What is the reason or reasons for your loss of faith?
In what I wrote above, I made several references to what I called a “mountain of unrefuted evidence” which led me to conclude that Joseph Smith was a con man and to conclude that the church leaders who followed him are little if any better. I only went into specifics for a small fraction of the contents of that mountain of evidence, and I didn’t give sources which a person could look up in order research things in depth for themselves. I’ll do that now, in case that the person reading this is unfamiliar with all the evidence.
Thankfully, I won’t need to dig out my old three-ring binder which I described above in order to create anything new to post here. Many other people have already done the work of pulling together all the evidence and documenting their sources. I didn’t have the benefit of their concise and complete documentation way back when I was doing my research in my teens and early twenties, but you (the reader) can find it in the following locations.
The CES Letter is the one you’ll hear people talk about the most, and for good reason. Jeremy Runnells did an excellent job of summarizing the issues that he thought were most important. You can download a copy of the CES Letter from this link (at least as of July, 2024): cesletter.org/…
Two people whose profiles are posted on this wasmormon.org website have also done excellent jobs of documenting the evidence and providing sources. (Actually, more than just these two have, but I was especially impressed by these two.)
Francis Henderson published an excellent document that can be found here (at least as of July, 2024): fnhenderson.us/…
Dianne Ormond published an excellent document that can be found here (at least as of July, 2024): mormonthink.com/personalstories/…
In order to make it easy for you (the reader) to see the church’s attempts to refute this evidence, and see why I say the church fails miserably in those attempts, I’ll give a few links here. I think all the church does is try to blow smoke, muddy the water, and then fall back on their catch-all claim that "prayer is the only way to know truth"... but you should of course judge that for yourself. (As with the other links, these are good as of July 2024. They might change in the future.)
Regarding the problems surrounding the Book of Mormon...
churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/…Regarding the problems surrounding the Book of Abraham...
churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/…Regarding the problems surrounding polygamy...
churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/…When you open these links on the church’s website, you’ll see a list on the left side of the page (at least as of July, 2024) that will take you to the church's responses for many other issues besides just the three I’ve given above.
doug