The Trinity Exposed

The following article is brilliant, but I must admit I swiped it wholesale from an associate’s sacrament meeting talk some time ago. I have however, expanded and editorialized it here to a length not even a visiting high councilman could hope to achieve.

The author has no objection to me riffing on his talk but prefers not to be immediately associated with this blog inasmuch as it delves highly into what is intended to be “opposition research” or “devil’s advocacy.” I press the edge way too much for his personal walk with Christ, at least publicly. He feels there’s a time and place for even the harsh examinations I give our common faith, but maintains that they are not always appropriate out in the open marketplace of ideas, where enemy idiots might abuse such reasonings, and the feeble of testimony might be shaken in their ignorance or perhaps honest stupidity. I note this in fairness to him.

Of course, I’d counter that with the assertion that the very object of my musings is to eliminate the ignorant, teach the weak how to think for themselves and avoid being stupidly misdirected by those LDS detractors of clearly superior wit, knowledge, and debatably, greater wisdom.

I’m not here to sign you up. I just want you to understand that Mormons are no more crazy than any other religious sect and far less crazy than many, including “orthodox” Christianity. They certainly have been much less dangerous to themselves and others than “historical” Christianity. And on the other hand, I don’t want to burst your bubble brothers and sisters, but the Kingdom of God on Earth is run by idiots just like you and me. If you think the “Church” is all a bed of Celestial roses, sooner or later you’re going to be very disappointed–or worse yet, you’ll be the pompous, pious, Ward Jerk who exports himself out into the real world somewhere, drives away thirty or forty investigators a year and sends half the ward into inactivity with their Utah-culture buffoonery while wondering all the time why their heated and productive missionary efforts aren’t amounting to anything because they aren’t retaining most of their new baptisms.

I consider my work here to be a form of literary autism. I write as if delivering my message from the cockpit of an intellectual and often spiritual go-kart made out of a couple of apple crates joined via used nails to a rickety wooden frame held up by worn out buggy wheels. Every time I sit at the keyboard, I push this rig the top of the highest hill in the neighborhood, shove off, and roar down the middle of the road just to see what happens. I expect only to manage basic steering. I don’t dare use the brake because it’s just a stick nailed to the side rail that drags the ground and it would only bust loose if pressed too hard. I rely on luck to make it to the bottom intact, to avoid cars, bicycles, and pedestrians. My only end-game strategy is to find a clear spot where the feeble brake will slow me enough that I can drag my feet as a last resort. If that doesn’t work I bail out, tuck and roll. I can’t guarantee the ride won’t end abruptly at the base of a large tree, or with the wheels shearing off on the curb across the intersection below, leaving me and my muse skating across some cranky neighbor’s lawn and into their rosebushes. If I don’t like the last ride, I have an inexaustable supply of gravity, and old buggy wheels are free. I can always drag the wreck back up the hill, bang it back together and try again.

(You may suppose this has the experiential ring of more than just a random analogy pulled off for colorful illustration, and you would be correct.)

The following talk has been highly sanitized and Mormonized, but it’s based upon several of my previous articles in this blog, two of which are the following:

http://lrwhitney.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/what-christians-have-always-believed/

http://lrwhitney.wordpress.com/2011/04/09/all-hail-the-protestants-part-6-born-in-the-usa/

If I had to give one reason why I call myself a “Mormon” or member of the LDS Church with all its faults, this post would  be it. My friend made my primary case better than I could have, and said it without pissing anyone off, something I seldom have the patience or interest to master. So here’s proof that my theological output can be presented in a form not inherently offensive to Christianity in general, or the very Mormons I hope to educate about it:

The Godhead

Two years before his martyrdom, the Prophet Joseph Smith wrote a letter to a newspaper editor, John Wentworth, who asked Joseph for a brief statement outlining the basic tenets of the “Mormon” faith. In response, Joseph Smith authored what we now call the “Thirteen Articles of Faith.” The first of these states:

We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.

http://mormon.org/articles-of-faith

But then again so does every other professing Christian denomination. If that were accepted throughout Christendom as the simplest declaration of a Christian understanding of the Godhead, there would have been little need for a Restoration movement at all. The belief in the Father, Son and Holy Ghost has been the first and foremost, fundamental Christian doctrine from the beginning of the Church. The belief in, and understanding of these three divine characters, and their relationship to mankind is the basis of the entire religion. It has also been the central issue in all of the most heated debates, even open warfare over what is or isn’t “orthodox” and what is or isn’t “heresy” particularly in the early centuries of the Church.

One of the earliest attempts to define, assemble and harmonize a “catholic,” or “universal” gospel after the death of the Original Apostles, was made by a group of saints the Church came to call the “Apostolic Fathers”—saints in leadership positions who were left behind in the wake of the typically brutal murder and fatal persecution of Christ’s chosen successors like Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, James, and the rest of the New Testament authors.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01637a.htm

http://www.goarch.org/resources/fathers

http://www.theopedia.com/Apostolic_Fathers

Contrary to popular belief, none of the New Testament was written directly by the various Apostolic authors of the texts it includes. There are no “Original Autographs,” of these Biblical texts, as religious scholars call them, meaning texts written by, in the hand and language of the New Testament Gospel writers. When scholars or clergymen refer to the “original Greek,” they are referring to records allegedly, and at the very earliest, written down by the “Apostolic Fathers,” not the Original Apostles, and not in Aramaic or Hebrew, or other languages many of the original authors may have used, or even Latin, but writings at best dictated into, transferred to, or recorded from memory in Greek, the scholarly language of the times. Though we now think of Latin as a scholarly language, or the language of the Church, the first Latin Biblical texts were actually called the “Vulgate,” from the same root as “vulgar,” meaning common, and so-called because Latin was considered the vulgar or common tongue of the average citizen of Rome.

The earliest New Testament manuscripts then, are in Greek, and these are at best copies of the Original Autographs, at worst paraphrases, and date from decades or more after the passing of the Original Apostles who tradition alone claims to have authored them.

http://www.tecmalta.org/tft105.htm

http://www.crivoice.org/autograph.html

http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/bibleorigin.html

And again, contrary to common belief, there was never a smooth and timely decision as to which books should be included in the Bible. It took over a century before anyone even bothered to start picking and choosing through the available writings. Every church had its favored books, official use of any given text was decided bishop-by bishop under local authority only, and since there was nothing like a clearly defined universal orthodoxy until the 4th century, there were in fact many simultaneous literary traditions. The grand claims we hear today about “what Christianity has always believed,” are made plausible only because the church that came out on top simply preserved texts in its favor and destroyed or ignored and “lost” opposing documents. And then of course, chose to translate what they canonized into language crafted to best bolster their preconceived “traditions” and “orthodox” understanding of the apostolic teachings. Christian “orthodoxy” was in this fashion, ultimately written by the victors of centuries of theological, political, and military warfare.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/NTcanon.html

http://www.sumtercatholic.org/files/Pages/BibleStudy/Bible_Canon_Timeline.pdf

http://staff.jccc.edu/jbacon/readings/meetingjesus/BibleTimeline.htm

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/a/canon.html

http://www.bible-researcher.com/canon.html

http://www.westarinstitute.org/Periodicals/4R_Articles/canon.html

The assertion that the King James Bible was “inerrant” complete and perfectly preserved and essentially ghost-written (Holy Ghost-written) through Divine Providence was nearly universal in Joseph Smith’s day. This notion has been greatly disabused by the ample availability of early manuscripts and the ease in which modern Bible scholars can compare all the historical translations to the oldest manuscripts. Unfortunately, even though today’s translators can rightfully claim they have produced cleaner and far less editorialized Biblical texts, there still rages in many Christian quarters the contention of Biblical “inerrancy,” and this mostly connected in the US, with such assertions about the King James Version.

The Lutheran take on this controversy is probably the most well-thought out. Lutherans by-and-large, though not universally, maintain that only the Original Autographs are inerrant. That way they can profess a theoretical allegiance to “inerrancy,” while at the same time equivocate every passage of the Bible word-by-word under the license of the Good Book only being atranslation of an inerrant text, and notin and of itself inerrant.

The greater body of Christianity has drifted into this more-or-less Lutheran view of the Bible. But Christianity has yet to deal with the ideological repercussions of the Lutheran approach to the issue of Biblical inerrancy. The companion claim in the Biblical inerrancy doctrine, is that the Bible is also “complete.” This demands that everything necessary for man’s salvation and good order be contained therein, and not one jot or tiddle more or less did God find necessary or helpful to preserve in order to work His will with mankind.

With the confession that no Original Autographs are known to exist, there remains the possibility that this is just ignorance on our part and they may at some point turn up. And also, there is the equal possibility that there might indeed be previously unknown manuscripts out there, some day to be discovered, also written by the Original Apostles. What if these new, hidden gospels contradict “orthodox” thought on any number of issues? What if some of the Original Autographs show up and differ significantly in various key theological areas from the earliest surviving copies in the “originals” (note of sarcasm there…) we now have only in Greek?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_inerrancy

http://christforus.org/Luther%20and%20Biblical%20Infallibility.pdf

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&cad=rja&ved=0CHcQFjAH&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wlsessays.net%2Ffiles%2FBeckerLuther.rtf&ei=YhIAUeaYFoT0qQH

qs4CoBg&usg=AFQjCNHG9wnpSgATTa9mxFT4FdcfWfW4dQ&sig2=P7YfNm3RHj

ctqzcQLrpfAg&bvm=bv.41248874,d.aWM

Most Christian sects have long abandoned any future possibility of new apostolic writings turning up. “Divine Providence” has taken care of the canon. It’s closed. It’s complete as-is. The Original Autographs are declared lost to time and wear. Were a letter in the hand of Jesus Himself to be unearthed today, all of “orthodox” Christianity would by current Christian dogma and Church tradition, as a matter of faith, be forced to reject it, however clear its provenance and authentication.

So, today, most of Christianity is amenable to the idea that while the surviving manuscripts from which we assembled our current canon, were Divinely inspired and preserved through Divine Provenance, there is noabsolute guarantee of their preservation of the original authors’ intent and specific language. The vast majority of Christian bodies today in this matter, agree soundly on the assertion that neither the King James Version or any other translation in any other language from any other era, is without unwitting error, or in the worst cases, political, ideological, social, scholarly, and theological manipulation, gatekeeping, or editorializing.

(In short, they’ve gradually come around to agreeing with Joseph Smith.)

Due to this hodge-podge, early canonical disorganization and translational or interpretational controversies that roil somewhat even today, in the first century after the death of Christ and His apostles, the Apostolic Fathers began to hear in the Church, a growing disagreement on the basic nature of the Christian message. In reaction to the “Great Commission” <http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+28%3A16-20&version=NIV>  and the need to present a concise, unified gospel message to the world, there emerged what is now called the “Apostle’s Creed.” Before we even had a New Testament, this was the first attempt in the post-apostolic Church to define a universal statement of faith:

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary, Suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was crucified, dead, and buried: He descended into hell; The third day he rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost; The holy Catholick Church; The Communion of Saints; The Forgiveness of sins; The Resurrection of the body, And the Life everlasting. Amen.

(Church of England Book of Common Prayer 1662)

http://www.creeds.net/ancient/apostles.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostles’_Creed

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01629a.htm

If you understand the vocabulary, the Latter-day Saint would have little problem at all accepting that statement of faith.

Joseph Smith’s 13 Articles of Faith, the Church of England’s 39 Articles of Religion that he used as a format, and similar stabs at chartering formal Christian creeds arise out of this early, post-apostolic tradition of trying to condense sometimes complicated history and theology into concise, encapsulated summaries. In the case of the Apostles’ Creed, legend has it that the Apostles gathered together and wrote it down for posterity on the tenth day after Christ’s ascension into heaven. That’s clearly not possible however. But each of the elements found in the creed can be traced to statements found in the Original Apostles’ writings and Church tradition of their period. The earliest written version of the creed is probably the Interrogatory Creed of Hippolytus (ca. A.D. 215). The current form is first found in the writings of Caesarius of Arles (d 542).

Some have suggested that the Apostles’ Creed was spliced together with phrases from the New Testament.] For instance, the phrase (“he descended into hell”) echoesEphesians 4:9, ” (“he descended into the lower, earthly regions”) in the Greek text. This phrase and the reference to the communion of saintsare articles found in the Apostles’ Creed, but not in its original form, called the “Old Roman Creed,” nor were these included in the Nicene Creed which later took on the issue of Father, Son and Holy Ghost more specifically.

The name of the Apostles’ Creed again, came from the  5th-century tradition that, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit after Pentecost, each of theTwelve Apostles dictated one statement of Christian faith to add to it, and thus it is traditionally divided into twelve articles. The title,Symbolum Apostolicum (Symbol or Creed of the Apostles), appears for the first time in a letter from a Council inMilan  in about 390: “Let them give credit to the Creed of the Apostles, which the Roman Church has always kept and preserved undefiled”.[3][4]

But what existed at that time in the Roman Church was not what is now known as the Apostles’ Creed. Instead, it was a shorter statement of belief that, for instance, did not include the phrase “maker of heaven and earth”, a phrase that may have been inserted as late as the 7th century.[5] So though ancient Church fathers may have contended that even this first, simple creed has been preserved “undefiled” from its beginnings, the Church’s own records prove otherwise.

