This blog was a lot of fun, but I’ve moved on to Reddit for my work against mormonism.

So, if you want to continue the party with me, come visit the greatest reddit for exmormons, exmormon.reddit.com

Have a good one!

-Measure

In the meantime, I have found some new information about the character of Joseph Smith, according to his neighbors, before he became famous.

Did I mention the Mormon church has tried to suppress this information?

This information comes via Steve Benson, at RfM:

Rodger I. Anderson, in his book, “Joseph Smith’s New York Reputation Re-Examined” (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1990), tackles the significant number of legal affidavits (over 80) that were sworn out against the character and conduct of Joseph Smith’s by his neighbors, associates and fellow citizens of New York state.

THE DAMNING NATURE OF THE AFFIDAVITS AGAINST JOSEPH SMITH

Anderson (who provides exact copies of the affidavits as well as other statements and interview) describes the affidavits’ contents, which were originally published by Eber D. Howe in his book, “Mormonism Unvailed” (Painseville, Ohio: Eber D. Howe, printer and publisher, 1834):

“In affidavit after affidavit the young Smith was depicted as a liar and self-confessed fraud, a cunning and callous knave who delighted in nothing so much as preying upon the credulity of his neighbors.

“A money digger by profession, Smith spent his nights and his days lounging about the local grocery story entertaining his fellow tipplers with tales of midnight enchantments and bleeding ghosts, the affidavits maintained. . . .

“In a statement dated 4 December 1833 and signed by 51 residents of Palmyra, New York, Smith was described as being ‘entirely destitute of moral character, and addicted to vicious habits.’”

Moreover, Smith, as noted by Anderson, was portrayed by his affidavit-signing critics as being “animated by no loftier purpose than the love of money”–”a money digger who told marvelous tales of enchanted treasure and infernal spirits.”

(Anderson, pp. 2-3, 8)
_____

REACTION BY SMITH TO THE AFFIDAVITS: DENOUNCING THEM AS THE WORK OF THE DEVIL

Anderson describes Smith’s desperate response to the release of the troublesome affidavits:

“Once published in 1834 [after being collected by Dr. Philastus Hurlbut, 'a one-time Mormon who was excommunicated in 1833 for, among other things, saying "that he deceived Joseph Smith's God, or the spirit by which he was actuated"'], Hurlbut’s affidavits became especially dangerous to the newly founded church and its leader.

“To defuse the potentially explosive documents, Smith read them aloud at public meetings, denouncing them as the work of Satan. More importantly, Hurlbut’s affidavits stimulated Smith to publish the first official history of the new church, ‘Early Scenes and Incidents in the Church,’ authored by Smith’s closest associate at the time, Oliver Cowdery.”

(Anderson, pp. 2-3)
_____

FAILURE OF EARLY SMITH APOLOGISTS TO EFFECTIVELY DENY THE AFFIDAVITS

Anderson reports on an “ambitious” attempt by William and E.L. Kelley to refute the affidavits–claiming in their own published report that they “could find virtually no one who knew anything firsthand against the Smiths and a number who remembered the family as being quite respectable.”

In this effort, the Kelleys produced less than impressive results.

The credibility of the Kelley claims were strongly disputed by even some of those to whom the Kelleys spoke during their dubious effort to build a chase for Smith.

Anderson, for instance, reports that “[a]t least three of those interviewed were so incensed with the published [Kelley] report that they produced affidavits of their own charging the Kelleys with misrepresentation.”

The complaints included Palmyra resident John H. Gilbert, who according to Gilbert’s affidavit on file in the clerk’s office of Ontario County, New Jersey, responded by appearing before a judge to state that he was “designedly” and “grossly misrepresented in almost every particular . . . .” Along with the affidavits of others, Gilbert’s complaint was subsequently published in local area newspapers.

(Anderson, pp. 5-6, 8)
_____

TAKING ON THE AFFIDAVIT ATTACKERS

Anderson notes that Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley, in his 1961 book, “The Myth Makers” (Salt Lake City, Utah: Bookcraft, p. 6)—together with fellow Mormon defender Richard L. Anderson, in his 1970 article, “Joseph Smith’s New York Reputation Reappraised” (“Brigham Young University Studies,” 10, pp. 283-314)–have attempted “to discredit the Smith family neighbors.”

