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SALT LAKE CITY -- There's rising concern in Idaho about a religious cult that packed up and moved out of Utah earlier this summer. Neighbors near Pocatello are upset about the group's plan for a massive new residence. The group is called the Church of the Firstborn and the General Assembly of Heaven. It was based for years in a Magna duplex. In June, KSL News followed a caravan as the cult consolidated its members and moved to Idaho. They left Utah for greener pastures in Idaho, but their new neighbors worry that the pasture is getting too crowded. Church...

What Nick Vujicic lacks in stature, he makes up for in faith. Vujicic, a 26-year-old man born without arms or legs, spoke about hope and faith in Jesus Christ to approximately 5,000 people at the Salt Palace Convention Center on Saturday night. Vujicic is using his unique situation to spread the message of being born again in Christ. An Australian native, Vujicic now resides in California where he runs his Christian ministry Life Without Limbs. “The world sees something special in a man without arms and legs,” Vujicic said. “I love being able to be used by God.” People’s reasons...

Settlement papers show Mormon church leaders agreed to return more than $202,000 in tithing money paid by a man convicted of bilking investors out of more than $142 million. U.S. District Court filings show Val Southwick paid The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints $202,761.74 between 2001 and 2006. In 2008, the LDS Church Corporation of the Presidency agreed to return the money as part of a Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action. Spokesman Scott Trotter says the church has a policy of not profiting from alleged ill-gotten gains. Southwick was convicted of securities fraud and is serving nine...

Spanish Fork » Joseph Smith may have called The Book of Mormon the "most correct of any book on Earth," but that doesn't mean it couldn't use some correcting -- even now, 179 years after it first came off the press. Regarded by a worldwide faith of nearly 14 million members as Holy Writ, the book is not wholly without errors -- typos, omissions, grammatical goofs and altogether wrong words. Mistakes have crept into the text since LDS Church founder Joseph Smith dictated the original manuscript, which he says he translated with God's help from gold plates. Truth is, the...

“HI, we’d like to talk to you about Jesus Christ!” Standing tall, two young and well-dressed American boys at my door broke the ice instantaneously. Happy to see them, I said that we were Christians too. What happened next, however, took me by surprise and left me scrambling for words. Stating that they were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they said they wanted to talk about a prophet and a book given to the prophet by God. Though a little shaken, I refused to hear their ideologies — they left only to return another day...

by Kent Ponder, Ph.D.          Many say that religious faith and reason are essentially incompatible -- that theological faith and sensible reason function as largely separate modes of mental and emotional behavior. LDS people, though, very often say that the Mormon faith is unusually reasonable and sensible.         Is it? As a test, let's consider the Jaredites and their ocean-going barges, described in Ether of the Book of Mormon. If you've read it, did you do it with the "eye of faith," or with the "eye of reason" (and common sense)? The LDS...

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (GINA) -- Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon at a post-Cabinet press briefing on Thursday said that the Mormons are not the only persons who have flouted immigration laws, by overstaying their time in Guyana. He recalled that similar issues had arisen in the past with Hindu and Muslim Missionaries. Guyana's Cabinet Secretary, Dr Roger Luncheon Luncheon asserted that much idle speculations surrounded an action that is taken regularly in every country in the world, once immigration laws are breached. He maintained that “if you flout immigration laws, this course of action will be applied.” He...

I came across some interesting Book of Mormon geography theories. Some of which I was familiar with and a few that were new to me. I found them interesting to read through. I’m sure there are more theories out there, but here are a few for you to read through. I’ve included links for more information on each theory on the titles of the theory. Mesoamerica Theory 1: Isthmus of Tehuantepec As you can see in this map, this theory is the one in which people believe the main location for the Book of Mormon is in Central America and...

In 1916 a church asked the Salt Lake City Council to allow them to build a huge cross, "the symbol of Christianity," on Ensign Peak. "We would like to construct it of cement, re-enforced with steel, of sufficient dimensions that it can be readily seen from every part of the city," the request read. That request came from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The cross was to honor the Mormon pioneers. Even though the proposal was approved by the City Council, the monument was never built. Today, there are no crosses on Mormon temples. Yet two are...

When I was growing up in Utah, Calvin Rampton and Scott Matheson were our Governors, Frank Moss was one of our Senators, and Gunn McKay was our Congressman. All were Mormon Democrats. My father was a steelworker who believed that the Democrats were the party that ended the Depression, won the War, and fought for the rights of working people. Evidently many Utah Mormons agreed with him. It was not until the mid- to late-1970s that the Democratic party fell out of favor among Utah Mormon voters. That shift resulted, I believe, because the public debate about morality became more...

