“You are left to your own devices to figure out what is going on with Joseph Smith and polygamy. The next step is to figure out what that means theologically. What does it mean, for example, that the prophet of the restoration married 14-year-olds and other people’s wives?”That's easy - it means I'm never getting married again, Romney ain't getting my vote, and all y'all crazy. Easy.
Instead of answering the questions about how the Book of Mormon was translated VS. revealed and why Smith had to use a hat, they present the Book of Mormon as proof for, you guessed it, the Book of Mormon. Jensen admittedly bases his life on a feeling. Turley quickly adds that there are some historical things about the Book of Mormon, but fails to offer any examples of historical proof.
Folks, this is dangerous. My wife and I once talked to a Mormon who taught history at one of the local universities here in San Antonio. We asked her if she taught her classes to investigate history the same way that her Church tells her to find truth. When she admitted that she didn’t, I expressed my concern over using a method for testing the truthfulness of the most important part of her life when she doesn’t trust that very same method for secular history. It simply doesn’t make any sense to pray about the historicity of an event and take that “answered prayer” as a reason for belief. If there are historical proofs for the Book of Mormon, then present them. Whether or not the Book of Mormonism is from God is another issue, but if the book cannot even be proven to be a work from antiquity, then it does not deserve our faith. An objective faith needs just that, an object. With the Bible we have literally thousands of manuscripts as evidence. Not so with the Book of Mormon. All we have there are golden plates that cannot be seen. We are just supposed to take the word of a man whose face was in a hat and who didn’t even use the supposed golden plates in the “translation” process.
In the last 10 or 15 years, he said, “the church has come to realize that transparency and candor and historical accuracy are really the only way to go.” The church has released seven volumes of the papers of Joseph Smith and published an essay on one of the most shameful events in church history, the Mountain Meadows massacre, in which church leaders plotted the slaughter of people in a wagon train in 1857.
But the church has not actively disseminated most of these documents, so when members come across them on Web sites or in books, Mr. Bushman said, “it’s just excruciating.”
“Sometimes people are furious because they feel they haven’t been told the truth growing up,” he said. “They feel like they were tricked or betrayed.”
Mr. Mattsson said that when he started sharing what he had learned with other Mormons in Sweden, the stake president (who oversees a cluster of congregations) told him not to talk about it to any members, even his wife and children. He did not obey: “I said to them, why are you afraid for the truth?”
When The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints fully implements its new online missionary program, it will - if nothing else - at least minimize the occasions in which a firearm is brandished to ward off a pair of Mormons.
Elder Joshua Limb and Elder Beaver Ho Ching have some experience with that. Both missionaries, who have served Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana for the past two years, have looked down the barrel of a shotgun while out spreading the word about the Mormon church. But those days may soon be over.
Officials with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints announced late last month that the practice of sending its young missionaries door-to-door should come to an end.
Leah Remini’s Friend, TV’s Michelle Visage, Says Scientologists Are “Scattering Like Roaches”
My 1970s California childhood was filled with violent faiths and death cults in a decade feeling the hangover of the Summer of Love and suffering the fallout of the nuclear family. I was five when Charles Manson was sentenced to life for the murders committed by his Family of former hippies, pretty girls whose minds had been opened and broken. I was in Junior High when the bodies were discovered in Jonestown, the jungle commune in Guyana where Reverend Jim Jones had hoped to build a new Eden. I will never forget the shape of them, lying flat and embracing, all having drunk poison punch at his command. I wondered how it was possible to have such faith, such all-consuming, passionate awful faith that you would follow such a leader, however charismatic he was.
The history of American faith is filled with charismatic leaders, eager to change the world and to destroy it. In a nation founded by religious radicals in search of freedom, we are raised to believe and raised to protect the right to believe at all costs. The faithful pushed their wagons into the empty west, missionaries and prophets spreading the word, building utopian societies with a violent certainty. The Mormon pioneers irrigated and settled an uninhabitable land of salt lakes. Their communal, utopian church would split over the practice of polygamy, which stood in opposition to the government and statehood. The recent raids on the fundamentalist Mormon Yearning for Zion Ranch of Warren Jeffs in Texas reminds us of the history of secret societies, with young women in pioneer dresses, trapped in cycles generations old, of men who must have multiple wives to attain the highest levels of heaven, a tenet of faith revealed by the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Joseph Smith.
In a post-war world, our faiths have turned darker and deadlier. We have grabbed hold of our freedom with both hands. Urbanization has led to isolation, to a rootless people in search of connection, estranged from the families that might have cautioned them or saved them. New cults formed in cities with followers drawn to a range of new gurus, Sun Myung Moon, Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi, “Fathers” Yod and David “Moses” Berg, Werner Erhard and his Est. All have been accused of a range of abuses, sexual, physical, mental, financial. Groups were made through abduction and maintained through brainwashing. New Age communes developed on the fringes, where charismatic men gathered harems and drugs provided the only escape.
