Apologetics Library

The Mormon God is constantly changing.

Many Mormons do not realize that the founding Prophet, Joseph Smith, would be excommunicated and denounced by today's church. This is because God now condemns polygamy, where-as before He endorsed it for "certain" leaders who were willing to "accept this challenge."

The same goes for those of darker skin color... Joseph Smith, and the following prophet, Brigham Young both claimed that dark skin was caused by sin, and was in fact the mark of Cain. For this reason African Americans were not allowed into priesthood, until June of 1978 when Spencer Kimball received a revelation from God to allow all into the priesthood, and cleansing African-Americans of their sin.

The Bible tells us in Malachi 3:6, James 1:17, and Numbers 23:19 that God does not change His mind, and Matthew 5:18 makes it clear that God's Law does not go away.

The three "blessed" witnesses who saw the "Holy Plates" were all excommunicated from the "Restored" Church.

The Book of Mormon is based on the golden plates that God revealed to Joseph Smith, and then to the three witnesses; Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris. All three of these witnesses were later excommunicated by the church due to accusations of lying, stealing, cheating, counterfeiting, defrauding, and persecuting the Mormons.

Even Joseph Smith exclaimed, "Such characters as these... David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, and Martin Harris are too mean to mention, and we had liked to have forgotten them."

In fact, of the 12 key people who had a role in starting the Church of Latter Day Saints, 8 later left the church leaving Joseph Smith, his father, and two brothers.

This has to raise the question, why would the key founders abandon the church, with one of the "blessed witnesses," Oliver Cowdery, becoming a member of the Methodist Church- church that has always opposed LDS theology.

(one a side note, despite what happened to Christ's followers they stood by what they knew to be true... until the very end.)

The Manuscript the church claimed Joseph Smith used to translate the Book of Abraham turned out to be a description of Pagan Funerals.

A Egyptian Manuscript, thought to be lost in the Chicago Fire was found and then donated to the Church of Latter Day Saints after they identified it as the one that Joseph Smith had used to make his translation.

The identification process was made fairly easy, because the Church had backed the papyrus with a heavy paper. This was done back in Joseph Smith's time.

However, when several qualified Egyptologists translated the papyrus, they found nothing of Abraham, but rather a description of Pagan Funerals.

As it turns out, Smith had translated one letter into seventy-six words, and he had also translated the name of the Egyptian moon god 177 different ways (none correctly). When a member of the church named Grant Howard pointed this out, he was excommunicated from the church!

The Nephites were greeted in the Americas by Animals that did not exist in America until thousands of years later.

In 1 Nephi 18:25, it states that they saw beasts of every kind, including the cow, ox, ass, horse, and goats. However, there's a few problems with this... cows and oxen didn't come to the Americas until about 1600AD. As for donkeys being in the United States, Asses, also, were not native to the Americas, and first appeared 1495.

But at least Horses lived in the Americas an estimated 2.6 million years ago, right? The only problem here, is that these native horses were completely wiped out in the late Pleistocene period, and were not reintroduced to the Americans until the end of the 15th Century!

So even if we remove cows and oxen from the verse, the soonest the Nephites could have seen these animals in the New World would have been late 15th Century!

The Book of Mormon is supposedly the "most accurate book" known to man, however it is also one of the most revised having over 4,000 changes between the two versions.

"...the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book..."
- excerpt from History of the church, Vol. 4, p. 461

While many of the changes between the 1830 and present day Book of Mormon were gramatical, there were also many modifications that changed the meaning of verses (ie: Mary being called the mother of God, changed to Mary the mother of the Son of God).

Sample of Changes: Site 1, Site 2