by Richard King

Created on: June 09, 2007

I was born in a community that was over 90% Mormon. I myself was baptized into the church at the age of 8. My father has held many offices in the church: High Priest, Bishop, Stake Presidency, etc.. As I grew up I attended meetings regularly. I went through the Boy Scouts program and received my Eagle rank, as well as the coveted Duty To God Award. After high school, I enrolled into and attended a Mormon Church college (Ricks College in Rexburg, Idaho). I have read the Book of Mormon many times.

One day I ran across a program called "The Bible Answer Man" on the radio.
On this program they attacked the Book of Mormon's validity. Being an elder in the Mormon Church, and being quite familiar with the Book of Mormon as well as the other standard works of the church, I took offense to what was being said, and took it upon myself to investigate the things that were being said on this radio program so that I might call in to the program and refute the things he was saying.

After an extensive investigation into the sources provided by the radio program, to my amazement, I found that everything they said was true.

As I grew up in the church, I was taught that Joseph Smith in translating the Book of Mormon was given each word exactly. That the word would not disappear until it had been correctly written. In other words, he could not move on until the translation was word perfect and correct. Because of this, you can understand my dilemma when I learned that the Book of Mormon has undergone over 3000 changes. What!? Joseph Smith said that an angel appeared to him and told him that the translation was correct and the Book of Mormon was the most correct book ever written.

One thing that makes these changes a very significant revelation, is that the Mormon Church claims that the bible has been changed, thus the saying "We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly".

Once the fact that the Book of Mormon had undergone these changes had come to light, the church tried to deny it saying that there had never been any changes, and even going so far as to launch a campaign to confiscate all copies of the 1830 version of the Book of Mormon. Modern versions of the Book of Mormon had been taken to libraries to exchange, and the librarians were told that they were doing this because the old ones were worn, and they wanted to give them a copy that was fresh.

Today the church (because their campaign to confiscate the 1830 version did not succeed) admits

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