| High Level Summary
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| Title
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MormonThink.com
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| Type
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Website
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| Author(s)
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Anonymous; Webmaster uses the pseudonyms "Truthseeker" and "SpongeBob SquareGarments"
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| Affiliation
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"Active" members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; Ex-Mormons active on the Recovery from Mormonism message board. Recent indications suggest that the only "active" member is the webmaster.
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| Accuracy
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Conclusions drawn are predominantly negative toward the truth claims of the Church.
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| Temple content
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NOTE: Extremely detailed temple content is posted on the web site
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A FAIR Analysis of the critical website MormonThink
Mormonthink.com is a site produced by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who are interested in the historical accuracy of our church and how it is being taught to its members and portrayed in the media.
Statement at the top of the MormonThink website
∗ ∗ ∗
I fantasize about a full-blown faith-destroying session. In real life, I did put the bishop in his place over polygamy. He kept saying I was wrong about Joseph having other wives and being illegal and such. I proved him wrong and he ate crow.
—MormonThink's "active LDS" webmaster, posting as "SpongeBob SquareGarments" on the ex-Mormon message board Recovery from Mormonism, Feb. 21, 2012
==
Sub-articles
==
Responses to the content of the website are located in the following sub-articles:
Summary: The web site MormonThink.com claims to be operated by active members of the Church with an interest in objectively presenting the "truth" about Mormonism. In general, the conclusions reached by the site reflect negatively on the Church.
Summary: According to MormonThink.com, if the Church actually contained God's truth and authority, "we would expect the following things to have happened in this way." The following is a list of issues presented by the website followed by FAIR's response. Most items on the list are standard anti-Mormon fare, issues FAIR believes have been "asked and answered" many times. Nearly all points appeal to some type of intellectual or religious fundamentalism.
Summary: (
http://mormonthink.com/witnessesweb.htm) The website concludes that the witnesses may have only seen the plates in a vision, despite their repeated assertions that they saw them with their own eyes, and that some witnesses only saw the plates when they were covered, although none of the three or eight witnesses are included in this group. The website notes that most of the witnesses left the Church (which is also clearly taught in Church), but does not comment on why not a single one of these witnessed exposed the alleged scam.
Summary: (
http://mormonthink.com/joseph-smith-polygamy.htm) The website concludes that Sunday School lesson manuals, priesthood manuals, seminary books, etc "almost never" mention Joseph's polygamy, despite the fact that some actually did mention it. They also claim we should believe that Oliver's claim that Joseph had an affair is true because Oliver was also a Book of Mormon witness. It is also concluded that Joseph wrote a "love letter" to one of his young plural wives and invited her and both of her parents to his single-room hideout for a tryst.
Summary: (
http://mormonthink.com/transbomweb.htm) The website concludes that at least two Apostles have mentioned the use of the hat in public discourses which appeared in print, and at least one believing LDS defender of the faith has mentioned it on television. This is apparently "astonishing," since if members or investigators knew that Joseph used a stone and a hat instead of two stones in a set of spectacles, and that he didn't need to look directly at the plates instead of viewing a mysterious conversion of reformed Egyptian characters to English words, then they wouldn't want to join the Church. But, the use of the stone isn't that much of a problem, it's really the
hat that is the problem.
Summary: (
http://mormonthink.com/runningweb.htm) The website concludes that the plates didn't weigh 200 pounds, but instead that they weighed 40 to 60 pounds just as the witnesses stated that they did. The site also concludes that Joseph could not have run with the gold plates because he had a limp from his leg operation as a child (this despite Joseph's physical health demonstrated by his vaunted "stick-pulling" abilities), and that his story of running with the plates is a "tall tale."
Summary: Correlation of
MormonThink's Table of Contents with FAIR Wiki responses
