Veritate - Christianity "LDS" and the Questions

They are the most likeable people who will ever knock on your door. Young, clean-cut, two by two, name tags straight, genuinely warm. Before I became Catholic I had real conversations with Mormon missionaries and they were some of the most pleasant exchanges I had with anyone representing a religious tradition. Then I told one of their members I was a 32nd degree Freemason and needed the whole story, not just the Book of Mormon but everything. He handed me the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. I opened them. I recognized what I was looking at. Because I had taken the same obligations, learned the same grips, and worked through the same degrees that Joseph Smith received in March 1842, five weeks before he introduced the temple endowment ceremony.

Joseph Smith taught that God was once a man, that men can become gods, and that the entire Christian church apostatized after the apostles, leaving no valid Christianity on earth for 1,800 years. He translated the Book of Mormon by placing a stone in a hat. His Doctrine and Covenants contains Section 132, which commands plural marriage as an everlasting covenant and is still in the canon. It contains Section 84, which promises a temple in Independence, Missouri in that generation. The temple has never been built. Moses said one false prophecy disqualifies a prophet. Paul said the angel who delivered the whole enterprise is accursed. And on June 27, 1844, Joseph Smith died at Carthage Jail raising his hands and beginning the Masonic Grand Hailing Sign of Distress. He never finished it. Nobody came. This episode follows the evidence.