The Apostles’ Creed was in any case, well based on Christian theological understanding of the 4 Canonical gospels, the letters of the New Testament and to a lesser extent theOld Testament. It does not however address some issues defined in the later Nicene and other Christian Creeds. For instance, it says nothing explicitly about the divinity of eitherJesus or of the Holy Spirit.

Even today, disputes over the wording of the Apostles’ Creed live on in the various Christian sects. For example, the creed is either altered or footnoted in some Lutheran circles due to its clergy replacing the word “catholic” with the word “Christian.” These sects claim that “Christian” in the ancient text reads “catholic,” meaning the whole Church as it confesses the wholeness of Christian doctrine.

http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/creeds/apostles.htm

The Church of Denmark  is one of several Lutheran, Reformed or Protestant sects that still uses the phrase “We renounce the devil and all his works and all his ways” as the beginning of this creed, before the line “We believe in God the Father Almighty etc.” That added preface to the Apostles’ Creed survives intact in the Roman Church tradition as an integral part of adult baptismal vows, and is observed in a question-and-answer format that then goes on to break the Apostles’ Creed down into a call-and-respond format. In Roman tradition, infant baptisms require these vows to be made in proxy by the child’s sponsors or usually, Godparents.

http://www.stisidore-yubacity.org/faqbaptismvows.html

Some Christian sects dispute the phrase “descended into hell,” preferring “descended to the dead.” The LDS notion of Christ visiting “Spirit Prison” is not out of harmony with the actual language of the creed however and the typical Mormon probably has a far better understanding of what that line means than all of orthodox “Christian” academia.

Christianity remains to this day split on the opinion of just who the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are, who or what Jesus Christ is in relationship to these other two Biblical characters, and how mankind dovetails into the whole Divine scheme of things.

Even those of you born and raised as Mormons along the Wasatch Front will probably know that in 325 the Roman Emperor Constantine ordered a council of regional bishops to convene at Nicaea to squelch a rising unrest in his growing Empire. In Constantine’s day, the name “Christian” was in reality a dirty word hung on the early saints by their Roman oppressors. Rome had persecuted them viciously for centuries. Then on the eve of a great battle (or so you may have been taught) Constantine had a vision of a great crucifix in the sky, under which the words “By this sign conquer” appeared.

But that’s not quite what the record shows. The ancient Christian scholar Lactantius tells us that the emperor fought and won this battle in the name of Christ after having a dream in which he received instructions to print the Christian monogram (looks roughly like the letters X and P printed on top of each other) on his troops’ shields. The historian Eusebius, who had Constantine himself as his source, says that the monogram appeared in the sky along with the motto: “By this sign, conquer”.

http://www.roman-empire.net/decline/constantine.html

http://christianity.about.com/od/symbolspictures/ig/Christian-Symbols-Glossary/Chi-Rho.htm

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cybaea/62443014/

Among other things, we learn from all this that if you dig a little deeper into the history of the Church itself, even the Roman Church as we know it today, its own records indicate that the crucifix, and certainly one with an effigy of Jesus hanging from it, was not originally used by the early Christians as a logo or banner of worship.

The Roman Church sometimes claims the Christian Monogram is a “P” for “Peter” or “Petros” (the rock) with a cross laid over it. Sometimes the “P” is drawn these days like a shepherd’s crook to reinforce that notion.

But in reality, it’s the two Greek Letters Chi and Rho, nothing to do with “P” as we pronounce it. More like a K and an R sound. These are the first two letters of “Christos.” They were overlayed to abbreviate His name as was a common custom then for all monograms. It was often enclosed with a circle. It was this monogram that Constantine painted onto his army’s shields to conquer the world in the name of Christ, most decidedly not a crucifix. And next time you are criticizing the abbreviation of “Christmas” as “Xmas,” keep in mind that so did the early saints. X is another abbreviation of Christos, based on its first letter in Greek, and used to avoid printing the name of God, a holdover from Hebrew tradition.

Having conquered the world however, and assuming the role of ruler of the Christian people, Constantine soon discovered that there were a lot of versions of Christianity, and they didn’t all get along with each other. The solution to these inter-Christian feuds he thought, was a refinement of the disorganized processes that had produced the rather vague Apostles’ Creed, or “Roman Creed” in his day. He wanted hard and fast rules on what was “orthodox” or “standard” or essentially “catholic and universal.” Thus, after a season of debate, in 326 the council at Nicaea issued what we now know as the Nicene Creed.

After a year of arguing over the Greek word “homoousios,” and debating if Father, Son, and Holy Ghost were entirely separate or just manifestations of God’s character made out of the same substance, the Nicene Creed pretends to define once-and-for-all, the true nature of God for all Christian faithful. It is the beginning of what “orthodox” Christianity still calls, the Great Mystery of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or, the Mystical Nature of the Godhead:

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

The Lutheran Book of Worship

The Book of Common Prayer (Episcopal)

http://www.creeds.net/ancient/nicene.htm

It’s important to note that the bishop of Rome, who we all now know as “The Pope,” didn’t even appear at the Nicene Council. He sent a routine delegate to observe, and history records no particular input from him. The “Pope” did not preside at this conference that would define Christian orthodoxy because at that time the bishop of Rome was just one bishop out of many. Though an important post, the bishop of Rome had no binding authority outside his own diocese, the equivalent to an LDS stake, and was making no claim to any right of central authority over the council. The Emperor Constantine had demanded the conference, and his delegated bishops from Alexandria, in Egypt, and nearby regions ran it, not the “Pope” as we think of the structure of the Roman Church today. (Nicaea is in modern Turkey and called Isnik. Rather a ways off from Rome.)

http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2007/03/pope-silvester-and-council-of-nicaea.html

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11044a.htm

The Nicene Creed didn’t stop the bickering however, and it took over 50 years of dissent just to enforce its universal adoption into the Western Church. In fact, what really happened is the original creed and its language became so lost and obfuscated with editorial variations it was necessary to convene another council in Constantinople in 381 and entirely re-compose the statement of faith, into what we now have today, beefing up the proto-Trinitarian nature of God, the divine nature of Jesus, and the role of the Virgin Mary. This is one of many harsh realities that is very rarely mentioned and almost unknown in “orthodox” Christian circles. Everyone talks of the Nicene Creed and the council of 325-26 that produced it. But that paperwork was all lost. What we now call the “Nicene Creed” was actually reconstructed from memory amid much quibbling over what it really used to say, in 381 in Constantinople, the city built by the emperor to be the center of political power in the new Christian “Rome.”

http://www.christadelphianbooks.org/agora/art_less/h13.html

http://www.jesustheheresy.com/nicene-creed.html

Though the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 381, was able to produce nearly universal agreement East and West on a basic Christian creed, the body-and-fender work done in this fashion to hammer together an “agreeable” statement wasn’t enough for many of the Western Church’s driving personalities. Having gotten most of what it wanted after re-working the original Nicene Creed, with this victory, the Roman or “Western” Church set about drafting what was supposed to be the more precise and undebatable language of the Athanasian Creed, which took the concept of unifying the Father, Son and Holy Ghost so far that it defined them clearly as a single entity.

This then, was the birth of the now allegedly “universal,” or “catholic” Christian concept of the Holy Trinity. The Triune God. And also the root of the first major schism of the Christian Church into Eastern and Western “orthodoxies.” The entire Eastern Church split off after centuries of friction in 1054, for among other things, disagreement with the use of the Greek word, homoousios, which was translated to mean “of one substance,” in the several Nicene Creed versions, and then rationalized to ridiculous extremes in the Athanasian Creed:

1. Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith;

2. Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly

3. And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;

4. Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.

5. For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit.

6. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.

7. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit.

8. The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Spirit uncreated.

9. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.

10. The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal.

11. And yet they are not three eternals but one eternal.

12. As also there are not three uncreated nor three incomprehensible, but one uncreated and one incomprehensible.

13. So likewise the Father is almighty, the Son almighty, and the Holy Spirit almighty.

14. And yet they are not three almighties, but one almighty.

15. So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God;

16. And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.

17. So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord, and the Holy Spirit Lord;

18. And yet they are not three Lords but one Lord.

19. For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity to acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord;

20. So are we forbidden by the catholic religion to say; There are three Gods or three Lords.

21. The Father is made of none, neither created nor begotten.

22. The Son is of the Father alone; not made nor created, but begotten.

23. The Holy Spirit is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.

24. So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Spirit, not three Holy Spirits.

25. And in this Trinity none is afore or after another; none is greater or less than another.

26. But the whole three persons are coeternal, and coequal.

27. So that in all things, as aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.

28. He therefore that will be saved must thus think of the Trinity.

29. Furthermore it is necessary to everlasting salvation that he also believe rightly the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

30. For the right faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man.

31. God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and man of substance of His mother, born in the world.

32. Perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.

33. Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father as touching His manhood.

34. Who, although He is God and man, yet He is not two, but one Christ.

35. One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of that manhood into God.

36. One altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person.

37. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ;

38. Who suffered for our salvation, descended into hell, rose again the third day from the dead;

39. He ascended into heaven, He sits on the right hand of the Father, God, Almighty;

40. From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

41. At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies;

42. and shall give account of their own works.

43. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.

44. This is the catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully he cannot be saved

http://www.ccel.org/creeds/athanasian.creed.html

http://talkingdonkey.wordpress.com/2005/05/22/the-athanasian-creed/

http://witness.lcms.org/pages/wPage.asp?ContentID=1036&IssueID=56

After beating the Triune God concept to death line after line, the Athanasian creed drifts back into familiar territory a while in attempting to define an orthodox “Christology,” as it became called amongst Christian scholars and clergy, making Jesus both man and God, which even in Mormon terms was perhaps worth some effort. But in the context of the many paragraphs reiterating the Trinity concept, inserting a fourth concept of a Triune God, who one-third of which was also 100% mortal, the Athanasian Creed doesn’t really clarify anything.

The most important language changes in the Athanasian Creed compared to all previous creeds, is the introductory and summary lines demanding that all self-professing Christians confess and embrace this creed else they are damned to hell and anathema to the Church.

For what it’s worth, the Eastern Church mainly wanted to specify that the Holy Ghost proceeded only from the Son exclusively, not the Father. It’s splitting hairs a bit perhaps, in light of the surrounding absurdity of the other circuitous Athanasian language, but if you’re not following this, I submit you’re not supposed to follow it. It’s a mystery. It’s beyond human reason to comprehend the nature of God. That’s the operative theory here. The Trinity is a philosophical construct, not a rational, logical, or scientifically sound one. It is a metaphysical concept, not reality. You were never meant to understand it. Because God is incomprehensible to man, and functions on some other plane of existence.

And where did this type of thinking come from? Particularly: this insistence that all three personages of the Godhead must absolutely be made out of the same substance, or that this Triune entity must not have been created from anything. It didn’t come from a canon that hadn’t even been assembled and agreed upon yet.

The Triune God came from trying to reason out the references to three personages in the Godhead in the apostolic writings, against the “hard science” of Greek philosophers named Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. It came from a a branch of philosophy I call for clarity, “Perfect Being Theory.” In this mental exercise, these great pagan Western thinkers sat around for generations, trying to imagine what a perfect being, whom you could call “God” if you wanted to, would be like.

http://books.google.com/books?id=5m5z_caqDkC&pg=PA97&lpg=PA97&dq=Plato+if+it+is+conceivable+it+is+possible&source=bl&ots=a3wqQSbc7C&sig=gWZBzy9EVDqGC_DY3P19RAMc_kI&hl=en&ei=oZqYTaKzDcyL0QHNzInvCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Plato%20if%20it%20is%20conceivable%20it%20is%20possible&f=false

http://www.enotes.com/plato-reference/plato

Since the philosophers and logicians of the Greek Academic World had long decided that all matter was corrupt, the first “logical” conclusion made by their peers in the new Christian Church, was that God, the perfect being, could not therefore be made of matter. A perfect being could not be composed of imperfect matter, and this later evolved into suppositions about “immaterial matter.” Also, a perfect being could not be dependent upon sub-parts or particles of any sort. A perfect being must be of one substance otherwise it could be separated and diminished. It could also be changed in this fashion—something perfection cannot be capable of. If it was less than before, or more than before, or arranged differently than before, it is not perfect. Perfection cannot be capable of being less perfect, or a different sort of perfect. There is only one perfect and anything not exactly like it is not perfect. By this “logik” (Greek for ‘logic’) obviously there can also only be ONE perfect being.

A perfect being must be omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibus, omnidyne, omnidirectional and omnimax. Some surmised that the cosmos itself was this perfect being. And they went on and on from there into a number of highly illogical assumptions by modern standards, based on a very primitive understanding of the universe.

These later Church historians and scholars became known as the “Apologists.” Many argued against Plato’s view of God, but they were in the minority and were all excommunicated and most tortured to death, primarily for not taking a Trinitarian spin on the emerging canon. In a Church now being administered by professional clerics and scholars, all of whom were educated in the Greco-Roman or “Western” arts and sciences, the Trinity as these Church authorities explained it to themselves and their secular peers, was perfectly logical and made complete sense. More importantly, it was easily grasped as a very sexy philosophical construct, as they argued their new religion with fellow academics and scholars of the day.

