our Heavenly Father, how to create an earth.  Creating a new earth always involved coming onto it, eating from a special tree, becoming mortal, having children, and then ascending back up to your heavenly throne.  As recorded in the Journal of Discourses, Brigham states:

“When our father Adam came into the garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body, and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him. He helped to make and organize this world. He is Michael, the Archangel, the Ancient of Days! about whom holy men have written and spoken—He is our Father and our God, and the only God with whom we have to do. ... When the Virgin Mary conceived the child Jesus, the Father had begotten him in his own likeness. He was not begotten by the Holy Ghost. And who is the Father? He is the first of the human family” (JD 1:50).

Just in case he left any room for confusion, he states on the next page, “Jesus, our elder brother, was begotten in the flesh by the same character that was in the garden of Eden, and who is our father in Heaven” (JD 1:51).  President Young taught that Adam was Heavenly Father, faithful members of the Church believed him and wrote about it in their journals, and the FLDS uphold the doctrine to this day.

Blood Atonement

            One of the more extreme practices of the early church is known as blood atonement.  The doctrine of blood atonement stated that the blood of Christ is sufficient to cover most of our basic everyday sins, but it could not atone for the breaking of covenants.  In these instances, the only way for an individual to “be exalted with the Gods” is to be killed and have his or her blood spilled.  Brigham states, “There is not a man or woman, who violates the covenants made with their God, that will not be required to pay the debt. The blood of Christ will never wipe that out, your own blood must atone for it; and the judgments of the Almighty will come, sooner or later, and every man and woman will have to atone for breaking their covenants” (JD 3:247).  In another instance, President Young said:

I want all the people to say what they will do, and I know that God wishes all His servants, all His faithful sons and daughters, the men and the women that inhabit this city, to repent of their wickedness, or we will cut them off. … I know, when you hear my brethren telling about cutting people off from the earth, that you consider it is strong doctrine; but it is to save them, not to destroy them. … I do know that there are sins committed, of such a nature that if the people did understand the doctrine of salvation, they would tremble because of their situation. And furthermore, I know that there are transgressors, who, if they knew themselves, and the only condition upon which they can obtain forgiveness, would beg of their brethren to shed their blood, that the smoke thereof might ascend to God as an offering to appease the wrath that is kindled against them, and that the law might have its course. I will say further; I have had men come to me and offer their lives to atone for their sins (JD 4:53).

In another talk later in this volume, when discussing this doctrine, President Young asks a disturbing question: “Will you love your brothers or sisters likewise, when they have committed a sin that cannot be atoned for without the shedding of their blood? Will you love that man or woman well enough to shed their blood?” (JD 4:219).  Apparently, we don’t love each other today as much as the saints did under Brigham Young.

Changing Doctrine

            As I’ve shown in the previous few posts, the Church’s doctrines have undergone dramatic changes in the past and are continuing to evolve today.  If you want to see what the Church was like under Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, you can go down to Colorado City, Arizona and take a good look.  I suppose this amount of change could be appropriate for an imperfect god that is constantly improving and learning new things every day, but not for the god of the Bible, which Mormonism depends upon, yet denies at the same time.  When members of the Church hear controversial statements made by Brigham Young, I’ve often heard them jokingly answer, “Oh, that’s just Brigham Young.  He doesn’t count.”  Why doesn’t he count?  Was he less of a prophet than Thomas S. Monson?  Is the Church becoming truer and truer every day?  Someday members of the Church are going to look at controversial statements made by Gordon B. Hinckley during General Conference and say, “Oh, that doesn’t count.  He was just a bigot.”  It’s interesting how when the prophet first says something, it’s gospel truth until it gets proven wrong.  Then it suddenly becomes just his opinion.  I guess people fly to Salt Lake City from all over the world twice a year just to listen to a man’s opinions.

Biblical Canonicalism

            From about October 2016 to April 2017, I held a set of beliefs that I would call Biblical Canonicalism.  I took the teachings of the Bible at face value without looking to any religious tradition to interpret them for me.  The text says what it says, and it doesn’t care that different churches twist it in different ways to say whatever they want.  Taking the Biblical text at face value led to a number of interesting conclusions.  I learned that the god of the Bible is one being and one person, and that his name is Jehovah.  I also learned that Jesus Christ is not literally God, although he was sent to Earth to perfectly represent him.  I learned that the dead are unconscious, but God will reward those who faithfully obey his commandments by resurrecting them and allowing them to live on the paradisiacal earth forever.  At one point, I also came to the conclusion that Heavenly Father still expects us to keep the commandments in the Old Testament.  After all, he commanded them and never revoked them.  Faithful saints in the New Testament strove to keep these commandments, both before and after the Atonement was complete.  I even started peeling the pepperoni and bacon off of my pizza and scheduling work-related appointments around the Biblical Sabbath, which is Friday sundown to Saturday sundown.  I had always been taught that since Christ had fulfilled the law, we don’t have to keep it anymore.  However, that’s the exact opposite of what Christ said (Matthew 5:17).  He fulfilled it because he added a few missing elements, such as compassion and the spirit of the law.  He did not do away with the rest of it.

            However, as I studied the Bible, I couldn’t help but notice that I was judging it by different standards than other books, such as the Book of Mormon or the Quran.  If I were to be honest with myself, I would have to judge all religious texts by the same standards.  As I continued to study, I discovered and came to terms with two major problems in the Bible and Christianity as a whole: God's character and Jesus' prophecies.

