I was born and raised in the mormon church.  I was baptized at the age of eight, giving me the title of being an official mormon.  Now I kept up with the teachings up until about the age of 14 when I decided that the church just wasn’t right for me.  I had been crying myself to sleep every night begging a god to change me because the church made me believe I was wrong and I was going to do everything I could to stop being gay.  This however is not the main reason I left the church.  

          In my ninth grade science class I had a teacher that changed everything on how I viewed the world, because up to that point I had been fairly ignorant in how I was choosing to believe.   Mrs. Lambdin I want to thank you for being the teacher that opened my eyes to the truth and this one is for you!  Lambdin on our first day of advanced biology told our class that evolution is true, and if that conflicted with our religion that is something we would need to work out on how to accept this fact, but the facts were in and evolution is an undeniable truth on how all life on Earth is formed.  This may seem like a pretty simple statement so what made it so impactful for me?  Well up to this point I was believing in both creationism and evolution, not realizing how these two origin stories conflict with each other.  

          At the time, like I had mentioned, I was struggling with my sexuality and had been completely unsuccessful in changing my desires.  This had set me up at this time to start to have doubts that my religion wasn’t completely true.  I defiantly did not choose these gay feelings and quite the opposite was trying to choose heterosexuality and to no avail, all while my church was telling me that I was choosing and I simply needed to choose to not be gay.  Then, with this first day of a science class I had started to stumble on my path to discovering the truth.  If evolution was true and creationism wasn’t, then how did this story of the Bible come about?  Were there other things that could be read into more besides evolution that shed light on what is true and what wasn’t?  

          Now evolution is a big topic and I want to give its explanation of how life formed a lot more justice and in detail that I don’t have planned for this speech. This speech will be more dedicated to what I stumbled upon that had me drop this faith the Bible and the Mormon religion taught, but I will make another speech that talks about evolution in more detail as well as other topics I’ll end up discussing here, so let’s go to where I first shed light on the truth about religion.  

          I had begun questioning why is homosexuality a sin we follow but not others, and there’s plenty we no longer follow.  Wearing clothes made of more then one fabric is a sin, wearing gold jewelry is a sin, eating pork and shellfish, touching the dead skin of a pig, working on the Sabbath, braiding your hair, women teaching men, and so many more, but the question I had was how and why does a sin become something that is bad into something that’s not bad.  Growing up in the mormon church there were a few big changes that caught my eye.  First being polygamy.  

          When the mormon church first started it was founded on the basis that polygamy was the foundation of a strong family unit and it was something God wanted all his son’s to do in order to create the most righteous kingdoms that are filled with lots of women to make lots of children.  Now, not just to give birth here on earth but in heaven as well.  It was encouraged for a husband to bring as many wives as possible in order for them to obtain the highest level in heaven and to produce many heavenly offsprings in their own kingdoms.  Which then their heavenly offspring would go to a world that their parents commanded like our god commands us and have their own planet like we have here on earth.  But then, this practice of polygamy was renounced by the church in 1890.  

          Why was something so fundamental to the churches teachings all of a sudden dropped?  Well, it was because Utah couldn’t become a state and LDS property was under the threat of seizure because polygamy was against federal law.  So the church said God spoke to the then church President Woodruff to end the practice of polygamy in order to safe guard the future of the church.  Now, if your doctrine is true, the actions of man should have no effect on what your God dictates as commandments. With polygamy being so engrained as being fundamental to how God want’s your family to be, why would the actions of man change how God chooses what’s integral, because the word of God, if true, shouldn’t be changed by the actions of man.  

          This is why the FLDS church exist, a fraction of the Mormon church, because there were some followers who saw this apparent changing of gospel as bending to the will of man, and it was not God’s will.  This isn’t the only time the church had change doctrine to give into the will of man.  In the mormon church, men receive the priesthood, which is what gives them the keys to run the church.  Up until 1978 though, men of color were not allowed to receive this priesthood because the color of their skin was the mark of Cain, the curse of Ham, and they were not worthy of it.  