What happened then at the Council of Nicaea, and all those that followed, is a group of Church academics getting together to homogenize the scraps of an incomplete canon with Church tradition and “science.” As they shuffled through these elements to sort out what it all really meant, they performed their doctrinal divination through a filter clogged by hundreds of years of Platonic and other pagan theories about what they should really be looking for in a really really perfect God. And sure enough, they clearly found Plato’s God in the apostolic and other historical Christian writings, exactly as they had predetermined to do, according to their rigid Greek philosophical and academic programming. Then they canonized those writings that supported this image, and sometimes conveniently lost or ignored the others.

The most important thing to note however, is that even in the modern canon, essentially all Christian doctors, practitioners, scholars and historians will freely admit that not only does the word “Trinity” never appear in any of the canonical texts, but the concept itself is also virtually foreign to the Bible as we profess it today. The Triune God is found in “church tradition,” not the canon of holy scripture, and Christian authorities have openly admitted that for some 1800 years. What? 1800? That’s short 200 years isn’t it? No, because in the first 200 years or so, really more like 300, almost nobody was talking about a “Trinity” in the Church, because it hadn’t even been invented yet.

The third big schism in the Church you may know, even if as I say, you grew up in Provo and were born and raised in the LDS faith, as were 99.8% of your friends and neighbors, so they were no help to you either, was the break-off of the Church of England from Rome in 1534. The Roman Church and a number of Protestant detractors still call the Church of England, the Anglicans, the Presbyterians, Episcopalians and variants associated with this schism, “Catholic Light.”

Here’s the Church of England take on the Trinity, found in its First Article of Religion:

There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

http://anglicansonline.org/basics/thirty-nine_articles.html

This is the Trinity statement Latter-day Saints are usually most familiar with. Again, the Platonistic concept of a perfect, and therefore immaterial God made of one inseparable substance (or oxymoronically, a non-substance) was transferred directly into the Anglican Communion from the Roman Church as a matter of unquestioned tradition because the concept was by then a thousand years or so old. (The Anglican Communion has no central structure or authority, that’s just what the circle of still-friendly branch-offs from the Church of England call themselves)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglican_Communion

Even if the Latter-day Saint could accept a formless, nonexistent God, one would be even more hard-pressed to accept an Almighty Deity without any “passions,” as described in the Anglican Creed. Again this is a function of Classical Theism. A Perfect Being is “impassible,” meaning nothing is capable of affecting it. Nothing in existence can physically, mentally, or emotionally disturb God. If our suffering made God sorrowful, God would be less than “perfect” because He was affected by lesser entities.

Fueling the English break from Rome, or rather, helping justify the English King Henry the VIII’s quest for multiple divorces, the second great Roman Church schism had already begun in 1517 on 31 October, what Lutherans and some others now call “Reformation Day.”

Was that a trick, or a treat? I’d say from the LDS perspective a little of each.

On that day, Martin Luther, the director of religious study at Wittenburg Castle Church, in Germany, tacked 95 complaints or “theses” about Roman Catholicism to the massive outer door of his church for all the world to see, and kicked off a wave of revolution and reform that reshaped the religious and political world for the next 500 years and more. The good reverend’s biggest complaint had to do with the notion of the Pope encouraging wealthy patrons to buy their way out of hell by making generous donations to the Church, called “indulgences,” which the professional clergy in turn just used to buy lavish accommodations and finance a life of luxury. But Luther had no intention of breaking away from the Roman Church, and never questioned the Trinity tradition nor the creeds associated with it.

Martin Luther also promoted for the Church, a replacement system of lay-clergy very similar to the modern LDS model, he called the “Universal Priesthood” that is now the main claim to authority of most Protestant clergies. Today it is usually called the “Priesthood of all Believers.” The Christian canon by his time had been fairly settled, and inasmuch as Luther was thoroughly disgusted at the institution-wide level of corruption, overt sin and greed, in his “catholic and universal Church,” he bolstered his argument against its professional clergy by claiming that the canon of scripture was the ultimate Christian authority, not the clergy, historical councils, or tradition.

“Sola Scriptura.” The Bible Alone.

The irony of this boast of course, from an LDS perspective, is that while rejecting the clergy, the history and tradition, some of the canon, and the basic authority of the Roman Church, Luther clung tightly to the Trinity tradition, and again, that’s all it was and all it remains. Luther in fact, sustained the principle Roman Church tradition, in spite of the notion being nowhere expressed in even Luther’s all-authoritative Bible.

http://www.gotquestions.org/sola-scriptura.html

The Roman Church still calls Luther’s whole “Bible Only” approach a blueprint for anarchy.

It must be said, that while claiming the ultimate authority of Biblical scripture alone, Martin Luther took exception to a number of books considered to be part of it. He had little use for the Old Testament at all, was a raving anti-Semite, and when he printed the first German Bible he took out Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation, and placed them in an appendix with a preface warning the reader that they were not very reliable or important. He also cut out the deuterocanonical books that filled the “400 Years of Silence” between the Old and New Testaments, and called them “Apocrypha,” meaning they were essentially just interesting reading but totally unreliable.

http://www.gotquestions.org/400-years-of-silence.html

http://www.templemount.org/0240.html

http://www.bible-researcher.com/antilegomena.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther’s_canon

Another one of the Reformation’s Sola Scriptura anarchists was a French lay-minister, or religious hobbyist named Jehan Cauvan. We know him in English as John Calvin. Calvin had little regard for Luther due to the latter’s monkeying with the canon, but took many of his other ideas to the extreme.

Calvin went on to invent most of what we in America know simply as religion. Calvin’s concept of a pure religion based entirely on Biblical texts, and the notion of purifying the corrupt Roman Church, soon produced in England a group known as the “Puritans,” who were ultimately driven out of England by a Church-State that was essentially Roman Catholic in every way except for the king demanding to be the prime religious authority and protector, rather than the bishop of Rome, or “Pope.” The Puritans found all of this objectionable and the King found their objections to be objectionable. They fled to Holland, found backing there, sailed to Plymouth Rock and the rest is history. Not the history you have been taught however. That’s subject matter for another time, but it must be said that the Puritans as it turns out, were not quite as dedicated to religious liberty as the spinners of American Christian history have led us to believe. Apparently they just wanted to enforce their own religious system using the same sort of oppressive Church-State tactics they’d experienced in England. This they did, armed with the political theology of John Calvin.

While we often snub the Roman Church for its obvious historical corruption and brutality, best exemplified in the Inquisition, John Calvin among other things founded one of the most abusive and repressive theocracies in Geneva Switzerland in 1541. It soon came to be called the “Protestant Rome.”

http://www.stephenhicks.org/2010/11/27/john-calvins-geneva/

http://www.calvin.edu/meeter/resources/servetus.htm

http://lrwhitney.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/all-hail-the-protestants-part-4-that-old-time-religion/

Calvin’s rise to power in Geneva is nothing short of baffling. At his first visit he irked the wrong social-movers-and-shakers, and was thus driven out and banished. He licked his wounds and eked out a living writing and giving religious lectures in nearby Strasbourg, till he’d built up quite a reputation and following. The sociopolitical structure that had banned him in Geneva fortuitously got turned around by a new crop of social climbers, this time filled with many who had heard and read Calvin’s lectures and thought him to be just the religious thinker to solve their law-and-order problems. Calvin was practically begged by Geneva’s new best and brightest, to return in glory and show them how to run a Godly city. He was offered a nice salary and home if he would do so.

Though leery due to his last exploits in Geneva, he did return and he was indeed received with open arms this time. Having no Church commission or clerical certification of any sort, he was appointed supreme Biblemaster and lawmaker for lack of a better title. The bible ruled Geneva, and Calvin ruled the Bible.

Calvin’s apologists like to claim he never directly supervised any of the atrocities committed by his word or decree, and like to dismiss the daily repression the population of Geneva labored under in his name as “typical of the period.” They excuse Calvin’s oppression, so they say, because he never had any official status as a civil or Church officer. In point of fact, anything Jehan Cauvan said to the combined Geneva Church/State city council was in practice law. Calvin in effect was commander of the courts, law enforcement, and the Church.

http://www.theopedia.com/John_Calvin

Ironically, during Calvin’s preliminary, “fleeing and being banished” phase, he was almost excommunicated for not adopting any Trinitarian dogma into the official statement of faith he initially drafted in order to recruit support for his Biblical empire.

http://lambonthealtar.blogspot.com/2013/01/calvinists-and-trinity.html

Calvin had embraced Luther’s Sola Scriptura concept with both arms, and frankly, he hadn’t seen any Trinitarian teachings in the Bible. If he didn’t see it in the Bible it wasn’t part of the Church. And for all his other faults, John Calvin at first perusal, did not see the Trinity in the Bible and so did not embrace it willingly and chose to pretend the issue didn’t exist. (Many modern Bible scholars will still admit Calvin’s first impression was correct.) When it became clear he would either die horribly or be unemployable and permanently impoverished, he conceded that the Bible didn’t preclude Trinitarian thinking.

http://bible-truth.org/Trinity.html

http://www.gci.org/God/3Biblehttp://www.gotquestions.org/Trinity-Bible.html

http://www.equip.org/perspectives/trinity-doctrine-is-the-trinity-biblical/

It was only in his second or third incarnation as a would-be religious reformer, in crafting the pitch that ultimately won him supreme control over the huge city-state of Geneva, that he surrendered to a vague acceptance of what he preferred to call the “Godhead” because that term actually was in the Bible. And even so, Calvin usually bypassed the issue of what either that term or the “Trinity” exactly meant. Calvin’s writings on the subject of the Godhead are not any clearer than the Athanasian creed and hundreds of pages longer. His disciples and religious scholars today still debate what his feelings on the matter really were, or what his commentaries on it actually mean.

http://www.gotquestions.org/Godhead.html

http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Believer’s%20Corner/Doctrines/godhead.htm

http://www.shortercatechism.com/resources/whyte/wsc_whyte_006.html

All of which takes us back to Joseph Smith and the First Article of Faith. It is only after gaining a basic understanding of ancient Church history and the machinations that resulted in todays prevailing “orthodox” Christian, Trinitarian dogma, that we can come to a genuine understanding of the issues and religious environment in which Joseph Smith read James 1:5 and subsequently went into the grove to pray for an answer about which of church to join.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James+1%3A5-8&version=KJV

The Puritans may have landed first, but their former antagonist, the Church of England, was close on their heels, and was the first significantly organized Christian force to appear institutionally in the United States. In Scotland, Wales, and the US, remote from the central control of the English Church, the Presbyterians and Episcopalians split off originally just attempting to ignore or deny the acceptance of the King of England as supreme Church commander and Protector of the Faith. They held to Luther’s “Priesthood of all Believers” and maintained that they were free to form their own governing bodies, in the former, the presbytery, which is a council of elders, and in the latter, the episcopate, which is a council headed by a local bishop.

Eventually, the American, Scottish and some other Presbyterian or Episcopalian branches absorbed the Puritan ethic, and embraced Calvinism to the point where they were considered “Non-Conforming” and no longer under the blessing of Mother Church. The Presbyterians in particular became extremely attached to Calvinistic dogma.

Meanwhile, back in England, John Wesley, a staunch Anglican, joined up at Oxford with George Whitefield, mixed Whitefield’s stump-preaching skills and Calvinism with his own Anglican upbringing, swerved into Arminianism, organized a “Holy Club” on campus, worked out a methodical approach to living a holy lifestyle, and that too got sneaked across and sometimes driven over the pond by Church of England suppression, thrived in America’s religiously free environment, and finally, at the death of Whitefield, eventually lost most of its Calvinism, and became Methodism as it is known today.

At long last, the much persecuted Baptists came into their own when they moved into the liberty of the American frontier. They, like the Methodists, were also a product of Jacobus Arminius, the man who led the Reformation of Holland. The Baptists however, had been beaten up by nearly everyone across Europe, thanks to their haughty insistence on baptism by immersion and their persistent habit of telling the Roman, Lutheran, and Anglican State-Churches that their baptisms didn’t count.

Arminius studied religion in Geneva, following Calvin’s great reign of terror there. Taking Calvin at his word, he studied the Bible himself and then argued that Calvin’s doctrines of Predestination and Unconditional Election made God the author of evil and were un-Biblical. This conclusion developed into the now infamous Calvinist/Arminian feud reflected in Joseph Smith’s day between the Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists. The Methodists at the time took the middle ground, sidestepped most of the theological debate, and concentrated on being pious, healthy, well-studied and stoic. The Baptists and Presbyterians of the day however, went at it tooth and nail.

The Presbyterians claimed if you joined up it was Predestined and inevitable, you were one of the Elect, God had created you intentionally to be saved, and anyone else was not part of God’s election by God’s deliberate design. The non-Christian, the “Heathen Nations,” were created to burn in hell, and never would nor could be saved, and thus never will be. Free will was an illusion they argued. Mankind existed and prospered or failed entirely at the will design of God.