Nibley contends that the affidavit signers “told the best stories they could think of, without particularly caring whether they were true or not” (brushing them off as “trumped-up evidence”).

Richard L. Anderson claims that the Kelley report was supposedly more objective and based on positive testimony from people who claimed to have known the Smiths personally.

Roger I. Anderson remains unpersuaded by such apologetic efforts.

Roger I. Anderson exhibits particular disdain for the tactics of Nibley, whom he regards essentially as an unprofessional hit man for Smith. His list of academic crimes against Nibley are substantive.

–First, Anderson says Nibley’s book suffers from the “unqualified scope of its generalization” in concluding that because he claims to have found “some writers who were lass than careful with the truth, . . . all such writers must have been similarly careless, a conclusion that is simply not justified.”

–Second, Anderson says that Nibley’s book is characterized by its “use of arguments which are non sequiturs.”

–Third, Anderson notes that Nibley is ‘mistaken when he charges that those who testified to Smith’s character were themselves disreputable,” rebutting Nibley by pointing out that “[w]itnessing a deed is not the same as committing it, and hearing a man boast of some act does not necessitate participation in it.” Anderson further points out that “[e]ven if it could be demonstrated that Smith’s accusers were in fact involved in the same practices they related, it would not mean their testimony was for that reason suspect. Defending the accused by pointing to the imperfections of their accusers is fallacious and only serves to deflect attention from the original issue.”

–Fourth, Anderson point out what he calls “[a]nother significant defect of Nibley’s analysis”—namely, “its frequent high-handedness in dealing with testimony unfavorable to Smith. Rather than consider whether similar testimony from more than one person might indicate that what they report is true, Nibley often dismisses the topic with flippant and unsupported assertions.”

–Fifth, Anderson criticizes Nibley’s repeated charge that Smith is supposedly the victim of exaggerated hearsay by noting that Nibley makes that unconvincing charge through the use of selective quotations and historically uninformed assumptions.

–Sixth, Anderson notes that Nibley’s “Myth Makers” is “marred by numerous factual errors, exacerbated by “a tendency to suppress information potentially harmful to traditional interpretations of the Mormon past.” Anderson goes so far as to say that “Nibley’s suppression of vital information . . . seems intentional.”

–Seventh, Anderson debunks Nibley’s apologetics by arguing that it is burdened by “a lack of scholarly standards in evaluating sources.” In criticizing Nibley on this score, he notes that “[f]irsthand accounts are impeached because they are not consistent with anti-Mormon fulminations of a century later, and contemporary accounts of episodes in Joseph Smith’s life are discredited almost wholly on the basis of later secondary reports.” Anderson criticizes Nibley for his “indiscriminate use of sources [which] enables him not only to oppose witnesses with non-witnesses but also to introduce sources whose only merit is that they make others appear unreliable by comparison.”

–Eight, Anderson chides Nibley for his “failure to consider Mormon sources when they concur with non-Mormon accounts,” further observing that “’The Myth Makers’ tends to disregard context” driven by Nibley’s “earnestness to impugn the whole corpus of non-Mormon literature.”

–Finally, Anderson sums up his critical assessment of Nibley’s multi-leveled demonstration of unprofessionalism by writing that “Nibley’s method of analysis is arbitrary” and “only proves what no one ever thought of denying, namely that not all historical documents are of the same evidential quality.”

Concludes Anderson:

“. . . Nibley’s argument fails on every significant point. Illogic, unsupported speculation, specious charges, misrepresentation, factual errors, indiscriminate and arbitrary use of sources, disregard of context, and a lock of scholarly standards characterize the book advertised by its publisher as a ‘masterful expose . . .[of] the makers of myths who told their untruths about Joseph Smith.’

