What Mormons Actually Believe - Golden Plates, Magic Stones, Becoming Gods, and the One True Church

If someone in your life is Mormon — or post-Mormon — and you're not sure what that actually means, this is where to start. Golden plates, seer stones, three degrees of heaven, and the only true church on earth.

If someone in your life is Mormon or post-Mormon and you're not sure what that actually means, this is where to start. The Foundations series is built for never-Mormons who want to understand what the people they love are healing from. This first episode covers Joseph Smith's 1820 First Vision and the translation of the Book of Mormon (via a seer stone placed in a hat, not by examining the plates directly); the Book of Mormon's anachronistic contents and the DNA evidence against its central geographic claims; the Book of Abraham's debunking when the original papyri were found in the Metropolitan Museum in the 1960s; polygamy including Joseph's youngest wife Helen Mar Kimball at 14; the three-tiered heaven; the Second Anointing; and the one-true-church claim that places every other Christian denomination in 1,700 years of apostasy.

In this episode: Joseph Smith's First Vision — the official account vs. the nine competing versions; the Book of Mormon translation method (seer stone in a hat) and what the church's own Gospel Topics Essays say about it; DNA evidence and the Book of Mormon's geographic claims; the Book of Abraham papyri identified as a common Egyptian funeral text; Joseph Smith's polygamy — ages, existing husbands, and the 1835 denial published while he was actively practicing it; the three degrees of glory borrowed from Emmanuel Swedenborg's 1758 Heaven and Hell; the Second Anointing and becoming gods; the one true church claim and the Great Apostasy doctrine.

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New episodes every Sunday at 9 AM — just in time for sacrament meeting.