The Heretic's Guide to Mormonism, David Fitzgerald Skepticon 4

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ladies and gentleman it's my great pleasure to introduce my good friend and great speaker David Fitzgerald author of nailed Dan's get to come I missed you too you know just to be fair I gotta say I'm imagining all you naked right now - okay before we get started I just want to get this out of the way and give a brief hello to all the Christians out there watching this on YouTube six months from now hi hey Christians now I know last year you know that talk you know it was upsetting I know I get that but beloved believe me you were going to love this speech so let me ask you guys if all the major world religions got together and had a contest to see which was the singularly greatest most well-documented sheer blatant pile of unflinching bullshit who would win oh it went way these are all good answers but today I want to make a heartfelt appeal on behalf of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints the Mormons now what can we say about the Mormons what can we say about the Moors and before we get started too much now wait no wait no first of all where are my Mormons in the house I know you're out there can I hear it let me hear it ex Mormons that's why me yeah yeah I know either we love you don't get me wrong if you brought your cousins and your ex-wives out here you know we love you guys too we're just having a little talk and here's the things we're talking about here's some fun facts about Mormonism the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day saints reports a worldwide membership of over 13 million every year they send out over 50,000 Mormon missionaries across 162 countries distributing materials in 93 languages it claims to be the fourth largest religion in the United States and the sixth largest Christian denomination which is interesting because most Christians don't think they're Christian at all now although the Mormon Church does not disclose its finances it's widely recognized as the wealthiest Church per capita in America with estimated Church assets of at least 30 billion with ABI and probably much more all good Mormons to stay in in good faith have to tithe that is give 10% of their gross not net income which means the church as the mid-90s actual tithing annual tithing revenue was estimated between four point two five and five point three billion again would they be every year if that wasn't fun enough they also own a large amount of commercial investments through the desert management corporation which earns an estimated 600 million annually I'm going to skip through most is there at their Enterprises range from an insurance company to stocks and bonds this 172 million dollar chain of radio stations the seventh largest in the country it's also one of the largest landowners in the nation owning more than 150 farms and ranches including America's largest cattle ranch shown here with total assets somewhere in the neighborhood of a million acres roughly the size of the state of Delaware now incidentally the church's religious buildings and property are considered expenses not sources of revenue even though they're huge sources of revenue the church also channels significant funds into humanitarian work it claims annual donations in the tens of millions of dollars and activities in 147 countries which also happened to contribute to church growth and like most religions it claims to be the fastest growing religion in the world which leads us to a question where did this multi-billion dollar tax-exempt corporation come from well I'm going to breeze through this but - but never in America has there been so much religious mania packed into a small single time in place as upstate New York during the 1820s - 1840s in fact the religion religion that the region became known as the burned over district in art of the way that so many crazy religious cults came and went there it was run over by one over the other we could spend off if this was a miniseries we can spend a whole first episode just on all these crazy guys in the pre story but we'll forget all that now this completely religious fubar situation came this man Joseph Smith now in March 1826 a court in Bainbridge New York convicted 21 year-old Joseph Smith of being a disorderly person and an impostor and what they meant by that is that Smith admitted at his trial to defrauding citizens by claiming to be a glass liquor and using a magic seer stone to find hidden treasure or lost property which was not an uncommon practice at the time now for decades Mormon scholars denied the existence of this court case they couldn't happen because this was happening during the time that he was receiving the golden plate so he couldn't done it and then in 1971 the court records were found into this basement of the county jail in Norwich New York denied now despite this within four years he was back in the local papers all which we still have as a Discoverer of the golden Bible the Book of Mormon Smith had several advantages for the Prophet biz his grandfather actually claimed to have heavenly visions and even had them published young Joseph himself was charismatic had a lively imagination and despite limited education and poor grammar he had a powerful voice and could transfixed listeners with his conviction now there just happened to be 8 Indian burial mounds near the Smith home when he was growing up and when they were anthis act they were found not to contain just merely bones but advanced artifacts and two particularly stupid groups to interest in this the first were treasure gold seeking treasure seekers and the other ones were religious crackpots who were looking for the lost tribes of Israel here in America now Smith was lucky enough to belong to both groups and interestingly enough his mother told us at one time that as a youth young Joseph way before this love to admit weave theories about the mound bender builder Indians he would talk about their dress their mode of worship the animals they rode their cities their buildings their warfare their religious worship