10 - Mormonism, Part 3

Well, welcome to the Striving for Eternity Academy's School of World Religions. This is a ministry of striving for eternity. You can go to www .strivingforeternity .org to get more information about Striving for Eternity or any of the other classes that we have available, like our School of Systematic Theology, School of Biblical Harmoneutics, School of Discipleship, all are available at that website.

We're glad to have you with us. I am Andrew Rappaport. I will be your teacher tonight. And with that, we hope to continue in our class as we have been going through our classes on an introduction to the major Western religions.

We have been looking at the lesson number four, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. If you have a syllabus, it would be good to grab that now. We are going to be going through that. The syllabus is available at our store at store .strivingforeternity .org.

You can get the syllabus or any of the other syllabuses there. And with that, you'd be able to follow along in the notes and you would be able to fill in the blanks. If you enjoy this lesson or any of the other lessons on the world religions and you would like to dig in a little bit deeper than we're doing in class, you can also, while you're at the store, pick up my new book, What Do They Believe? A Systematic Theology of the Major Western Religions.

That is available at our store. So you can just go to the store, which is, like I said, store .strivingforeternity .org. Enough of that now and let's dive right in. And just as a quick kind of recap, we dealt with previously in part one with the authority of the LDS.

And I'm saying LDS as an abbreviation for Latter Day Saints. It's just a lot easier. So if I say LDS, what I mean is Latter Day Saints as opposed to Mormons or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Why not use the term Mormon? Well, here's the thing. What you end up seeing is that the Mormons who, as we're going to look at today, say that their church started as a restoration. The church fell away and they restored the church and the gospel.

And yet, in arguing that they say that they restored it, well, they end up wanting to be more like us. So why would they want to act and pretend like they're Christian like us? You know, they've been doing a campaign called We Are Christian.

They've redid their website so that it removes some of the things that they've been criticized. And one of the other things they've done is they no longer use the term Mormon because that's associated with a cult.

They no longer say Mormonism. They say LDS. That's kind of a clue if someone says they're an LDS, that they're a Latter Day Saint, that they're trying to get away from the Mormon label. That being said, we've been having an influx of them on our Facebook page responding to these classes saying how we just don't understand.

We're just haters. We don't understand the truth. We're so wrong. All right, if you're going to make those criticisms, support it. I've asked now like a hundred times for someone to name one thing that I've said about the Latter Day Saints that's inaccurate.

Yeah, that's what I hear. Silence. Yeah, crickets. That's what, if I had the thing for crickets, it'd be good. Cricket, cricket, that's what we're hearing. Nothing. They can't name one thing. It's not that we're here to hate people.

We're not. We're here because, well, I want to teach the differences of the world religions, but we are comparing them to Christianity so that we have better equipped on how to witness to these people because the simple reality is these people are lost and going to spend eternity in a lake of fire.

That's why we point out these differences. It's not hatred to point out that they're an error. It's loving to point out that they're an error. And if they realize that everything I'm saying is correct and they can't name a one thing that I'm saying that's incorrect and then they want to say that we're wrong, the only thing that that's pointing is that you don't like the fact that we're pointing out what your church teaches.

So, we went from the authority part two. We looked at their view of God. From their view of God, we looked at the view of Jesus Christ. Now this week, what we're going to start with is their view of sin.

The LDS View of Pre-Existence and Original Sin

That's right. We're going to look at their view of sin. So if you have your syllabus, you could turn there and we are looking at the section on sin for the Latter-day Saints. The LDS believe that men will be punished for their own sins and not for Adam's transgression.

In other words, they do not believe in original sin. They have a real problem with the idea of original sin and believe that man must pay for their own sin. In fact, the basis of the argument is based in the fact that they believe the spirit of man was created prior to the fall.

Before the fall, when man was still good, everything was good, I should say. They believe it was at that point that the souls were created and therefore, they would say there can't be a basis to be having an original sin where we're all punished in Adam as our federal head.

This is sort of sounding like Judaism, isn't it? Yeah, if you've been with the classes, Judaism had this same wrong teaching. But let's look. First, let's look at the pre-existence since I mentioned it.

The LDS doctrine teaches that God created man as spirits before, that's your blank there, before the sixth day of creation. So notice, before God created man, all the spirits, angels and, well, spirits, period, what we would call angels, and they were all created and they were not given bodies yet.

And we're going to mention this, this is going to come up in a little bit where it's going to get really funky on how these spirits were created. But the life you live as a spirit is going to determine the life you'd have in the body.

