Why I No Longer Believe

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…

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Should We Avoid Doubts and Questions?

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…

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Nature of Spiritual Confirmation

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…

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The Book of Mormon: Keystone

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…

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Book of Mormon Issue 1: Animals

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…

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Book of Mormon Issue 2: Agriculture

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…

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Book of Mormon Issue 3: Technology

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…

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Book of Mormon Issue 4: Language

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 1st Nephi, Nephi is com­mand­ed to get the brass plates from Jerusalem…

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Book of Mormon Issue 5: Hebrew DNA

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,…

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Book of Mormon Issue 6+: Everything else

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.…

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