Please read all of this, even if you disregard everything I say. Simply reading it does no harm. But, if I'm lucky, it will make you question. In sending this, I am operating on the premise that turnabout is fair play. If you send me propaganda, I am certainly allowed to send you 'Critical Thinking' encouragement. (I do NOT consider this atheist/humanist propaganda, because I'm not too sure that I really care if you believe any of this, and because I am not trying to sell you anything—like a war in Iraq/Vietnam, or a political candidate, or a nonsensical religion). My goal is merely to make you think. I understand you will be resistant. And you may simply refuse to read this. But I am trusting you to respect me enough to read it all, as I have spent a considerable amount of time on this, even if it upsets you or you disagree with me. Or, if that fails, I am blindly trusting your curiosity to know what makes others (your daughter) tick. I will warn you, however, that I am very candid in this, and that you will likely translate this candidness into disrespect. Just remember, it is not you that I disrespect. You ARE separate from your beliefs. This, I am sure, is the first premise upon which we will disagree. The problem with the specific example you gave me (which the man directly stated) was that his beliefs were not centred on the idea of Joseph Smith's Restoration of the TRUE Gospel. Unfortunately (to you), unlike him, I believe very strongly that the entire BASIS of the LDS religion stems from the fact that the dogma/(restored) gospel we are expected to follow WAS given to Jo Smith by God. This story IS the foundation of the church. If you do not believe this one premise—that god appeared to Smith and restored the true gospel—then all you are left with is basic Christianity (i.e.: the bible). I actually do no find this man's story very convincing. I am more likely to believe that he returned to Mormonism as a Christian sect because it was familiar to him and because he enjoyed the strong sense of community. If, as he claimed, he allowed the historical evidence to bring down his faith, I find it difficult to believe he truly had all the secular ('Secular' does NOT mean 'Anti-Mormon'! It means, simply, unbiased.) information at any given time. With the secular information we have (most specifically [and you may skip this if you REALLY feel the need], the court cases in which Smith was tried for conning people out of their money, the records of his polygamous marriages dating them to SEVERAL years before the 'revelation', and the terrible end to the Book of Abraham—the papyri under question have been discovered and translated properly, and have nothing to do with Abraham—the LDS church was crushed)--with this information, it is impossible for me to believe that anything written by Joseph Smith has any merit, given his dubious trustworthiness. And since LDS doctrine is based on (almost exclusively) his writings, Mormonism itself simply cannot be true. The LDS doctrine over the years has also constantly been changing with the times. Brigham Young taught for 33 years that Adam was the father of Jesus—that Adam was god. But Mormons don't believe that any longer—Mormons aren't even told that such doctrine was ever taught. BUT, if all prophets derived their power through the same line, then either the current church is wrong, or Brigham Young was leading people astray. Which is correct? The same thing happened in 1978 when the blacks were finally allowed the priesthood almost 15 years after the Civil Rights movement! The answer? That god was waiting for the whites to be more accepting of the change. This would indicate that god is a respector of persons, which goes DIRELCTLY against the canon. So, tell me, if all prophets are true prophets, which are we to believe? IS Adam god? Also, the BOM when originally written said: 'Joseph Smith, author'. Later changed to 'Translated by'. Beyond that, the original BOM stated that Jesus WAS God. It was only later (during the Adam-God doctrine) that Jesus became the Son of God. Which is true, then? Because if Adam's NOT god, don't you think that's a bit too wrong to be explained away as 'new revelation'? I don't see that there's two ways about it. It's either incorrect, or correct. So, which is it? And why did J Smith plagiarise the bible stories? Paul = Alma the Younger. Was he so lazy he couldn't think of anything else to write about? Why is Nephi so whiny? Why did people recognise the names in the BOM as coming from the works of Solomon Spaulding? Why was the BOM given to the printers with no puntciation? Why did Smith, in his own notes, set down one Egyptian character and derive a paragraph from it when written Egyptian is a Phonetic language, not symbolic, as was believed in that time? Why wasn't the BOM written in plainer speech if it was meant for the 1800s? Why do we still use the KJV when there are multiple more academically correct versions of the bible (as in, other, older, more trustworthy versions of the gospels have been discovered and implemented in translations)? There is no archaeological evidence that the Bible OR the Book of Mormon is true. There is no true record of Christ actually having existed; all we have are oral traditions written by men. Fallible men—a category from which J Smith is certainly not excepted. And the archaeological evidences we do have very much contradict what the Book of Mormon claims. Native Americans are not descendants of Middle-Eastern people—the Human Genome project has traced lineages, and Smith's assumption is simply incorrect. There were no horses in America that long ago. There were no glass windows in 600 BCE. The papyri contained not the book of Abraham, but the Egyptian Book of the Dead. These are all scientific facts. (Though I don't know why I'm bothering to tell you, as you place very little faith in science when it matters, and entirely too much faith in it when it doesn't.) Without evidence (or when disregarding evidence, since we've GOT evidence), you must have faith, you say. Spiritual strength, which translates to 'indoctrination'. You must have been indoctrinated to enough to say 'I know the church is true; I know J Smith was a true prophet, etc.' without even thinking there is another option. You must believe that the holy ghost is manifesting the truth to you. And if it does not, that there is something wrong with you. This is why you and I will never agree. You believe that faith and spirituality make something true, while I believe that contradictory scientific evidence shoots it down immediately, of which there is in abundance for the book of Mormon—including typographical evidence that the real writers of the BOM were Solomon Spalding, Oliver Cowdry, Sydney Rigdon, and J Smith, with Smith having contributed very little, as few examples of his personal writing style can be found in the BOM. To you, of course, none of this means anything. Religions of all sorts encourage its members not to think, and you have done so marvellously. Good for you. You follow authority to a fault. But why not give your children the chance to grow themselves—the one you never got/never chose for yourself—if they desire it? Here is why the digital age is really cutting down on LDS retention: Information is now everywhere. Much of it is biased, but there is also lots of secular, uninterested (sources uncaring of propaganda and agendas) histories available to us. BYU has in their own library, a history of the church and early teachings of the prophets that, when read, create a cognitive dissonance most indoctrinated folk (yes, that would be you) do not like. If you know of any of these problems, you excuse them away as quickly as you can, and turn to biased (yes, LDS sources are biased because they are trying to sell you their religion) sources for answers. When this real information comes to light to those who are not comfortable simply willing the dissonance away, but feel the need to face it, to determine the secular truths, then membership numbers wane, as they should. I am one of those people in which the cognitive dissonance caused a philosophical crisis, simply because I was being faced with questions that I'd never really reasoned out the answers to. I had simply believed what I was told, even when practical evidence proved otherwise. See Parts II & III