“If Joseph Smith’s neighbors are to be discredited, it must be on the basis of better evidence than that advanced by Nibley.”
_____

THE FUNDAMENTAL RELIABILITY OF THE AFFIDAVITS

Despite efforts by Nibley and other Mormon defenders to deny historical reality on the reliability of the affidavits in question, Anderson says:

“I believe that the testimonials collected by Hurlbut, [Arthur Buel] Deming, and others are in fact largely immune to the attacks launched by Nibley, Anderson, and others. . . . [T]here can be no doubt that these reports [from Hurlbut’s collected affidavits], in early twentieth-century German historian Eduard Meyer’s words, ‘give us the general opinion of his [Smith’s] neighbors in their true, essential form’” (quoted in Heinze F. Rahde and Eugene Seaich, trans., “The Origins and History of the Mormons . . . “[Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah, n.d., p. 4])

“ . . . [I]t is clear that a broader picture of Joseph Smith emerges from these early affidavits and interviews than is otherwise available from [Smith’s] family and followers.”

(Anderson, pp. 6-12, 14, 16-18, 20-22)
_____

WIDER SCHOLARY ASSEESSMENT THAT THE AFFIDAVITS ARE AUTHENTIC AND BELIEVABLE

Predictably, Mormon apologists have relied on their traditional limited circle of Mormon defenders in unconvincing attempts to repudiate the affidavits.

Anderson writes that because of “the questionable reliability of the Kelley report and the lack of credible testimony discounting the affidavits collected by Hurlbut and others, most scholars outside of Mormonism have tended to accept the non-Mormon side of the issue. The number of witnesses, the unanimity of their testimony, the failure to impeach even a single witness, and the occasional candid reminiscence by Martin Harris, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith,. Lucy Mack Smith, William Smith, Joseph Knight, or other early Mormons have contributed to the conclusion that Hurlbut and his followers were probably reliable reporters.

Citing the work of J. H. Kennedy, “Early Days of Mormonism . . . “ (New York, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888, pp. 17-18), Anderson observes that “[e]ven those who suspected that the witnesses against Smith may have been motivated by more than a simple desire to inform have not questioned the depictions of Smith as a basically self-seeking charlatan.”

(Anderson, pp. 6, 9)
_____

IN THE END, THE AFFIDAVITS HOLD UP

Anderson crystallizes his assessment of the affidavits reliability as follows:

–“First, I can find no evidence that the primary source affidavits and other documents collected by Philastus Hurlbut, Eber D. Howe, and Arthur B Deming are other than what they purport to be. The men and women whose names they bear wither wrote them or authorized them to be written. Ghost-writing my have colored some of the testimony, but there is no evidence that the vast majority of testators did not write or dictate their own statements or share the attitudes attributed to them.

–“Second, every contemporary attempt [in Smith’s era to impugn these accounts failed. Book of Mormon witness Martin Harris’s effort to prove Isaac Hale’s letter a forgery was contradicted by Hale himself. The attempts by Lucy Mack Smith and William Smith to exonerate the Smith family of certain charges were undone by the more candid admissions of friends or other family members. And RLDS apostle William Kelley’s report, designed to discredit Joseph Smith’s debunkers was itself discredited by many of those contacted by Kelley.

“The fact that these efforts resulted in impeaching not a single witness who testified against Smith, though many of these same witnesses were still alive and willing to repeat their testimony, supports the conclusion that the statements collected by Hurlbut and Deming can be relied on as accurate reflections of their signers’ views.

–“Third, with the possible exception of Peter Ingersoll, there is no evidence that the witnesses contacted by Hurlbut in 1833-34 and Deming in 1888 perjured themselves by knowingly swearing to a lie. In fact, existing evidence goes far to substantiate the recorded stories. The harmony of the accounts, the fact that they were collected by different people at different times and place, and the sometimes impressive confirmations supplied by independent witnesses or documents never intended for public consumption discredit the argument that the work of Hurlbut and Deming contains nothing but ‘trumped-up evidence.’

–“Fourth, there is no evidence that the majority of witnesses indulged in malicious defamation by repeating groundless rumors. Many based their descriptions on close association with the Joseph Smith, Sr., family. They did not always distinguish hearsay from observation, fact from inference, but they generally state whether or not the source of the information is firsthand, and several witnesses provided enough information to demonstrate that much what was previously thought to be popular rumor about the Smiths was not wholly groundless.