she said he would do this as much as seemingly as he had spent his whole life with them and so to make a very long convoluted and contradictory story short one day Joseph Smith announced that he had been visited announced that he had been visited three times by a white skinned skinned angel named Moroni Native American interview yeah I hear it the angel told him of a book written upon gold plates which explained the origins of the Indians as well as the truths of the gospel the gold plates were buried nearby in upstate New York along with two magic stones the herb and the Thummim that would not to be confused with una Thurman which I do sometimes which would enable Smith himself to translate the books so after a couple more visions he found the buried treasure on the hill of Kimura the site of an ancient battlefield and brought them home with them on September 21st 1827 about eighteen months after his conviction for fraud he then set about translating the golden Bible from reformed Egyptian into English old-timey King James II Old Testament English and lo and behold the books turned out to be well let's read it from the official introduction to the Book of Mormon this book was written by many ancient prophets by the spirit of prophecy in Revelation their words written on golden plates were quoted in a bridge by a prophet historian named Mormon the record gives an account of two great civilizations one came from Jerusalem in 600 BC and afterwards separated a tune known as the Nephites and the Lamanites the other came much earlier when the Lord confounded the tongues at the Tower of Babel this group is known as the Jared i'ts and after thousands of years all were destroyed except the Lamanites and they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians come on you we got a story to tell here ah it's not doing it what do I do oh there we go there they go keep going no this is not a D&D game this is really his story okay now Smith was forced to refuse to show the place to anybody because if anyone else saw them they would instantly die but the Prophet had a problem he was only semi-literate he could read a little bit but he could not write so he needed someone better educated than he to take down his inspired dictation well after a few choices he finally found his neighbor Martin Harris who mortgaged his farm to help with the great work and moved in with the Smiths you don't see the blanket in this picture here but he actually in this artist's rendering he actually sat down on one side of the blanket at Krung across the kitchen Smith sat on the other side with his translator stones speaking at him from behind the curtain now you have to understand the blank was therefore Harris's safety because Joseph Warren a--the he tried to catch a glimpse of plates or looking at the Prophet at work he would be struck dead now there's a wrinkle because unfortunately mrs. Harris was not having any of this and was furious with her husband for mortgaging the farm so when he excitedly brought over the first hundred and sixteen plates of the great work to show his wife she apparently hid them or possibly even burned them and then she challenged Smith to just translate those pages again now I got to tell you something that's about all I know about Lucy Harris but I think I love her why as you can imagine this gave Joseph Smith a couple bad weeks but fortunately the prophecy prevailed and he announced another revelation he couldn't replicate the original witch after all you know could be in the devil's hands right now and corrupted hopelessly but God in His infinite wisdom had seen all this pesky business ahead of time and provided a brand new set of smaller gold plates the plates of Nephi which told basically the same story only different in a bridged form it was still pretty close so translation resumed and after several secretaries stepped in about three years or a few months depending on who you ask the Book of Mormon was translated and all the gold plates were magically transported back to heaven by the angel Moroni where apparently they remained to this day Joseph Smith called this book the Book of Mormon the most correct book of any on earth though oddly enough it seems like the first edition doesn't seem like we have the first editions they have embarrassing spelling and grammar errors it also seems to have a lot in common with this book the ethan smith view of the hebrews and other books like summon Spaulding's manuscript found which also speculated the american indians descended from ancient israelites who migrated to the new world the church grew rapidly and gained over a thousand members in less than a year though Smith wound up excommunicating all the men who had been his first followers and had sworn that they too had seen the golden plates first there were the three witnesses though all three told conflicting stories of what they had seen and their stories grew more elaborate every time they told it and when questioned Martin Harris confessed well he didn't actually see see the plates he said I didn't see him as I do that pencil case yet I saw them with the eye of faith I saw them just as distinctly as I see anything else around me though at the time they were covered with the cloth incidentally the same guy Martin Harris also said that he met Jesus one day in the shape of a deer and walked and talked with him for a few miles he also said that the devil looked like a jackass with very smooth short hair like a mouse he prophesied that Palmyra New York would be destroyed by 1830 six and that by 1838 the Mormon Church would be so big there'd be no need for a President of the United States and yet for some reason this all wasn't enough for Smith and he felt the need to bring in eight more witnesses to testify that they too saw and handled the plates and their students inscriptions half were insolently from his own family and the other half were close friends and after half of them left the church they gave more details what they said was that Smith had first set them to continual prayer and other spiritual exercises whatever the hell that means and then