The following is quoted entirely from a post on the RFM board. The author of this piece is Tal Bachman. I have much respect for this writer, and will try to keep the entire piece together, so that the meaning of his essay is completely understood and not altered in any way. This is the most excellent essay I have ever come across regarding the hipocracy of Mormonism teachings.

THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF TOTAL IGNORANCE

Church members enjoy quoting D and C 93's phrase, "the glory of God is intelligence". Yet, literally, any single line of inquiry put to any church member, including church propagandists at FARMS, only ever culminates in an admission of total ignorance.Examples of this:"We don't have all the answers now, but one day we will. Until then, we just need to put these things on the shelf"."We have no way of fully or finally verifying what, if anything, Joseph meant when he referred to Native Americans as 'Lamanites'"."We don't really know how to explain why there is no evidence there was a universal flood"."The jury's still out on this issue"."We don't know why William Clayton would have written such a thing in his diary, or why it was even put into the Official History of the Church"."We don't know why blacks were denied the priesthood"."We don't really know who first populated the Americas, where Cumorah was, where the Three Nephites might live, why there are million year old fossils all over the place including human skeletons, how God could punish Eve for committing an act he'd forced her to commit, why Joseph calls God the Father 'Jehovah' in Section 109, how anyone could 'feel' darkness, why Brigham Young said what he did about Adam, etc.""We cannot finally determine the exact relationship between the Book of Abraham and the papyrus scrolls; (we do know, however, that the spirit testifies that the Book of Abraham is true)"."I don't know that we teach that. I don't know too much about it".Etc.Of course, in Mormonism, these admissions of ignorance are actually a source of great pride; in that state, being able to look at a mountain of facts which explodes a particular truth claim, and then still maintain belief in that truth claim by making yourself stupid about it, means to the believer that he is "humble", and that he has "faith", and that he isn't "swayed by every wind of doctrine", that he will "trust the spirit" rather than evidence that not even church propagandists would dare dispute. But all it really means, is that he's made a mistake: for, as he would know if he had not uncritically pre-committed himself to dogma, the Book of Abraham is the result of human ingenuity, not divinely-conferred powers of spontaneous translation; the scriptures are wrong about a universal flood; the human family is not all descended from two people in Missouri just five millenia ago, etc. If it is really, as Mormons would have it, a virtue to disbelieve all those things, then so would it also be a virtue to disbelieve that men have scaled Everest, that penicillin fights off infection, and that overeating causes obesity. But how could disbelieving in true things, or believing in false things, ever really be a VICE, especially if God is All-Intelligent and All-Knowing?For it to be a virtue to disbelieve true things, would mean that virtue equalled the ignorance always inspired by the uncritical acceptance of dogma - and that in turn would mean that within Mormonism, in practice, the glory of God is actually a defiant UNintelligence. Not that Mormons are the only ones to pride themselves on subscribing to an ideal, which they also pride themselves on routinely violating in practice. As Bob McCue noted at the conference, fanatics never do have a sense of irony.The pride Mormons take in defiant unintelligence can be most easily observed on apologetic bulletin boards. There, one can find no end of proud protestations of faithful ignorance. One can even find scorn and disdain for those who feel that willful unintelligence is rather more like a vice than a virtue. Of course, they (like all Christian apologists) do have St. Paul, who always had sharp words for the wisdom of the world, on their side - and we all know how reliable he was. He was so reliable, that not even the supposed one true church does anything but cherry-pick among his many exhortations and explanations, since most of them strike even the most deluded now as embarrassing. That is, in the very act of feeling good that St. Paul is on their side, they themselves destroy any credibility he might be given, by IGNORING so much of what the man says.It is perfectly true that many conclusions about the world derived from procedures like testing must be presumed to be incomplete or defective; and yet, these kinds of conclusions are the most reliable we have. Even Mormon propagandists and leaders concede this in deed, since they continue to re-shape "official church doctrine" in conformity with just those conclusions. To believe otherwise, is to believe that EVEN IF many thousands of swords, skeletons, and shields had been found in Joseph's NY Hill Cumorah, that church propagandists would STILL be spinning out such ad hoc absurdities as the Two Cumorahs Theory. Or, that EVEN IF all 6500 of Scott Woodwards Peruvian DNA tests had come up positive for Israelite ancestry, that he and church propagandists would STILL be saying that "no one ever should have thought the Native Americans descended from BOM peoples". But of course, they would not have said these things at all; rather, they would have been doing cartwheels if the evidence pointed to original Mormon doctrine being true, and claiming victory. Instead, they keep claiming the battle is not over yet, even though it ended, in truth's favour, the very first time the church changed its doctrine in response to physical evidence. The truth is, the battle has been over for a very long time, whether we wish to admit it or not.To repeat, not even those so defiantly proud of their ignorance, can help (albeit kicking and screaming) following the evidence where it leads. It is just that such folks are far more able, in the very act of following the evidence where it leads, to convince themselves they are NOT doing just that. This allows them to still feel pride in trusting the spirit more than the arm of flesh, in the very act of deferring to the arm of flesh over whatever it is they think the spirit is. Cool how that works - it must feel wonderful to feel absolutely right, despite that being an impossibility for anyone who's become a walking, talking paradox.Once upon a time, Mormons had "knowledge": "the Indians are the descendants of the Lamanites"; "Adam and Eve were the primal parents of the human race" (according to an official First Presidency statement under Joseph F. Smith); "Joseph Smith translated the papyrus scrolls"; "As man is, God once was", etc. Now, on each of these questions, and dozens of others, there is only a proclaimed (and that proudly) ignorance. The sad fact is, that our Mormon friends belong to a church which, at the moment, doesn't even have an official position on who the descendants of the peoples mentioned in its FOUNDING BOOK OF SCRIPTURE are - the very people which the book claims it was written to help "re-gather"! How embarrassing is *that*?Is there ANY religion so anxious to embrace ignorance as a defense strategy, as is Mormonism? The answer to every follow-up question (the one after the initial offering of a thought-terminating cliche) is only ever, "I don't know". And are there any religionists anywhere who exceed Mormons in the amount of pride they feel in unknowing everything they once knew? It is shocking.The Mormon Holy Ghost was supposed to be a revealer of "all things", but it seems to spend all its time obscuring everything...HMMMMM....!T.