          This racism also fueled polygamy as the first church leaders encouraged their men to take on as many young Native American women as wives to get their skin lineage back to the pristine color of being white and to lift this curse of dark skin.  Mormon teachings also teach that Man shall not be punished for Adams transgressions, which means no man should be punished for another mans sin, but here we have people of color being punished for Cain’s sin, because there are many many contradictions in these scriptures.  

          Contradictions are throughout christianity and isn’t just exempt to mormon teachings.  In the Bible we have contradictions such as no one has seen God, but yea some people have seen god, whether just works or just faith gets you entered into heaven, that God is and isn’t the creator of evil, Jesus being the only person ascended to heaven but also wasn’t the only person and Elijah did as well, children should and also shouldn’t be judged by the sins of their father, King David’s captain killed 800 men in one encounter but also he just killed 300, Jesus healed only one or only two blind people at Jericho, etc. etc. the contradictions keep going. 

          There’s also the fact that in the mormon church you have to be baptized to get into heaven, and in christianity, they teach that you have to accept Jesus into your heart in order to go into heaven.  Now, there are people that are born that will never ever hear this gospel.  They were put here by God, to never have the opportunity or chance to be baptized or hear about Jesus.  Which means, God put people on this earth with no expectation of them being able to get into heaven.  

          Now Mormons have what’s called baptisms for the dead in order to fix this problem.  However, there are people that will be born that will have no written record of ever existing so the church will never be able to do baptisms for the dead for these people.  Meaning, God put people on this earth with the intention of them never being able to get into heaven.  Now these teachings from Mormons and christians that you have to accept Jesus or be baptized are absolute and fundamental to their religion, that there’s no way getting around this.  So I just don’t understand how people can believe in a religion that a God would put people on this earth with no ability to get back to him.  

          Let’s go back though with what happened in 1978 as to what was the cause to lift this curse of Cain from colored men so they could receive the priesthood.  Well we see the Mormon’s private college BYU, which wasn’t allowing people of color in because they weren’t valiant or pristine enough, was under attack with discrimination laws coming into effect.  At the time laws were changing and private schools like BYU were under threat to loose tax exempt status if they continued to discriminated.  This along with laws coming for corporate soles like the church and the church needing to protect their ability to make money is what made the Mormon church end this discrimination.  

          With needing to protect their ability to make money, we know that the Mormon leaders were having issues finding people of color to run their Temples because they lacked the priesthood, which was costing the church lot’s of money because they needed this ability to collect peoples tithing everywhere. Now, here we have, once again, mormon teachings changing as the value(s) of the time changes and when money is involved.  These “God” commanded teachings that end up changing with current cultural values doesn’t end with race.                                

          If you look at the strength for youth pamphlets back in the 20th century, it was a sin for women to show their shoulders in public.  Now it is no longer a sin.  Why were the women 100 years ago damned for showing a part of their body but women today aren’t?  It’s because church policy changes as the public opinion changes, but if church policy is based on the word of God, why is God bending to the humans and the church not keeping their commandments as the immalleable will of God which doesn’t change from humans choosing to not follow it.  If God really set those rules it wouldn’t matter what humans did, those rules should be infallible but we see what’s considered a sin changing as the climate of current culture changes against those teachings.  

          Now if we go back we see these types of changes happening in all churches.  Current atmosphere of the time changes what the church teaches in order for them to keep followers and not loose them to their absurd teachings that the public at large no longer wants to follow, like divorce.  Not only do we see them changing from this aspect, but the Bible has also been revised so many times we don’t have anything close to what the original Bible was.  

          The current Bible has thousands of differences compared to the oldest manuscripts of it.  That is because it’s been translated over and over, with each transcription comes new revisions from translation errors and copying blunders made by man, that what we have now is no where near the same as the original Bible.  How can something that has been changed by humans over and over be the true word of God?  It’s because it isn’t.  What we have is a story that was created by man, that has been changing over and over as it get’s told by different cultures, and that we can trace to its beginnings of what the original source is.  This is where we will continue next episode, if the Bible isn’t true, where did that story come from?