assembled them in a room and produced a box which he said contained the treasure the lid was open the witnesses peeped inside and yea the box was empty they said brother Joseph we don't see the plates and the Prophet goes all Sam singleton on their ass and says oh ye of little faith how long will God bear this wicked and perverse generation down on your knees brethren every one of you and pray God he goes on for this for another 20 minutes or so so they drop to their knees and prayed for more than two hours with fanatical earnestness direct quote and afterwards looking into the box they were now persuaded that they saw the plates again direct quote the concrete proof thus established the angel came and took the plates back to heaven which is really too bad that the plates are so holy because that would be awesome proof for the unbelievers but strange enough for every person that Joseph Smith baptized there were a dozen who remember his triumph or fraud and the church faced constant vicious persecution Smith was assaulted beaten and arrested many times and I just found out this fun fact from an ex-mormon friend of mine as often as not it was other Mormons who were beating his ass for stealing their money like when you put a Mormon bank together to issue Mormon money and lost all their money making lots of money or stealing their wives and so with this persecution he and his followers had to keep moving west to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois but they couldn't escape their troubles and Smith was finally killed by a mob while in jail in 1844 martyred just like Jesus except for the fact to get a gun in his hand and shot and killed two guys on his way out after the death of his prophet the church fragmented and in fact today there are still splinter groups breaking off from the LDS anybody want to guess how many splinter groups of the LDS there are 35 40 50 okay there's like I think maybe eight major ones and there are over 200 splinter groups some are just the size of a one-family but most of the majority endured under the leadership of this guy Brigham Young persecution however grew even worse until it was outright war between the United States and Mormons mobs attacked Mormon families LDS buildings were burned attacks and counter-attacks escalated until at one point both sides were using artillery finally the Mormons gave up and fled westward for over a year until they saw the land the promised land that Brigham Young had taken him to yes the promised land of Utah and the rest is history so enough of the history lesson let's get to the good stuff on this talk what puts them in a league of their own is their freaky beliefs because frankly Mormonism is so chock-full of so mondo bizarro 19th century sweetly racist beliefs that we could pick any of these crackpot notions and spend all day talking about them but we're just going to zip through them all so what's the first crazy-ass Mormon belief that everybody knows that loves yes polygamy that's right and what's the thing now at first I had to say at first glance it may sound promising sure sure but let's think about something like in real life it isn't so pretty at all in fact according to my friend Andre amor Emmet who's an ex-mormon and wrote an excellent book called broad gods brothel it is downright scary and after seeing that I couldn't watch Big Love because there's nothing cute about Mormonism as it's practiced today it's extremely creepy scary yeah nothing it was horrifying now it's difficult to say when the beloved doctrine of a polygamy started exactly and the reason it's hard to say is because at first it was practiced in secret and actively denied in fact it seems like at first the only ones who knew about it were his new wives to be who were often married to other men it's also hard to say just how many wives he had though it appears to be close to 50 this girl here Mary Elizabeth Rawlins Lightner claimed that Smith secretly told her in 1831 when she was 12 that he was going to be that God had chosen her to be the first one he commanded Joseph to take as a plural wife it turns out she wasn't the first but she was the initiative become his ninth wife at age 23 now rumors of Mormon polygamy began to become public enough to be denied in Mormon publications and enough to piss off other Mormon witnesses like the three witnesses who left the church because of it until 1843 when Smith had a revelation now by the way just like Muhammad Smith received incredibly convenient divine revelations at short notice especially just like Muhammad when he had a new girl that he wanted to take his own another wife now after this revelation was written and you can still read in doctors and covenants he presented it to his wife Emma who said she didn't believe a word of it and appeared very rebellious even though it mentions her by name repeatedly according to this thing and up again you can still find in every edition of Doctrine covenant doctrine 1:32 it's not optional at all Christ commanded the practice of polygamy as a new and everlasting covenant and declared that anyone who rejects the new prac will suffer damnation and not be permitted to enter into my glory he also said that the first wife's consent should be sought before a man married another wife but if she did not consent to the plural marriage that Christ would destroy the first wife and that the husband is exempt from ever asking her consent in the future now by the way official polygamy lasted this everlasting covenant lasted until 1890 when the church was forced to literally make this change as a condition to for statehood for Utah surprise a new revelation reversed the whole thing but don't worry in the afterlife men are still allowed to get more wives what's our next freaky belief oh yeah that's good too the sacred underwear here's a fun fact the sacred symbols that are in there are Masonic symbols and initially were cut into the garment with a knife so deep it would leave a scar until there were too many protests from the Mormon women racist Dogma yeah blacks were not allowed until the priesthood until God changed his mind about