Responding to Mormons And The LDS 'Facelift' | Highlight: Apologia Radio

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Here's the video. It's going to start right here and you're going to see what he has to say about those lion

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Mormons. Mormon friends and family, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, which has undergone quite a facelift in this last generation.

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It's happened many times in their history, but the facelift recently, you know, they've gone from mormon .org

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to the come unto Christ. The new website is, of course, the churchofjesuschrist .org,

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and they've tried at times to get away from the title Mormon. It made a lot of old school Mormons kind of upset.

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And so is this guy mad about marketing? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, this, okay, wait, wait, wait, he was like, they've done this a lot in their past.

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Can you believe they've, their generations have done different things in one another? Like, oh, wait, wait, wait.

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I just want to point out. Can you believe that this ploy of this facelift trying to get people to use the actual name of the church?

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Yeah. Okay. Well, here's the other thing is he's, he's, he's insinuating that we're working in conjunction with the official church as part of some kind of PR maneuver.

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Well, that's debunking number one. I can assure you, Jeff Durbin, we are neither funded. It's ironic, but a lot of the woke schooled ex

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Mormon anti Mormons accuse us of being funded by the church. Nobody made the claim that you're working in conjunction with the

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Mormon church officially, the authoritative arm of the church. No one made that claim at all.

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I was making the claim about the facelift that Mormonism has gone through on a number of occasions over the last generation or two.

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And that's something that I think can't be disputed. I brought up the fact that the Mormon prophet fairly recently was trying to get away from the word

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Mormon and move it to the classical name for the church and get away from the term

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Mormon. And I said it, it made a lot of old school Mormons mad and it did make them upset.

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But when I'm talking about facelift, what I mean is you're trying to get away from the classical teachings of the

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Mormon church, like Brigham Young Journal of Discourses, volume 13, page 95, 1870.

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He says this about his sermons and it's his teaching. He says, I have never yet preached a sermon and sent it out to the children of men that they may not call scripture.

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Let me have the privilege of correcting a sermon and it is as good a scripture as it deserved the people of God. The people have the oracles of God continuously.

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So there is Brigham Young saying that his sermons are in fact scripture and to be seen as scripture.

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And so you're getting the very revelation of God from Brigham Young when he teaches. And here's what

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Brigham Young also says, Journal of Discourses, volume 3, page 266, 1855.

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Now, if any of you will deny the plurality of wives and continue to do so, I promise that you'll be damned.

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Mormonism today wants to get away from polygamy being practiced as necessary for exaltation.

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Or if you deny polygamy, you'll be damned. Brigham Young said he's an authoritative prophet of God. He speaks for God.

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He's given people the oracles of God and what he is giving is as good as what's in this book right here.

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It's pretty explicit. It's very explicit. Now, Brigham Young says that if you deny polygamy, you'll be damned. How do you guys feel about that today?

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How do you feel about it today? Because I know that there's Mormons in Utah today who are practicing polygamy because they read

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Joseph Smith. They read Brigham Young. They read the prophets. They see that the prophets are teaching that you will never become a

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God apart from being a polygamist. And if you deny polygamy, you'll be damned. Well, there's a facelift necessary because, of course, the

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United States government threatens the Mormon church and then God has a revelation. He changes his mind. Now polygamy here is no longer necessary.

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After Brigham Young said that they'd never be entered into the union apart from denying polygamy and they would never do it.

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And then, of course, what happens is exactly that. They deny polygamy. They're part of the union. Everyone knows the history.

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And Brigham Young also, as a prophet, said a number of things, highly, highly offensive things.

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Brigham Young, there's so much more I could say here and I'll go easy on the racist quotes about black people from Brigham Young as a prophet.

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I'll go easy on that. But Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, Volume 7, page 289, 1869 says,

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No man or woman in this dispensation will ever enter into the celestial kingdom of God without the consent of Joseph Smith.

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From the day that the priesthood was taken from the earth to the winding up scene of all things, every man and woman must have the certificate of Joseph Smith Jr.

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as a passport to their entrance into the mansion where God and Christ are. How's that going for you guys today, as our brothers and sisters in Christ that teach that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation?

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Brigham said you need Joseph. You need Joseph. You guys want to stand by that? You want to stick by that? Brigham Young said that you need to because he said that what he's giving to you are the oracles of God and they're as good as what's couched in the

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Bible. We can go for days here, guys. Do you want to talk about the Adam God doctrine? You want to talk about black people? You want to talk about blood atonement and throwing a javelin through somebody so their own blood will be spilled, so their sins will be atoned for?

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Yeah, Brigham Young taught that. You want to stick with that? Or are you good with the facelift that's occurred over the last generation?