The Baptists claimed salvation was an “election of believers” and conditioned upon faith in Christ and an express confession of same. They believed they could save anyone they could get the message out to, and it was your duty as a Christian to go out and win for Christ all the damned souls you could call into the waters of baptism, anywhere around the world. They believed salvation was a choice mankind could, and most would make if argued enthusiastically enough, and thus salvation had to come through a deliberate act of faith by confessing Jesus as Lord and entering the waters of baptism to symbolize it.

The Methodists added to the Baptists’ message, that salvation was not fixed, entirely unconditional and irreversible, even for the devout. It was possible to “backslide” into damnation they argued, by falling into bad company, bad, habits, physical, mental, and thus spiritual sloth. Baptism was a big deal alright but Methodists remain noncommittal on defining a “correct” mode even today. Wesley from his Anglican background even held that infant baptism by whatever method held a spiritual value of some useful sort for the baptizee but, again, it wasn’t a sure lock to salvation. In contrast, he was very precise however on claiming that Cleanliness was next to Godliness. Hence, the Methodist emphasis particularly in Joseph Smith’s day, went well beyond “conversion,” and into rigidly enforcing a strict, “holy” lifestyle that would prevent a backslidden condition from developing.

http://umportal.org/article.asp?id=8268

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Calvinist%E2%80%93Arminian_debate

These are the questions for which Joseph Smith went to the Lord on his knees and begged answers. They had nothing whatsoever to do with the basic nature of God and in all truth Joseph Smith didn’t even know who he was going to be talking to when he kneeled down in the grove. Joseph probably never doubted or seriously questioned the Triune God common to all of those Christian denominations attempting to win him over. Joseph had a very simple question of which church to join in light of the sorts of quibbing interpretations of scripture the Calvinists, Papists, Arminians and the others were bickering over in his day. The answer he got to this mundane quiery, was a personal visitation from the father and son, preceded by a bracing battle between the Spirit of Darkness and his deliverer from same, the Holy Ghost.

http://www.lds.org/library/display/0,4945,104-1-3-4,00.html

A personal appearance from the Godhead was the answer to a question Joseph Smith didn’t even have the knowledge or wisdom to ask. Joseph was just looking to be pointed in the right direction. The entire Godhead appeared to warn him that the true  Church of Jesus Christ could not be found heading in any of the directions his religious recruiters wanted to take him:

The Lord says: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me us made up of rules taught by men.”

http://bible.cc/isaiah/29-13.htm

It may have been a long and convoluted literary journey, but I have struggled here to impress upon the reader just exactly what this one single passage of Biblical canon means, and why a reliable translation can make all the difference in understanding scripture. Connotation is everything, and I hope I have rewarded the reader with some small idea just who these men were, where they got their rules about the “Perfect Being,” they called the “Trinity,” and how they taught and enforced their human scholarship, science and philosophy, for generations, until human, academic “reason” had entirely superimposed itself over the canon and apostolic tradition.

The one thing all Joseph Smith’s “professors of religion” agreed upon was the Neo-Platonistic nature of the Mystical Trinity. But Plato’s God didn’t come to visit Joseph Smith in answer to his first uttered prayer. It wasn’t the Godhead of Athanasius, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Luther, Calvin, Arminius, Wesley, or any existing Christian tradition, that spoke to Joseph Smith in the Sacred Grove.

In Joseph Smith’s day the Roman Church was treated to nearly ghetto-like conditions at times and subject to general abuse almost universally among the American population. Most of America’s Christian population had fled the Old World to escape the domination of Rome in one way or another. Rome would have to take a back seat to America’s raging Protestantism and sometimes forcefully, brutally so for almost two centuries even after the signing of the Constitution granting all Americans religious liberty.

But while the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and others courting Joseph Smith’s loyalty universally condemned Roman Catholicism as corrupted, they ironically also held true to the image of the very Triune God that Plato, Constantine, Athanasius and the Roman Church’s “corrupted” authorities had trademarked in the fourth and fifth centuries.

The LDS belief in the “Godhead” and our understanding of it’s nature isn’t based on any of the historical Church creeds. How could it be? They don’t make any sense. They aren’t found in the canon. All they amount to is an agreement that the nature of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost is a mystery beyond the understanding of the human mind. God is incomprehensible and so unlike us, that as mere mortals that it doesn’t even bear pondering.

The LDS concept of the Godhead isn’t based entirely upon the Biblical canon either. It began in the Sacred Grove as direct observation, and developed in its fullest through modern revelation:

Although the three members of the Godhead are distinct personages, their Godhead is “one” in that all three are united in their thoughts, actions, and purpose, with each having a fulness of knowledge, truth, and power. Each is a God. This does not imply a mystical union of substance or personality.

Joseph Smith taught: Many men say there is one God; the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are only one God. I say that is a strange God anyhow-three in one, and one in three! It is a curious organization anyhow.

“Father, I pray not for the world, but I pray for those that thou hast given me…that they may be one as we are.”…I want to read the text to you myself–”I am agreed with the Father and the Father is agreed with me, and we are agreed as one.” The Greek shows that it should be agreed. “Father, I pray for them which thou hast given me out of the world,…that they all may be agreed,” and all come to dwell in unity [TPJS, p. 372; cf. John 17:9-11, 20-21; also cf. WJS, p. 380].

The unity prayed for in John 17 provides a model for the LDS understanding of the unity of the Godhead-one that is achieved among distinct individuals by unity of purpose, through faith, and by divine will and action. Joseph Smith taught that the Godhead was united by an “everlasting covenant [that] was made between [these] three personages before the organization of this earth” relevant to their administration to its inhabitants (TPJS, p. 190).

The prime purpose of the Godhead and of all those united with them is “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39; Hinckley, p. 49-51).

Each member of the Godhead fulfills particular functions in relation to each of the others and to mankind. God the Father presides over the Godhead. He is the Father of all human spirits and of the physical body of Jesus Christ. The human body was formed in his image.

Jesus Christ, the Firstborn son of God the Father in the spirit and the Only Begotten son in the flesh, is the creative agent of the Godhead and the redeeming mediator between the Father and mankind. By him God created all things, and through him God revealed the laws of salvation. In him shall all be made alive, and through his Atonement all mankind may be reconciled with the Father.

The Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit who bears witness to truth. The Father and the Holy Ghost bear witness of the Son, and the Son and the Holy Ghost bear witness of the Father (3 Ne. 11:32; cf. John 8:18). Through the Holy Ghost, revelations of the Father and of the Son are given.

(Author: Dahl, Paul E.)

http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Godhead

To this I’d like to add my testimony that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God, and that he restored the truth of Man’s relationship to God: That Our Father in Heaven is literally our Father, that we are all his children in and out of His church, that we are all brothers and sisters, of every race, creed and color, on every continent, and that we can all become like our Father in Heaven, and that his only begotten son, Jesus Christ was sent to redeem us from our sins and weakness and mistakes, and that we can know this is true through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

But most importantly, Joseph Smith restored to us the truth that God is not some intangible, incorporeal, incomprehensible being forever beyond our understanding. He is our Father in Heaven, and Jesus Christ is our brother, the Holy Ghost can be our daily companion, and we are all part of God’s family.

Gladys Knight (McDowell…)

I went to see the Gladys Knight (McDowell) Travelling Mormon All-Stars the other evening. Alright, they’re actually called the “Saints Unified Voices.” Or the “SUV Choir.” I’m on record as having openly bemoaned her union with the Latter-day Saints as the smothering of a great musical talent in a thick coating of unsalted bread and cream. I remember her main public apology for Mormon music going something along the lines of: “Well, I can learn to tone it down I suppose…” Thank God she didn’t–and I mean that literally.

Praise Jesus.

I’m not much of a gospel fan, not big on soul either, and I don’t care about a night train to Georgia or anywhere else. I didn’t go as a Pips groupie or anything. That whole Soul Train/Motown thing was just stuff they played inbetween the good songs on the radio when I was growing into my musical tastes. Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder, Dianna Ross and the hideous collection called the “Jackson 5″ and worse, in my musical world, just interrupted the Beatles, the Who, Led Zepplin, and of course, Sunshine Superman, Sky Pilot, Earsplittenloudenboomer and Inagodadaveda. I would do something else or change the station when Up Up and Away came on. Midnight Train to Georgia or Heard it Through the Grapevine was only something I suffered through when the family sat down to watch Ted Mack, Ed Sullivan, Flip Wilson or Helen Reddy. Those people are of course long vanished from the public mind, but not Gladys Knight. She’s still at it.

And then I got into British Isles folk rock, where there were strict no-jazz-no-blues rules. Eventually I entered my Queen phase with Killer Queen and the greatest rock band of all time’s first American release. But I digress. My point is, I have never been gospel or soul oriented, but I was familiar with all of it.  I knew Gladys Knight as a gospel and soul great, so as a music buff in general, and a Mormon curious about the whole African-American/Mormon relationship, I had to go just to see what it was all about. I just had to go see how Mormonism had killed her off–hoping of course that it hadn’t.

It hadn’t.

Sister Knight is a great evangelist and choir director, and her husband, William McDowell, certainly from a “guy” perspective, is an even better evangelist and public speaker. The program was musical, uplifting, entertaining, at times hilarious, and even the uptight midwestern, Scandihoovian audience eventually figured out it was OK to say, “Good evening” back at the orator when addressing or greeting the congregation. My inactive daughter who attended with me said if Mormon meetings were always like that she’d be showing up every Sunday again. Having been in choir in high school, she naturally couldn’t resist complaining about many of the women’s solo voices and the choir in general being strained and thin, but let’s face it: getting anything like a gospel choir sound out of a bunch of white folk from the local ward in Las Vegas Nevada is nothing short of miraculous. These were amateurs straight out of the whitebread Great Basin neighborhood, many of them now past their prime, all of them had just sung their guts out in a two-hour set, from the early show, and were in the heart of a long tour, indeed, a series of tours now going on for ten years. And remember, few of them for the most part grew up in gospel, jazz, blues or soul hotbeds like Chicago, Memphis, Harlem or the Delta, or were otherwise given the gospel voice from childhood. But it was a night of praise and worship, not a minstrel show with acrobats, pyrotechnics, and a dancing bear inbetween the songs to keep the rabble entertained. They they didn’t need James Brown to do the splits or Tina Turner to shake her booty. The SUV Choir got the job of singing God’s praises done remarkably well all by themselves–again, as I say, even for a bunch of white folk.

And a Hawaiian. And maybe a few very lightly tanned black folk. But really, it’s a ward choir from Las Vegas. I’m perfectly willing to give them a break on a few technical performance issues.

(However, the first soloist to step forward, looked just like Mike Hamar from the Red Green show…which I have to admit, did disturb me a bit. I kept compulsively looking at him throughout the whole concert after that. I just couldn’t get past the soulful whiskey-tenor coming out of the mouth of Possum Lodge’s resident pathological liar and habitual criminal.)

Gladys Knight’s troupe is everything the LDS missionary program isn’t, everything the Utah-withered, world-estranged LDS leadership doesn’t quite understand about the Good News any more, and everything you’d expect when the best of African-American and Mormon worship traditions are merged.

Let the Church say Amen.

http://desertsaintsmagazine.com/2006/12/01/gladys-knight-suv-choir-generate-referrals-for-lds-missionaries/

http://byutv.org/show/11b1a72c-95ec-483d-b87b-6e12db8dca5e

(Just a note of warning: The BYU Hawaii video linked above is a great introduction to the SUV choir, but the Mormons at BYU Hawaii sponsoring it manage to lecture and preach and sell and explain and disrupt the choir itself so much that it’s mostly a promo for BYU Hawaii–and wreaks of BYU Mo-Pix-era “Johnny Lingo” corporate film odor.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arOSmIwToPI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-aVoXeXw64

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KvIi0mOcVc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4UbBUgiRsc&feature=related

http://www.suvchoir.org/

Troubling Doctrines Part 3: Blood Oaths And Soul Theft

Mormon Temple Oaths

People universally hate anyone with a secret club they can’t join. That’s why Born-Again-types really hate Mormon temple worship. Lefties just hate anyone who thinks they’re so holy that they or anyone else off the street wouldn’t be just as holy as they are, and so again, are naturally appalled by exclusive orders with requirements and standards and boards of approval. Like country clubs, or executive washrooms, or hospitality suites at professional sports stadiums. So Lefties hate the temple as well. Really really hate it. Intellectuals hate religious orders with funny hats and quaint rituals because they’re too sophisticated for all that childish play-acting and secret-decoder-rings-sort-of-nonsense. So they hate the Mormon temple too. Perhaps many do not hate it so much as just scoff at the temple rites as a particularly silly Mormon endeavor. It’s a central focus of their mockery and paranoia for many reasons whatever the Mormon detractor’s motivation.

The fact remains that you can get essentially verbatim transcripts of everything that goes on in a Mormon temple off the web, or from numerous anti-Mormon travelling minstrel shows run by the Christian ministries that specialize in dressing up in silly costumes and trying to scare you into their fold, and frighten your money into their collection plate. You will not generally get it in-context, nor will you have any cultural or doctrinal basis through which to understand it in the same sense that a Mormon understands it all. More to the point, you will almost invariably receive whatever you scrounge up on your own or are made privy to even in the many formal anti-Mormon productions, either live or in the media of the trade, entirely out-of-context and deliberately so. Buzz words and code words and sound-bites and cheap shots will be neatly wrapped together in hysterical Christian bigotry and paranoia, and served up as a neat and deliciously frightening dish of Born Again bullshite. You will feel just all that much more special for being “Saved” and just all that much more thrilled to have uncovered yet another sinister conspiracy to lure mankind down to hell–that you’ve safely avoided by continuing to support whatever delusional bastard is giving you the show of your life instead of talking to any actual Mormons or trying to understand what they’re really all about.