it in 1978 why weren't they allowed to become priests before them because they were cursed with black skin for their pre-existing spiritual when they were pre-existent spirit children heaven we don't have to take my word for it we got these to chose here who will tell you the same thing the Negro here is evidently receiving the reward he merits this tool says Negroes are not equal with other races it's the Lord's doing not something we have to say about it and it's not just blacks a prophesied that the red men in just a few generations would also become white delightsome and just and he encouraged his followers to take Indian wives women are still out of luck I mean sorry I mean they are still free to enjoy the privilege of being wife and mother here's another fun fact here how many heavens are in Mormonism there's three of them yeah and here's a simple chart to tell us how to get there well actually all you really need knows we're on this path here that's that's the one going straight there yes we are I'll jump to the fact the way it works is through eternal progression because as you know God is an exalted man he wants just a good Mormon now he's God hey you know as man is God once was as God is man may become the first transhumanist movement were the Mormons this is true and here's like I say a simple chart to figure it out how eternal progression works let's see so in the middle here that's Planet Kolob which I've recently found out is in the Tropic of Cancer that in the coca BM galaxy let's see that's where God lives with his wives and sons Jesus and Lucifer and when you become a god you'll create your own universe to rule with your family unless your sons want to go and create their own universe the girl is going to stay at home but their boys can go off and make a universe what else we got blood atonement why does Utah still execute people by firing squad because of the doctrine that sin cannot be forgiven without the shedding of blood now where did they get such a friggin crazy-ass idea is that right the New Testament sorry I forgot god loves blood loves blood so wait a minute alright that's all well and good enough but what about all those people who died before Joseph Smith started Mormonism no probably got it figured out this is why they have got a gigantic genealogical database in a huge response ory in Utah and honestly that's why the best thing the Mormon Church has ever given us outside of Donny Marie maybe every week at special ceremonies in Mormon temples Mormons are given a certain quota of names of the departed to pray into their church so they can become Mormons too now you think that would be awesome but the American Jewish community was incensed when it discovered that the Mormons had required Nazi Final Solution records and were industriously baptizing the murdered Jews of World War two they also were not happy that Adolf Hitler was also baptized as a Mormon see you in heaven yay that's going to be fun all right but wait there's more more bonus freakery in the temple there are temple rituals we can't know about them because they are set o sacred they're not shown to outsiders but in the last hundred years people have broken it found filmed it documented it and we've discovered that hey surprise they've been rife with masonic costume symbols and handshakes stolen completely from them all right this bear in mind this is very scary now and I hesitate to even show it to you but yeah yeah if Twilight wasn't heinous enough UCLA film and religion professor Angela Ellie's did a point by point comparison of how Mormon beliefs and culture influenced an imagery run through the Twilight Saga right down to the fact about how much a house keeping that heroine Bella is always doing here we go not the Girl Scouts but the Boy Scouts is that where the Boy Scouts have to believe in a god any God they don't care which God it is and they can't be gay Girl Scouts seem to be fine without any of that but maybe it's because the Mormon Church is a major sponsor of the Boy Scouts of America no who's number two the Roman Catholic Church so talk about strange bedfellows alright but there's even more do you know where this is its Independence Missouri right here in Missouri do you know what it is it's the Garden of Eden motherfuckers right there right there in Independence Missouri just three hours that way not only that that is Ground Zero my friends where Jesus is going to come down with the nation of Israel and start the city of Zion at the Second Coming and unfortunately the Mormons loss of property rights to it to a splinter group of Mormonism so they don't own the ground zero for Jesus anymore Oh didn't see that coming all right the three Nephites I only found out this for my good friend Steve Thorson who's the next Mormon the three Nephites when Jesus went into the new world he chose 12 more apostles three of whom are still alive today helping Mormons secretly with their super powers that is good television why do we not see this on TV I would watch that show all right brace yourself because this is this one is super freaky guess who this is it's yes it's Bigfoot that's right but according to some Mormons this is not official doctrine but there are Mormons out who here believe it if this is Adam and Eve son Cain who is alive oh well wandering the earth wearing no clothing but covered by hair how do they know this how do they know this because Mormon apostle David W Patton encountered him once and spoke to him about it all right that's good stuff that's good stuff all right but here is my favorite favorite topic of Mormonism it's Mormon archaeology now I don't think I really have to spend too much time arguing to you guys that Mormon archaeology is a complete oxymoron but just in case there's any doubt here is just a few of the chains of evidence to show it let's just start with DNA okay DNA shows that Native Americans and Polynesians came from Asia they are not related to the ancient Hebrews we can trace this through linguistics as well just by observing how words change from Asia through Polynesia even though the Book of Mormon has them coming exactly