What is there to be said in rational terms about the apologetic pursuits of true-blue members of the fastest growing, yet the most deceptive, ecclesiastical organization in the United States, the LDS (Mormon) Church? As I spent 30 years, from late-1970 to 2000, doing part-time what nearly 80,000 full-time Mormon missionaries are currently doing in 2019 to recruit, mainly from the ranks of Christianity, lukewarm believers in Jesus and the Holy Bible (men and women who claim to be Christians) into the grasp of Mormonism, I know a great deal about being a true-blue blind-faith Mormon. When I say a true-blue Mormon, I’m referring to an adult man or woman who learns in public or private high school, and college, the facts about the history, archaeology, and anthropology of ancient America, that there weren’t any horses in pre-Columbian North, South, and Central America until they were brought by Europeans and allowed to breed; and that there weren’t any wheels (chariots and carriages) used by the Olmec, Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations. These many (approximately five million of them) seemingly educated and rational individuals can spend a Friday in school taking tests to affirm that the foregoing historical facts about ancient America are indelibly true, and then, later, spend two-to-three hours in Mormon Church services on the following Sunday proclaiming that their sacred scripture, the Book of Mormon (stating in unambiguous words that Nephite, Lamanite, and Jaredite civilizations, which produced most of the native inhabitants of the North, South, and Central America, had abundant herds of horses and many chariots and carriages) is a historically true and divine book from God. Isn’t this, though, a bit like studying the fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Tarzan of the Apes” and then belonging to a church that sacredly believes that the civilizations described by Burroughs in print actually existed?
Well, this issue goes to the very heart of true American culture and the really-sacred right and privilege, ensured by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, that all Americans have, to worship an olive tree, a racoon, or a catfish as a deity or god if they so choose to do so. Yes, Mormons, and all other Americans, have the right to believe and practice anything they want to believe, even that Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass/Alice in Wonderland” is a book of truth and reality and that the “rabbit hole” truly exists. But, yet, do Mormons have the legal freedom and right to ritually deceive Christian men and women (Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, etc.) into believing that Mormon theology is biblically Christian in doctrine and, after that, inducing those gullible individuals into promising to pay a full-tithe of their income to the Mormon Church for the rest of their lives before they are permitted to be baptized into the Mormon Church?
Mormon full-time missionaries, tens-of-thousands of young men and women hardly out of their teens and thousands of grandfatherly/motherly senior married couples, are very much like insurance and used-car salespeople as they spend two-years selling Mormonism, 8-to-10 hours per day, in assigned areas in the USA and around the world. At Mormon mission training centers (MTCs as they are called), they are tasked, over a six-week period of time with memorizing a script of, usually, five copyrighted “discussions,” (sales pitches) created by the LDS Prophets and Apostles about Mormon theology, doctrine, and history; and these missionaries are told to focus and concentrate on doing one primary thing during the two-year missionary timeframe, to ultimately baptize all of the non-Mormon investigators to whom they are presenting the Mormon sales pitch. Then there are the hundreds-of-thousands of part-time missionaries, called ward missionaries, much like I was as a stake (an area of multiple wards) missionary, who are officially tasked with establishing relationships with friends, co-workers, and neighbors to prepare them to be formally indoctrinated by the full-time Mormon missionaries. First-off, these part-time missionaries start telling these Christians about the Book of Mormon, which they call a second-witness of Jesus Christ and the most correct book upon the face of the earth (its original 1830 edition had over 4,000 grammatical and syntactical errors in addition to over a hundred fatal anachronisms). Most of the time, these Mormon part-timers don’t give those Christian investigators (friends, neighbors, co-workers) copies of the Book of Mormon because they don’t want them to read it without missionary instructions about how to read it. You see, when the full-time missionaries begin their “discussions” with the prepped Christians they hand-out specific Book of Mormon reading assignments. They don’t encourage the investigators to read the Book of Mormon from cover-to-cover like a novel. Why? Well, there are some verses in the Book of Mormon that directly contradict scriptures in the Holy Bible’s New Testament, such as 2 Nephi 25:23, which is the Mormon concept of grace. Most Christian adults have been taught as children that the grace of Jesus, which confers salvation from sin on the individual, is a totally free-gift, in addition to resurrection from the dead, that is given by Jesus through the faith or belief of the individual person. The preceding Mormon scripture states that, “For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do.” When investigators of Mormonism ask true-blue Mormon missionaries if it is a fundamental doctrine of Mormonism that a person is saved by grace, the response that they almost always get is, “yes.” Yet, reading that particular scripture without LDS missionary direction, a Christian will immediately and inevitably get the reasonable idea that grace is relegated by Mormonism to a much-lesser function of salvation than that of human endeavor, or works; for Mormon missionaries are loath to tell Christian investigators the absolute truth about Mormon grace, that it is regarded theologically by Mormonism as purely “resurrection,” which is afforded by (the Mormon) Jesus to all human beings, regardless of faith, past, present, and future.