One might be compelled to concede that Mormons are not “orthodox” Christians because they reject the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, reject the “Trinity” concept of God (as did John Calvin initially, because he found no particular evidence of it in the the Bible–until they beat Trinitariatism into his personal sack of dogma on pain of heresy charges, torture, and excommunication) or that the canon is not closed and God still talks to man directly through living prophets. One might conclude that even if it is conceded that their faith was well-meant, Joseph Smith and his legacy are self-deluded and far less inspired than they claim. But the “Christian” reaction to Mormonism has been one of extermination and continual aggression in this goal. So, yes the facts remain that it is extremely difficult to demonstrate that the Mormon movement was anything else but sincere, and it also remains that where there has been a Mormon tendency to “avenge” themselves, it has nearly always been openly in battles with actual mobs and rogue militias who actually were trying to kill them and steal their stuff. To be very clear, there are no “secret” Mormon death squads sneaking around in the dark, ready to kill you for recording and publishing, or otherwise exposing all the temple “secrets.” There never have been. No historical cases or other evidence would lead you to conclude so apart from dime-novels and partisan, Christian anti-Mormonist efforts of the day.  No so-called “Danite Bands” are going to ride up and slit your throat for browsing through all the Mormon temple rituals we find “exposed” on the web. Nevertheless, those who attempt to make their living at “exposing” these dark secrets, would have you believe that you and they both are risking life and limb to peruse all the deep, Satanic Mormon temple rituals.

So go ahead. Read up. Surf your arses off. See if anyone gets killed.

The temple is where the Mormon initiate receives and dons his so-called “magic underwear.” It’s part of the initiatory symbolic washing and anointing ceremony. Of course, in the ritual itself, no “magic” is actually ascribed to this “temple garment” apart from being a reminder of man’s dependence upon God and a spiritual protection from the Adversary. It’s the garment God clothed Adam and Eve with in the Garden of Eden.

As rituals go, there isn’t anything going on in a Mormon temple any weirder than you’d see at an Order of the Arrow or Eagle ceremony with the local Boy Scout Troop. Or take a look at a good Roman Catholic High Mass for that matter. The costumes aren’t any more silly than the Pope wears daily and in public—only the Pope has better slippers. The Mormon temple ceremony is called an “Endowment,” and consists of a sort-of lengthy skit during which actors, officiators, and in most cases now, video presentations tell the story of Creation, and point out the Mormon version of man’s relationship to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. In the course of this presentation, the temple patron is “endowed” with further light, truth and knowledge. Certain signs and tokens are given as a symbolic exchange of trust between Deity and humanity. You can think of these as “magic words,” and “secret handshakes,” if you want, but that really misses the point. There is no power or magic in any of these signs or tokens and nothing is lost at all if they are exposed to the public. The possession of these words and signs merely represents a sacred trust, a covenant made by the temple goer, to keep God’s gifts safe and use this enlightenment to build His Kingdom on earth and serve mankind.

There have been several versions of the oath the Mormon temple patron swears to through the years. This is a promise to keep the signs and tokens he or she is given in the temple ceremony private. The most alarming of these originally used language essentially professing that the covenanter agreed to suffer death through unpleasant means if they betray God’s trust. Mormon detractors have always made great theatre of these oaths, but of course have always twisted the actual language to claim that the Mormon temple patron is even today, consenting to have his guts ripped open and his throat slit if he ever exposes the secret Mormon goings-on inside that shrine. Like the Masons, these anti-Mormonists who work in the field of Mormon temple mockery, are almost gleeful when they explain how packs of LDS Avengers are stalking them down. Oddly enough, they and their ancestors have been exposing and exposing again, all these oathbound Mormon secrets for generations, and all of them seem to remain in fine health. For all the exposed secrecy, there is no string of gutted and throat-slit Mormon whistle-blowers littering the Holy Roller anti-Mormon Revival Highway. No, these religious quacks keep slithering from tent show to tent show, church basement and fellowship hall, dressing up in their magic Mormon underpants and temple robes, with complete impunity.

But of course, that’s because the Danites wouldn’t dare take them out—not with God on their side and such a public profile! It would give the Secret Mormon Death Squads away!!!!!!

Now, in the case of the these anti-“cult” evangelicals like to make against the Freemasons, these Christian Conspiracy Nuts will all tell you at some point in the Masonic rituals the candidate is told that Lucifer is the God of this earth, and of course specifically then, the God of the Masons. This you should know, is utter nonsense. The name “Lucifer,” or “Son of the Morning,” or “Star of the Morning,” or “Light Bearer,” actually refers to the planet Venus in those Masonic texts. Those traditions pre-date Christianity and really have nothing to do with the God v Devil scenario. But Christians have been burning witches for far less since day-one. So it doesn’t matter much what either Masons or Mormons actually make of their own rituals, traditions, and understanding of same. This is particularly true of the symbolic oath-taking in either a Mormon or Masonic, or any other ceremony. All that matters to the “anti-cultists,” is that a superficial word or symbol or sentence can be woven into their preconceived, universal, inter-leaved galactic conspiracy of Satan, the invisible matrix that runs every human institution and population on the planet—except theirs of course. Like the Mormon temple, every word of every ritual ever performed in every level of Masonry has been “exposed” and transcribed and is commonly available on the internet. The same evangelical clucks travelling around pissing on Mormons, are doing the same routine on the Masons, and a host of other likely-looking World Conspirators. Like the Jews–who also wear funny hats and goofy outfits, have a temple closed to outsiders and who at least at one time indeed performed bloody rituals in their temple.

And the whole truth is that anyone capable of going without the Big Three for a year or so (hot drinks, tobacco and booze) and sitting through the missionary discussions, can get themselves baptized, and will then find that the Mormons practically herd them into the temple at the earliest possible convenience whether they ask to go or not. Mormons are more than happy to show you all their “secrets” first hand whether you make any effort to worm your way inside or not. Now, if you freak out after your first time and just have to warn the world, or even if you just con your way in to take secret recordings so you can make the circuit with the many other traitors, turncoats, and spies that have populated the Born-Again vaudeville stages set up in church basements and fellowship halls throughout orthodox Christendom since before they killed Joseph Smith, the only consequences you are going to suffer are between you and God.

Danite Vengeance Oaths

As I write this in the heart of the presidential campaigns of 2012, on top of all the other Mitt Romney-related anti-Mormon attention in the liberal medial, the evangelical versions of these anti-Mormonist paranoids have furthered the notion that Romney may have sworn oaths of vengeance against the United States of America. No such oaths have ever existed however. The most “damaging” alleged oath was supposed to bind the Mormon to murdering and avenging the assassination of Joseph Smith by slaughtering American civil and military agents for generation after generation. But, those who “expose” and quote these oaths, are apparently too stupid and illiterate to realize that they are their own worst enemies in the matter:

“You and each of you do covenant and promise that you will pray and never cease to pray to Almighty God to avenge the blood of the prophets upon this nation, and that you will teach the same to your children and to your children’s children unto the third and fourth generation.”^[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_vengeance

http://1857massacre.com/MMM/oath_of_vengeance.htm

http://www.worldviewweekend.com/worldview-times/article.php?articleid=6317

http://www.courageouschristiansunited.org/blog/a-critique-of-ed-deckers-the-mormon-plan-for-america-and-the-rise-of-mitt-romney-44896

http://www.toolsforfreedom.com/The-Mormon-Blood-Oath-of-Vengeance-p/5200.htm

http://www.challengemin.org/temple.html

So it seems the Mormon was only charged to pray for God to avenge the prophets. Seems fair to me.

The final question of these various oaths was resolved in 1990 when the temple ceremony was adjusted to entirely remove any and all of them. The anti-Mormonists are so eager to prove the current nature of their information, and prove that these Mormon secrets are fluid and not fixed in stone by God Himself, that in their urgency to remain current and deeply inside the temple secrets, ultimately, they confess that there are no Mormons taking any “blood” oaths of any sort and haven’t been in over two decades. They betray the fact that no Mormons have taken even the symbolic blood oaths against mobbers or their political cohorts that killed Joseph Smith since shortly after WWI—roughly one hundred years ago to date. There is no way, for instance, that Mitt Romney would have taken any oaths worded in such a way to require him to kill Americans to avenge Joseph Smith, or even offer himself up for slaughter for the slip of the tongue or for inadvertently giving away a secret handshake.

If however, you go back far enough, to the days when mobs of Christians were burning, raping and pillaging their way through Mormon settlements in Missouri and Illinois, or a decade or two later when the US Army was sent out with the express purpose of destroying Mormonism once-and-for-all, yes, the wording of these oaths, or certainly the interpretation of these oaths, would have been far more direct. When your “good Christian” neighbors are bashing your brains out in the rain and burning you out of house and home, you tend to develop some serious convictions about stopping that behavior.

At the time these several oaths were initiated, Christian America was killing and abusing Mormon friends and family and yes, Mormon leadership took loyalty very seriously, because Mormon turncoats were fueling the anti-Mormon national and regional mood and providing the mobs, militias, and the clergy that authorized them, with all the excuse they needed to justify treating Mormons like vermin. America was indeed trying to exterminate them repeatedly till they were driven permanently into the wilderness to escape with some level of liberty at least for a few years. Even so, apart from the highly disputable “Mountain Meadows Massacre” there really hasn’t been a single credible example of Mormon “vengeance” that could reliably be traced to any of these oaths or any specific desire to murder the mob members, politicians or religious leaders directly responsible for Joseph Smith’s assassination. Even in the early days, you have to remember, the desire to avenge the blood of Joseph Smith by wreaking havoc upon the members of the mob that Christian America and her political servants heaped upon him, would hardly have needed an oath to enforce it. It was after all, the Wild Wild West. And nobody has ever confused the Mormons with the Quakers or Amish—or at least not for long in terms of the Mormon willingness to fight back. Most Mormon “vengeance” was executed in open warfare with mobs who made the first attack and were openly swearing to destroy Mormonism to the last man, woman, and child. And those mobs were authorized and often led by noted Christian clergy and civil officers in direct violation of Constitutional and statutory law for the expressed purpose of killing all the Mormons and taking all their stuff.

http://lrwhitney.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/mormon-wars-part-6-a-perilous-quirk-and-a-blunder/

http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=1c234dc029133110VgnVCM100000176f620a____&locale=0

For all the alleged unsuitability of Mitt Romney or any other Mormon for public office because of his alleged “oaths,” there seems to be no particular enthusiasm for rejecting George Washington, who was both our first president and master of his local Masonic lodge. The Masons make Mormons look like pikers when it comes to incendiary oaths and secret ceremonies. And George was only the first of a string of Masons to take the office of the US president:

James Monroe

Andrew Jackson

James Polk

James Buchanan

Andrew Johnson

James Garfield

William McKinley

Theodore Roosevelt

William Taft

Warren Harding

Franklin Roosevelt

Harry Truman

Lyndon Johnson

Jerald Ford

Funny, but we don’t hear a lot in the media about how unsuitable FDR or Harry Truman were for the presidency because of their secret, oathbound fraternal memberships.

Stealing Jews

Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel on Tuesday called on Mitt Romney to tell the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to stop doing proxy baptisms in the names of dead Jews, including Holocaust victims such as Wiesel’s parents.

UPDATED POST: 5:10 P.M.

LDS officials have reached The Anti-Defamation league to say, according to an ADL press release that:

…an individual member inappropriately submitted the names, an action the LDS said was “clearly against the policy of the church.” The church has indefinitely suspended the individual’s ability to access their genealogy records.

Abraham Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor, said in the statement that he accepted this as a good faith promise from the church. It’s critical to halt the practice because, Foxman writes:

Holocaust victims died precisely because they were Jewish. Listing Jews as ‘Christian” on one of the most researched genealogical sites in the world inadvertently aids and abets denial of the Holocaust.

Perhaps the ultimate solution would be for the church to revisit its theological position on posthumously baptizing Jews and believers outside the Mormon Church, just as other religions have reconsidered centuries-old beliefs.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2012/02/mitt-romney-mormon-baptism-elie-wiesel-holocaust/1#.UHrmuW9ZUdU

The long and short of this is, Mormons don’t steal anyone’s soul after death. Mormon baptism for the dead may be deemed silly or heretical to either the orthodox Christian or Jew, but the concept and the ceremony itself, while carried out once again in the mysterious Mormon temple, is anything but sinister. Christ our Lord demands that everyone be baptized as a symbol of our discipleship and adoption or re-birth into His family and His promise of salvation. Most of Christianity writes you off as damned if you miss out on that “Born Again” opportunity in this lifetime. You could go to hell through chance or happenstance or some big a-hole minister who just turned you off to religion, and you formed your entire opinion of Christianity based upon that one twisted dickweed who had it all wrong. But still, you go to hell and burn forever in a lake of fire that never consumes but continuously burns. In “historical” Christian circles, this means very clearly that Anne Frank is burning in hell for instance. This notion is understandably offensive to Jews. And even more offensive would be praying or baptizing poor Anne’s way out of hell. But that’s not what Mormon proxy baptism for the dead does or even intends to do.