So how does that work? Well, here's how it works. There were a bunch of angels, there was this warfare that went on before creation and those spirits that obeyed God, well, they were pure and light. So they came as white people.

Yes, that's right. And therefore, you can guess, those that disobeyed God were dark and evil. So God sent them to earth as black people. And then those that couldn't determine, that didn't go one way or the other in this warfare between God and Satan, really Jesus and Satan, the two brothers, if you paid attention in last class, they came back as, I guess, red and yellow and everything in between, right?

They were the mix. They were the neutral people. What you see there is the racism that was very prevalent during Joseph Smith's time coming up. Now, that's one of the strange things is that you won't hear them talk about that anymore.

It used to be that when they allowed blacks, after blacks in America were allowed to vote and things like that, they were allowed to join the Latter-day Saints, but they weren't allowed to be elders, priests, because they were blacks and rebellious.

Then why could they become Latter-day Saints? So that was their working it out on earth kind of a problem that they get, you know, everything's worked out in heaven. But then all of a sudden it wasn't politically correct to say that blacks were these evil, wicked people before they were born, and that's why they're black, therefore, well, they suddenly took that out.

So I guess God changed his mind? Nope. It's just, it was never really there. Some will argue because they don't know it was ever in the books. That's the reason I go to YouTube, sorry, to eBay, and I buy old copies of these books for sale, of Doctrine and Covenants, of Pearl of Great Price, and Book of Mormon, because having those older ones, you can show them how these are the areas where the Latter-day Saints that have the most perfect, as we saw, the most perfect book, and yet they had to go through revisions, and like ones regarding doctrine.

So they believe that all the spirits were born before the sixth day of creation. LDS believe that you did not suddenly come into existence when you were born. Do we have Doctrine and Covenants 93? Alright, there we go.

Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence or the light of truth was not created or made, neither indeed can it be. And so what you see there is this idea that man was there with God in the beginning.

And so LDS teach that you were happy in God's presence, but he knew that you needed more in order to progress. Progress to what? Well, as we mentioned in the last class, they believe man can become God, so in order to become God, you needed to progress and become a man to become God.

You did not have a physical body like you do now. You needed a chance to gain experience on your own, away from God's presence. Can't have that beautiful, be in the beautiful presence of God, you have to go away.

But the ability to communicate with him and receive help was still available, so he sent us to earth, supposedly, hoping that we would return to him one day and receive everything that he wants to offer us.

Yikes! That is really right out of the pit of hell, quite literally. Genesis chapter 3, Satan saying to Eve, oh, God doesn't want you to eat that fruit because he knows when you eat that fruit, you're going to be like God.

Yeah. So, now this idea, we're going to come back to this pre-existence, because it becomes important in a little bit in the next, in letter C, but let's do letter B there, in your syllabus, free will.

Free Will, Divine Offspring, and the Fall as Joy

Not only did man have a pre-existence, but they believe that man has a free will. The Latter-day Saints believe that one of the most precious gifts that God has given people is the ability and power to make choices.

God respects a person's freedom to choose. He would never force anybody to choose good or would never stop anyone from making wrong choices, because man's sovereignty is so much more important than God's sovereignty.

Yeah, are you hearing the sarcasm in my voice? He knows that by making choices and experiences of their consequences, we learn the difference between good and evil. As you learn to choose good, you find greater happiness.

That is right out of Genesis 3. I mean, that is almost like exactly what Satan said to Eve, right? This idea of free will, the free will in the Latter-day Saints is exactly the free will that Satan promised Eve.

So it's really not that hard to find the source of this religion, and it's not God. All right, am I tipping my hat? Am I giving away my view? Sorry. Let's look at their view of the children of God. Man is, ready for this, man is the literal, physical offspring of God.

That's your blanks there. Man is the literal, physical offspring of God. And they base this on Acts 17, 28 to 29. Let me read that for you. It says, For in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of you, your own poets have said.

For we are indeed his offspring. Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art of imagination of man. And so they say, see, see, that proves that we're the literal, physical offspring of God.

Yikes. The LDS believe that everyone is a child of God with a divine nature and a divine destiny. Divine nature meaning you're born from God. If you have a divine destiny, you can become like God. By the way, we're not all children of God.

According to John 1, 19 to 20, it says, Those that believe on him have the right to be called a child of God. See, we have the right to be called a child of God only when we're adopted into his family, not because we're created in his image.

