Difference between revisions of "Criticism of Mormonism/Books/Mormonism Unmasked"

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|subject=Chapter 3: The Making of  Religion
 
|subject=Chapter 3: The Making of  Religion
 
|summary=Responses to specific critical or unsupported claims made in "Chapter 3: The Making of  Religion" indexed by page number.
 
|summary=Responses to specific critical or unsupported claims made in "Chapter 3: The Making of  Religion" indexed by page number.
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|sublink1=Response to claim: 27 - Joseph Smith: "I have more to boast of than ever any man had"
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|sublink2=Response to claim: 28 - “During this time, Joseph and his father became increasingly engaged in folk magic, using magical seer stones and divining rods to look for buried treasure and lost items”
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|sublink3=Response to claim: 28 - “Due to a tremendous revival in his neighborhood in 1820, Joseph Smith became concerned about which church he should join”
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|sublink4=Response to claim: 29 - The author claims that Joseph “did not publish his account of his first vision until 1842”
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|sublink5=Response to claim: 30- The author claims that “the revival that Smith described…did not happen until 1824-25, not in the year 1820”
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|sublink6=Response to claim: 30 - The author states that “as of 1820, Joseph Smith was teaching that the Father and the Son both had physical bodies”
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|sublink7=Response to claim: 30 - The author states that the “early documents of Mormonism show that during the 1820s and early 1830s, Smith was teaching there was only one God”
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|sublink8=Response to claim: 30 - Joseph Smith’s “plural god doctrine was not put forward until the 1840s in Nauvoo, Illinois”
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|sublink9=Response to claim: 30 - In Joseph’s 1832 First Vision account, he said he was fifteen when “the Lord” appeared to him
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|sublink10=Response to claim: 30 - In his 1835 First Vision account, Joseph stated the he saw “many angels”
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|sublink11=Response to claim: 30 - in the 1832 account, Joseph “mentioned that he had already concluded that all churches were in apostasy before he went into the woods to pray
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|sublink12=Response to claim: 30 - the “earliest publication to print a ‘full history’ of the rise of Mormonism, the ‘’Messenger and Advocate’’, failed to mention Smith’s vision in 1820
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|sublink13=Response to claim: 31 - Joseph Smith “engaged in folk magic and was occasionally hired to use his magical stone"
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|sublink14=Response to claim: 31 - The author notes that in 1826 Joseph was charged with being a “disorderly person” and “glass looker”
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|sublink15=Response to claim: 31 - “Did he use the Urim and Thummim, prepared by God and stored with the plates, to translate the record, or did he use the chocolate-colored stone found in Mr. Chase’s well?”
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|sublink16=Response to claim: 32 - The author claims that Joseph attempted to “join the Methodist Church in 1828, eight years after the Father and Son allegedly told him that all the churches were apostate
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|sublink17=Response to claim: 33 - “the LDS concept of a total apostasy contradicts Christ’s promise that ‘I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it”
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|sublink18=Response to claim: 33 - the Book of Hebrews “explains that the Aaronic priesthood was brought to an end with the death of Christ and that Christ is our only eternal High Priest ‘after the order of Melchizedek’”
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|sublink19=Response to claim: 33 - the Church was originally named “The Church of Christ,” followed by “The Church of the Latter Day Saints"
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|sublink20=Response to claim: 34 - Joseph received the promise that a temple in Independence, Missouri would be “reared in this generation"
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|sublink21=Response to claim: 35 - The author states that Joseph Smith predicted that the Lord would come within “fifty-six years”
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|sublink22=Response to claim: 35 - The 1835 edition of the Doctrines and Covenants contained “major revisions to already published revelations"
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|sublink23=Response to claim: 36 - The 1835 Doctrine and Covenants included a declaration that “one man should have one wife”
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|sublink24=Response to claim: 36 - Oliver Cowdery referred to this relationship as a “dirty, nasty, filthy affair of his and Fanny Alger’s"
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|sublink25=Response to claim: 36-37 - Joseph secretly practiced polygamy “through the rest of his life, always with denials”
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|sublink26=Response to claim: 37 - "Obviously, these papyri do not relate to the Abraham of the Old Testament, as Joseph Smith claimed"
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|sublink27=Response to claim: 37 - “Smith turned once again to treasure hunting to solve the church’s financial problems” by going to Salem, Massachusetts to look for treasure in the basement of a house there
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|sublink28=Response to claim: 38 - Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon created the impression that the Kirtland Safety Society was “created by God, that it had a sacred mission, and thus was invincible”
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|sublink29=Response to claim: 38 - “Mormon leaders organized a sort of secret church police called the ‘Danites’”
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|sublink30=Response to claim: 40 - Joseph incorporated many elements of Masonry into the temple endowment ceremony
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|sublink31=Response to claim: 41-42 - The author discusses the Council of Fifty
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|sublink32=Response to claim: 43 - The author notes that “two guns were smuggled” into Carthage Jail and that Joseph and Hyrum “using the guns that had been smuggled in to them...tried to defend themselves"
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|sublink33=Response to claim: 44 - “nine of the LDS apostles were charged with counterfeiting, and to avoid arrest, the fled in the night”
 