“Having survived the determined criticism of Mormon scholars Hugh Nibley and Richard L. Anderson, the Hurlbut-Deming affidavits must be granted permanent status as primary documents relating to Joseph Smith’s early life and the origins of Mormonism.”
_____

THE AFFIDAVIT-SIGNERS’ FINAL ASSESSMENT OF JOSPEH SMITH

“In general terms, the Hurlbut, Howe, Deming and Kelley testimonials paint a portrait of a young frontiersman and his family, struggling to eke out a minimal existence in western New York, facing the discouraging realities of life on the margins of society.

“Intelligent and quick-witted, if not always a hard worker, Joseph Smith, Jr., had been brought up by parents who believed in angels, evil spirits, and ghosts; in buried treasures that slipped into the earth if the proper rituals were not performed to exhume them; in diving rods and seer stones, in dreams and visions, and that despite their indigent status, theirs was a family chosen by God for a worthy purpose. . . .

“Whether hunting for buried treasure or the ancient record of a lost civilization, neither Joseph nor his family saw any conflict between the secular pressures of earning a living, even by so esoteric a means as money digging, and a religious quest for spiritual fulfillment. If they could accomplish one goal by pursing the other, so much the better.”

“Nondescript and of little consequence until he started attracting others to his peculiar blend of biblical Christianity, frontier folk belief, popular culture, and personal experience, Joseph Smith was an enigma to his incredulous New York neighbors.

“For them, he would always remain a superstitious adolescent dreamer and his success as a prophet a riddle for which there was no answer.”

(Anderson, pp. 113-116)

For clarity, and to punish Kyle for being so mean as to actually try to make a mormon think about his beliefs, I’m coloring Kyle’s text red.

Kyle is my ‘theist’ corrospondent.

-Chat Begins-

Kyle:
Hello?

Dan:
Hello how can I help you today?

Kyle:
Hi Dan, where are you from?

Dan:
Hi

Dan:
I am from Washington State

Kyle:
Me too.

Kyle:
I’m in Kent.

Dan:
Oh I am from Spokane

Kyle:
oh, I see.

Dan:
Yeah I love Washington.

Dan:
Did you have a question I could help you out with today

Kyle:
So uh, I was wondering, based on a article I read this week… mormons were saying that They don’t practice polygamy anymore. Is that because polygamy is against church teachings?

Dan:
Yes polygamy is against the churches teachings.

Dan:
It is been outlawed for a very long time now

Kyle:
So would it be considered a sin to practice polygamy, in the mormon church?

Dan:
Yes and a very serious one. Anyone that practices polygamy is immediately removed from the church records and is no longer a member

Kyle:
So, if polygamy is bad, and a sin, even… why did the first leaders of the church practice it?

Dan:
You know I don’t know exactly why they did. I know that back then the Lord deemed it necessary at that time to practice it. Today that need has passed and the Lord has outlawed such practices

Kyle:
Hold on… are you saying that God deemed it necessary for his people to sin?

Dan:
No I am saying that throughout history God has instituted Polygamy to his people. Such is the cas in the days of Abraham and David and other Prophets. However, it is only at certain times. When the church first started the Lord allowed it but the Lord has

Dan:
since indtructed us to stop the practice

Kyle:
But you said that polygamy was a sin. I don’t believe that God would ever instruct his people to sin. I’m sorry, that’s just my belief.

Dan:
And that is okay. I am not say that the Lord is telling his people to sin. I am trying to say that at certain points in the history of the World God has instructed his people to participate in Polygamy and other times he has not

Kyle:
But you said that polygamy is a sin, so you are saying that sometimes God instructs his people to sin.

Dan:
Did he instruct Abraham to sin when he had multiple wives. No but then later he stopped the practice

Kyle:
Well, if polygamy is a sin, then I guess that’s another problem. But I wasn’t really asking about the problems in the bible. It just seems to me that mormon teachings are quite contradictory when it comes to polygamy.

Dan:
Well this is what I know. That the Lord teaches us through prophets. And I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet and at a certain time God instructed him to allow Polygamy.