There's that difference. We have to understand the difference between being created in the image of God and being made like God. OK, so the LDS believe that everyone is a child of God. That's right. See, I said there's a divine nature and divine destiny.

You live, you live with him supposedly as a spirit before you existed, before you were born and God sent you to earth to receive a body and gain experiences so that you need to learn so that you can return to him.

Let's look at a passage. This is going to be, I may mispronounce it, but Moshe 5, 7. OK, there we go. So in this, we see here, he says, And now, because of the covenant which ye have made, ye shall be called the children of Christ, his sons and his daughters.

For, behold, the day he hath spiritually begotten you, for ye say that your hearts are changed through faith on his name, therefore ye are born of him and have become his sons and daughters. So here's a problem.

When you follow their doctrine properly, you're going to see that what you have is a case that the teaching that God the Father had physical offspring. If you remember last class, we said the physical offspring first was Jesus, then Satan, and then all of us followed from the physical offspring of the Father.

But that's not what this passage said, did it? Put that back up for a moment. And if you look at the passage, it says there that we are the children of who? Who's that say? We're the children of Christ.

And so what you see there is a confusion. You see right there a issue where they have the reality of that they argue for two different things and they don't pick up on it. Are we the offspring? The physical, literal children of God the Father or of Christ?

If Christ was the first offspring, then why wasn't he the first one sent to earth? Why did he come some 4 ,000 years later? And how come Satan never came? I'm just curious. Maybe because he rebelled so the others come back as black people, but Satan's not allowed to come back at all.

Right? I mean, you see the problems? You know, they say here that we're the children of Christ, his sons and daughters. And yet we're supposed to be the offspring of the Father and his wife. Oh, it gets so confusing.

And that's the thing. When you're trying to make something up as detailed as this is, you fall into problems. And those problems become something that have, well, you end up with things like this. And you end up with contradictions that you can't work your way out of.

So according to LDS, the fall was a joy for man. When Adam and Eve fell, it was a joy. It brought mortality and physical death. That's a great joy. Second Nephi 2 .25, do I have that? I do. Okay. Adam fell that man might be.

And men care that they might have, what's that? Joy? Really? So Adam fell that we could have death and that brings joy? I don't know. Have you ever gone to a funeral of like even of an unbeliever and been like, oh, this is a joyful time.

Because in their idea, we couldn't become God unless we became man. Yikes. So you see, if their view of man is that messed up with a view of man and sin, I think their view of salvation is going to be really messed up.

Well, rest assured, it is. All right. So they have a different gospel, all right? We saw that they had a different Jesus. They have a different view of man. They have a different God. They have different authority.

I mean, not one thing is even close here. So what's their view of salvation? Well, the LDS state that they believe salvation is through Jesus Christ. And they have this in Moshe 3 .17 where it says,. And moreover, I say unto you that there shall be no more name given, nor any other, nor means whereby salvation can come unto the children of men, only in and through the name of Jesus the Lord Omnipotent.

And so what you end up seeing there is, it sounds like they're clearly saying salvation is through Jesus Christ alone. And we would say, yes. Okay, we're going to agree with that. Hold on. Different Jesus.

All right? However, the LDS church believes in a different gospel altogether than the one taught in the Bible, as evidenced by the fact that they claim about the Book of Mormon. What are the claims they make about the Book of Mormon?

Well, they claim that the Book of Mormon restores the gospel and contains the fullness, that's your blank there, fullness of the gospel. This means that the fullness of the gospel was lost. And the claims that basically the Book of Mormon claims that the gospel that had been lost had been taught to Adam and to Enoch and to Noah and to Abraham and to others.

However, if the gospel to Adam and Enoch and Noah and Abraham and many others was lost, and this is the fullness of the gospel, then it had to be taught over and over and it kept kind of getting lost.

How could we trust Joseph Smith to have gotten it right? That he's the first to get it right? I mean, this is the same question we asked with Islam when they said that the Bible was corrupted over and over.

God's Word kept getting corrupted, but Muhammad could get it right. This is just a little critical thinking to ask yourself. How could Joseph Smith, it was taught to Adam and then to Enoch and then to Noah and then to Abraham and many others, and it kept getting lost over and over and over.

How could we trust Joseph Smith, the con artist, because that's what he was. The arrest records show it, prove it. So furthermore, what does it teach about God that he can't keep his fullness of the gospel with his people?

He can't protect it. He's a pretty weak God. LDS doctrine states that God wants all his children to know the truth, yet he does not protect it, the truth, from error? Doesn't sound like a God that sincerely cares for his people.

