This essay was writ­ten in Fall 2012, dur­ing my inves­ti­ga­tion into my faith. Read about how I began to doubt in my post How I Lost my Faith by Defend­ing it. Please see the table of con­tents to this series in the right side­bar, or if you pre­fer to see the full series in one…

There is a real fear among the some faith­ful that ques­tion­ing the verac­i­ty of the church or the Book of Mor­mon is a sure way to lose your soul to the dev­il. I think this mind­set is at odds with the more cen­tral, key teach­ing of the LDS church, which is even taught as the…

I would first also address hope­ful­ly briefly why I don’t just rely on a spir­i­tu­al inspi­ra­tion as the con­fir­ma­tion of the true­ness of Book of Mor­mon or any oth­er church teach­ing, as most mem­bers do. As I stat­ed ear­li­er, we believe that the Holy Ghost will con­firm the truth of it to us by a…

I will be pre­sent­ing and explain­ing what issues have most trou­bled me as I inves­ti­gat­ed the truth­ful­ness of the Book of Mor­mon. Inter­est­ing­ly enough, most of the issues that fol­low may not be new to any­one who reads this, as they were not for me, either. The dif­fer­ence is that before, I nev­er gave any…

The Book of Mor­mon is very clear that there were par­tic­u­lar ani­mals among the Nephites and Laman­ites. Thanks to pale­on­tol­o­gists and oth­er researchers, we now know which ani­mals actu­al­ly did live in the Amer­i­c­as dur­ing the Book of Mor­mon peri­od of his­to­ry. Here are good sum­ma­ry vers­es from the Book of Mor­mon: 1 Nephi 18:25 And it…

Zeniff records some of the Book of Mor­mon seeds: Mosi­ah 9:9 And we began to till the ground, yea, even with all man­ner of seeds, with seeds of corn, and of wheat, and of bar­ley, and with neas, and with sheum, and with seeds of all man­ner of fruits; and we did begin to mul­ti­ply and…

We already dis­cussed the char­i­ots which I think is a huge prob­lem. Sev­er­al addi­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy advances are com­plete­ly out of place. I’ll go through these more briefly than the pre­vi­ous sec­tions, but I am hap­py to dis­cuss any of these in depth if you have any ques­tions. Silk The Book of Mor­mon men­tions the use…

The text of the Book of Mor­mon indi­cates that the peo­ples with­in the nar­ra­tive took great care to pre­serve their lan­guage from evolv­ing or frac­tur­ing into dif­fer­ent dialects. They wrote in Reformed Egypt­ian to sup­pos­ed­ly “save space” and spoke and read Hebrew. In 1^st Nephi, Nephi is com­mand­ed to get the brass plates from Jerusalem…

I will go into this in more depth at some time, but until just recent­ly (2006), the intro­duc­tion page in the Book of Mor­mon said all of the peo­ple chron­i­cled in the book “were destroyed, except the Laman­ites, and they are the prin­ci­pal ances­tors of the Amer­i­can Indi­ans.” The new intro­duc­tion reads much the same,…

Quot­ed Isa­iah Scrip­tures Schol­ars divide the book of Isa­iah into three parts. There is very lit­tle dis­agree­ment about this fact. Here are the three parts and when they were writ­ten: Chap­ters 1 to 39 (First Isa­iah, Pro­­­to-Isa­i­ah or Orig­i­nal Isa­iah): the work of the orig­i­nal prophet Isa­iah, who worked in Jerusalem between 740 and 687 BCE.…

The major­i­ty of mem­bers don’t know where the Book of Abra­ham (found in the Pearl of Great Price) comes from. Here is a brief his­to­ry from Wikipedia: Sev­er­al papyri and eleven mum­mies were dis­cov­ered in Thebes by Anto­nio Lebo­lo between 1818 and 1822. Some­time between 1822 and his death on Feb­ru­ary 19, 1830, Lebo­lo arranged…

This is Fac­sim­i­le 1, locat­ed at the front of the Book of Abra­ham in the Pearl of Great Price. Joseph Smith described this scene as “The idol­a­trous priest of Elke­nah attempt­ing to offer up Abra­ham as a sac­ri­fice,” mean­ing, the man with the knife is a priest of Elke­nah and the man on the altar…

Fac­sim­i­le 2 is actu­al­ly a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a “hypocephalus”. Egyp­tians would put these under the head of mum­mies, like a pil­low. Here are lots of real hypocephali as they are in abun­dance: You’ll notice that I’ve cir­cled cer­tain sec­tions. Go back and study what’s inside the red cir­cle first. Four ram heads, right? Now go…

Fac­sim­i­le 3 is described by Joseph Smith as “Abra­ham sit­ting upon Pharaoh’s throne, by the polite­ness of the king, with a crown upon his head, rep­re­sent­ing the Priest­hood, as emblem­at­i­cal of the grand Pres­i­den­cy in Heav­en; with the scepter of jus­tice and judg­ment in his hand.” Once again, this is not about Abra­ham at all, but is…

I had pre­vi­ous­ly been able to con­vince myself that the rea­son we don’t have the gold plates is because Joseph Smith, Jr would have been hunt­ed to an even ear­li­er death if he had kept them. Still, I, and I think every mem­ber, has a secret wish that the Lord would decide it was time…

I’ve focused most­ly on the Book of Mor­mon, since I accept that it is the key­stone of the reli­gion, just as Joseph Smith, Jr stat­ed. The Book of Abra­ham and his oth­er trans­la­tions are close behind. Some of the oth­er top­ics that have affect­ed my tes­ti­mo­ny: Polyg­a­mous mar­riages of Joseph Smith, use of coer­cion, several…