LDS church file

I have many concerns about the LDS church, and theology in general, so to make
this easier to digest Ill just start with my top 20


Criticism of the practice of plural marriage and other doctrines taught by
Joseph Smith appeared in the Nauvoo Expositor, which led to a series of
events culminating in Smith's murder in 1844, as Im sure you know.
As the church began openly practicing plural marriage under Brigham Young
during the second half of the 19th century, the church became the target of
nation-wide criticism for that practice.
Beginning in 1857, the church also came under significant media
criticism after the Mountain Meadows massacre in southern Utah.
The LDS church was actively involved in support of the temperance
movement in the 19th century, and then the prohibition movement in the
early 20th century.
Joseph Smith had established a form of Christian communalism, combined
with a move toward theocracy. Mormons referred to this form of theocratic
communalism as the United Order, or the law of consecration. While short-
lived during the life of Joseph Smith, the United Order was re-established for
a time in several communities of Utah during the theocratic political
leadership of Brigham Young
In addition to religious socialism, many Mormons in Utah were receptive to
the secular socialist movement that began in America during the 1890s.
During the 1890s to the 1920s, the Utah Social Democratic Party, which
became part of the Socialist Party of America in 1901, elected about 100
socialists to state offices in Utah
Lorenzo Snow felt that he had received a revelation. This prompted him to
promise adherents in various Utah settlements that if they paid their tithing,
they would experience an outpouring of blessings, prosperity, the
preparation for Zion
Changes to church hierarchy structure

The church came under intense fire for its stances on African-American and
Native Americans issues. The cause of some of the church's most damaging
publicity had to do with the church's policy of discrimination toward blacks.
Smith had shown sympathy toward a belief common in his day that blacks
were the cursed descendants of Cain. In 1849, church doctrine taught that
though blacks could be baptized, but they and others could not be ordained
to the Priesthood or enter LDS temples. These peoples were called
"Lamanites", because they were all believed to descend from the
Lamanite group in the Book of Mormon. Who were also cursed with a dark
skin.

The Book of Abraham is an 1835 work produced by Joseph Smith that he said
was based on Egyptian papyri purchased from a traveling
mummy exhibition. According to Smith, the book was "a translation of some
ancient records ... purporting to be the writings of Abraham, while he was in
Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus".
This is in the Pearl of great price. Copies of the three facsimiles to eight
Egyptologists and Semitists soliciting their interpretation of the facsimiles,
the results of which were published in Spalding's work, Joseph Smith, Jr. As a
Translator and each of the eight scholars recognized the facsimiles as
portions of ordinary funerary documents, and some harshly condemned
Smith's interpretation.

Jewish groups criticized the LDS Church in 1995 after discovering that
vicarious baptisms for the dead for victims of the Holocaust had been
performed by members of the church.
You can check this wiki out to see how the church has blatantly denied
science over the years:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_views_on_evolution "I do not regard
Adam as related tocertainly not as descended fromthe Neanderthal, the Cro-
Magnon, the Peking or the Piltdown man. Adam came as divinely created,
created and empowered, and stands as the patriarchal head of his posterity
Talmage 1931




Theological discrepancies:

Due to doctrinal differences, the LDS Church is generally considered to be
distinct and separate from mainstream Christianity by Catholic, Orthodox,
and Protestant churches, which express differences with one another but
consider each other's churches as Christian. Many have accused the LDS
Church of not being a Christian church at all as a result of disagreements with
Apostolic succession and the "Great Apostasy", the Nicene Creed and, more
so, Mormon cosmology and its plan of salvation including the doctrines
of pre-mortal life, dead, three, and exaltation. Having Adam, the Holy Ghost,
Jesus Christ, men after death, and god as divine makes Mormonism a
POLYTHEISTIC religion.

9 million children die every year before they reach the age of 5, thats 24,000
children a day, 1,000 an hour, 17 or so a minute. Imagine a tsunami of the
sort we saw in 2004 killing of a million people every ten days, killing only
children under five years old. Any god who would let children by the
MILLIONS suffer in this way, or let their parents grieve in this way; either can
do nothing to help them, or doesnt care to. He is therefor either impotent or
evil. This continues to happen on a scale thats absolutely beyond our
imagination, while the LDS church continues poor millions of dollars and
resources into building opulent temples around the world.

The Bible contains warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for
slavery, for bride price, and for indiscriminate massacre.

Faith is the surrender of the mind; its the surrender of reason, its the
surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. Its
our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our
yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or
something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith
must be the most overrated.

The slave-holders of the South were on the winning side of the theological
argument the bible encourages slaves to treat their masters well, but serve
their Christian masters ESPECIALLY well so they may partake in their
holiness.
I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people
became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license
religious people give one another to believe when reasons fail.

Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when
they are highly immoral - that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts
unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains
why Christians like yourself expend more "moral" energy opposing abortion
than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human
embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research. And it
explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while
millions die from AIDS there each year.

Every one of the world's religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of
the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact
about our world and us wrong. Every scientific domain -- from cosmology to
psychology to economics -- has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.
In short, modernity, secular politics, and science have dominated the discourse over
the last century. We now have a world-view that has come to us through these
things, not theology, and certainly not Mormonism. In this brief history, hopefully
youve seen that the LDS church has been on the wrong side of every public bout
over morality. What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to
believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.

Id encourage everyone to become knowledgeable about the church
history, and understand how many catastrophic errors the clerisy has made
and continues to make that create tremendous negative impacts on the lives
of those who blindly follow. Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more
happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.