A while back a friend gave me a little book entitled Winning Spiritual Warfare: Steps to Freedom in Christ, by Neil Anderson. Only forty-eight pages, it packs an amazing punch. On page 20 is a section called "Non-Christian Spiritual Inventory", where you can check all the occult practices or false religions in which you have been involved, even on a casual basis. The list is not comprehensive, but it does include more than sixty items, such as Hare Krishna, fortune-telling, automatic writing and Rosicrucian, to name a few.

I was surprised at the number of items I checked off, some of which I’d nearly forgotten about: Ouija board, self-hypnosis, Fetishism (objects of worship, crystals, good luck charms), Unity, Yoga and—Mormonism. Fortunately, I have since burned the Ouija Board, I no longer wear the crystals, and the good luck charms never worked anyway. I dabbled in Yoga in the seventies, and have not been near it since.

Mormonism is another matter, and that’s where renouncing becomes vital. I know I have renounced all kinds of Latter Day Saint(ism), but what about the literature strewn all over my house? That is where Cleansing Home/Apartment comes in:

“After removing all articles of false worship from home/apartment, pray aloud . . . ‘Heavenly Father, We acknowledge that You are Lord of heaven and earth. In Your sovereign power and love, You have given us all things richly to enjoy. Thank you for this place to live. We claim this home for our family as a place of spiritual safety and protection from all the attacks of the enemy. We renounce all curses and spells utilized against this place. . .’”

As I re-read the book I realized that we have more Books of Mormon, Doctrines and Covenants, and “Inspired” Bibles than you can shake a stick at, not to mention several of Inez Smith Davis’ insufferably boring The Story of the Church. Plus volumes 1-5 of The History of the Church, and numerous other RLDS/Restoration publications that have drifted in during the past five or six years.

Many of you still have loved ones who are immersed in the Joseph Smith muck, and I can certainly relate. Cecil, of course, is still caught up in the Restoration, and many of the books belong to him. I have tried to be scrupulous in ridding the house of all the books that belong to me alone—and there were dozens. However, I have no right to go through like the grim avenger and remove all of Cecil’s books ala Fahrenheit 451. So if I need one of these for my research, which is ongoing, I can borrow from him. Is that appropriate? I believe so. And, of course, I have kept the books written about Joseph Smith and his antics—also dozens. One Book of Mormon, which is particularly large and heavy, I’m using as a door stop in my bathroom.

Paul Trask, in The Long Way Home, describes the burning ritual he and Leslie enjoyed after they were reborn into the light of Christ. I would love to have done that, but didn’t have the wherewithal to perform that particular ceremony. Perhaps someday Cecil and I can do it together, with his books. What a blessed day that will be! Meanwhile, the Joseph Smith church is a jealous mistress and all I can do is try to be a godly wife.

In His amazing love

Jan

P.S. I seem to have taken the summer off and for that I apologize. Here come the excuses. Cecil was diagnosed with prostate cancer in June and the prayerful process of choosing a treatment has been a little distracting. The nursing home where I work has had a staffing crisis which has just resolved and at last I have some time off. Imagine, in this economy and job market, being overloaded with work. Praise the Lord!

This was one of the reasons I was so enraptured by the story of the “simple” farm boy and his Golden Bible. How could he have done all that neat stuff if not by the power of God? After I left the Restored Church I tucked chiastic structure away. Far away. So I’m not sure what compelled me to dust it off a few days ago and “Google” it.

I love Google. It lets you type in any outrageous combination of words and it will nearly always give you at least a piece of what you’re looking for. Whether or not the information it feeds you is accurate is for you to determine. You must be circumspect to a fault when dealing with the Internet, particularly with Google. In the case of “chiasmus” it gave me 293,000 references. While I realize this doesn’t quite measure up to the numbers we have been exposed to in the past sixteen months, it certainly provided me with enough fodder in which to muck around for a long time. For example, it took me to Wikipedia, where I learned that chiastic structure was used in the Bible, the Torah, "Paradise Lost" (which I studied in college) and "Beowulf" (which I also studied,) among dozens of obscure and extant works dating back to the early Greek or Hebrew, depending on your perspective or political bent. The word itself is Greek, but the LDS insist that Joseph Smith’s Golden Bible is Hebrew. Not to be contentious, but I thought it was English.

