Posted by:
Wally Prince
(
)
Date: September 04, 2019 02:35AM
I realized a few decades ago that my faith, the religion I was born into, was probably quite problematic and disreputable.
What helped put things in perspective was the realization that any intellectually honest person looking at the life and deeds of Joseph Smith should be seeing not just a few red flags, but an entire sea of red flags.
In other words, it is easy to formulate a large number of very simple, straightforward, brief declarative sentences concerning the founder of the religion I was born into, that are each well-supported in the historical record and, for all practical purposes, can reasonably be regarded as historically factual statements, with each such historically factual statement by itself being enough to raise huge, bright red flags in the mind of any sane and well-adjusted individual.
Just a few examples of such short statements:
(1) Emma looked into the barn and saw her husband, Joseph Smith, having sex with Fanny.
http://josephsmithspolygamy.org/plural-wives-overview/fanny-alger/(2) Joseph Smith put the rock into his hat and then pressed his face into the hat, claiming that the rock was showing him the correct translations of inscriptions that were on a set of golden plates that he had placed elsewhere for safety and concealment.
(3) Joseph Smith asked God to tell him whether it was okay for Joseph Smith to have marital relations with an unspecified number of women other than his wife Emma, who was still living and to whom he was still married...and God told Joseph Smith that it was more than okay. It was a commandment.
(4) Joseph Smith claimed that God had revealed to Joseph Smith a very important set of guidelines intended to safeguard and improve the health of the members of his church. Unfortunately, the set of guidelines did not provide any ideas that were not already being discussed and circulated in society at large and, more unfortunately, in its misguided emphasis on favoring cold drinks, rather than hot, the guidelines appeared to be based on a complete lack of knowledge about the germ theory of disease transmission and therefore failed to advise the members of the church to boil their drinking water and frequently wash their hands with soap as an economical and efficient way of preventing the transmission of deadly diseases.
(5) Before being selected to be the Prophet by God and Jesus, and before being led to buried treasure (in the form of golden plates) by a being who glowed in the dark and claimed to be someone who had lived for a time in Joseph Smith's area about 1,400 years ago, Joseph Smith claimed that he had a magic rock that gave him the ability to help the locals find buried treasure. Unfortunately, even though he could frequently help them find the exact location of the buried treasure, there were invisible ghosts and spirits (whom only he could see) that had the power to make the buried treasure slide away further underground and out of reach.
(6) Joseph Smith claimed that he had learned some special handshakes and passwords that spirits would need to possess after they died in order to enter heaven. He also had the inside information on the type of underwear that you needed to wear in this life in order to be found worthy of entering heaven.
(7) Joseph Smith told the general public that he did not believe in plural marriage and had no involvement in plural marriage...at a time when he was in fact secretly introducing and practicing a doctrine of plural marriage, based on a "revelation" he claimed to have received, and then he went and destroyed the printing press of the Nauvoo Expositor, a newspaper that seeking to report the truth about Joseph Smith and the practice of polygamy. Very prophet-like.
(8) Joseph Smith bought some old Egyptian papyrus writings and a mummy and claimed that the writings were the "Book of Abraham" written by Abraham himself, even though they have since proven to be nothing more than very common funeral texts used in accordance with Egyptian funerary customs and have zero connections to Abraham.