Posted by:
The 1st FreeAtLast
(
)
Date: June 29, 2013 03:47AM
How odd!
In the LDS Church's Gen. Conference in Oct. 2002, then-president Gordon Hinckley told Latter-day Saints:
"We declare without equivocation that God the Father and His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, appeared in person to the boy Joseph Smith.
"When I was interviewed by Mike Wallace on the [CBS] 60 Minutes program, he asked me if I actually believed that. I replied, 'Yes, sir. That’s the miracle of it.'
"That is the way I feel about it. Our whole strength rests on the validity of that vision. It either occurred or it did not occur. If it did not, then this work is a fraud. If it did, then it is the most important and wonderful work under the heavens."
Mormonism has always been a demonstrable fraud, a very 'inconvenient' reality that Hinckley and other senior church leaders have known for generations. For example, the church's collection of JS' writings - see the organization's Joseph Smith Paper website for details - revealed long ago that his First Vision stories were incongruous.
Disconcertingly, JS kept altering key details about the supposed seminal 'event' in Mormon history. He was 15, 17, and later, 14. He was in some place he didn't specify, then in his bedroom, then in a grove of trees. He had determined that all churches were wrong, then his later story, he wrote that he didn't know which sect to join, so he went to the woods to pray and ask God (and joined the Methodists in 1828 despite supposedly being told by Jesus Christ in early 1820 to join no religious sect/church because "all their creeds were an abomination"!).
In JS' earliest recounted First Vision narrative, he said he'd dressed in black, rode of black horse to a specific location (during the astrologically-important autumn equinox), and there met a shape-shifting amphibian guarding a chest with gold plates in it. After magically turning into a man, the creature/being struck JS, knocking him "three or four rods" (fifty to sixty-six feet), and told him that he hadn't obeyed his "orders."
That "true", occult-heavy version of JS' First Vision didn't resonate with the locals in upstate New York, so he concocted another 'faith'-promoting theophany to launch supposedly "restored" Christianity. However, in JS' first First Vision interview with researcher/writer Peter Bauder in 1830, he failed to recount any "Christian experience."
Two years later, JS wrote that he'd had a vision in which he saw Jesus Christ - but he didn't mention any other "Personage", i.e., Heavenly Father. Still, his latest First Vision tale corrected his earlier mistake during the Bauder interview of not relating a "Christian experience." Who was going to listen to a 'prophet' who said nothing about having one?!
A couple of years later, the official First Vision narrative stated that JS was 17 and in his bedroom when an angel visited him (no mention of going to the woods to pray, suddenly being overpowered by an unseen, malevolent force that caused him to become mute, or the "two Personages" floating above him among the trees, however). In that "true" First Vision story, the angel told JS about gold plates and their location.
Then in 1838, the year in which JS targeted George Harris' wife, Lucinda (and illegally made her his 2nd plural wife) and members continued to leave the Church of God (the Mormon organization's official name back then) in large numbers due to the lingering effects of the collapse of the fraud-based Kirtland Safety Society 'bank' that JS had launched in late 1836 and continued to lied about in 1837, Mormonism's "prophet of the Restoration" created his latest First Vision myth, the one that subsequently became "the miracle", as Hinckley put it, and official, "true" Latter-day Saint history.
To understand the legitimate reasons for people's anger at the chronically dishonest and manipulative LDS Church, we mustn't forget JS' work of fiction, The Book of Mormon. He lied and claimed in March 1842 that it was an "important and interesting book" in which "the history of ancient America is unfolded, from its first settlement by a colony that came from the Tower of Babel at the confusion of languages to the beginning of the fifth century of the Christian era."
Scientific research throughout the Americas since the 19th century has thoroughly discredited the purportedly "true" BoM, the "most correct of any book on earth", quoting JS, and the "keystone" of the Latter-day Saint religion.
How many people have been systematically deceived by the habitually dishonest LDS Church during the past 6-7 generations? More than 15 million.
How much money has been defrauded from unsuspecting Latter-day Saints since 1830? An estimated $200 billion.
Bear in mind that the grossly unethical Mormon Church has routinely indoctrinated millions of members to believe that their "eternal salvation" has partly depended on them handing over to the church at least 10% of their allowance (during childhood), money gifts, wages, salary, pension(s), inheritance(s), and other forms of financial increase.
Where has much of the money from duped Latter-day Saints gone? According to one of the Mormon Church's senior executives quoted in a Deseret News report on Nov. 17/06 - Laurence Stay, vice president of Ensign Peak Advisors Inc., the church's wealth management company - EPA traded "billions of dollars" of financial securities (e.g., stocks, bonds, credit derivatives) "every day" to generate money for the church.
While the LD$ Church's Ensign Peak Advisors Inc. made hordes of cash for the financially secretive religious-corporate organization, Latter-day Saints were told that the church couldn't afford custodians and members would have to clean chapels (for free). Also, the missionaries' meager budget to pay for groceries and basic personal care items was cut.
But - somehow - the LD$ Church DID manage to scrape together billions of dollars to spend on its City Creek Center commercial real estate development in Salt Lake City.
Let's now take a moment to remember the thousands of hoodwinked converts to Mormonism, JS' religious fraud, who died crossing the plains, naively believing they were going to "Zion" to become part of "the kingdom of God on earth."
And we shouldn't forget the deceived missionaries who have been sent to violent and impoverished Third World countries and suffered from malnutrition, diseases, parasites, and widespread filth.
Or missionaries who have been attacked and killed, all in the name of spreading "the Gospel", the multi-billion-dollar LD$ con that continues to dupe millions of unsuspecting people in more than 100 countries.
The sooner the fraud of Mormonism is exposed, the better.