As HuffPost reported in January, the practice of proxy baptism for the dead in Romney’s church could prove troublesome for some voters.

The ritual has reportedly been performed in the name of Hollywood celebrities,Mahatma Gandhi, Anne Frank, and the still-living Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. When Wiesel learned his name was entered as “ready” for posthumous baptism, the famed Holocaust survivor told HuffPost that Romney “should speak to his own church and say they should stop” performing such rituals on Jews.

But church spokesman Lyman Kirkland said Wednesday in an email that the “ready” classification is misleading. “This characterization is inaccurate,” he said. “’Ready’ [next to a name in the database] in no way means a baptism is imminent; it only means that a name in the genealogical database has been determined to be an actual person. The term ‘ready’ as shown in the database is probably causing confusion and will likely be changed to something that describes the process more clearly.”

Radkey disputed that claim, saying, “If a name is on New FamilySearch lists, this will not be for genealogical purposes only. It usually means posthumous rites.”

The LDS church has issued apology after apology for members targeting Holocaust victims despite promising to put an end to the rituals. This week, a delegation from the American Jewish Committee met with senior church leaders in Salt Lake City to discuss “advances in mitigating Jewish concerns regarding the issue of posthumous baptism of Holocaust victims.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/16/mormon-proxy-baptism_n_1778904.html

What Mormons are contending is you do not go to hell by happenstance or accident, and indeed, hell as Christianity has sold it to the world, is hardly literal and almost nobody goes there. Those who do go to “hell” have deliberately earned it by willful rejection of the Holy Spirit and the Blood of Christ. Mormons call it “Outer Darkness, and only those who ultimately end up there of their own deliberate doing, will ever know how miserable this “Outer Darkness,” really is. All others have a chance at re-education in spirit prison or “paradise” depending upon how they lived their lives, and the legal requirement of physical baptism can be met by mortal proxies performing this ordinance on behalf of the deceased. It is an ordinance symbolizing a covenant that has to be made in a prescribed manner in physical existence, not a spiritual afterlife. Oh, yes, it sounds very legalistic but an ultimate commandment is an ultimate commandment and the point is, Mormons believe God allowed a system of proxy ordinances to satisfy these legal demands so little Johnny Johnson who died in Uppsala Sweden in 1823 at birth and never got baptized, never confessed faith in Christ, and thus is “unsaved,” doesn’t burn in hell forever just because his mother had a bad case of the flu at the time and had a complicated delivery.

OK, Mormons actually think that the innocent unborn and mentally unaccountable go directly to the “Celestial Kingdom,” the highest level of Heaven and enter the presence of God directly, upon death due their inherent innocence. Yeah, I know, it’s the opposite of what they taught you at Bible camp. But we’re talking Mormonism, not “Christianity.” Mormons believe there has already been a weeding out of the “evil” among us for the most part in a pre-mortal existence, and all those who are born of this earth have already proven their basic goodness. Man is stupid, not evil. Man is flawed and imperfect, not damned at birth. All men are born pure and innocent and unstained by some asinine political invention the Church has called “Original Sin.” Original Sin is a recruitment and control device invented by a professional clergy, not an eternal truth. Mormons believe “Christianity” has got it all wrong on many of these points. And likewise, the Jews got it all wrong before that, but unlike orthodox “Christianity” through the ages, Mormons believe the “Jews” are still God’s covenant people, that all God’s promises made to the House of Israel will be honored in the end. Mormons have never had any part in condemning the entire Jewish race as the “Christ-Killing” bastards Martin Luther, various popes and Calvinists have made them out to be for fun and profit over the years.

Now, of course, in “orthodox” Christian theology, God knowingly and willfully created little Johnny Johnson and shot him out his mommy’s birth canal up in icy Sweden, deliberately to die at birth and burn in hell because that was his “Predestination.” Johnny was not one of the “Elect.” And though the Calvinists, the Papists, the Lutherans, the Arminians and all the others, have different ways of rationalizing it, they all agree that dead fetuses and dead babies, heathens born and raised out in the bush, and all those not raised “Christian,” burn in hell because without baptism, or a “come to Jesus” moment, without knowledge of the Bible and a confession of faith, they by default return to Satan, their true father and fleshly creator, where they suffer eternal torment in a lake of fire as damnable children of hell.

Mormons are not “historical” or “orthodox” Christians. They do not believe that they are snatching dead Jews or heathens from the jaws of the Destroyer. In Mormonism, post-mortal life is essentially pretty pleasant for everyone, Mormon or not, with the exception that those guilty of overt evil and criminal acts go to a sort of prison or holding area. Those already covenanted with Christ and not guilty of overt, willful and unrepentant sin and evil, go on to “paradise,” or the “bosom of Abraham” in Old Testament Speak. I’m simplifying this a bit but the point is, that once Mormonism’s token post-mortem baptismal ordinances are performed by mortal proxies in a Mormon temple, it is believed to be entirely up to the deceased on the other side of the veil to accept or reject them. Think of it as some well-meaning Mormon leaving you a ticket at the box office for the greatest show on earth. (As he understands it.) If you’re not interested, just ignore the invitation. Continue to hang out on the corner outside the theatre, or find a comfy bar or pub somewhere and keep to yourself and your current friends and family. If that’s what you know, if that’s where you are most comfortable, fine. If you decide you are interested in going places in higher social circles, all you have to do is show up, collect the ticket, and enter the gala, elite playhouse and enjoy. Even then, if you don’t like the show, you can always get up and walk out.

Mormon proxy ordinances are just that, proxy ordinances. They are not actual, immediate, effective ordinances. Just because you (as is usually the custom) have brought all your great-granddad’s records in to do the work for your kin, doesn’t mean you’ve “saved” them from Southern Baptistism or Judaism, or Islam or whatever religious orientation they may have followed at death.

A lot of wailing and concern has arisen particularly from Jewish Holocaust survivors who, in the course of genealogical research found that Mormons have in the past routinely done ordinance work for Holocaust victims and Jews in general. This is seen as some sort of insult to the Jews who died, but quite the contrary is true. Mormons do not believe they are changing Jews into Mormons. Mormons actually think they’re as Jewy and the Jews in any case, and call themselves an adopted branch of the House of Israel. And I mean that in a nice way. The respect and personal identification Mormons have with the Jews is unique in all the history of Christendom. Not even in Mormon theology is it believed that dead Jews are being transformed into dead Mormons in these ceremonies. They are not listed as “converts” or “members” or “Christians,” after the ordinance work has been performed. It is merely noted that the proxy work has been done for them. Mormons do however believe that they are granting their ancestors the opportunity to move upward and onward in the hereafter along Mormon theological beliefs in rising degrees of glory—as opposed to the one-size-fits-all “total salvation” or “total damnation” scenario found in the post-death fate orthodox Christianity preaches or the nebulous, maybe-not-existence-at-all that a lot of Judaism teaches.

In short: Mormons do not believe Jews are going to hell in any theological scenario in or out of the temple, in or out of the baptismal font, in this life or the next. No forced conversion or offense is intended or even possible in Mormon theology via proxy baptism for the dead.

From a Jewish standpoint, the gut-objection is fairly obvious, but the theology, or theological objection made by Holocaust survivors and relatives of Holocaust victims to Mormon proxy baptism, is born out of their understanding of a conventional Christian perspective. All Christians, in an almost unique exception to Christian orthodoxy, believe in life after death. Where you go and why, is not nearly as universal, but almost to the sect, to the denomination, dead people go to Heaven, or some sort of hell. Jews who die proudly Jewish resent the suggestion that even after death they need to convert to Christianity to be “saved.” It is debatable however, whether or not most or all of Judaism as practiced today even professes a belief in a life after death and if not, nothing Mormons or anyone else do in the way of post-mortem conversion would have any effect or significance at all in most Jewish theology. The Bible clearly teaches us that even at the time of Christ the “Jews” were seriously split on the notion of resurrection and Eternal Life.

Calling proxy baptism in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints “eccentric, not offensive,” Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby wrote recently that “Mormons undergoing peaceful rituals in their own temples aren’t on the list” of the “very real, very dangerous enemies” to Judaism.

“In Judaism, conversion after death is a concept without meaning,” wrote Jacoby, who is Jewish. “No after-the-fact rites in this world can possibly change the Jewishness of the men, women, children and babies whom the Nazis, in their obsessive hatred, singled out for extermination.

“By my lights, (Mormon) efforts to make salvation available to millions of deceased strangers were ineffectual,” he continued. “But plainly they were sincere, and intended as a kindness.”

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865551351/Jewish-columnist-calls-LDS-proxy-baptism-eccentric-not-offensive.html?pg=all

OK, so Mormons are legalistic a bit and the whole prospect may sound silly to many, but baptism for the dead is a lot less perverted than believing stillborn babies and anyone outside of your local minister’s influence are literal sons and daughters of the devil and rightfully worthy of hell and damnation unless they have the luck and good birth position to meet up with the CHURCH and its ministers. This latter proposition concludes that some 90% of all the billions and billions of human beings ever to walk the face of the earth are filthy creatures of the Adversary and through no fault of their own will be spending eternity being tortured and abused by Satan.

Don’t argue with me. It’s not my doctrine. It’s a mystery…

Troubling Doctrines Part 2: A Word of Wisdom

The Word of Wisdom

So far, I’ve outlined a couple of LDS doctrines that are quite correct and Biblically justifiable, even on a general orthodox Christian level. So let’s move on to the ubiquitous hindrance to LDS recruitment: The Word of Wisdom. This imposing obstacle to Mormonism’s pastoral advance around the globe, claimst to be based entirely upon an uniquely "Mormon" revelation, but again, this too is something of a health code that finds itself in common agreement with much of American Calvinist or Wesleyan/Methodist, even Lutheran and Baptist, so-called "Fundamentalist" zealots. Superficially it strikes a tone along the lines of self-denial and Spartanistic, anti-comfort, anti-enjoyment stoicism. But the revelation itself is actually rather a different animal entirely. And Mormonism has, and generations of its leadership have unfortunately entirely missed the biggest warning in this revelation. It’s the first clause in explaining why the revelation is even being given at all:

Behold, verily, thus saith the Lord unto you: In consequence of^aevils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of^bconspiring men in the last days, I have ^cwarned you, and forewarn you, by giving unto you this word of wisdom by revelation—

https://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/89?lang=eng

The Word of Wisdom is only nominally a health code or guide to healthy foodstuffs and nutrition in general. It is clearly a caution against use or at least over-use of a few substances that remain very very popular, like recreational drinks laden with alcohol or say, glutting-out on a beef-only diet. But that’s not the first or arguably its primary purpose. The Word of Wisdom is first and foremost a warning not to become dependent upon substances and “rich” foods which are not good for you in large quantity anyway, not because it is evil and dirty and sinful, but because once you become dependent upon these products you will be caught paying large sums of money to your enemies and crass profiteers when you should be spending that time, money and effort in saving your asses from the hell on earth that was to come for the Latter-day Saints, and in building up the Kingdom of God. This as opposed to wasting half your income in the grog houses or on expensive, imported coffee, tea, and tobacco. God is simply advising the Saints not to become slaves to these tastes and habits because you will be healthier, and you will not fall prey to future enemies.

Never heard a sermon on that however. Not in half a century of LDS indoctrination, both in and out of Utah. I’m just a spiritual moron I suppose, but I wonder why God would put that right up front and nobody in LDS leadership for nearly two-hundred years would notice it.

In recent decades Mormons have been snidely citing scientific and medical research proving just how inspired Joseph Smith’s revelation was. You can play whatever games you want with nutritional and health research these days–one day eggs will kill you, the next day there’s "good" cholesterol and "bad" cholesterol. One day coffee will kill you, the next day, it’s actually pretty good for you. Mormons will argue for instance, that research proving moderate, regular consumption of red wine is good for the heart and reduces cholesterol and plaque build up in the arteries, are false because you can get the same benefit from the "anti-oxidants" in grapes without the alcohol. The next week a Swedish twenty-year study will will conclude that, no, it’s alcohol–acting like drain cleaner for the bloodstream, and antioxidants are basically voodoo and superstition.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/10/health/la-he-coffee-heart-disease-20110410

http://alcalc.oxfordjournals.org/content/35/6/601.full

http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/AlcoholAndHealth.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120626131852.htm

Here’s the summary paragraph of one of the most reliable, intensive, and long-term studies of the effects of moderate alcohol consumption:

Univariate and multivariate analyses revealed that alcohol consumption
was significantly associated with a lower incidence of overall dementia
and Alzheimer dementia. In line with a large-scale study also based on GP
attenders aged 75 years and older, the study found that light-to-moderate
alcohol consumption was associated with relatively good physical and
mental health. This three-year follow-up study included, at baseline,
only those subjects 75 years of age and older, the mean age was 80.2
years, much higher than that in most other studies.