the opposite way in fact if you go to the Mormon Polynesian Center in Hawaii they have a great film showing you this Thor Heyerdahl kontiki cites a scenario where they leave from South America and go off into the the Lost Tribe of who's those guys who started us out in Polynesia the Samoans Samoans Lost Tribe of Israel another fun fact here we go and another thing that linguistics shows is that the ancient Americans had no words for things like chariots swords coins silk etc botany flora Smith assumed that that America ancient Americans had the exact same kind of Arcadia grrah culture that he had in upstate New York so he had them growing wheat barley corn flax from planting vineyards understanding the symbolism of the olives and trees well and he did get corn right he did get corn but the other major crops that are actually in the new world has no idea at all and incidentally we still have numerous cases where these crops have been preserved in archaeological sites and they're easily identifiable so if they were even growing these for just a few decades let alone thousands of years that the Book of Mormon says they are every soil sample taken in Central America or America should show traces of these things because pollens were the most indestructible natural objects own known zoology smith populated the Book of Mormon world with elephants donkeys cows auxins and horses now remains of extinct mammoths which died out 10,000 plus years before had been discovered just recently so it would have seen more plausible in the 1830s that the ancient Indians would have domesticated elephants but the rural New Yorkers back then had no way to know that although horses originated in North America 7 million years ago they and all the American species of elephant were extinct thousands of years before biblical times and this is fun some Mormon apologists have tried to suggest that well when Smith translated the word for deer a horse you know he really meant deer and when he oxen he really meant Buffalo so was he such a big dumbass that he didn't know the difference between those two things but what's more is archaeologically we know there were no horse-drawn anything in in Central America South America North America the closest they got was llamas and they weren't draught animals either and there's absolutely no evidence of the domestication of animals other animals bridges roads stables etc etc etc this is doubly ironic because iron and steel are mentioned in many places in the Book of Mormon so he has his ancient Jared i'ts making steel swords in 2500 BC or to put it another way more than a millennium before steel iron making let alone steel making came to Mesopotamia we have evidence for copper silver and zinc mines and smelters in pre-columbian America but we've never found any trace of iron or steel mills there and Frank Zindler says this wonderfully he says if millions and millions of people made and used weapons and tools of Steel for a period spanning more than three millennia not only should archaeologists find plenty more plentiful remains of all these things swords axles anvils sickles and many other iron-based artifacts they should also be able to find the remains of steel mills all over the territory covered by his cast of characters it's perfectly conceivable you might lose a steel sword but how in hell do you lose a steel mill love Frank here's one more thing textiles ancient Mexicans were weaving weaving coffin fabrics by the year 5000 BC but not only does the Book of Mormon not mention cotton he has many of his characters wearing flax or even silk some as old as 600 BC but since silk was a trade secret in China until the 6th century he is about 1200 years too early and then there's numismatics the Book of Mormon describes lots of ancient coins so let's take a look at them oh that's right that's right they've never found them because as it turns out the ancient limonite money economy was a bullshit economy based on bullshit although the ancient americans had gold and silver in abundance they never made coins they never evolved in money economy they used Jade beads obsidian blades cacao beans as meanings exchanged but this didn't stop him from inventing whoodles of Nephites money none of which have ever been discovered but interesting if you go to Book of Mormon websites you can see pictures of these that are a computer-simulated but they don't say their computer-simulated they just say this is what they look like you know nice yeah it's nice so then we've got archaeology in fact let's not waste any time let's just do archaeology history sociology anthropology since no trace of evidence could be found of any of this in upstate New York or outer in-state New York or anywhere in America Mormons have tended to start looking in Central America for traces of the and in fact to this date not a single shred of evidence has turned up that would back up the theory that the Book of Mormon took place in Central America and in fact Michael dqo Yale archeologists I couldn't say better than he says it here there is not a whit of evidence that the Nephites ever existed the whole enterprise is complete rot root and branch it's so racist it hurts it falls right into the nineteenth-century American idea that only a white man could have built cities and temples the American Indians didn't have the brains or the wherewithal to create their own civilizations so - these jokers in the 1820s the Red Indians may seem like they were all alike but needless to say they were never united in one or two great nations so crazy all right now we get it ugly the skeletons in the Mormon closet the Mountain Meadows Massacre on 9/11 1857 a local Mormon militia disguised itself as Paiute Indians and with a contingent of Paiutes attacked a wagon train of Arkansas immigrants passing through Mountain Meadows Utah Territory the train had the bad fortune passing through the territory during a Mormon rebellion but the motive of the attacks are disputed what's not disputed is that the immigrants fought back circled the wagons and a siege ensued when the Mormons discovered that they'd been identified