As everyone knows, today marks the anniversary of Joseph Smith’s death. While I’ve been reading the various e-mails they reminded me of how it once filled me with pride and a great sense of indignation that anyone would kill God’s prophet.
It never crossed my mind as a Mormon what his death did for me personally. That thought didn’t cross my mind until after I’d left my heritage so I’m posing the question here for the Mormons today.
What if anything did Smith’s death do for you?
Do you know with 100% certainty if you’d go to heaven right this minute if you stopped breathing?
Do you realize the God of the Bible and the god of the Book of Mormon aren’t the same?
As a Mormon I wasn’t aware that Smith shot & killed two people before he was eventually killed as well.
As a Mormon I hadn’t investigated the Church’s history well enough to know he led members from one state to another because of the pressure they received for breaking the US laws.
As a Mormon I didn’t know the Book of Mormon went through a series of major revisions since its first printing.
And as a Mormon I had no idea just how vitally important it was for me to have a personal relationship with Jesus.
I encourage the Mormon to read the history books of Mormonism study and investigate the Church’s “scriptures” for his or herself and compare it with the Bible!
Here are two articles to start with! One provides a concise comparison of the final week of both Jesus and Joseph Smith while the other one looks at the circumstances of why Smith was in jail when he got killed.
If you’re a Mormon know that we pray for you each and every day and hope you come to know the real Jesus of the Bible!
With Love in Christ;
Michelle Grim
1 Cor 1:18
I’m a Mormon and I am saved. Just thought you would like to know that.
Nooo… you believe in a “different Jesus”, and the mainstream Christian god is either too cruel or too weak to save the billions of His non-mainstream Christian children from eternal damnation unless they find the correct Jesus while in mortality. Which is why we need dozens of “ministries” to regurgitate the same half-baked criticisms and pretend they haven’t been addressed by apologists and scholars for decades. (Too bad we’re more concerned with the very small LDS Church than with all the Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Catholics, etc. Guess they’ll just be damned. Sucks to be them.)
Sarcasm aside, if she didn’t realize as a Mormon that she needed to have a personal relationship with Jesus, that’s purely her own fault. Apparently she slept through every meeting. And I find it odd that the “major” revisions to the Book of Mormon (which have been discussed in several church publications) bother her, but the fact that there are more textual variants between manuscripts of the New Testament than there are words in the New Testament doesn’t. Double standard much? And personally I’ve known since Primary that Joseph Smith used a gun in Carthage jail, but maybe they just didn’t bring it up in her ward. Not sure how defending his friends while a huge angry mob was illegally trying to murder them all is supposed to make me think poorly of him though.
What Joseph and Hyrum Smith’s deaths did for me was provide an irrefutable testimony of the divinity of their work. “Con men” don’t willingly endure years of persecution and eventual death rather than give up on their cons. They just don’t.