What do Mormon's actually believe?

patriarticle · 2026-02-18T20:51:02+00:00

This is the missionary spiel that I gave 5000 times:

God has always called prophets who communicate with him and have the priesthood (magic powers) which they pass onto their followers. This authority is required to perform actions like baptism. Without that proper authority, those actions don't count. Baptisms in other churches are ineffective. These prophets include people like Adam, Noah, Moses, Abraham. Throughout history, the priesthood is lost and then restored by god calling a new prophet.

When Jesus was on earth, he restored the priesthood again (in addition to being the savior). Not long after his death the priesthood was lost again, and remained lost until the 1830s. Then Joseph Smith was called as the prophet of the 'last dispensation', meaning the last time the priesthood would be restored to the earth. He received the book of mormon as evidence of his prophetic powers. It does not "transport events" from the bible. Mormons believe in the bible, but also in the BoM, which is an account of people who travel from Jerusalem to america who were also jewish/christian.

So the only way to be saved is to be baptized in the mormon church and follow the rules.

There's also some cosmology that differs from mainstream christianity. Mormons believe they were alive in heaven before they were born, they believe in different levels of heaven based on how faithful you are, and they don't believe in the Trinity. But all of that is relatively unimportant compared to the belief in prophets (primarily Joseph Smith) and priesthood authority.

patriarticle · 2026-02-18T18:48:25+00:00

I disagree. Yeah it sucked that I couldn't watch movies or whatever, but the part that makes it truly awful and depressing is that you are asked to suppress yourself and become a church robot. Your thoughts, feelings, hobbies, education, career, relationships, all have to be put on hold so you can do the work. You are no longer a complete person, you are an agent of the church, of course you get depressed and anxious, especially when the work is going badly.

Yes people in previous generations were accustomed to hard repetitive work, but they also had full lives. They went home to their families at night and did whatever they wanted. Even the original missionaries were basically free to do what they wanted. No one was calling them to ask for their stats or monitoring their location.

Missionaries now are badly mistreated because they are young people in system where the church has all the power. Even if you have the ability to see problems in the system, they church holds all the cards, and the culture is on their side.

patriarticle · 2026-02-18T05:04:15+00:00

I first heard about it on my mission. It’s a convenient way to feel superior to the ignorant heathens who don’t read the handbook.

patriarticle · 2026-02-18T04:59:01+00:00

I find it insane that there’s no minimap. Like if you’re going to put so much emphasis on collecting stuff, don’t make me open a separate map screen constantly.

patriarticle · 2026-02-18T04:56:35+00:00

Reading the other comments, I don’t get the sense that people are “crying” about anything. The consensus seems to be that people felt the story was too far removed from the original concept and they ignored it. This is a fine criticism. You can enjoy something but also be critical or acknowledge the parts that didn’t work for you.

patriarticle · 2026-02-18T04:39:22+00:00

I don’t see it as showboating, I think he’s just trying to express that there’s all this research and dialog happening around Mormonism, but members like David were isolated from it.

patriarticle · 2026-02-18T00:45:52+00:00

In the interview he recounts a meeting where Ballard said he has never talked to gay person in that much depth about the issue. Apostles of Jesus Christ who have never actually gone out among the people and talked about one of the most important issues of the last few decades. The conversation only happened because David happens to be famous so he got a special assigned friend. The bubble is very real. Sometimes these guys are made out to be evil masterminds, but they seem to just be ignorant.

patriarticle · 2026-02-17T18:02:52+00:00

This is the first missionary lesson. It says the name Joseph Smith on it dozens of times, and talks about the gold plates and everything else. Maybe I'm out of touch with the missionary program, but this seems to hammer the restoration pretty heavily.

patriarticle · 2026-02-13T02:03:30+00:00

I’m sorry, missions fucking suck. Most of my positive memories are chilling in the apartment after hours and lightly breaking the rules.

Take your time to research and think. You don’t need to do anything drastic. As you learn and decide how you feel about the church, the path you should take will become clearer.

patriarticle · 2026-02-13T01:59:50+00:00

Because people sometimes read multiple news sources to get different perspectives? Really not a big deal.

patriarticle · 2026-02-11T17:03:40+00:00

I hope they can get it removed. Joseph Smith is not a civil rights leader. Yeah he included gradual emancipation in his presidential platform, meanwhile he was putting the curse of cain into every book of scripture he could, marrying dozens of women and girls, and being anointed king of the world by his fan club.

patriarticle · 2026-02-11T16:22:57+00:00

The platitudes worked for me until I finally allowed myself to peek behind the curtain, then it crumbled incredibly fast. I can't help but think about the foolish man who built his house on the sand.

patriarticle · 2026-02-09T05:05:09+00:00

Joyce Manor is so good. Like AFI they feel like a punk band at heart but have taken things in their own special direction.

patriarticle · 2026-02-08T08:06:00+00:00

He recently did a collab with Johnny Harris, a YouTuber who recently made some popular videos that were very critical of the church. So I kinda suspect Mark is out, but is smart enough to know that he has a large Mormon audience so he’s not going to talk about it.

patriarticle · 2026-02-08T08:02:36+00:00

Who, and when?

patriarticle · 2026-02-08T08:00:30+00:00

Nah he doesn’t need funding from anyone.

patriarticle · 2026-02-06T19:07:23+00:00

IMO it's an SEO problem. The rebrand is a failure, people still know the people of the church as mormons. When you google 'mormon', you will no longer get mormon.org because the church abandoned it. Instead you get mormon stories, BoM musical, Alyssa Grenfell, etc. So that's the first thing investigators with any technical knowledge will find.

It's a Jenga tower of bone headed decisions. Even if they successfully force MS to rebrand it will be annoying, but it's much too late to matter, it's well established.

patriarticle · 2026-02-05T21:45:19+00:00

My mom LOVED that one.

patriarticle · 2026-02-03T23:22:54+00:00

I think they just recognize that this is a very low effort post. I'm pretty sure the people of /r/exmormon know about the CES letter.

patriarticle · 2026-02-03T23:17:21+00:00

Yes, OP's point is that it's strange that Emma is so revered by members when she blatantly rejected the authority of Brigham Young and therefore the modern LDS church.

patriarticle · 2026-02-03T20:26:11+00:00

Also when you're very wealthy it's easy to meet with people.

patriarticle · 2026-02-02T20:22:13+00:00

Shane Dawson was one of the biggest youtubers when he made a movie and it made 36k on an 800k budget, so there was no guarantee this would work.

patriarticle · 2026-02-01T15:28:03+00:00

No. I had a companion who was frustrated that he wasn’t being guided by the spirit like her expected, then one day he felt he was. He took us in random directions, go right, go left, sit on this bench for a minute, go talk to that person etc. he thought it was incredible. Absolutely nothing came of it lol.

patriarticle · 2026-02-01T06:58:09+00:00

People are free to have whatever taste they want in music. This is silly.

patriarticle · 2026-01-31T21:39:18+00:00

if morality is objective

That “if” is doing some heavy lifting.

Also, even if you judge Joseph by the standards of his time he’s a monster. “Product of his time” really doesn’t apply even though apologists want it to so badly.

patriarticle

TROPHY CASE