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You want to stick with the horrifically racist past of your church, the horrifically racist past of your church that only after the civil rights movement in America where the culture shifted did it actually say, okay, now our black brothers and sisters are allowed to hold a priesthood.

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You guys want to talk a lot about that? Because we can talk a lot about that. We can actually listen to your prophet, Gordon Hinckley, being questioned on this issue of our black brothers and sisters and the

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Mormon priesthood. Until 1978, no person of color attained priesthood in your church.

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Why it took so long time to overcome the racism? I don't know.

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I don't know. I can only say that. I don't know.

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Acknowledging that therefore it was racist and hatred. And I don't know why it took so long to get over it.

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That's the prophet of the Mormon church. That's the prophet of the Mormon church. And he just doesn't know why this stuck around for so long.

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Why did it stick around for so long? Well, he's confused by it. And so when I talk about facelift, that's what

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I'm talking about. Talking about polygamy. I'm talking about the racism. I'm talking about the doctrine of blood atonement.

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I'm talking about things in that vein. That's what I'm talking about. And even, yes, going so far as to try to get away from the name that you are known by, the nickname, the

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Mormon church, which again, did upset a lot of Mormons. They rather like the name.

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They're used to it. They're comfortable with it. And it upset a lot of Mormons. And so that's what we're talking about when we talk about the facelift.

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I was just going to say an important point, the point you were making with the website, because it used to be lds .org,

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I believe, right? Mormon .org. Wasn't it? Didn't they have LDS as well? They might have, but they had Mormon .org. Because I think if you do it, if you type those in now, they both go to churchofjesuschrist .com.

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And they're like, oh, what? Just try and use the name of the church. It's like, hold on. You're missing part of the name of your church, and it's

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Latter Day Saints. Last Day Saints. Yeah. They have removed that because they're trying to be more

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Christian, to be more just another denomination of Protestants. So that was the point you were trying to make.

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They completely missed that, what you were saying. So I just wanted to make sure I pointed that out. I think there's a good opportunity to say there's a distinction between also the presiding governing leadership of the church doing these things and trying to move people into this association of the

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Mormon church with every other denomination of Christianity. And I would say that's probably where the comparison is here, because they keep saying, why would you come after your brothers in Christ?

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They're a bigger fish to fry there. They wouldn't have said that 10 years ago. Yeah. Right?

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So while we may not believe that you all are a syndicate together, a coalition working in tandem, there is still a general desire for you to educate the masses that Mormonism is just another

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Christian denomination. Well, I mean, even like, Jeff, you can attest to this, even the Easter pageant, which you're going on almost 30 years of that.

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Mm -hmm. What's it be? It'll be 30 years in three years.

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Yeah. Three years. 96 was when I first went. Yeah. Like, I've been going for about 15 years, about half of that.

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And there's been some significant shifts even in that over the years. You know, originally when you were going, it was just like straight

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Mormon doctrine. And then it switched to basically a King James version of the life of Christ with little

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Mormon things splattered in here that you wouldn't even catch if you weren't paying attention.

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And the new one they did, even our friend was like, wow, this is totally different.

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It's basically like a Disney musical of the life of Jesus. It's completely different. And there's hardly any eye -catching

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Mormon doctrine at all in it. And that's what we're talking about. Pastor James also says, before I was there, when they first started the

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Easter pageant, it was like the Mormon Jesus full proof. And it was the

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Mormon story full proof. And so people would show up to the Easter pageant, they would start getting through what was being done, then they left.

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They left. So the Mormon church changed the Easter pageant even after that, because they tried to give the full proof version of Mormonism.

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That's the issue in here with this, is the effort to make Mormonism more palatable to the average citizen of the nation.

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Because things like polygamy, it still don't go over quite well, even in a culture as evil as ours.

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Look, guys, go watch, there's a documentary, and I think there's actually a docu -series called

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Under the Banner of Heaven. Now please forgive me, I haven't actually watched the whole series, so I don't know if there's some inappropriate parts in it.

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I'm not sure if you guys have seen that or remember it, so forgive me. But when I talk about the facelift, let's talk about it in light of something like Under the

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Banner of Heaven. Under the Banner of Heaven, where you've got Mormons that get connected to original source teaching material from Joseph Smith Brigham Young, and they realize the

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Mormonism we're practicing here in Salt Lake ain't what Joseph gave us. Look, there's doctrines of blood atonement and polygamy here, and that's what they taught explicitly, and so we're trying to be faithful to that.

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So even this new series of Under the Banner of Heaven that sort of illustrates this sort of a problem is what

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I'm pointing to, is the facelift of Mormonism trying to get away from the racism, trying to get away from the polygamy, trying to get away from all of that.