"for the preaching of Christ crucified . . . is foolishness"

[vorlon13]

It's interesting how they already suspected what they were writing was going to sound like horseshit before they even finished it.

I'm coming around to the view that most/all religions 'evolved' similarly to how we've seen Mormonism change.  The significant part of the Mormon experience is they have not thought through anything, documented copiously all their prevarication and connivance, and publicly maintain they are still The True Faith despite knowledge at the upper levels of the bureaucracy of copious multiples of the minimum required facts for ANYONE to conclude their religion is false, and not just false, but ludicrously false, and totally unrecognizable to their founder and his early followers, who, if they were around today would all be excommunicated for their unevolved version of Mormonism.

Mormonism is a petri dish model of how most/all religions hatched and grew.  That they published all their intermediate stages of changes of doctrine is profoundly astonishing as it shows everyone 'how the sausage is made'.  Even today, church officials publicly assert they've had the same doctrines, strictures, dogma, rules and covenants since their beginning despite the churches own habit of releasing and/or publishing all the relevant materials that prove otherwise.

Mormonism is a contemporary model of how religions gestate and mutate.  The crucial difference is their recent origin and a very early 'revelation' that they be a record keeping people.  The passing decades have shown how specifically stupid that little missive from 'God' was as the Mormons themselves have hoisted themselves upon their own petard, and also illustrated clearly how other religions came down to us too.

LOL, not only does Mormonism falsify itself, it shows us how other religions that we lack the appropriate paper trail for changed, grew, mutated, schismed, apostatized, reinvented and ultimately falsified themselves too.