Re: Captain Moroni unfurled the title of liberty to fight Kingmen

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Posted by: Cold-Dodger ( )
Date: January 07, 2021 12:20PM

Captain Moroni unfurled the title of liberty to fight Kingmen

If Captain Moroni were real and alive today, he would have stormed the Capitol to evict the people who stormed the Capitol today, not to join them. There is footage of a Mormon man waiving a white flag with the title of liberty written thereon at the incident yesterday. “In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children.” (Alma 46:12)

I realize that since I’ve left the church my opinion will be discarded out of hand by the people who need to hear it most, but I have to say as one who grew up Mormon and took it all seriously, seeing a Mormon flying the title of liberty at the incident yesterday is a perversion of that sacred symbol. Captain Moroni would have marched on Washington to evict the people who seized the Capitol, not to join them.

In Alma chapter 46, there was a man called Amalickiah. “And Amalickiah was desirous to be a king; and those people who were wroth were also desirous that he should be their king ; and they were the greater part of the lower judges of the land, and they were seeking power. And they had been led away by the flatteries of Amalickiah, that if they would support him and establish him to be their king that he would make them rulers over the people.” (Alma 46:4-5)

It was to fight this dangerous man and his deluded followers who were seeking to overturn the Nephite constitutional system of government with a cult devotion to a single man and his version of reality that Moroni rent his coat and wrote the title of liberty upon it.

The Nephite nation-state is akin to America in many ways. Clearly the book intends the history of the Nephites and how they eventually fell to be an allegory for the United States. The Book of Mormon says again and again that if we turn from God and Jesus, we will eventually be destroyed. But it does not prescribe theocracy to keep this from happening. Instead, it channels an early 19th century Christian version of American patriotism to constitutional government and the Bill of Rights that it provides. The Nephites had a crude First Amendment, if you will. Obviously they didn’t call it that, but in Alma chapter 30, it states that the law could have no hold on such an one as Korihor, an atheist who it says was seeking to destroy the church and promote hedonism, just for preaching his words because there was freedom of belief throughout all the land. They would eventually bind him anyway, but they were infringing on his guaranteed civil liberties as they did so. If they were true to their own political values, they would have had to let him preach as long as he didn’t break the law in deed “for there was no law against a man’s belief.” (Alma 30:11) The Book of Mormon prophecies destruction when the day finally comes that the Christian religion deteriorates among the Nephites, but there was to be no coercion of men’s souls to make them “choose the right.” The last righteous king of the Nephites set up a system of judges that answered to the voice of the people, a constitutional system that guaranteed certain liberties for all men, “that this land may be a land of liberty, and every man may enjoy his rights and privileges alike...that the burden [of keeping the people in the right way] should come upon all the people [instead of their king and/or other leaders], that every man might bear his part... that every man should have an equal chance throughout all the land; yea, and every man expressed a willingness to answer for his own sins.” (Mosiah 29: 32-38)

I have written in the margins of my copy of the Book of Mormon a note comparing chapter 46 in Alma about the title of liberty to the war in heaven. There were two sides in the war in heaven, the side that opposed the liberty necessary for man to make choices and act for himself and the side who defended that liberty because it was God’s plan for man to choose his own fate. Captain Moroni may be likened unto the premortal Jesus who raised some version of the title of liberty in the life before and drew all the elect from the four quarters of heaven to his banner to fight for their God and the liberty he wanted for his children. People came out of the woodwork happily tending their garments and excited for a chance to prove their worthiness to God in an environment where they were not compelled to do such. No one who loves these stories doesn’t want to be on that side.

Thus we see the profanity and corruption of these symbols and these allegories when they are used in an an attempt to intimidate the legislative body that represents the will of the people in order to keep them from seating a duly elected leader as is their duty to perform. To profane a symbol means to turn it on its head, to use it for the opposite of which it was intended when it was told and for the opposite reasons of which it became sacred in the first place. To corrupt a symbol is to render it meaningless by using it for other purposes and to have other meanings that compete with and eventually replace the original. To keep the symbol sacred means to set it apart in such a way that these things cannot happen. The title of liberty, while a symbol of Christian virtue against the forces that would destroy it, is specifically a call to Christians to uphold a civic duty to oppose the enemies of a free society. Those who hold different views and who, according to your beliefs, may cause our eventual downfall with their views are not the enemy here. A man is free to believe what he wants and to act according to his conscience, because the law of the land guarantees us that right as long as we defend it from Kingmen or from other forces that would subvert the liberty and constitutional order of the land for power and lust.

That’s all this insurrection yesterday was: a bunch of Kingmen breaking and entering the Capitol to seat Amalikiah on the judgement seat for another term to satiate his ego despite having been told by a vote of the people to give it to another. This profanes the title of liberty. This also corrupts the title of liberty, for now it associated with all the other crazy nonsense that was seen and heard on that day.

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Posted by: josephssmmyth ( )
Date: January 07, 2021 12:29PM