The full-time Mormon missionaries won’t tell Christian investigators that getting to Mormon heaven, or exaltation, is an entirely work-based process of constant repentance, improvement, and human effort to be as good as one can possibly be, and that “only” Mormon elders and their wives” have the opportunity of getting there. In other words, Christian Baptists, or those of any other Christian denomination, believing that the grace of Jesus provides a free gift of salvation through faith in Christ Jesus will, according to Mormonism, not be eligible for Mormon heaven.
Another fact about Mormonism that the 21st Century full-time LDS missionaries won’t dare divulge to Christian investigators is a matter of true 19th Century Mormon history, that the statements about Mormon theology, doctrine, and history contained in the basic five missionary “discussions” changed significantly in 2014 nearly five decades after they were designed and written during the 1950s. The full-time missionaries presented those “discussions” (they were, and are still, more like lectures than mutual discussions) to me back in 1970, and I was shown color pictures of Joseph Smith, Jr. sitting at a table before golden plates that I was told were “translated” by him through the use of a regalia that he wore around his neck, which hung-down over his chest, called the “Urim and Thummim.”Across from Smith at the table, separated by a veil, was also pictured his scribe, Oliver Cowdery, who wrote down what Smith translated from the golden plates. I was told by those missionaries that the pictured depiction of Joseph Smith, Jr. was the only “way” in which the Book of Mormon was translated from those golden plates. In 2014, however, an official essay was published by the Mormon Church without any fanfare that substantially revised the story about Joseph Smith, Jr. and the way he produced the Book of Mormon, which shockingly wasn’t from the alleged golden plates. Way back in 1835, the Mormon Church had known that, officially, Joseph Smith, Jr. had “not” used the golden plates to “translate” the Book of Mormon, which had meant going from one language, reformed Egyptian, allegedly depicted on the golden plates to another, English. The version of Smith, Jr. producing the Book of Mormon was altered to a process of him placing his head into a hat in which was placed a seer stone from which he “read words that appeared above the seer stone.” Hence, a “translation” process, falsely told as fact to the Christian world by the Mormon Church for nearly 50 years, was abruptly changed, in 2014, to a “dictation” process, which involved no translational skills used by Smith, Jr. to produce the Book of Mormon. As a true-blue Mormon stake/branch missionary for 30 years, I swore to hundreds of Christian investigators of Mormonism during that timeframe that Joseph Smith, Jr. had translated the golden plates, from a fictional language called reformed Egyptian to English, to produce the Book of Mormon. Not once, during that time, did I, or any of the full-time missionaries with whom I worked, tell any investigator of Mormonism that Smith, Jr. had stuck his face into a hat to dictate what he saw written above a “seer stone” to someone else.
Hence, the rationality of apparently normal true-blue Mormons is certainly suspect when they knowingly substitute false information for accepted truth and fact and tell people who know nothing about Mormonism things about Mormon history, theology, and doctrine that are blatantly not true, or intentionally leave-out information and facts essential for a person to know in-order-to accept and believe Mormonism. Yet, a person who would believe and accept a true historical fact on Friday, but, on the following Sunday, renounce that fact in favor of blatant fantasy in the presence of other fantasy-believing individuals, wouldn’t appear to have his head on right. Nonetheless, true-blue Mormons who graduate from BYU with nationally accepted academic degrees fall into that category of delusiveness. At the time I was baptized into the Mormon Church, in 1970, the full-time missionaries were not allowed to baptize any investigator into the Mormon Church who would not agree to pay a full-tithing and to abide by the LDS word of wisdom, which was abstinence from tobacco, coffee, tea, and alcohol. To get an idea about how much money flows into the Mormon coffers every year through the payment of tithing by Mormon missionary converts, in 2018 approximately 190,000 people, mainly lukewarm Christians, were recruited into Mormonism in the USA. Now, the average income of the 190,000 adults, mainly between the ages of 20 and 45 years, was approximately $60,000/year. In tithing that is $6,000/year/individual tithe payer. Now multiply $6,000 by 190,000 tithe payers. That’s a total of $1.140 billion dollars per year for as long as those Mormon converts believe in Mormonism and pay tithing, which is generally between four and eight years. Not a bad profit for an investment of a few million dollars per year by the Mormon Church. Should there be federal and state laws against such a thing? There are such laws in the U.S. Code and in every State criminal code against organized racketeering and the systematic defrauding of gullible people through the systemic use of false statements and material misrepresentations about Mormon theology, doctrine, and history. Why, therefore, are they not enforced against the Mormon LDS Church? That’s a very good question that has yet to be properly answered. For there are many individuals, hundreds of thousands, who, at this moment, would like to get-back the money that they paid in tithing and other contributions, in good faith, to their ward bishops every payday, which went directly into the coffers of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City, Utah.