Google also took me to quite a large number of Mormon web sites, all of which claim that the Book of Mormon is undoubtedly authentic simply by virtue of the presence of so many chiastic arrangements. And therein lies the rub. One of the sites I found, maintained by one Jeff Lindsay, tells us: “In the late 1960s, a young Latter-day Saint discovered that an ancient form of Middle Eastern poetry was found throughout the Book of Mormon, suggestive of its ancient Semitic origins. This poetical form, chiasmus, a type of inverted parallelism, reaches highly artistic heights in the Book of Mormon and is difficult to ascribe to chance. Yet the information available to Joseph Smith when the Book of Mormon was translated provided nothing to guide him in crafting such structures.” Then the hook: “Could this be part of a growing body of evidence for ancient Semitic origins for the text?”

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Any scholar worth his salt knows Joseph Smith grew up absolutely steeped in the Bible—a self-inflicted activity, and one which certainly gave him a leg up when it came to writing, translating, reciting or regurgitating the Book of Mormon.

Chiasmus is “a figure of speech by which the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second.” From Answers.com

A An so they traveled onward
B Ever searching
B Always seeking
A As they journeyed onward

A The overarching theme is love God with all your hearts
B Never forgetting He made you and He loves you.
C Therefore keep His commandments,
D Looking to Christ our savior.
D With Jesus as our savior
C We will obey the commandments
B Of the One who made us and loves us,
A And we will love God the Father with all our hearts.

I will be the first to admit the above examples are pretty crude. But I’m simply trying to make a point. I made these up in about two to three minutes. Couldn’t Joseph Smith sit with his face in his hat and do the same thing? On the other hand, with all the words he used—around 275,000 of which 27,000 (nearly 10%) were direct quotes from the King James Bible—could not someone of John Welch’s ilk find a chiasm behind every tree? Remember, Smith was not stupid. He had an amazing capacity for memorization. He had read extensively. He was far from the naïve farm boy that the LDS propaganda machine has been so successful in presenting. Although he was no mental giant, I submit that he had “gifts” from a malevolent source, just as Mohammad and Pearl Curran had.

Furthermore, there have been more than 3,000 changes to the Book of Mormon manuscript since 1830. Surely some of these changes could or would have enhanced any number of the chiasms which pepper the entire book. John Welch, the man who discovered chiasmus in the Book of Mormon in 1967, states in a FARMS article ("How Much Was Known about Chiasmus in 1829 When the Book of Mormon Was Translated?" FARMS Review 15/1 (2003): 47–80) it was unlikely but not impossible that Smith had heard of chiasmus. Before you say, “Hey, you didn’t know about it!” keep in mind I had hardly cracked the Bible, and I wasn’t on the brink of writing a “Golden” one when I was in college. To say these activities couldn’t have been further from my mind would be an understatement of biblical proportions.

Finally, after more rooting around I stumbled across a debate among three Mormon scholars along these same lines, concerning John Welch’s obsession with Alma 26 and the Great Chiasm. In “Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm” Earl M. Wunderli has this to say about Welch’s preoccupation with the chiastic structure in the Book of Mormon:

“Although Welch and others have found a number of extended chiasms in the Book of Mormon, including the entire books of First and Second Nephi and Mosiah, I will limit myself in this paper to a critique of Welch's Alma 36 chiasm. He calls it a "masterpiece of composition," one of his favorites, and "one of the best" from among hundreds he has evaluated. He has written about it at least four times. It reflects most of the problems with all of his extended chiasms. My argument is that he has imposed chiasmus on the Book of Mormon where none was intended.”

Not to be outdone, a father-and-son team, Boyd F. Edwards and W. Farrell Edwards wrote a response to Wunderli, with the imaginative title: "Response to Earl M. Wunderlin’s ‘Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm’":

“While valid statistical results do not require adherence to these particular literary standards, they do require careful attention to identifying and strictly accounting for all of the important elements in a passage, both those paired elements that participate in the basic chiastic structure of the passage, called chiastic elements, and those that do not.

“We developed six rules to ensure adherence to this requirement and to enable a uniform comparative analysis of various texts. We used these rules to identify and account for all chiastic and non-chiastic elements in each passage studied. We then used elementary statistics to calculate the likelihood that random rearrangements of these elements would be chiastic. In other words, this is the likelihood that chiastic structure could have appeared by chance rather than by design.

