Porter Rockwells Ghosts Ghost

Last LDS post I'm not Mormon because the problems kept stacking up until I couldn't explain them away anymore. When the 116 pages were lost, Joseph didn't simply translate them again. Instead he received a revelation telling him to substitute a different record, which looks a lot like a man who couldn't reproduce his own text. The Book of Mormon itself reads like a product of the 1820s rather than an ancient record. It takes sides in the religious arguments of Joseph's own day, condemning infant baptism, attacking the Universalists who preached that everyone would be saved, and warning against secret combinations just as the country was in an uproar over Freemasonry. It also settles questions about the Trinity, free will, and baptismal authority that ancient Americans had no reason to be asking. Its sermons sound like a frontier revival, and it quotes the King James Bible, translation quirks and all, in passages supposedly written long before that translation existed. Joseph also went back into the Book of Mormon and changed "the mother of God" to "the mother of the Son of God," which tells me the theology was shifting and the scripture was being edited to keep up with it. The First Vision changed with each telling too, from the Lord alone in the earliest account to the Father and the Son in the version the church teaches now. The Book of Abraham is even harder to defend. When the papyri resurfaced, Egyptologists identified them as ordinary Egyptian funeral texts that have nothing to do with Abraham, so whatever Joseph was doing, it wasn't translating. He publicly denied practicing polygamy while secretly taking plural wives, and that denial worked well enough that some Mormons today still believe he was a monogamist. The church today is no better. I see no evidence of real priesthood power, and no evidence that the church is led by a prophet rather than run like a corporation by a board of MBAs. When President Nelson and the First Presidency urged members to get the Covid vaccine, my wife was one of the people who suffered an injury from it, and I can't believe a true prophet of God would have led his people into that. The church asks members to pay tithing while it sits on billions of dollars. It bends with the cultural wind instead of standing on revelation, and it stays out of the culture war because it wants so badly to be mainstream, even to the point of supporting the federal Respect for Marriage Act in 2022. Even in my local ward, the kindness often felt more like a performance than real love. I might have set aside any one of these by itself, but taken together, the light bulb finally went off. And to all you assholes on both sides (anti and LDS) who thought I wasn’t being genuine, I was. This was a real spiritual journey. Take care