In Doctrines of Salvation, Volume 1, page 188, it says this, quote,. Furthermore, there is no salvation without accepting Joseph Smith as a prophet of God. Boy, that sounds exactly like Islam, doesn't it?

One of the tenets of Islam is that you had to believe in Muhammad as a prophet of God. Same thing. Same problem. It's a different gospel. The gospel is not Jesus Christ through Joseph Smith. So, we had to wait for Joseph Smith to come on the scenes, yikes, but it's really seen that their view is that baptism is necessary.

Baptism, Works, and the Second Chance After Death

LDS believe that baptism is necessary, that's your blank there, for salvation. And this is seen in their doctrine of baptism for the dead. Yikes, what's that? There's one verse in all of scripture in 1 Corinthians that mentions baptism for the dead.

There's no context of it. It's really not clear completely on what Paul's talking about there, but the LDS teach that many people have died without receiving baptism and other ordinances that Jesus Christ taught were necessary to enter into the kingdom.

Therefore, because God wants all His children to have an opportunity to return to Him, He has provided a way to those who died to receive the ordinances through those who are living. This is why in their temple services they have the baptism for the dead.

This is why if you do any kind of genealogy study, you're going to come across the Latter-day Saints, because they are the most prolific in trying to figure out people's lineages. And the reason for it is because they want people to be able to go back and get baptized for all the people that are in their family tree.

This also goes to point to another thing. They believe in two means of salvation. You can be saved here on earth or get a second chance after death. Wow. That's just wrong. It is appointed unto man once to die and then the judgment.

That's what the Bible says. That's not what Mormon doctrine teaches. Letter C. Salvation is by works, not by grace and faith alone. And you saw that just with the baptism, but Jesus took it upon Himself, took upon Himself the sins of all men on condition, really?

He died on the cross and it was conditional? Condition of repentance, offering all people a general salvation. And additional salvation is an individual salvation and is conditional only upon grace, but also upon obedience.

That's your blank. Obedience to gospel law. Wow. Almost sounding like theonomy. But they believe that there is this idea that it is by obedience to the law that you're saved. Perhaps the most famous statement of the LDS in relation to grace and works is in 2 Nephi.

I think I have that one there. And I added some emphasis on this, but it says there as you read, for we labor diligently to write to persuade our children and also our brethren to believe in Christ and to be reconciled to God, for we know that it is by the grace that we are saved after all we can do.

You notice that I emphasize that because that is the problem. They believe that clearly works based salvation because it is after everything you can do, then you can be saved. The LDS teach that atonement comes, the atonement of Christ is fully effective in the individual's life only after we have six things, sorry, five things.

Faith in Christ, repentance of sin, being baptized, receiving the Holy Ghost, sorry, there were six things, obeying the commandments, and strive to be like Him. Those sound like works to me. You know, you really get to see this view because in the Joseph Smith translation of James 2, 14 to 21, you see that in verse 17, he adds the word being alone in there.

So it says in verse 17, even so faith if it does not have works is dead being alone. This also shows that Joseph Smith was influenced by Roman Catholicism because it's only Roman Catholicism that interprets James as being dealing with the doctrine of regeneration and not sanctification.

The entire book of James is dealing with how one can know they are saved. What things of their sanctification, that process after we're regenerate, after we become a believer in Christ, that process after that until the day we die and are glorified, that process of sanctification, how do we know?

Well, James gives us a series of things to look for in our life to say if we are believers, if we have genuine faith, these are the things that we're going to see in our life. One of them being works.

Therefore, the works are after regeneration. And the argument James is making is that you know that you are a believer because the works are evident because you have the works that shows that you were saved because you were continuing in the sanctification process.

However, that's not what the Catholic Church teaches because this is the only passage that they could find to try to prove their doctrine of faith plus works. Joseph Smith, who was so much against the Roman Catholic Church and saying that it fell away and yet what is he doing?

He's actually arguing for a position further than what the Catholic Church teaches because what he's doing is he's saying, okay, the Catholic Church said it was faith by works, all right, faith plus works, I should say, and so they believed in the works.

But he's saying that this passage is even so, if they do not have work, if they do not, whoop, sorry, knocked my glass of tea there. I was trying to take it. If you heard that bang, I'll put it down there.

So even so, if they have works, is dead being alone, the idea being is that the reason the faith is dead, or sorry, the reason the works are dead is because the faith is alone. In other words, you must have works along with your faith.