Kyle:
So God instructed him to sin? (we’ve already established that you believe polygamy is a sin)

Dan:
Later God instructed the new prophet after Joseph Smith that Polygamy should no longer be practiced

Kyle:
Let me see… according to what I’m reading, the next 3 or 4 prophets also practiced the sinful act of polygamy.

Dan:
Sir I don’t understand your purpose in coming here. Are you just trying to prove that my church is wrong. If you want to know what we believe in Polygamy then I will tell you that we no longer practice polygamy. We haven’t for a long time

Kyle:
Prove it is wrong? I’m just trying to figure out why mormons now say polygamy is sinful, but then say it was not sinful before…. almost like you believe in a changing god.

Kyle:
Well, I’m sorry, I guess you never said it wasn’t sinful before. You seem to be saying that God sometimes orders people to do sinful things… is that what I would expect to see if I joined the mormon church?

Dan:
No you would see that we are led by a loving heavenly Father that looks after us through Prophets that reveal the truth to us.

Kyle:
How can I be sure that they won’t ask me to do sinful things, since they have done so, in your church, in the past?

Dan:
Well if they ever ask you to do something and you question it. I know through prayer you can know the truth and that the Lord will reveal to you what you should do

Kyle:
So if the prophet asks me to do something that God says in scripture is sinful, I should ask God if he is authorizing the sin?

Dan:
The prophet would never ask you to do such a thing but the Lord will tell you what you should do. The scriptures tell us that the Lord’s ways are not our ways. But also know that we can ask God what we should do and he will tell us

Kyle:
How can you say that the prophet would never ask me to sin, when in mormon history prophets have asked people to sin?

Dan:
Because I have personally followed the Prophets counsel today and never been led astray and I have felt the Lord’s guidance in my life continually

Kyle:
So because the prophet has never asked you to sin he will never ask me to sin? Is that what you are saying?

-chat abruptly cut off-

Poor Dan. Oh well, hopefully I gave him some stuff to think about.

-Kyle

This list was posted to the RfM board by “Lost”, and he found it from another source, linked below.

Facts: Mormons Wont Tell You When They Call at Your Door.
http://www.macgregorministries.org/mormons/facts.html

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that they believe your Church is wrong, your Christian creeds are abomination to God, and you pastor or Priest is a hireling of Satan.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that there is salvation only in their church – all others are wrong.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that those who have been through their temples are wearing secret underwear to protect themselves from “evil”. This “evil” includes non – Mormons like you.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU about their secret temple rites at all. If they did, you would spot them as non Christians immediately.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that they think “familiar spirits” are good, and that their Book of Mormon has a “familiar spirit”. Leviticus 19:31 says familiar spirits defile one, and are to be avoided at all costs.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that women receive salvation only through their Mormon husbands, and must remain pregnant for all eternity.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that they intend to be gods themselves some day, and are helping to earn their exaltation to godhood by talking to you.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that they intend to have many wives in heaven, carrying on multiple sex relations throughout eternity, until they have enough children to populate their own earth, so they can be “Heavenly Father” over their own planet!

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that you were once a spirit – child of their heavenly father, and one of his numerous wives before you were born on earth.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that the Virgin Mary really wasn’t a virgin at all but had sex relations with their heavenly father to produce the Mormon version of Jesus Christ

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that they believe Jesus had at least three wives and children while he was on this earth.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that the “heavenly father” they ask you to pray to with them, is really an exalted man that lives on a planet near the star base Kolob, and is not the Heavenly Father of the Bible at all.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that Jesus was really Lucifer’s brother in the spirit world, and it was only due to a “heavenly council” vote that Jesus became our redeemer instead of Satan!!

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that there are over one hundred divisions in Mormonism. They conveniently “forget” this while criticizing the many denominations within the body of Christ

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that all their so- called scriptures such as the Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, Doctrine and Covenants, and even their official “Mormon Doctrine” statements contradict each other on MAJOR doctrinal points. The King James Bible is likewise contradicted.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that the reason the Book of Mormon has no maps is because there is not one scrap of archaeological evidence to support it!