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Revision as of 18:48, 2 February 2017

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Response to Mormonism Unmasked


A FAIR Analysis of:
'Mormonism Unmasked'
A work by author: R. Philip Roberts

This is an index of claims made in this work with links to corresponding responses within FairMormon Answers. An effort has been made to provide the author's original sources where possible.

Chapter 1: Mormons on Your Doorstep

Summary: Chapter 1: "Mormons on Your Doorstep" is a fictionalized account of a series of encounters between Latter-day Saint missionaries and an investigator family. There are no glaring inaccuracies in this chapter, although the "investigator" family is a little too ideal. This chapter sets the stage for the remainder of the book.

Chapter 2: The Marketing of an Image

Summary: Responses to specific critical or unsupported claims made in "Chapter 2: The Marketing of an Image" indexed by page number.

Chapter 3: The Making of Religion

Summary: Responses to specific critical or unsupported claims made in "Chapter 3: The Making of Religion" indexed by page number.

Chapter 4: Polytheism Reborn

Summary: Responses to specific critical or unsupported claims made in "Chapter 4: Polytheism Reborn" indexed by page number.

Chapter 5: Confronting the Mormon Jesus

Summary: Responses to specific critical or unsupported claims made in "Chapter 5: Confronting the Mormon Jesus" indexed by page number.

Chapter 6: This is Good News?

Summary: Responses to specific critical or unsupported claims made in "Chapter 6: This Is Good News?" indexed by page number.

Chapter 7: Revealing Revelations

Summary: Responses to specific critical or unsupported claims made in "Chapter 7: Revealing Revelations" indexed by page number.

Chapter 8: Jesus Is Coming Again

Summary: No claims are currently addressed in this chapter.

Chapter 9: By Whose Authority?

Summary: Responses to specific critical or unsupported claims made in "Chapter 9: By Whose Authority?" indexed by page number.

Chapter 10: Meeting the Mormon Challenge

Summary: No claims are currently addressed in this chapter.


About this work

Reviews of this work

Louis Midgley, "Orders of Submission: Review of essays on Mormonism. Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 9/2 (Summer 2005): 1–81."

Louis Midgley,  The FARMS Review, (2006)
Though both The Mormon Puzzle and Mormonism Unmasked attack the Church of Jesus Christ and the faith of Latter-day Saints, the book is less irenic than the video. However, they are both well within the genre of aggressively adversarial "evangelism" that is typical of the countercult industry; they are not what one might expect from officials in a respectable, sophisticated, mainline Protestant denomination. Latter-day Saints seem to have ignored Mormonism Unmasked. Critical attention was, instead, focused more on The Counterfeit Gospel of Mormonism, on the widely distributed video, and on the accompanying packet of anti-Mormon literature.


In addition to the sinister mask on the cover of Mormonism Unmasked and the lurid title setting the tone, the back cover declares that this volume will "lift the veil from one of the greatest deceptions in the history of religion." Roberts claims to have demonstrated that "Mormonism is a fabricated and artificial form of Christianity. It is a new religion produced by the false prophet Joseph Smith." Other similar highly adversarial packaging sets the stage for the actual contents of this book. Readers of Mormonism Unmasked are promised, with much florid rhetoric, that within the pages of this book they will learn how to "expose and put an end to their false teachings" (back cover). However, the book does not spell out exactly how Baptists who are inflamed by what they find in Mormonism Unmasked are "to put an end" to LDS teachings.

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