Evil God

            Everyone who has ever studied the Old Testament has had to face those uncomfortable violent passages.  The Children of Israel obediently slaughtered many thousands of innocent men, women and children at God’s command.  The victims included apostates (Deuteronomy 13:6-18), girls who were not virgins on their wedding night (Deuteronomy 22:17-21), those who dared insult the Prophet (2 Kings 2:23-24), and really anyone who got in the way of Children of Israel’s conquest.  Normally we just gloss over these passages, tell ourselves that that was a different time, and thank our lucky stars that we don’t see anything like that today.  Oh wait, we do, and we call it terrorism.  We see it in the news all the time, and we tell ourselves that a true god would never tell his people to do something like that.  I agree.  A loving, merciful god would never command his people to kill apostates, stone non-virgins on their wedding night, or kill thousands of innocent men, women and children.  If it’s wrong today, then it was wrong then too.
            I wish this were limited to just a few passages in the Old Testament, but it’s a common theme throughout the whole Bible, from beginning to end.  Although Jesus encouraged people to show love to each other, he also warned them of God’s wrath.  He taught this principle euphemistically in some of his parables, including the one about the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24-30).  Paul explained in more direct terms that when Jesus returned in his glory, he would lift the righteous Christians into the sky to meet him (1 Thessalonians 4:17) while everyone else would burn up and die below in the earth’s cleansing process (2 Thessalonians 2:8, 2 Peter 3:10).  “As the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be” (Matthew 24:37).  If that weren’t enough, all of the non-Christians who ever lived would be brought back from the dead so that God could personally torture them in the Fire (Revelation 20:12-15, 21:8).  Jehovah God, if he is real, is a fascist and a terrorist.  When I realized this fact, I asked myself a question: how can God be our savior if the danger he’s saving us from is himself?  In effect, he isn’t saving anyone.  He’s just sparing those he likes.

Second Coming Predictions

            Another problem I found with the Bible was one big unfulfilled prophecy.  I’ve seen my share of unfulfilled prophecies during my life, so this topic is specially important to me.  It’s always the same thing, too.  Visionary predicts disaster that’s alarmingly near, followers frantically prepare, date comes and goes, followers come up with justification for visionary and continue to believe in him, even though they just witnessed first-hand evidence that he is a false prophet.  While reading through Matthew 24, where Jesus describes the signs of the Second Coming, I stumbled upon a problematic verse: “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled” (Matthew 24:34).  Most Christians, when they read this verse, explain it away by telling themselves that Jesus is just referring to the destruction of the Temple, which did happen in that generation.  However, if he were only referring to the destruction of the temple, which he had predicted at the beginning of the chapter, he would not have said “all these things.”  And yes, Christians, the word “all” is attested in the original Greek.
            Now, it would be great if this verse were just a fluke, but the theme is common throughout the New Testament.  In another instance, Jesus tells his followers:

For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works.  Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom. (Matthew 16:27-28)

Jesus always spoke to his followers as if they were the ones who would see the signs of his coming (Matthew 24:15, 33) and that his Second Coming was alarmingly close.  In Revelation 22, he repeats the phrase “I come quickly” three times.  In a world that’s only 4000 years old, I’m not sure I’d call something “quick” if it delays more than 2000 years.  I find it much more likely that Jesus was simply the first of a long list of people who have made false predictions about the Second Coming.  Julie Rowe predicted the Tribulation would start in October of 2015, Marshall Applewhite predicted that the Earth would be “recycled” in March of 1997, Jehovah’s Witnesses predicted the Second Coming would happen in 1975, as well as 1914, Joseph Smith predicted it in 1891, William Miller predicted it in 1844, and Jesus predicted it would happen in the 1^st Century AD.  Dozens of others have predicted similar events since then, and they’re all wrong.

What I Believe Now

            Now that I have established that I am no longer a Mormon or a Christian, you might be wondering what I do believe.  Many people who doubt the Bible seem to jump straight to Atheism.  However, I see a few problems with their position.  Without supernatural help, we couldn’t know anything about God.  His existence and character would remain a mystery.  Therefore, if there is a God, then he could reveal himself to us and we could know him.  But, if there is no God, then we would never know for sure if he isn’t there or if he just isn’t answering.  Atheists, on the other hand, are somehow very certain that there is no God, and I don’t find that very logical.

            On the other hand, there are also a few reasons to believe in a personal God.  Most cosmologists could agree that the universe had a beginning, and that before the beginning, there was nothing.  If you could rewind the universe and go back in time, you would not go forever.  There would have to have been a beginning.  But, nothing couldn't become something without supernatural help.  Whatever it was that created space, time and matter from nothing would have to reside outside of these three parameters, since nothing can create itself.  This argument can get confusing, but the point is that many of these kinds of questions are hard to explain without the supernatural.

            In conclusion, I have not found a reliable source of revelation that can explain these questions, and I’m not sure I ever will.  None of the sources I’ve looked at are consistent in their teachings, have their time-specific prophecies fulfilled, or describe a god worth worshiping.  You may think I’m being too picky, but I feel like these are reasonable expectations.  I feel like God should be able handle not contradicting himself all the time, not making false predictions, and not being an evil monster.  So, if you need a label, you can call me Agnostic.  At this point, I don’t practice any religion or worship any god.  But if there is a good, truthful god, and he wants to reveal himself to me, then send him my way.  I’d love to get to know him.  In the mean time, I’m comfortable with the fact that this mysterious god is just that—a mystery.

(Update: August 12, 2019)
I should add that there is one minor thing that I have slightly changed my position on since I wrote this essay, and that's that I don't mind mind calling myself an atheist. At the time, I was still under the impression that an atheist is someone who is 100% sure that there is no god, but that's not true. It's just someone who doesn't believe in god. In fact, atheists don't usually claim 100% certainty on anything. Absolute certainty is a characteristic of religion.