“Welch's and Wunderli's literary standards are largely irrelevant to this process. We validated our approach by confirming that it yields very small likelihoods for well-known deliberate chiasms such as Leviticus 24:13-23 and that it yields moderate or large likelihoods for spurious chiastic structure such as that found in the computer manual. Although authors do not select words at random as if from a hat when composing passages of text, the actual composition process yields passages having likelihoods that are comparable to those for random word selection when the author has no intention of writing chiastically. This observation further validates our statistical approach.”

Let’s be honest here: with all the repetition in the Book of Mormon—and it’s the most redundant book I’ve ever read—how could it not be possible to find a plethora of chiasms? Remove a book at random from your book shelf and chances are you will find more than one chiasm. Hint: Hawthorne or Poe.

To add to the confusion, Wunderli wrote a response to the Edwards and Edwards response in which he states: “With respect to the literary merits of Alma 36 as a chiasm, the Edwardses do not challenge any of my data but only my misapplication of Welch's proposed criteria. Welch's criteria are useful in determining the presence of chiasmus but are explicitly neither finished nor authoritative and should not be made the issue.”

I’m not making this up when I tell you that Edwards and Edwards responded to Wunderli’s response. Fortunately for all of us, I’m unable to locate it right now. And since this is a blog, not a scholarly journal, I feel I can get away with it. But I’ll depart the dueling academics and leave you with my personal favorite: Hebraicisms, Chiasmus, and Other Internal Evidence for Ancient Authorship in “Green Eggs and Ham.” If you don’t click on any other link, click on this one.

In His Amazing love

Jan

(Note) A word about copyright: The website gives permission to copy and share one page, but not use it for commercial purposes. I have simply copied and pasted a few excerpts and provided a couple of links, giving credit to Dialogue: Journal of Mormon thought from which the long quotes came. Obviously I am not using any of this for commercial endeavors.

My tears and prayers go out to each one of you; you who who are struggling, trying to find the truth; you who are grappling with loved ones who have not yet found the light; you who are still victims of the evil, may God's light shine on you all.

In His amazing love

Jan

Here is the statement in question from the last post, "What's in a Word?":

“. . . misunderstood by Joseph Smith when he wrote his so-called inspired version of the Bible. You remember, the one he translated using the seer stone in his hat, right after he wrote the Book of Mormon utilizing essentially the same method. (Emphasis mine)

I was sure I had heard or read that this was the case. But Paul, who has about twenty more years of research than I, says no, it was something he and Sidney Rigdon cooked up. I have no doubt about that; it’s well documented. But I was certain I’d read about the Urim and Thummim/seer stone in the hat in the “translation” of the “Inspired Version” as well as the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. Not to be easily swayed, because I’m a good part rat terrier, I set out to find the truth.

After much web surfing and crawling through my own books, I got this far:

On a website entitled knowledgerush.com is this paragraph:

“ It is possible, but not certain, that Smith's process of receiving ‘revealed text’ is the same for this volume [Joseph Smith Translation] as it was for his earlier work, The Book of Mormon, and his later work, The Book of Abraham; however, these other works appear to have been dictated from beginning to end with little revision, and they purportedly based on an original ancient document. To translate, he may have used a seer stone in a hat, or a purported set of seer stones set in the form of spectacles which he called the Urim and Thummim. According to most accounts, however, most of the translation took place without any physical mediums, but by direct revelation through the Holy Spirit.”

The information doesn’t really reveal much, but I sent a question to them asking about the possibility. I haven’t received a reply yet.

In The Four Gospels of Joseph Smith we find that “In October of 1829 Oliver Cowdery, an associate and scribe for Joseph Smith, purchased a large leather bound edition of the King James Bible at Egbert B. Grandin’s Bookstore in Palmyra, New York. At the time Smith was residing in Pennsylvania. The Bible was published in Cooperstown, New York, by H. and E. Phinney Company in 1828. This printing included the Apocrypha. This KJV 1828 Bible (JS Bible) became the textual basis for the revision.”
H. Michael Marquardt, The Four Gospels of Joseph Smith (Xulon Press, 2007) 33.