by the immigrants they induced them to surrender and to give up their weapons then after escorting them out of the area the militiamen and their tribes and auxiliaries executed the unarmed immigrants all of the party about 120 men women and children were killed except for 17 children under the ages of 8 the surviving children were distributed the local Mormon families to raise and the victims possessions were auctioned off at the Cedar City LDS tithing office investigations were interrupted by the US Civil War and they upped it in they resulted in nine indictments but only one this guy here John Dee Lee Brigham's young adopted son interesting enough was tried in a court of law and after two trials he was convicted and in March 23 1877 a firing squad executed him at the massacre site yeah there's not too many good ways to put a comedic spin on all that so let's move on to some other funny stuff here Joseph Smith and Brigham Young on science here's some little-known facts this is from the Mormon young ladies Mutual Improvement Association of Zions young woman's Journal he started out by saying nearly all the great discoveries of men in the last half century have in one way or another directly or indirectly contributed to prove Joseph Smith to be a prophet as far back as 1837 he said that the moon was inhabited by men and women the same as this earth and they lived to a greater reason we do they live generally to the age of a thousand years he described the man as averaging near six feet in height dressing quite uniform and something near the Quaker style and it goes on he said he'd be he was told that he'd be preaching the gospel to the inhabitants of the islands of the sea and the inhabitants of the Moon even the very planet you behold with your very eyes and I've got to go back for one minute because I love this opening paragraph he says astronomers and philosophers have from time almost immemorial until very recently asserted that the moon was uninhabited that it had no atmosphere etc but recent discoveries through the means of powerful telescopes have given scientists a doubt or two on the old theory scientists and their bullshit yeah set him straight Brigham Young he doesn't stop at the moon no in a sermon he delivered in the tabernacle in Salt Lake City he said who can tell us of the inhabitants of this little planet that shines it even on the moon when you inquire about the inhabitants of that sphere you'll find it there most are ignorant as that as they are to their fellows so it is with the inhabitants of the Sun do you think the Sun is inhabited I rather think it is do you think there is any life there no question of it it was not made in vain in fact it was made to give light to those that dwell upon it and to other planets and so will this earth when it is celestial eyes throughout early Mormon doctrines we see this this confusion between what's a planet and what's a star because they keep going back and forth saying Kolob is a planet or a star and this guy the Brigham Young is actually saying that planets are just baby stars that haven't been Celeste realized by Jesus yet okay here at this bit I love I love because one particular Achilles heel that seems unique to Mormonism is their vulnerability to archaeological fraud in general mainstream Christians don't all get attached to relics so when hopes is like the Shroud of Turin or the ossuary of Saint James turn out to be fakes and they always do it's not necessarily a deal killer for the faithful but what makes Mormon doctrine so special is that Joseph Smith never realized that archaeologists were already beginning to read Egyptian so he continues to put smoking guns in his mouth throughout his career let's look these are the Kinderhook plates in 1843 six brass bell-shaped plates were found discovered in a burial mound in Kinderhook Illinois with a small number of human bones and given to Joseph Smith who translated a portion of them I have translated a portion M and finally they contained the history of the person whom they were found he was a descendant of ham through the loins of Pharaoh king of Egypt and he received his kingdom from the ruler of heaven and earth well despite an Illinois man coming forward a little while later and admitting that the plates were forgeries created by himself and two other men to make fun of Joseph Smith the church continued to assert that they were genuine mysteriously enough though the actual plates disappeared and for many years all six plates remained lost until 1962 when one of them was recovered there it is well b/w Rick's the president of the BYU Archaeological Society was delighted invited all the world to investigate the truth of the Kinderhook plates pour pour will be in 1980 permission was granted to make some very sophisticated electronic and chemical analysis of the plate which verified it yes it is indeed one of the original Kinderhook plate and yes it is pure bullshit 19th century fake this gets even better The Book of Abraham one of the cornerstones of Mormon scripture is the Book of Abraham it's in the pearl of great price in 1835 Joseph Smith obtained some Egyptian papyri along with several mummies from these Egyptian writings Smith claimed to translate one of the cornerstones of Mormon scripture The Book of Abraham which he said was the writing of Abraham when he lived in Egypt called the Book of Abraham written by his own hand on papyrus still in the introduction to the book today the original Egyptian text was lost for many years and believed have been destroyed in the great fire of Chicago Great Chicago Fire of 1871 but unfortunately for the church it turned up again in 1967 complete with Joseph Smith's handwritten notes on it needless to say Egyptologist immediately identified it as a common Egyptian funerary manual the book of breathing's a collections of spells and incantations to help the deceased it doesn't contain any information about Abraham or as religion but it names the name corpse of and his mother directions to bury them and yet this is still a cornerstone of Mormon scripture and it even has pictures from the book that