Otherwise, it's dead. You need both. And so supposedly, God knew this and he decided that he was going to have to make a way. So the LDS do not believe in any way in eternal security or perseverance of the saints.

Why? Because, well, we have works. Therefore, we're going to have an issue where we lose salvation, things like that, right? So the LDS do not believe in eternal security. Thus, one can fall from grace.

Since works gets you in, you must keep yourself by those works. That's one of the things you always see. If works save you, then works sustain you. And that is the issue. If you believe that your works are going to save you or keep you saved, then you must maintain your salvation.

And we went into that in great detail in the Doctrine of Salvation in our class on systematic theology. They would be very much in line with what's called Arminian theology. And you see that in Doctrine and Covenants.

This is Doctrine and Covenants 20, 32. We don't have it. Okay, then I will just read it. It says, but there is a possibility that man can fall from grace and depart from the living God. And so we also see letter D that they believe in a second chance.

Heaven, Hell, and the Eternal State in LDS Teaching

So they believe in a, the LDS believe the period between death and the resurrection is still a probationary or testing period for those in hell. Kind of sounds like purgatory, huh? I mean, there's so much against the Catholic Church, and yet they took so many of those doctrines.

If they repent, and actually they took those doctrines, but they couldn't take the sources of those doctrines because the sources of those doctrines were tradition. And so they want to avoid the Roman Catholic tradition, saying that that church fell away, right?

If they repent and turn to Christ, they may yet be redeemed, and that's your blank there, redeemed from Satan through the atonement and inherit some degree of glory among the many mansions to the Father.

To this end, they believe that the gospel is preached to the ignorant and rebellious spirits in prison that may repent and accept Christ and live. This is from John 5, 25 to 29 of 1 Peter 3, 18 to 21 in chapter 4, verse 6.

So they believe that Christ, remember we're spirit, we get a body. So we go back to spirit. We're in prison because we didn't believe, and God gives us a second chance to be redeemed by hearing the gospel a second time, and then we can get some level of grace.

We're going to get this in a moment that there's different levels of heaven, and so we can't get to that highest level, but maybe we can get to one of the other levels if we receive Christ after. Wow, is this hurting your head?

Yeah. There was someone after we taught the last class, and they said, my head hurts. This stuff is strange. Just be glad we're not dealing with Scientology. That one's even weirder. All right, so what's their view of the eternal state?

All right, the eternal state. This is the last of our section here. And we have here that the eternal state is becoming a God. Yeah, it's becoming God-like. It's becoming like Christ. So we could become, well, actually like the Father right now, the way the Father is right now, because Christ has to become, Christ was a man that had to become, he had to progress to be like the Father as well, and so he's going to be a God.

He's secured. We have to be like him. But right there, it should ask you, like, what's so special about Christ if he's just a spirit like us? So he's the firstborn, right? It shouldn't be anything different.

Just saying. I know. That's why all these Latter-day Saints are so upset with these classes, because we're just applying a little critical thinking to your doctrine, and it's a problem for you. And you can't say that anything we're saying is wrong, and that really bugs you.

You'd love to point out something we're saying that's inaccurate. I understand. But we're quoting your sources. Just saying. So, becoming like gods. The LDS believe that God ordained and established a plan of salvation whereby his spirit children might advance and progress and become like him.

After you become an LDS, you have the potential of becoming a God. That's your blank there, to becoming a God. This is from the teachings of Prophet Joseph Smith. That's right. This is right from his teachings.

Teachings of Prophet Joseph Smith, pages 345, 347, and 354. According to the formula, God became a man that... Sorry, let me read again. Quote, God became man that man might become God, unquote. That's their formula.

The LDS believe that the early Christians were invited to study and to become gods. Note the plural there, by the way. This is a real problem for Orthodox teaching, isn't it? Yeah. We have a real problem with this.

Okay? This is exactly what caused the fall. You know that thing that gave us great joy? Yeah. That fall from being in God's presence to being in a state of sin. And I hate to disappoint them, but Adam is our federal head.

The firstborn, by the way. The real firstborn of humanity. In the sense that he was the first one that was created man. And because of that, you end up with the fact that you see that this is the exact thing that Satan tempted Eve with.

We're in the federal headship of Adam. That's why we have a sin nature and we sin. All right, so let's talk about their view of heaven. And we'll try to wrap this up. There are three levels of heaven, as I mentioned.