This Bible now resides in the Community of Christ archives. It was also published in the town where I was born and grew up: Cooperstown, New York. Woo, woo, woo.

In 495 words I have managed, I hope, to make the correction. It is pretty clear that Joseph Smith did not use the Urim and Thummim, a stone or a hat in the “translation” of the “Inspired Version” of the Bible. Therefore, please disregard the following words: “so-called inspired version of the Bible. You remember, the one he translated using the seer stone in his hat,” in "What’s in a Word?"

I highly recommend that you read about Joseph Smith’s “Inspired Version” of the Bible, found on pages 103-112 in Part Way to Utah. Better yet, re-read the whole book. It’s on this website.

God bless

Jan

The word is “leave” and it was utterly and absolutely misunderstood by Joseph Smith when he wrote his so-called inspired version of the Bible. You remember, the one he translated using the seer stone in his hat, right after he wrote the Book of Mormon utilizing essentially the same method.

Hebrew 6:1 reads: “Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection: not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God . . .” (KJV)

The word “leave” in the Greek, is aphiemi, meaning to abandon, in some cases, but in other instances, meaning moving beyond something. When I began college, I took a number of introductory courses which laid the foundation for more advanced study: English 101, 102, 103, etc. Then I moved on to 201, 201, 203, etc. I did not abandon everything I learned in the first courses. I simply moved on to the higher level courses, further continuing my education.

This verse has been copiously explained by such scholars as Matthew Henry and John Calvin. Unfortunately, Joseph Smith didn’t have the intellectual capacity to grasp the implication of the passage. So he simply added the word “not” and utterly changed the impact. This is what he had to say about the verse: I believe the Bible as it read when it came from the pen of the original writers. Ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors…. Look at Heb. vi.1 for contradictions—“Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on to perfection.” If a man leaves the principles of the doctrine of Christ, how can he be saved in the principles? This is a contradiction. I don’t believe it. I will render it as it should be—“Therefore not leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on to perfection; not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works….”

Joseph Smith, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, introduction and notes by B. H. Roberts, 2d ed. (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1950), 6:57, 58.*

What makes this so disturbing is the number of seemingly intelligent people who believe this error. But multiply it by the thousands of Joseph Smith errors, inaccuracies, misinterpretations, sleights of hand, and outright lies and we have a church that is trapped in a quagmire of massive proportions. The followers of Joseph Smith would do well to follow instead the example of the Bereans in the 17th chapter of Acts. We wish they would do so.

In His amazing love

Jan

*I borrowed this section from The Book of Hebrews and the Joseph Smith Translation by Robert M. Bowman.

Is this how I felt about Christians while I was entrenched in the Joseph Smith church? Probably. I tried logging in to ask a question or two, but it’s been nearly three years since I was last on that forum and I think I have been kicked out. The questions I was asking at that time were making some people unhappy. They wouldn’t send me my password so I’m pretty sure I’m kaput where they are concerned.

So I Googled “Fullness of the Gospel” and found a website (LDS) which describes “The Preparatory Gospel and the Fullness of the Gospel” using the Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Mormon, with one or two references to Matthew 1: 4, 8. To be honest I tried to read through it. I really did. It seems the “Preparatory” Gospel is administered by the Aaronic priesthood and the “Fullness” is administered by the Melchizedek priesthood. I’m not making this up. It got so convoluted that I got a cramp in my brain and had to stop reading. No wonder those people are so confused!

I found another website (also LDS) in which the writer states that even though you receive Christ, and are baptized, if you do not “endure to the end” you will be cast out of God’s presence. Somehow the Gospel message gets derailed between the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. The Jesus Christ who supposedly visited the people in the New World after His resurrection doesn’t resemble in any way the Jesus Christ of the Bible. It seems like this is just another way Joseph Smith made it up as he went along. What didn’t make it to the Book of Mormon somehow, through a profuse number of revelations after its publication, made it to the Doctrine and Covenants.

How convenient. Another book to cover your shortcomings. How blessed we are to have just one book: The Holy Bible, which has been around for centuries, translated into hundreds of languages but never losing its original meaning. One need only go to the original Hebrew or Greek to confirm the truth of the Gospel.

