Here's a link to a guy, similar to Joseph Smith, but in our time. This is how it should have gone down:

https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/crime/2018/10/10/nixa-crime-illegal-circumcision-teens-polygamy-sister-wife-telemarketing-scam/1538578002/

If only history would have been different...

Makes me dizzy to think of such a thing.

I ... i... better ... go lie down ...

What a stupid pastor. The New Testament explicitly states that circumcisions are no longer necessary. Like Joseph, he wants to drag the Old Testament laws back into the modern world.

My life would have been spared decades of misery had Joseph gone down early in the game, before he got so much hero worship.

IRL, it was the Best exit for ChurchCo for Joe to die the way he did, "martyr" & all.

If that hadn't happened, he might have been proven a fraud...

and especially for the Brigham Young gang. It does kind of make you wonder if some of Joseph Smith's "friends" and "colleagues" on the inside helped ensure that the martyrdom would happen.

Quite a convenient thing that all of the Smiths who could have taken over after Joseph Smith all died around the same time--Hyrum right alongside JS and then Samuel not long after (after being "cared for" by Hosea Stout, Briggy's attack dog).

Of course, after Joe and Hy were done away with, Sam obviously had to go because he was opposed to polygamy.

One thing I'm sure of is that we only know a fraction of the intrigue and skulduggery of those guys. Just ponder the fact that they were all members of a secret club, with secret handshakes, secret "new names" and took bloody oaths of secrecy to protect their secrets. Is it too much of a stretch to think that Brigham "Blood Atonement" Young and his henchmen took those things seriously?

Brigham and several of the others were also proud Freemasons. So they were members of at least two different secret societies. Who knows what was said and done behind closed doors and in dark wooded areas after the Nauvoo Expositor published its expose on the polygamy club?

Was there concern among other members of the club after Joe was arrested for destroying the Nauvoo Expositor that he may end up being a chatty Cathy, revealing all their secrets?

Did Brigham and Heber, et al, worry that Joe would try to save his own position by coming up with a new "revelation" to cancel polygamy and throw the rest of the club members under the bus (kind of in the way that Wilford Woodruff did about 60 years later)?

That's good Wallace, I have never fully realised that the Smiths all died at about the same time.

Did the pastor believe his claims? If so, that is one major difference between him and JS.

Yet another fake "pastor" committing crimes.