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that the state of Utah, which is predominately Mormon, has a higher than the national average of wife-beating, child abuse, and teenage suicide.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that their prophet Joseph Smith was heavily involved in the occult when he founded Mormonism.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that that they encourage visitations from dead relatives from the “spirit world”, a practice forbidden in the Bible. (Deuteronomy 18:10-12.)

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that there are many accounts of Joseph Smith’s first vision besides the one they present to you, and all are different

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that their secret temple oaths are based on the Scottish Rite Masons.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that before 1978 they considered the Negro race inferior, and even one drop of Negro blood prevented a person from entering their priesthood.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that they expect Christ to return to their temple in Missouri, but they haven’t built the temple He’s supposed to return to, because they don’t own the property. (It is owned by the “Temple Lot Mormons” who have plans of their own, and won’t let the Salt Lake City group buy it).

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that they consider the Bible to be untrustworthy and full of errors.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that Jesus’ death on the cross only partially saves the believer.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that that according to Anton Lavey’s Satanic Bible, the demon god of the living dead is called “Mormo”. Is it just a coincidence that the Mormons are so concerned with the dead?

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that on their Salt Lake City Temple they prominently display an upside-down star which is a Satanic symbol known as the Goat’s head. Why?

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that they believe the Archangel Michael came down to earth with several of his celestial wives, and became Adam in the garden of Eden.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that that they believe the angel Gabriel came down to earth and became Noah in the days of the flood.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that their Prophet Joseph Smith prophesied falsely many times. For example, he foretold the second coming of Christ for 1891. The Bible teaches that one false prophecy puts the prophet under death sentence. (Deuteronomy 18:20-22).

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that their Prophet Joseph Smith did not die as a martyr as they claim, but was killed during a gun battle in which he himself killed two men and wounded a third.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU about the Mountain Meadows Massacre in which they brutally murdered an innocent wagon train of settlers, of over one hundred men, women, and most of the children, traveling through Utah.

MORMONS WON’T TELL YOU that Joseph Smith taught that there were inhabitants on the moon, and Brigham Young taught there were inhabitants on the sun as well!

I won’t kill the blog, it will stay up,  and I will continue to monitor and respond to comments.

I may start posting here regularly again one day, but for now, the blog will hibernate.

I have taken my active anti-mormon proslytizing to twitter. You can follow my feed there: http://twitter.com/measure76 

It is easier to share articles from exmormon.org there, though they won’t get archived that way. But I think I’ve archived a really good sample here, and if I see anything that’s really new and interesting, I will come back to this blog and post it.

One more thing about my twitter feed… while primarily exmo-rantings througout the week, on NASCAR Racedays, and Seahawks GameDays, I’ll be twittering about those subjects.

One thing that is interesting to note is that I will be presenting more information about how the video has been made here, than has ever been made public to the church’s own members through official channels. I guess if you want to learn more about the church, sometimes anti-mormon websites are your best bet.

Without further ado, here is the information:

Temple Move Production Memories

by “One who was there”

name witheld

The first of the ‘newest’ temple films was made in 1988,
entirely on stage at the LDS Motion Picture Studio in
Provo, Utah.

Before going into production, the studio built a complete
film processing lab in order to avoid outsiders seeing the
footage when the film was processed. It was an
astronomically expensive undertaking, and for a number
of years afterward they kept the lab running to process
church stuff, but eventually the costs WAY outweighed
the benefits, and they have since shut it down (smart
since everything is moving digital anyway).

The entire studio was dedicated by Hinckley as a Temple,
and no one was allowed on the lot without a recommend.
I think once both projects were done it was assumed the
studio was “un-dedicated” since no one came back to
remove the official designation as a “temple.”

The original concept and design of the “heaven” set was
completely different from the one you see in the movie.
In the original version, the set consisted of three elliptical
shapes, covered in gold shiny material, stacked on each
other against a void of stars. When the set was
completed and camera tests were done, it looked too
much like Star Trek and the set was scrapped, and
replaced by the painted ‘marble’ columns that exist in
both versions of the film.

The second film, made in 1990, was partially filmed on
state at the motion picture studio, and partially filmed
out on location.