Nelson’s New Illustrated Bible Dictionary (Thank you, Refiner’s Fire) describes Gospel as “The joyous good news of salvation in Jesus Christ.” Furthermore, it states, “The gospel is not a new plan of salvation; it is the fulfillment of God’s plan of salvation that was begun in Israel, was completed by Jesus Christ, and is made known by the church.”

“But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him.” II Corinthians 11:3-4. (KJV) How much clearer can it get?

The savior, the spirit, and the gospel which the followers of Joseph Smith are so proud of are an illusion. The church which Joseph Smith started in 1830 is no church at all. He created it all with a stone, which, by the way, he stole, plus a bunch of hocus-pocus. Satan didn’t stop with Eve; he was just getting started. Just as Eve was conned by the devil, so the adherents of the Smith gospel are being conned every day.

It is experiences such as the peek at the Center Place forum that drive home the fact that these people are so entrenched in false doctrine that they are incapable of seeing truth. Sometimes I wonder just what will get through to them. My intellectual self tells me that only God through His Holy Spirit can get through; my emotional self says I need to beat them over the head with the real Bible. I think it’s just as well the forum didn’t send me my password. Speaking the truth in love is not my strong suit.

As someone once said, “When all else fails, read the instructions.” If we don’t have scripture ready to back up what we say it’s not going to work. Above all, if we don’t pray about it it’s not going to work, either.

In His amazing love

Jan

I was in a village which was inhabited primarily by Joseph Smith followers. I don’t think they were Mormons; more likely they were Restorationist types. While I was there an enormous ball rolled into town. As dreams go, it came from nowhere. It was probably fifty feet in diameter, maybe larger. Large enough to get everyone’s attention. It seemed to be made of a buff-colored, exceptionally heavy plastic, and it was covered with what appeared to be thousands of indecipherable markings.

Immediately everyone became excited, claiming that this was a sign from God, a message from Joseph Smith, a warning of the end of the world, or all three. The whole town hurled itself into a huge revival, with prayer meetings, impromptu church services, singing, chanting, you name it. I, of course, wasn’t quite so excited. After half-heartedly attending one or two of the sessions I found myself alone in the street. I approached the ball and found that a small strip of the material had come loose. I tore it off (Don’t ask me where I got the strength to do that but, hey, it was a dream.) and discovered written on the other side the name of a town in California, and the group of children who had constructed the monstrosity.

Armed with this piece of information I found an acquaintance sitting in a small diner with some of her friends. I gave her the scrap of plastic to read. Immediately she put it in her mouth and started to swallow it. I reached down her throat and managed to drag it out.

The rest of the dream is, thankfully, rather fuzzy. I awoke and said, “Huh,” or something like that. Then, as the day progressed, I thought about it. The woman in my dream was willing to suppress a vital piece of information simply to perpetuate the lie. How often has this type of stifling taken place through the years? Countless times. I was reminded of a dear friend of mine who has been in the church his whole life and believes that Smith was martyred. Even after being shown evidence that he died in a gunfight, killing two men before he was shot dead, my friend continues to maintain that Smith was a “sacrificial lamb.” In fairness to my friend that was the way Smith described himself on more than one occasion.

I found The History of the RLDS on the top shelf of a bookcase, dusted it off and looked for the gunfight. Therein was murder, martyrdom and sacrifice, but no gunfight. How can a multi-volume history exist with no mention of what really happened in Carthage that day? It’s possible I overlooked it because part of the answer was provided when I Googled the death of Joseph Smith.(The LDS history apparently contains the firearm information.)

Hits #1 & 2 (Wikipedia) got it wrong. Big surprise there. Hit #3 (PBS) has no mention of Smith having a gun. Hit #4 (Light Planet)has this to say: “On June 27, 1844, they were mobbed and shot while confined at Carthage Jail in Hancock County, in western Illinois. Climaxing more than two decades of persecution across several states, this event gave them an enduring place as martyrs in the hearts of Latter-day Saints.”

Next are a couple of You Tube videos. The first is a dramatization produced by the Mormons. It’s a short segment—about 6.5 minutes and portrays Smith as the sacrificial lamb. The comments are very telling. The second is a narrative by Bill McKeever of Mormon Research Ministry, in which he gives stunning descriptions of outright smothering of the truth by followers of Joseph Smith. For those of you who have visited the Carthage jail, you have no doubt heard the same “information” from your tour guides. But if you listen to McKeever, you’ll hear outrageous omissions, suppressions, distortions, concealments and lies told by these Latter Day Saints.