See the complete article here …

http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/News/Feeds/2011/03/industries-research-suggests-alcohol-consumption-helps-stave-/?et_cid=1214037&et_rid=45490710&linkid=http%3a%2f%2fwww.biosciencetechnology.com%2fNews%2fFeeds%2f2011%2f03%2findustries-research-suggests-alcohol-consumption-helps-stave-%2f

Mormons aren’t unique among the “tea-totaling” Christian sects keen to demonize alcohol. They foster the same asinine claims about “Jesus juice” or non-fermented “wine” they pretend Jesus drank instead of the “real” wine the scriptures rather plainly claim he did consume regularly–just like all the other ancient prophets. The fact of the matter is wine makes itself, any fruit or berry juice makes itself alcoholic within 24 hours even in temperate climates. You either culture it into a drinkable wine or you let it go nuts and degenerate into vinegar. There were no Judean refrigerators in 33 AD. If you were lucky enough to find a cave or hole in the ground to get the temperature down to 80-90 degrees F or preferably less, a big jar of wine would ferment out in a few days or easily less than a week to over 8% ABV—which is a knock-you-on-your-ass-level of alcohol that will only take about two pints for anyone under about 220 pounds to feel warm and silly. Yes, that’s the “mild” or “young” wine that was drunk daily, all day long by Jesus Christ and his disciples. Later in the fall, where the vintner could employ cooler, longer ferments, he would carefully ferment the "must" or fresh-pressed grape juice, for many weeks, and peak out around 12-14% ABV—that’s the “good” wine Jesus made out of water at the wedding in Cana. And the wine steward noted this specifically in John 2:1

http://christianity.about.com/od/New-Testament/a/JZ-Wedding-At-Cana.htm

In the case of Mormons, they expand this revisionist “Jesus juice” fantasy to convincing themselves that barley, singularly extolled in the Word of Wisdom as the source of “mild drinks,” was commonly used to make all sorts of other “mild drinks” rather than beer, and so it clearly means these drinks, not beer. They oddly enough in their desperation to prove this silly claim, invented a number of burnt-crap-tasting substitutes for coffee out of the stuff in the process.

http://www.exmormon.org/mormon/mormon443.htm

I’m currently enjoying a Discovery Channel mini-series celebrating the positive influence of booze on America’s development. The Pilgrims for example, landed on Plymouth Rock only because they cut their intended journey short when they ran out of beer. The Puritans provisioned a daily gallon of beer for every man woman and child of them and those who drank it continuously, survived. Those who tried to make due with fresh water died of cholora, dysentery, and a number of other water-borne plagues. They even made 3.2 beer or "small" beer for the kiddies, who drank about half that ration a day. When they could get cider they drank that daily as well.

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/how-booze-built-america/videos

But looking at the example of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and the original promoters of the Word of Wisdom, what we really see is a warning against becoming dependent upon substances that leave you beholding to "Gentiles" and sources or producers who can manipulate you based upon your addiction or cravings. There was also manifest an aversion to having the "Saints" drinking in the same taverns and public houses as the more disorderly "Gentiles." Moderation, the policy clearly outlined by LDS president Joseph F Smith in 1902 when he became the first to attempt a more strict adherence to the Word of Wisdom, is in truth, the key to understanding the point of God’s advice in this revelation.

Pres. Joseph F. Smith, in the Improvement Era, Sept. 1903.

Moderation

Even in the days of Paul it was needful to caution the Saints to be moderate. In his letter to the
Philippians, the apostle particularly admonishes the brethren in these words: "Let your
moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand." While this, perhaps, is the only
instance in the Bible where the word occurs, the idea of wisdom and moderation being essential
in all things, is freely expressed in many other exhortations to the people. Thus Peter, the apostle,
calling attention to the example of Christ, exhorts them to cease from sin, which is named as
lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revelings, banquetings, and other lusts of men. And again,
Paul to the Ephesians instructs the saints "to walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,
redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding
what the will of the Lord is. And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the
spirit." It was Jesus himself who denounced the Pharisees because within they were full of
"extortion and excess."

http://www.physics.byu.edu/faculty/rees/325/documents/moderation.pdf

Unfortunately for most Latter-day Saints, Joseph F Smith also had a thing against eating meat. He didn’t eat any basically. And he had this to say about it:

Several prophets have spoken out against sport hunting. Joseph F. Smith said in 1913, "I do not believe any man should kill animals or birds unless he ‘needs’ them for food…I think it is wicked for men to thirst in their souls to kill almost everything which possess life. It is wrong, and I have been surprised at prominent men who I have seen whose very souls seemed to be athirst for the shedding of animal blood. They go off hunting deer, antelope, elk, anything they can find, and what for? ‘Just for the fun of it!’ I am a firm believer… in the simple words of one of the poets: ‘Take not away the life you cannot give, for all things have an equal right to live’." (Juvenile Instructor 48:309)

In a later statement that was quoted again by two other prophets, President Joseph F. Smith said, "We are a part of life and should study carefully our relationship to it. We should be in sympathy with it, and not allow our prejudices to create a desire for its destruction. The unnecessary destruction of life begets a spirit of destruction which grows within the soul. It lives by what it feeds upon and robs man of the love that he should have for the works of God. It hardens the heart of man… The unnecessary destruction of life is a distinct spiritual loss to the human family. Men cannot worship the Creator and look with careless indifference upon his creation. The love of all life helps man to the enjoyment of a better life. …Love of nature is akin to the love of God, the two are inseparable." (Juvenile Instructor, April 1918, p. 182-3)

http://www.vegsource.com/articles/catano.htm

I heard a great devotional sermon by LDS president Spencer W Kimball at BYU in 1978, which he expounded upon much the same sentiments–citing the now defunct LDS hymn, "Don’t Shoot the Little Birds…" Not much traction on that one in Mormon hunting circles either. I had recently returned from BYU to my Midwestern home. Having this lecture fresh on my mind, I brought the subject up in a combined elders/high priest lesson and posed the question: What would you do if this upcoming conference, the prophet made this mandatory? Well, a riot ensued. The prophet wouldn’t do that, bla bla bla. So clearly, it’s far easier to give up coffee, tea, and booze, than giving up sport hunting in the Mormon psyche.

“I do not believe any man should kill animals or birds unless he needs them for food, and then he should not kill innocent little birds that are not intended for food for man. I think it is wicked for men to thirst in their souls to kill almost everything which possesses animal life. It is wrong, and I have been surprised at prominent men whom I have seen whose very souls seemed to be athirst for the shedding of animal blood.” (Gospel Doctrine, 5th ed., Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1939, pp. 265-66.)

One of the poets stated in this connection:

Take not away the life you cannot give,
For all things have an equal right to live.

—and I might add there also, because God gave it to them, and they were to be used only, as I understand, for food and to supply the needs of men.

It is quite a different matter when a pioneer crossing the plains would kill a buffalo to bring food to his children and his family. There were also those vicious men who would kill buffalo only for their tongues and skins, permitting the life to be sacrificed and the food also to be wasted.

When asked how he governed so many people, the Prophet Joseph Smith said, “I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves.”

We look to the Prophet Joseph Smith for proper teaching. He said once: “We crossed the Embarras river and encamped on a small branch of the same about one mile west. In pitching my tent we found three massasaugas or prairie rattlesnakes, which the brethren were about to kill, but I said, ‘Let them alone—don’t hurt them! How will the serpent ever lose his venom, while the servants of God possess the same disposition and continue to make war upon it? Men must become harmless, before the brute creation; and when men lose their vicious dispositions and cease to destroy the animal race, the lion and the lamb can dwell together, and the sucking child can play with the serpent in safety.’ The brethren took the serpents carefully on sticks and carried them across the creek. I exhorted the brethren not to kill a serpent, bird, or an animal of any kind during our journey unless it became necessary in order to preserve ourselves from hunger.” (History of the Church, 2:71-72.)

http://www.ldsveg.org/Kimball.htm

Now, the Word of Wisdom is not the most controversial Mormon Doctrine from an outsider, even a detractor’s perspective. Indeed, it has become quite fashionable in many segments of the population to promote a balanced diet, moderation, and even a complete abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and sometimes tea and caffeine. Vegetarianism and hard-core veganism are remarkably popular social trends. All of these issues are contained in the Word of Wisdom. But, the move from LDS modern leadership toward a compulsory and absolute requirement to totally cease the consumption or practice of any or all of these mostly enjoyable “vices” however, such as the current demand for total abstinence from alcohol, coffee and tea as a requirement for Mormon baptism and temple attendance, is the single most pointless stumbling block that the inbred Utah culture has ego-centrically placed in the path of otherwise good and righteous Saints and prospective Saints. One current LDS web site bills the Word of Wisdom as a "Health Law." God however, in the revelation itself, makes it abundantly clear that this is a lie. It is not a commandment, and if it is a "Law" then it is a "Law" enacted by a clergy pretending to serve God by overtly disobeying His express instructions regarding the observance of this bit of very good advice.

On February 27, 1833, Joseph Smith received this now very much aggrandized Word of Wisdom in response to his wife Emma’s nagging about the mess they kept leaving for her to clean up in the attic room above Newel Whitney’s store, where for a time they held what was called, “The School of the Prophets.” During these sessions, the church leadership and various elders and potentates settled comfortably in, lit up their pipes, downed a few shots, cracked open a beer, poured a glass of wine, stuck a pinch between cheek and gum, and slurped, puffed, spit and farted their way through the mysteries of the universe, as men even today are wont to do. All that was missing was the pizza, KFC, cheese puffs and Doritos. Emma was born and bred of a family of Methodists who wreaked of Temperance and prohibition. True sons and daughters of America’s Puritan dry-ethic. She would have naturally been appalled by all the manly enjoyment going on in those study sessions with Joseph and his prophetic pals. As a result of these lessons and discussions the young visionary made many pronouncements and received many a revelation prompted by all the study, prayer and pondering that went on in these congenial and very manly gatherings. One of these became known as the “Word of Wisdom,” and was eventually adopted into the LDS canon, in the volume that became “Doctrine and Covenants,” section 89.

Here’s the “official” LDS presentation of the purpose and requirements of this revelation:

http://www.lds.org/topics/word-of-wisdom

But the truth is, the Word of Wisdom has never banned the use of alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, or a steady diet of beefsteak and fried chicken. It’s a word to the wise. Advice—no more. Good advice, but not a law, not a dietary code, not a restriction of any sort. It was Heber J Grant, president of the LDS church in 1921, nearly a hundred years after this revelation, who first enforced a strict abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, tea and coffee as an absolute requirement for temple participation. Two decades earlier mind you, then LDS president Joseph F Smith gave it a try in 1902. The effort was met with utter failure. Not even Brigham Young himself had been able to succeed in morphing the general, broad admonitions in the Word of Wisdom into specific and universal prohibitions:

Though Young encouraged Mormons to follow the Word of Wisdom code, the church was tolerant of those who did not follow it. In 1860, he counseled those chewing tobacco in church meetings to at least be discrete and not excessive, but did not charge users with sin.^[35] By 1870, however, he ended the practice of chewing and spitting tobacco in the Salt Lake Tabernacle.^[36]

Young also recognized a separation between using tobacco (which was discouraged), and selling it to non-Mormons as a business (which was encouraged).^[37] He also owned and maintained a bar in Salt Lake City for the sale of alcoholic beverages to non-Mormon travelers, on the theory that it was better for LDS Church authorities to run such establishments than for outsiders.^[38]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_Wisdom

Brigham Young at one point in his Utah adventures, briefly organized a distillery, but the army came through in 1858 bringing more booze than it made sense to manufacture locally, and Young abandoned the project when it could be had cheaply from incoming merchandisers. Young preferred beer anyway, and drank it daily until the day he died. He also took wine, as did essentially the entire Mormon population in his day:

A Mormon (one that was oft accused of killing people) started the first Utah brewery. Indeed, the infamous Orrin Porter Rockwell established the Hot Springs Brewery Hotel in 1856 (Valley Tan; November 6, 1858). Rockwell himself was a colorful character: he was the personal bodyguard to both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and with his Manson-like beard and intense, thunderous eyes, he turned out to be as intimidating as he looked. During a speech given by Vice President Schuyler Colfax in 1869, Porter was noted as to have blurted out "I never killed anyone who didn’t need killing."

…

Now why, pray tell, would we give this man, much less any man, the means to distribute beer to the common folk? The answer is simple: because of our railroaders and miners. It didn’t take long for people to find out that Utah had rich mineral deposits, and mining soon became the beating heart of Utah’s early economy (besides, there were still many unemployed people wandering around the West after hopping on the California Gold Rush train too late). Naturally, the prospect of new jobs immediately made numerous people perk up in excitement, and it wasn’t long before this little settlement was flooded with immigrants. Many of them (especially Germans) still had cultural drinking habits from their homelands, and the LDS Church greatly needed their labor. In fact, the first truly major brewery to be established in Utah was in 1864 by a German immigrant named Henry Wagener (Beer in the Beehive, 2006). The California Brewery grew to great prominence in a short amount of time, no doubt due to its prime location: right at the mouth of Emigration Canyon (in fact, it was only a couple hundred feet away from where the This Is the Place Monument now stands).