September 11th marks the gruesome day when 152 years ago, some 120 men, women, and children were slaughtered in cold blood by a group of Mormons. The Mountain Meadows Massacre would be the "worst incident of organized mass murder of unarmed civilians" until the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995. To understand how this happened, we must understand the relationship between the early Mormons and the rest of the nation Shortly after being organized as a church, Joseph and his two hundred or so followers settled in Kirtland, Ohio. The church grew, but by 1837 many had begun to lose faith....

There is a serious threat against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It has a name. The name is Andrew Price. He belongs to an evangelistic group that goes about teaching against all other churches. This group has a website and on this website you can click on a myriad of different religions and read what this church teaches against any specific religion. The name of the online church is being withheld because this article will not be used as a forum for that church. Several different ministers, preachers, pastors,in other words, paid clergy for that church...

Joseph Smith was just one of a proliferation of preachers and prophets who found God along the stony ridges and narrow lakes of western New York in the first half of nineteenth century. It was a place and a time of intense interest in religion: pathways to paradise ran in all directions. Prospective pilgrims had a choice, and many a wanderer journeyed a little way down first one path and then another testing alternate routes to heaven. The story of the strange systems and unusual faiths that resulted is essentially a record of unsuccessful experiments with religion. Some survived for...

Today, Mormons work hand-in-hand with other faiths at the Food Bank Coalition of San Luis Obispo County to feed the hungry throughout an area of some 280,000 people. But it has not always been that way. In 1992, Kristina Manning approached the "Loaves & Fishes" organization and asked to be a volunteer. But Manning, a new LDS convert, was turned down. Two members of her bishopric at the time in the Paso Robles 1st Ward of the San Luis Obispo California Stake paid a visit to Loaves & Fishes and tried to resolve the situation. After being told they were...

In his commencement speech at Brigham Young University Thursday, Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints urged Latter-day Saints to...avoid being defensive. “In our interactions with others are we expecting always to have to defend ourselves? If so, I think we need to make a course correction.” Elder Ballard said. “It is inconsistent with where we are today..." Elder Ballard referred to recent research that suggested Mormons can sometimes appear defensive to those who are not members of the Church. The study said that when Mormons are...

I want to talk...about the reliability of Mormon history produced by the Church. I think there has been in years past the sentiment that the Church hedged on the way that it did business; that it was not forthright in what was published; that it was afraid of its past and unwilling to hold our heritage and our historical past up to the kind of scrutiny that other disciplines were subjected to. [SNIP] (Q:1) A major recurring criticism we see is that the church doesn't discuss difficult or controversial historical events in classroom manuals and even, for example, discourages the...

The idea for this talk came from reading some critics about the Book of Abraham. The critics were discussing an Egyptological issue on the internet. You all know these type of critics, the ones who have not the courage of their convictions sufficient to sign their real name to their opinions. [SNIP] Contemporary hostile non-Mormon eyewitnesses (surely the gold standard of evidence for present-day hostile non-Mormon critics) as well as Mormon eyewitnesses identify the Book of Abraham as coming from the long scroll in Joseph Smith's possession. The eyewitnesses force us to focus on the long roll, whichever that may...

There are wolves in sheep's clothing and I want to bring up two specifically. One is an organization called MormonThink.com. Okay. I don't know if you're familiar with it. I bring it up only as a warning voice. MormonThink.com presents itself as an open environment where we can discuss principles of the gospel and the teachings of the gospel from an open perspective where the truth is really found out, let the chips fall where they may. I will tell you right now that there is an agenda of those that operate that website. Their objective is not to give...

Cultural Christians. Captive Christians. American Jews. Pantheists. Muslims. Spiritual Skeptics. Mormons. The U.S. can be broken down into seven main faith groups, according to the pollster George Barna in his latest book — “The Seven Faith Tribes” — which is at least his 40th. Even he may have lost count. “These have more to do with lifestyles and values and draws parallels with faith inclinations,” Barna said in a recent phone interview from his office in California, where he oversees The Barna Group, a research organization. The faith groups are not the nation’s seven largest but are rather clusters of...

Dear Editor, The Guyana political opposition is all up in arms about the story of the group of Mormons who have clearly broken the country’s immigration laws. Interestingly, the lawbreakers are all Americans and opposition activists are keenly playing up this aspect rather than seeing their departure as merely a procedural aspect of law and order. The government has said that the church may send in replacement missionaries provided their paperwork is intact. Recently, the opposition has taken to cozying up to anything American, even writing to the American government and asking the Obama administration to meddle in local politics....