The Joseph Smith church is a lie, founded by a lying, conniving charlatan, perpetrated by those seeking their own self aggrandizement and perpetuated by a continuation of deception, fraud, intimidation, and ignorance. Again, for those of you who are seeking or questioning, please know that we here at Refiner’s Fire and Lifeline are praying for you to find your way to the truth of the Lord Jesus Christ.

I’m glad I had that dream, silly as it was. It let me know this is a huge undertaking and that we need to keep on fighting the fight.

Love and Prayers

Jan

I’m only using this as an example of something we are all probably guilty of at some point or another. It could just as well be that we just don’t think it’s necessary to go to church and that we can achieve spiritual growth just by taking a walk in the woods. In other words, pick and choose from the Word of God to suit our own agenda.

That’s what Joseph Smith did on a monumental scale. But badly, because he had no knowledge of the original languages of Scripture, and his ego got in the way of any common sense and rectitude

I don’t have any real idea of the readership of this blog. Since there are no recent comments I am assuming that you either agree with everything I say and go away, or you agree with nothing I say and go away. But I also assume that some of you are searching, and some of you come back, as I did when I stumbled upon Carol’s website http://www.lifeline2rlds.org and then upon this one. So, since I happen to be on this cafeteria kick, the following is just one suggestion where to start looking for some of J. Smith’s errors in his “inspired” version of the Bible.

If you go to Paul Trask’s Book, Partway to Utah, pages 102-112, 175-179, and 183-186 you will find a wealth of information on Smith’s desecration of the Bible to suit his own plan. He was a master at using various passages to justify his church’s existence. He was wrong, but he was very good at being wrong.

Then go to Carol Hansen’s Reorganized Latter Day Saint Church: Is It Christian? and read Chapter 11, beginning on page 195. Both books are downloadable on this site. Both will give you an idea of Joseph Smith’s use of hunks and chunks of Truth, coupled with his out-and-out lies, and the resultant disaster.

Finally, I want to share a little gem I found a couple of months ago while surfing the net. It’s taken from a well known website, Mormons in Transition and the essay is entitled "The Book of Hebrews and the Joseph Smith Translation" by Robert M. Bowman, Jr.* The point being made is in the use of a single word in chapter 6, verse 1a. The word is “leaving” and this is the context: “Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection. . .”

Here is Joseph Smith’s version: “Therefore not leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection. . .”

As he wrote: “Ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors . . . Look at Hebrews vi.1 for contradictions—“Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on to perfection.” If a man leaves the principles of the doctrine of Christ, how can he be saved in the principles? This is a contradiction.”

No, Mr. Smith, this is a total misunderstanding on your part. The Greek word aphiemi translates “leaving” which can mean leaving behind, but can also mean building on, or progressing beyond. Dr. Bowman points out that it can be like a teacher telling her class that they will leave addition and move on to subtraction. The interesting point is that both Matthew Henry and John Calvin addressed this very thing in their commentaries. But Smith didn’t have the faintest idea of the meaning of what he was revising, and to say it was an inspired translation is borderline pathetic and an embarrassment.

To continue with Smith’s quote in reference to this verse, notice the use of “I” when referring to the translation: “I don’t believe it. I will render it as it should be—“Therefore not leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on to perfection; not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works. . .”

By no stretch of the imagination is that inspired. But those who have been immersed in the books of the Latter Day Saints would have no way of knowing that. Unfortunately, Joseph Smith’s arrogance did not allow for questioning that which did not mesh with his template. Generations of unquestioning people have been misguided and lost because of him. If you are questioning, or searching, or if you have a loved one who is still involved in any of the Latter Day Saint churches, you have come to the right place.

If you find any of this confusing or incoherent, I urge you to click on this link and read the article for yourself. It's long and very detailed, but far more interesting believable than the Book of Mormon, which is agonizingly long and excruciatingly detailed.

In His amazing love

Jan

*Robert M. Bowman, Jr. is a very interesting person in his own right. He is a convert from Catholicism and ultra conservative. Since this is not a political blog I recommend that, should you have any curiosity about him, you utilize your search engine of choice. It’s always wise to check out sources, and you may be surprised at what you find.