We’ve had a couple of posts about the Church of Latter Day Saints, and conversation has naturally turned to the founder, Joseph Smith. He’s a fascinating character, by turns a con man and a sincere prophet. But to understand Joesph Smith requires understanding the world he was born into. That means understanding one of the oddest and most influential regions in American religious history: the Burned Over District.
The Burned Over District is a nickname given by 20th Century historians to western and central New York. It comes from a quote by Charles Finney, the father of American revivalism, who explained in the 1870′s that the region had seen so many revivals in the previous decades that it no longer had any more “fuel” (the unconverted) to “burn” (convert).
…Many of these pioneers were still in an in-between state amid the medieval world and the Enlightenment. As one historian put it, they were “literate but not learned,” and they possessed many superstitions and beliefs in what we would now label as “occult.”
Few areas of the United States have seen the flowering of as many diverse enthusiasms and social and moral reforms as blossomed along the old Mohawk Trail and the early Erie Canal in New York State in the nineteenth century. As settlers poured into what had been the traditional lands of the Iroquois Nation, experiments of all kinds of a religious and of a social nature found a haven in these new lands. At one religious extreme were the celibate Shakers at Sodus Bay at Lake Ontario and then in Groveland in the valley to the east of the Genesee River, or the semi-celibate followers of Jemima Wilkinson, the purported re-incarnation of Christ in female form. At the other end of the social, religious, and moral scale was the creation of the Perfectionist Oneida Community where a form of free-love was established under the control of a Committee of Elders.
In between these extremes, the religious effervescences gave the name of "The Burned Over District" to western New York. Just as a forest fire can sweep all before it, the religious and reforming urges swept their way across the Ontario Plain between Albany and Lake Erie, changing the religious and social approaches to life. There was, for example, Charles Grandison Finney who led the emotional religious revivals which affected town after town and village after village in the 1820s and 1830s. Next were the followers of Charles Miller who accepted his reading of the Bible to look forward to a day in October of 1843 when Jesus would re-appear and the End of Time would be at hand. Although time did not end in 1843, a new Adventist group of sects did develop from this prediction, and they continue to expect the imminent coming of the Day of Judgment in our own times.
Another aspect of the religious impulse made manifest was the advent of the Mormon faith when the semi-literate Joseph Smith was told by the angel Moroni to unearth the golden plaques buried on a hill outside of Palmyra, New York, plaques which he claimed he deciphered from the "Reformed Egyptian Alphabet" to create a new religion. On a more secular note, outside of Rochester two young girls announced that they could communicate with the dead through knockings on the tables or the walls or the floors of the room in which their séances were held, a discovery which would lead to the Spiritualist Movement, now centered in Lily Dale in western New York. A form of Perfectionism inspired various groups to become as perfect as their Father in Heaven. On one hand this lead to the religious conversions at church or camp meeting revivals, or, at another extreme, to John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the Oneida Community, who realized that he was free of sin and he and his disciples could never sin again, come what may, and thus they were free to enter into Complex Marriage where all in the Community were free to express their sexual love for one another.
All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few, except the elect have seen it or at least taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me. It is such a pretentious affair and yet so slow, so sleepy, such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print.
If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle. Keeping awake while he did it, was at any rate. If he, according to tradtion, merely translated it from certain ancient and myteriously engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone, in an out of the way locality, the work of translating it was equally a miracle for the same reason.
Mr. Romney’s ads are mostly boring. It’s kind of an achievement to be boring at a moment in history like this, so credit where it’s due: That musta taken effort!
Their best guess is that Martha has fled a dodgy boyfriend, and she herself releases no further clues. Her conduct, however, hints at more than heartbreak. It is one thing to ask them, “Is it true married people don’t fuck?,” which might be no more than the provocative pose of youth; to climb into bed beside the married couple while they are making love—as Martha, schooled in group sex, naturally does—signals an insolence of another order. “That’s not normal, it’s private,” Lucy cries, and her verbal confusion pulls us toward the clever core of the movie. The easiest option, which would have produced a nifty horror flick but little else, would have been to build an ideal, love-warmed nest of the bourgeoisie and then, as in “Fatal Attraction,” have it invaded by shrieking demands from without. The effect of “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” on the other hand, is to peck away at what Lucy and Ted would claim as their well-earned happiness. Even the tiniest gestures on Martha’s part—opening a can of beer and tossing the ring-pull aside, or trying on a dress and dropping the hanger for Lucy to pick up—are invested with something more warped, or more scornful of our regular habits, than simple sloppiness. Ted never makes a definite move on Martha, but you can sense the squirm of desire within him, and when he solemnly informs her, “We are trying to have a baby,” her laugh—rich, robust, and mad—slaps him into a look of wounded panic. She already has a family, ready-made. She may have slipped its grasp for now, but not for good. When, at a low ebb, she calls the number of the farm, speaks briefly, then slams down the phone, somebody calls right back.