There's the terrestrial, the teleterrestrial, the terrestrial, and the celestial. Okay? Three different levels. The lowest level is the telestral. That's the telestral glory. Reserved for those who were wicked in the flesh, but in some sense are given some degree, they turn to Christ in their suffering between death and the resurrection.

So remember, I said that you have that second chance. If you were to die as a wicked person and then afterwards you repent, someone does a for you, they do the ordinances for you, then you can get into the lowest level of heaven.

This is Doctrine and Covenants 76 verses 81 to 113. I'm not going to post it. We're not going to read all that because it's very long. But that's where you can find it. Doctrine and Covenants 76 verses 81 to 113.

The next highest level is the terrestrial kingdom. Is reserved for the honorable men and women while they were on earth, the righteous who rejected the fullness of the gospel and witness of the Spirit during their mortal life, but changed their minds in the spirit prison.

This is Doctrine and Covenants 76 verses 71 to 80. So it's the same chapter, just different verses. Doctrine and Covenants 76 verses 71 to 80. So these are the people that they lived a good life. In other words, those works.

They were a good person. They didn't believe in Mormonism and so they had to go to that punishment world and then they received Mormonism after they died. Their lot in eternity is to dwell with Jesus in glory forever, but without enjoying the separate presence of the Father and continuing in family relationships.

So they don't get the full presence of the Father. They get to be with Jesus, not to go the next level up. And the highest level is the celestial kingdom, which is reserved for LDS members, children who died before the age of eight.

I'll mention that in a moment. The mentally handicapped who have the mind of a child under eight years old and those good people of every religious belief who never heard and understood the gospel during their lives or who never felt the Spirit bear witness to it.

This is Doctrine and Covenants, again, chapter 76 and this is going to be verses 50 to 70. So it's Doctrine and Covenants 76 verses 50 to 70. And what you end up seeing there in that is this is those Latter-day Saints, and it's really those that are married in the temple and have children, they can have spirit children, have their own planets, oh yay!

They get to be in a position where they argue that they will be in this highest kingdom where they get to be in the presence of God the Father. And they will be able to enjoy His presence, not only Jesus' presence, but theirs as well.

And oh, by the way, the benefit of being there is you get to be with Joseph Smith. That's right. You have the Father, the Son, the Spirit, and Joseph Smith that they have to look forward to. Yikes. I mean, it's just there's so much to go here.

Why the age of eight? They get that out of a King James reading of, oh, I forgot, it's in Peter, I forget if it's first or second now, where it says that eight souls were saved in Noah's day. The eight souls that were saved was not eight years old, as they argue.

It's eight human beings were on the ark in Noah's day. It was Noah, that's one. His wife, that's two. His three sons, that's five. Their three wives, that's eight. Eight souls, eight people, not eight years old.

So they have the idea that anyone before the age of eight immediately goes to heaven. By the way, side note, maybe some of you remember, I think, was her name Yates? I forget, it might have been. Andrea Yates, I want to say, but I could be wrong on the name.

If I'm wrong, I'm sorry. But there was a woman who killed her, I forget how many, like five kids, six kids. Her son, the oldest, was going to turn eight. And she recognized how sinful they were. She was so concerned for them, excuse me, that she started killing her son, her children in age order.

She took their lives so that they would immediately go to heaven. She realized that if her children turned eight years old, they would go, they'd be accountable and they might not make it to the ultimate celestial kingdom.

You see how dangerous this teaching could end up being? A mother killed all of her children to send them to heaven. And Latter-day Saints can't say there's anything wrong with that, truthfully, because though she murdered, she murdered just to make sure that they made it to the right kingdom.

Yikes. All right, let's look at their view on hell, if we could. The Latter-day Saints believe that there is a hell, but it will be lightly, that's your blank there, lightly populated. There is a hell, but it will be lightly populated.

After all, if you think about it, once someone gets a taste of hell, only a fool would reject the second chance. Who's going to reject a second chance? They recognize how devastating hell is and they're going to reject it?

Let's see, in Alma 12, 18, if we could put that up for a moment and we will read this one. It says there, these sons of perdition. Now, notice what it says there. These sons of perdition, perhaps only a few in number.

Will be resurrected, but not all be redeemed from the power of Satan. Because they were filthy. So, as the prophet Alma said to them, they shall be as though there had been no redemption made. For they cannot be redeemed according to God's justice.

And they cannot die seeing that there is no more corruption. So, what you have here in this passage, a couple things. One, you see, they're saying these sons of perdition, those that are going to be in hell, it's light.