are with his interpretations of them which hilarious all right one last big thing the Hofmann affair during the 1980s the LDS Church was rocked by scandals that frankly I am surprised they're still around after it but then again we got the Catholic Church still around too so in the early 80s mark William Hoffman a sixth generation Mormon started discovering a flood of early Mormon documents one after another some the church publicized and others they bought secretly and tucked away and didn't publicize the first was the an thon transcript which Hofmann claimed was to be found stuck in the pages of a 17th century Smith family Bible and it appeared to be an original chart written by Joseph Smith himself of these reformed Egyptian characters let's get a closer look the reformed Egyptian characters yeah that's what they are the church went gaga over it and paid over twenty thousand dollars for it Hoffman immediately dropped out of school and became a full-time professional rare book dealer in that he claimed to have an entire network of tipsters and tracked down modern distance early Mormons and soon he had this reputation for discovering previously unknown documents with great historical significance especially for the Mormon Church in 1981 he showed up at LDS headquarters and tried to sell a letter to the chief archivist of the Latter day Saint Church the letter claimed that Joseph Smith's son not Brigham Young had been selected by Joseph Smith to be his successor now one of the splits we had right at the beginning was this very church Brigham Young went one way the people who said that no Joseph Smith Jr junior should be the new prophet went off the other way that they're the missouri-based reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints they had always maintained that yeah Joseph Smith's line was the real successors but they never had written proof so when the church library balked at the price Hoffman went over to them this set over a scramble to acquire the letter he finally trade to the Utah Church for over 20 grand in antiquity so they could bury it and then he turned around and leaked the news to the New York Times so the LDS was forced to pay for it give it up and hand it over to the Reformed Church fun fun game and he continued this fun and very lucrative game over and over during the early 80s producing new discoveries and playing the anxious Mormon Church officials like a fiddle nobody sure just how many documents he sold them but because they kept most of the purchases hushed up but they included a letter from his mother a letter from two of the eyewitnesses giving different accounts of their vision and original contact for the first edition of Book of Mormon two pages of the original Moore Book of Mormon manuscript and most interestingly the salamander letter which claimed that Smith had been treasure hunting and practicing black magic and that a white salamander not an angel had appeared to him in his vision as in other cases Hofmann sold it secretly to high-ranking church officials for thousands of dollars gave his word that no one else had a copy and as soon as it was buried leaked its existence to the press so the church was forced to release the letter to scholar for study despite having denied existence or that they had it in their possession now you would love this guy except what wretches the story open up is that as all these documents were forgeries created by him every single one of them and when his scheme began unravel he went from forger to murderer he killed two people with homemade bombs before the third bomb went off in his car seriously injuring him and wrecking his a bought his forging arm in jail by the way they didn't just show that the Mormon leaders were easy to dupe but they were eager and desperate to spend thousands of dollars to cover up what they thought was genuine proof that their religion was a fraud yeah that's special all right well finally some good news come on let's get the good news oh yeah that's him dish he did that thing BAM some good news about Mormonism it is very possible that the Mormon Church has maxed out at one time it claimed to be adding a million members every three years but nowadays during the age of the internet and fact-checking the rate of growth is primarily due to children born into Mormon families new converts are down in recent decades and just skip through this well actually a huge portion of the newly converted Saints perhaps as many as 50% in some areas will leave the church at some point and there are millions of disenfranchised multiracial generational Mormons who don't describe themselves as Mormons anymore so much as jak Mormons or fringe Mormons or as a Brian Dalton mr. didi calls him former Mormons or foremans they're categorized as inactive on the church census and a 2005 Salt Lake City tribute article cited research saying that the church's active churchgoing membership may only be 4 million not 13 million which means they're over twice as many ex-mormons as there are active Mormons and that is good news and I could talk more about the changes in even existing mormon Mormonism there's new order Mormons who are humanistic Mormons who are almost atheist Mormons if you will there's affirmation there's gay Mormons and these people are all still Mormons and yet they're gates it kind of a one of those you know black Republican you know Christian heavy-metal dichotomies it happens but that's all I've got except for this one bit right here I'll end on that note and next year I apologize for not having the book this year next year we'll have the complete heretics guide to Western religion Mormonism the book thank you thank you thank you but in the meantime there is a book you could buy it's right out there it's by my very good friend kill kill Patrick how many science fiction fans are in the audience science fiction fantasy fantasy fans steampunk fans zombie fans erotica fans that's all in there it's all in there it's all in there I would love the more books you buy this the more time I have to write books like that so thank you very very very much I love you skeptic on

