Introduction

My name is Thomas. Thanks for viewing this blog. I am a Latter-Day Saint. I am currently getting ready to start medical school this Fall. I have a busy schedule but find great satisfaction in finding time to take part in projects like this one. Sometime last year I received a call from an elderly gentleman by the name of Bill Morissette. At over eighty years of age, he was looking for someone who could help create a blog containing his large collection of evidence of the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the Prophet Joseph Smith. Having spent much of his life with a major seizure disorder he had found himself suddenly healed and not needing to take any of his anti-seizure medicines. Having not had any seizures for about five years, he now feels more free than he has felt for most of his life. He strongly believes that this was a miracle and a gift from God meant to allow him to fulfill one last obligation to the Lord before he dies. The vision of what this is to become now drives him day in and day out. However, though he feels compelled to create this blog, he struggles to use computers. He also does not own a computer with internet access. Nonetheless, he is convinced that this is what he must do with the remaining years of his life and diligently sought out help to accomplish his vision.

Having found my father's name in the Deseret News for being a "blogging bishop," he phoned us and asked for our help. As I have a little more time presently than my dad, the task falls to me. After reviewing Brother Morissette's collection, I am certain that this information needs to be made available to the honest seekers of truth throughout the world. Working on the development of this blog, Brother Morissette and I have become good friends and have gained a spirit of unity as to what this blog needs to be. We both have received witnesses from Holy Spirit that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the true and living church of Jesus Christ as well as have found that complete intellectual satisfaction can be maintained in believing this in our modern world. However, we both agree that the world is currently flooded with erroneous information about the origins of the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ through the Prophet Joseph Smith; many in the form of both subtle and blatant attacks. However, Brother Morissette has long collected "anti-Mormon" attacks and filed them away along with documents disproving their accusations. In addition, he has spent years combing secular journals for discoveries which provide support for Latter-Day Saint historical claims and has acknowledged and compiled the priceless contributions of of Latter-Day Saint scholars to the same. From his work I am producing short and concise articles which as a whole will become a convenient library of evidence for the intellectual legitimacy of Latter-Day Saint belief. We agree that it will take many thousands like ourselves to tip the balance of erroneus-to-factual statements about the church to favor the factual.

Considering that throughout history the majority of members of each society have always believed just was "intellectually safe" to believe at the time in that society (e.g. during the middle ages the majority of people in Europe believed that the earth was flat simply because the information possessed by the majority of persons in Europe at the time suggested this was so) it is very logical to suggest that the only people who will open their heart's to this life changing message will be those who are very humble and open minded as well as those who have (with the aid of scripture and the Holy Spirit) developed for themselves a set of intellectual paradigms that make it intellectually safe for them to give it (the message) place in their hearts. Once this occurs, people will then be allow themselves to let the Holy Spirit work in them such that he can give them their own convincing personal witness that our history and doctrine are true. This is traditionally (though not exclusively) obtained while reading the Book of Mormon and investigating the doctrines of the Restored Church as explained by your local set of missionaries. However, the more tools the Lord has available to guide people to the intellectually prepared state necessary to accept the message of the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in its fullness, the more people he can reach (for example: the church has seen that its feature length films have each brought in increases in those who accept the message). As members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints believe that the church is the literal earthly partition of the Kingdom of God--the stone cut out the the mountain without hands which will roll forth to fill the entire earth--and that each of us have responsibility to help build that kingdom up further by "feeding God's sheep" (meaning by providing all men and women on earth the opportunity to hear and accept the message of , ideally while living on earth)... and based on the assumption that in our modern world intellectual conversion must accompany (but cannot supplant) spiritual conversion ... we must flood the earth with the intellectual and logical soundness of the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Based on the library of both internal and external evidences of the Book of Mormon and the Prophet Joseph Smith compiled over decades by Brother Bill Morissette... and commented on by myself, this blog is devoted to this cause as it was revealed by the holy ancient prophets including to the great King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon over 2,400 years ago by the prophet Daniel. Since this is to be an intellectual blog rather than a doctrinal blog, I will refer all doctrinal questions to the holy scriptures, www.mormon.org, and www.lds.org.