Mormonism
The Mormon Church has grown from 30 members in 1830 to more than 4 million in 1978 and is estimated at over 6 million to date. The goal of Mormonism is 8 million by 2000. They have rapidly caught up with the Jehovah's Witnesses, but the JW's have a very active growth also and are presently over 6 million strong.
Joseph Smith Jr., was born on December 23, 1805 in Sharon, Vermont and later moved to Palmyra New York.
In 1820 Joseph allegedly received a vision that became the basis for the founding of the Mormon Church. He received another vision on September 21, 1823. Notice that Joseph was only 15 years old when receiving his first vision and 18 at the second. Joseph drew members slowly after revealing his visions and claiming that he was a prophet of God, thus the start of the Mormon Church. It was also reported that Joseph Smith was involved in the occult at the time of the supposed visions.
Joseph Smith was killed in Carthage, Illinois, in 1844, in a jail cell. He was jailed for destroying a local paper company that was publishing anti-Mormon literature in the paper.
After the death of Joseph Smith the leadership went to Brigham Young, the President of the Twelve Apostles, who convinced the great majority of Mormons that he was their rightful successor. Young led the group westward in a journey which saw many hardships including Indian attacks, exposure and internal strife. On July 24, 1847, they arrived at Salt Lake Valley in Utah which became the headquarters of the Mormon Church. The Mormons claim they are the restoration of the true church established by Jesus Christ. It is not Protestant or Catholic, but claims, rather, to be the only true church. They even go a step further with this statement;
" If it had not been for Joseph Smith and the restoration, there would be no salvation outside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints", (Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, p.670).Another statement; " No salvation without accepting Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith was verily a prophet, and he told the truth and this knowledge is of the most vital importance to the entire world. No man can reject that testimony without incurring the most dreadful consequences, for he can not enter the Kingdom of God", (Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation, pp.189-190).
The claims of Joseph Smith and his followers are clear. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints claims it is God's true church on earth while all the others are wrong. With one "Special Revelation" the Mormon Church expects its intended converts to accept the totally unsupported testimony of a fifteen-year-old boy that nobody ever preached Jesus Christ's gospel from the close of the Apostolic age until the "Restoration' through Joseph Smith, Jr., beginning in 1820! We are asked to believe that the Church Fathers for the first five centuries did not proclaim the true gospel; that Origen, Justin, Iraneaus, Jerome, Eusebius, Athanasius, Chrysostom, and then later Tomas Aquinas, Huss, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Tyndale, Wycliffe, Knox, Wesley, Whitefield, and a vast army of faithful servants of Jesus Christ all failed where Joseph Smith Jr., at the age of 15 was to succeed!
With one dogmatic assertion, Joseph pronounced everybody wrong, all Christian theology an abomination, and all professing Christians corrupt, and all in the name of God! How strange for this to be presented as restored Christianity, when Jesus Christ specifically promised that "the gates of Hell" would not prevail against the church (Matthew 16:18)! In Mormonism we find God contradicting this statement in a vision to Joseph Smith Jr., some 18 centuries later!
What a concept! The God of compassion that is " Not willing that any should perish" (2 Peter 3:9), would allow His creation to perish for 18 centuries waiting for Joseph Smith to arrive with the truth!
The Mormon Church has four accepted sacred works: the Bible, the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and The Pearl of Great Price.
The Bible:
They believe the Bible is the Word of God but is corrupted because the Catholic Church took away from the original translations.The Book of Mormon:
Considered to be inspired and is supposedly the account of the original inhabitants of America to whom Christ appeared after His resurrection.Doctrine and Covenants:
A record of 138 revelations revealing some of Mormonism's distinctive doctrines such as baptism for the dead and celestial marriage.The Pearl of Great Price:
Basically the book of Moses with an additional book of Abraham and other history of Joseph Smith and articles of faith.The Mormon concept of God is summed up in a statement by Joseph Smith in one of his messages; "
As man is, God was, As God is, Man may become." According to this statement, God was once a man and evolved into God and every man has the ability to accomplish the same results. Is that not the same thing that Satan told Eve in the Garden? "For God doth know that in the day ye eat therof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." Satan's lines never change!Joseph Smith made his teaching clear in "The King Follett Discourse" as follows;
"
I am going to inquire after God: for I want you all to know him and be familiar with him. I will go back to the beginning before the world was to show you what kind of a being God is. God was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens. I say, if you were to see him today, you would see hem like a man in a form like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form of a man. I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea and take away the veil so that you may see. It is the first principle of the gospel to know for certainty the character of God and to know that we may converse with him as one man with another, and that he was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ did. Here then, is eternal like- to know the only wise and true God; and you have got to learn to be Gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all Gods have done before you." (Joseph Smith Jr., King Follett Discourse, pp.8-10).Other statement by Mr. Smith;
"
In the beginning, the head of the Gods called a council of the Gods; and they came together and concocted a plan to create and populate the world and people it." (Joseph Smith, Journal of Discourses, 6:5)."
The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man's." (Joseph Smith, Doctrine of Covenants, 130:22).According to the following verses in the Bible there is only ONE God; Deuteronomy 6:4, Isaiah 9:6, 43:10-11, 44:8, 45:5,21-22, John 1:1-3, 10:30-33, and many more.
Even the Book of Mormon contradicts Joseph Smith's own statements above in the following verses; 2Nephi 11:7, 31:21, Mosiah 15:1-5, 16:15, Alma 11: 26-29, 3Nephi 11:27, 36.
The bottom line is that there is only ONE God and the idea that we could all become Gods started long before Joseph Smith in the Garden of Eden.
The concept of Jesus; Jesus was the first born of God's spirit children and we can become in the same likeness as He was. Look at the following statement;
"
His humanity is to be recognized as real and ordinary - whatever happened to Him may happen to any one of us. The Divinity of Jesus and the Divinity of all other noble and stately souls, in so far as they, too, have been influenced by a spark of Deity- can be recognized as manifestations of the Divine." (Elder B.H. Roberts citing Sir Oliver Lodge in Joseph Smith, King Follett Discourse, p.11 note).The Mormon Doctrine even attributes man as being in the beginning with God;
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Man is a spirit clothed with a tabernacle. The intelligent part of which was never created or made, but existed eternally - man was also in the beginning with God." (Joseph Fielding Smith, Progress of Man).According to these statements the book of Genesis and the very Words of God on the Creation is a Lie!
Evident Problems with the Book of Mormon
After all these years and work by Mormon and other Archaeologists:
7. No mention of Book of Mormon persons, nations, or places have been found.
False Prophecies
The Mormon religion contains false prophecies. 2 Nephi 10:7, speaking of the Jews, predicts,
"…When the day cometh that they shall believe in me, that I am Christ, then have I covenanted with their fathers that they shall be restored in the flesh, upon the earth, unto the lands of their inheritance." The Jews are today back in their land, but do not believe that Jesus is the Christ. The prophecy is false.Mormonism is a belief system that focuses on a man and his teachings and puts the true word of God in the background and makes it confirm to the man's ideas. It is the basic idealism of how a cult operates.