Info

Channel: HamboneProductions

Views: 149,571

Rating: 4.7274046 out of 5

Keywords: david, fitzgeral, sk4, skepticon, mormonism, mormon, latter, day, saints, atheism, atheist, free, though, secular, Jesus, Smith, Mormonism, is, bullshit, lies, false, made, up

Id: DTi8dq4KAeE

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 45min 52sec (2752 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2011

Reddit Comments

Watched the whole thing. It’s crazy to see it all laid out like that, like a sarcastic CES letter

Thoughts

Even though I don’t believe anymore, I felt uncomfortable with his presentation. I don’t think it’s good to mock other people’s beliefs, and I certainly wouldn’t mock other people who also come from that group of “19th century made up religions” even though I have friends in that camp.
I can’t believe I got duped ☹️

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/Abishspeaks 📅︎︎ Jul 16 2018 🗫︎ replies

Is it just me? I love commiserating with ex-Mormons who actually lived through the bullshit themselves; but when I see other groups doing stuff like this, I just want to scream at them to fuck off. They don’t know what it’s really like. I can see even the small errors in the presentation and dismiss them as ignorant.

Is this just latent Mormon indoctrination I need to get rid of? Or are they really just religious fuckbois?

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/perk_daddy 📅︎︎ Jul 16 2018 🗫︎ replies

He covers a lot but I particularly love how he nails TSCC for the multi-billion dollar tax-exempt corporation it is (3:55)

Incidentally, the church's religious buildings and property are considered expenses, not sources of revenue - even though they're huge sources of revenue.

and how preciselyit lines up with TSCC's FAQ about finances, released 6.5 years after this talk:

Why does the Church need financial resources?

This is a broad, worldwide work that requires considerable resources. The Church supports more than 30,000 congregations and maintains thousands of chapels and meetinghouses

These aren't expenses, they're income generators. They even say so near the beginning:

Resources used to carry out this work come principally from the tithing donations of Church members.

(Reposted with new link, hopefully this works on mobile)

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/theycallmejethro 📅︎︎ Jul 16 2018 🗫︎ replies