The logistics of filming such a secret project on location
were staggering. In order to get the best light, we left
for location VERY early in the morning, would take a long
break in the middle of the day, then resume filming in the
afternoon. the hours were horrendous. There was so
much tension on set. Everyone was constantly on edge,
and tempers flared all the time. It was the closest I have
ever come to quitting a show in my career, because the
vibe on set was so terrible.

At the time, everyone felt it was “the adversary” trying to
prevent the film from being made. In retrospect,
however, I think it was that the energy was just not lining
up. I was constantly being yelled at for no reason my my
immediate supervisor. Everything that could go wrong,
did.

Some scenes were filmed on a church-owned ranch on
the Utah-Wyoming border. The ranch was so vast you
could look horizon-to-horizon and see only church
property. It was a cattle ranch, and one day a stampede
of mad cows came crashing through base camp, sending
us all running to the trailers for cover.

We had code-names for all the characters so that anyone
picking up our walkie-talkie broadcasts would have no
clue what we were doing. Adam and Eve were referred to
as “Jack and Jill” and Peter James and John were called
“The Three Bears.” We nicknamed the film itself
“Chronicles.” God and Jesus were “the shiny guys.”

The scripts, wigs, and other props were kept in a large
vault (pretty much exactly like the big bank vaults you
see in movies) and every morning we had to count every
page of every script to make sure none were missing;
scripts were never set around anywhere but were always
in someone’s personal possession; at the end of the day
we again went through every copy of every script to
count pages. (Forget that anyone could have taken a
script to the copy machine down the hall and made 50
copies; no one really admitted that at the time!) But it
was almost freakish how terrifically important we all
were. You would have thought Armageddon was on the
verge of happening if we slipped up on one thing.

We filmed the altar for Adam and Eve on a private ranch
here in Utah, but when we made contact of course no
one told the owners what film it was. One morning after
we had built the set but before we started filming, we got
a call from the owners, completely unhinged and upset
because they had found a stone altar on their property
and thought we were doing satan-worship!! At that point,
the church told us to let them know about the project so
they would not freak out again. That location was awful;
deep mud everywhere, and we had to make new roads to
get our equipment to the set. Then of course the
helicopter was a nightmare, because of the wind it
created….

The couples playing Adam and Eve in both films were
required to be actual married couples. For one of the two
films, the couple were literally whisked home from their
honeymoon by church officials who wanted them to play
the roles in the film. I thought it was bizarre that it was
so urgent they literally had to end their own honeymoon

early — but of course, having covenanted to give
everything to the church, they were thrilled. The set
was, as you can imagine, VERY modest.

As I mentioned before, the first film was done all on
stage, with everything created from scratch. The art
department spent HOURS gluing fake leaves to the tree
branches to create the garden of Eden. And the huge set
backdrop for the heaven set was outfitted with thousands
and thousands of fiber-optic lights to create the ‘stars’.
Behind the cyc, there were rows of projectors supplying
the light to the tiny cables, which were stuck through
little holes in the back of the cyc. This was a NIGHTMARE
to create and maintain. A few years after the films were
done, they were finally removed. (Of course today the
stars would be digital effects, not physical creations on
set.)

The funny thing is, before we went into production,
Gordon B. Hinckley came to the studio and gave a
fireside, in which he instructed everyone involved to
never divulge the behind-the-scenes stuff of the films,
because it would ‘ruin the experience’ for temple-goers.
But no sooner were the films ‘released’ than the animal
wrangler on the films went all over the place doing
firesides, talking about the role of the animals in the
films, and told some stories I never recognized from the
production!!! All in the spirit of testimony-strengthening
embellishment, I suppose!

All in all, I can say it was a wild adventure. And we
thought at the time we were practically deserving of
exaltation for making God’s Greatest Movies Ever. But
when we prayed for good weather and it was a downpour

instead, no one got mad at God for ignoring us, or for
letting Satan drench us in his anger. It just made us all
the more determined.

Instead, I’ll share a Lesson SpongeBob SquareGarments shared on RfM, from he was recently asked to teach a LDS Sunday School Lesson to some teenagers: