Why I Cannot Be a Mormon: But I Can Love My Latter-day Saint Neighbor

Joseph Smith’s early life in a poor, often-uprooted farming family in Vermont and upstate New York, his limited schooling, his family’s loose church ties, and the 1820 vision he said told him to join none of the churches around him.

How the Book of Mormon was dictated between 1827 and 1829 using a seer stone, why the work had to move twice, and how Smith published the book and organized his church with six members in the spring of 1830.

Latter-day Saints read and value the Bible, but question whether it is complete and reliable. This chapter traces where the claim of a corrupted Bible came from and why 2 Timothy 3:16–17 stands in its way.

The Bible is put through the historian’s three tests: manuscript evidence, outside corroboration, and marks of eyewitness testimony. Thousands of surviving Greek manuscripts and dozens of biblical figures confirmed in ancient inscriptions show how well it holds up.

The same tests applied to a book with a single source: the seer-stone translation method the Church itself documents, what the eyewitnesses said about the plates, and the 116 lost pages that were never retranslated.

Because loose sheets of the 1833 Book of Commandments survived a mob’s attack on the press, the 1833 and 1835 versions of the same revelations can be compared side by side, and the later text shows significant additions.

Unlike the golden plates, the papyri behind the Book of Abraham survived. When the fragments resurfaced in 1966, Egyptologists could read them directly, and this chapter weighs what they found against Joseph Smith’s translation.

The King Follett discourse, the teaching that the Father has a body of flesh and bones, and Joseph Smith’s plurality of Gods, compared with the God of Isaiah who has no equal before Him or after.

LDS teaching on premortal life as spirit children of Heavenly Parents and the premortal council, set beside Scripture’s picture of human beings formed by God rather than arriving from somewhere else.

How the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople answered the question of who the Son is, why LDS teaching describes the Godhead as three separate beings, and where Lucifer fits in that account.

The Holy Ghost in LDS doctrine, a personage of spirit without a body, and the difference between feeling His influence and receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands.

Doctrine and Covenants 132, the 1843 revelation that joins eternal marriage, exaltation, and plural marriage in one document, and what it promises couples sealed in the temple.

What happens inside LDS temples, from the recommend and the initiatory to the endowment with its signs and tokens, and why family members without a recommend have waited outside on wedding days.

Where Latter-day Saint and Christian teaching agree about grace, and where they part ways over exaltation, the meaning of the Fall, and what the Atonement actually repairs.

The vision of three kingdoms of glory and outer darkness in Doctrine and Covenants 76, the spirit world, and baptism for the dead, compared with what the Bible teaches about judgment.

Joseph Smith’s four firsthand accounts of the First Vision, written between 1832 and 1842, and how the number of heavenly beings, the reason for the prayer, and other details change from one to the next.

The claim of a total apostasy followed by an angelic restoration of the priesthood, what that claim implies about Christ’s promises to His church, and why the accounts are missing from the earliest published revelations.

Plural marriage taught as a requirement and then ended in 1890, the priesthood and temple restriction on Black members lifted in 1978, and other teachings the Church has since revised.

The test Deuteronomy sets for any prophet, applied to dated revelations such as the temple commanded for Independence, Missouri, alongside the answers Latter-day Saints give from their own scripture.

The promise of Moroni 10:4–5 and the “burning in the bosom.” The feeling is real, but people in contradictory faiths report the same experience, so it cannot by itself settle which claims are true.

A chapter for the Latter-day Saint with questions: doubting an institution is not the same as doubting God, the cost of asking is real, and no one has to decide on anyone else’s schedule.

The author’s conclusion: the case is a pattern rather than one disqualifying detail, the God of LDS doctrine is a different kind of being from the God of historic Christianity, and the argument is against claims, not people.