…

Yet the fertile fields that the Church members worked in soon provided something more: grapes. Lots of grapes. In fact, the wine that was derived from these grapes soon became hoarded by the LDS Church, largely because they were still using wine in their sacraments until the 1870s, when the teenage boys of the Aaronic Priesthood became allowed to prepare the sacraments themselves (soon replacing wine with water for their own protection, citing D&C 27:2 ["… that it mattereth not what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink when ye partake of the Sacrament"] as the reason for the switch). The Mormon-owned and operated Zions Cooperative Mercantile Institution outlet (ZCMI for short) soon began selling wine and beer to the general populace at its downtown location, providing much joy to the hard-working residents of Salt Lake City.

http://www.slugmag.com/article.php?id=1313

Sorry to inform all you modern Utah-Mormon products, but for generations before and after the pioneers rolled into the valley, most Mormons drank beer and most Mormon leaders understood the Word of Wisdom to have expressly promoted turning barley into beer, which is the only “mind drink” ever made of barley in the day. That and cider, but there were no apples to be had in Utah at the time. Beer was, and remains in most civilizations, a "mild drink.” Brigham Young was a regular coffee drinker as well. But, one might ask, was all this brewing and vinting and distilling something Brigham Young hatched up out of his own interpretation of the Word of Wisdom? Was it some big change in policy on how the Word of Wisdom was to play a part in Mormon lifestyles? No, not really. Young’s predecessor was certainly no more fervently dedicated to the Word of Wisdom than Brigham Young or any of the other early Latter-day Saints:

Nevertheless, contemporary records indicate that Joseph Smith, Jr. was not, himself, a strict observer. Smith is recorded at various times as drinking tea,^[27] beer,^[28] and wine.^[29] There is a report he also smoked tobacco: according to Amasa Lyman, a member of the First Presidency under Smith, Smith once finished preaching a sermon on the Word of Wisdom and immediately afterward rode through the streets smoking a cigar.^[30]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_Wisdom

Even after many non-binding and nearly-binding “official” pronouncements along the way, it took nearly two centuries for there to be any complete “authoritative” consensus on what the Word of Wisdom actually “proscribed”:

The revelation suggests that barley-based mild drinks (such as beer) may be permissible.^[16] As recently as 1901, Apostles Brigham Young, Jr. and John Henry Smith argued that the revelation did not prohibit beer.^[40] However, LDS Church leaders now teach that consumption of any form of alcohol, including beer, violates the Word of Wisdom

…

In a pamphlet written in 1930 called The Word of Wisdom, Apostle John A. Widtsoe taught that refined flour was contrary to the Word of Wisdom.

…

Adherence to the proscriptions of the Word of Wisdom was not made a requirement for entry into LDS Church temples until 1902. However, even then, church president Joseph F. Smith encouraged stake presidents to be liberal with old men who used tobacco and old ladies who drank tea.^[40] Of those who violated the revelation, it was mainly habitual drunkards that were excluded from the temple.^[40] Around the turn of the century, the proscriptions of the Word of Wisdom were not strictly adhered to by such notable church leaders. Anthon H. Lund, a First Counselor in the First Presidency, drank beer and wine; Apostle Matthias F. Cowley drank beer and wine; Charles W. Penrose, who also served as a First Counselor in the First Presidency, drank wine; Relief Society president Emmeline B. Wells drank coffee; and church president George Albert Smith drank brandy, for medicinal purposes.^[40] In 1921, church president Heber J. Grant made adherence to the proscriptions of the Word of Wisdom an absolute requirement for entering the temple.^[40]

Today, adherence to the proscriptions of the Word of Wisdom is required for baptism^[48] and for entry into temples of the LDS Church.^[49] BYU historian Thomas G. Alexanderpoints out that while the original Word of Wisdom as a "principle with promise" was given by revelation, there is no evidence that any church leader has claimed a separate new revelation, or even a spiritual confirmation, of changing the Word of Wisdom from "a principle with promise" to a commandment.^[40]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_Wisdom

http://en.fairmormon.org/Word_of_Wisdom

As recently as a few days of this writing the LDS church was responding to presidential campaign related television articles, and clarifying another long-held Utah cultural Word of Wisdom myth:

On Wednesday (Aug. 29), the LDS church posted a statement on its website saying that "the church does not prohibit the use of caffeine" and that the faith’s health-code reference to "hot drinks" "does not go beyond (tea and coffee)."

A day later, the website wording was slightly softened, saying only that "the church revelation spelling out health practices … does not mention the use of caffeine."

The same goes for the church’s two-volume handbook, which LDS leaders use to guide their congregations. It says plainly that "the only official interpretation of ‘hot drinks’ … in the Word of Wisdom is the statement made by early church leaders that the term’ hot drinks’ means tea and coffee."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/01/mormon-caffeine-policy-cl_n_1848098.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

Supposedly this issue had been settled nearly a hundred years ago. In 1922, Church President Heber J. Grant counseled the Latter-day Saints:

I am not going to give any command, but I will ask it as a personal, individual favor to me, to let coca-cola [sic] alone. There are plenty of other things you can get at the soda fountains without drinking that which is injurious. The Lord does not want you to use any drug that creates an appetite for itself.^[55]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_Wisdom

Two years later, Grant met with a representative of the Coca-Cola Company and concluded:

…I have not the slightest desire to recommend that the people leave Coca-Cola alone if th[e] amount [of caffeine in Coca-Cola] is absolutely harmless, which they claim it is".^[40] Grant never again spoke out against the use of cola drinks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_Wisdom

Approximately fifty years later, 1971, the church issued an official statement on the matter:

With reference to cola drinks, the Church has never officially taken a position on this matter, but the leaders of the Church have advised, and we do now specifically advise, against the use of any drink containing harmful habit-forming drugs under circumstances that would result in acquiring the habit. Any beverage that contains ingredients harmful to the body should be avoided.^[56]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_of_Wisdom

And it’s really not the Word of Wisdom itself that commands the LDS faithful to do the bidding, er, that is, follow these sorts of “suggestions” from high LDS authorities, even given clear disclaimers from those same authorities that their “suggestions” aren’t binding in any way. It’s the prevailing notion, promoted by these self-same authorities oddly enough, that their “advice” is “modern day scripture,” even when they’re just blowing doctrinal smoke out of their backsides or expressing personal preferences. Heber J Grant for instance, was probably already fixated upon the notion that Coca Cola was loaded with cocaine when he made the church’s first attack on caffeinated drinks. Cocaine, it’s original booster ingredient, had been removed in 1903, and caffeine replaced it. In 1918 some University of Utah cluck of a chemist named Frederick J. Pack wrote a paper concluding that since coffee contained caffeine as its active ingredient, and so did Coca Cola, it should also be banned in the "spirit" of the Word of Wisdom. Grant was no chemist and it all probably sounded the same to him. Drugz iz drugz. He bought the article’s premise obviously, and here we have the beginnings of Mormon scientists and laymen essentially writing their own research and folk-doctrines into official LDS policy through the well-meaning, if ill-informed lay-clergy that makes such rulings with or without an actual "revelation" and has the social and organizational clout to enforce them just by making the suggestion.

The problem these modern prophets and apostles and “authorities” of various stripes in the LDS church have with promoting the Word of Wisdom as a list of compulsory proscriptions, is that in the end, it doesn’t matter what any of them, including founding prophet, Joseph Smith have to say about it. Regarding The Word of Wisdom, unlike many other LDS doctrinal controversies, the language of the revelation itself unarguably defines itself as a non-commandment. Unlike many other Mormon folk or pop doctrines, or even longstanding "policies" like not ordaining Negroes to the priesthood, in the case of the Word of Wisdom, all LDS authorities have always accepted verbatim Joseph Smith’s revelation to be the very Word of God. Again, unlike many other murky LDS interpretations of early "revelations," quasi-official oratorios or ad-hoc scribblings, the Word of Wisdom has a direct provenance from Mormonism’s founding prophet, who immediately recorded it–as he claimed–from God’s lips to his ear, and directly onto paper. It was immediately broadcast and well-known and has never been changed. It has been adopted as LDS canon and as such is the ultimate reference in any determination of "true" or "accurate" doctrine of the church.

Section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants is without any room for interpretation, a “Word of Wisdom.” God says it is presented merely as good advice. God says so in its introduction. It is not given as a commandment and God Himself says so. It cannot be made compulsory by any or all of the ruling quorums who have obviously done so anyway, simply through ignoring a few lines and adding some cultural spin. That isn’t the order of the church. And in this specific case, it clearly can’t be adopted as a set of binding requirements even through communal acclaim because God says it is not to be made in any way compulsory. Only God can say otherwise. God says: Here’s a Word of Wisdom, but remember, it is not intended to by a commandment or binding in any way. Then Heber J Grant a hundred years later says: Hey, I’m making it a commandment. Ignore that line and obey my ruling or you’re out of the temple and out of the church. And then his counselors and the two other quorums sustain his heresy.

There is nothing unclear or unanswered or ambiguous about God’s will in the matter of the Word of Wisdom. It’s not like the Negro/priesthood ban where there never was a clear, canonical declaration one way or the other. There is no commandment that you obey the Word of Wisdom. It is therefore not even rational to answer “Yes” when you are asked if you obey it or not. One cannot "obey" a suggestion or good advice. Indeed, no LDS authority has any right to ask you that question, nor prescribe a penalty for not answering it or answering it “no.” You cannot “obey” a suggestion—even if it comes from God. Nor can any LDS authority punish his flock or any member of it for not following a suggestion.

God, indeed, clearly delineates only the benefits of following, repeat: following—not obeying–His Word of Wisdom: Better health and peace of mind. In the revelation itself, God does not assign any punishment of any sort for not following this advice apart from the implication that you won’t be as healthy or clear-headed as you would be if you chose to follow his advice. You cannot vote in a commandment from God when God explains Himself it is not intended to be compulsory in any way. The Word of Wisdom is a greeting and some good counsel. Don’t read what I have to say about it. I’m just telling you what God had to say about it. Only God can deliver a commandment through revelation—modern or otherwise. This particular revelation says it’s not a commandment. You can sustain it all you want and vote it into the canon. That just canonizes the fact that it’s not a commandment.

Since nobody’s ponied-up a revelation, or even a pretense of an allusion to a revelation that supersedes the concise and irrefutably non-commandmental nature of the Word of Wisdom, what we have in the form of modern LDS policy on the issue of interpreting or "following" the Word of Wisdom, is essentially defined as heretical. Directly contravening the express will of God as stated in church canon, and issuing an edict demanding that the body of the church do likewise, has all the elements of the Council of Nice, or any of the other Church councils the early Latter-day Saints began their career condemning. The purely socio-political processes and mechanisms through which compulsory compliance to the "suggestions" made in the Word of Wisdom have grown to be enforced in the LDS church today are exactly the sorts of "interpolations of men" described by Joseph Smith in his condemnations of the state of orthodox Christianity Biblical translations and interpretations in his day.

There is a legal doctrine meaning “the thing speaks for itself.” The Everest of ecclesiastical truth built from the translations and revelations of the Prophet Joseph Smith speaks for itself as it towers above the foothills of philosophy. Even so, most will ignore it. Still others will reject the Restoration, supplying their own alternative explanations, just as some did who once heard thunder instead of the voice of God. (See John 12:27–30.) However, in a happy day ahead, “they that murmured shall learn doctrine.” (Isa. 29:24; 2 Ne. 27:35.) This suggests that doctrinal illiteracy is a significant cause of murmuring among Church members.

https://www.lds.org/ensign/1986/08/a-choice-seer?lang=eng&query=interpolations

“There are many things contained therein that are not true, which are interpolations by the hands of men. …

“Therefore, whoso readeth it, let him understand, for the Spirit manifesteth truth.” (D&C 91:1–4.)

Well, the Word of Wisdom certainly speaks for itself. And the history of its promotion into a "Health Law" by a bunkered LDS leadership eager to create cultural unity also speaks for itself. The current Word of Wisdom policy originated in the Methodism of Emma Smith, and is the product of John Wesley and the creeping Puritanism of John Calvin. It certainly flies in the face of the enlightened moderation of Joseph Smith. The specific Mormon mandate against alcohol, tobacco and "hot drinks," found its fervor in the Temperance Movement as championed by the elitist, sacrificial demands of Heber J Grant in the heyday of prohibition. Joseph F Smith began the push for in-house prohibition, and did so three years ahead of national prohibition. Heber J Grant took over as president a few years afterward and stiffened penalties, made strict observance of the Word of Wisdom a “test of fellowship.” For decades they pushed forward to have not just the Mormon world, but the entire world abstain from alcohol. But embracing and entwining the Temperance Movement and the beliefs of Calvin and Wesley and those personal prejudices of the largely female leaders of the nation’s rising political religion, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B Anthony, to Emma Smith and Carrie Nation, any more authoritative or doctrinally valid than the generation of LDS leaders following them, who embraced Klingon Skousen and all his conspiratorial delusions and made the John Burch Society and anti-Civil Rights politics a quasi-official wing of the Mormon priesthood for the last four generations.

http://www.biography.com/people/elizabeth-cady-stanton-9492182

http://susanbanthonyhouse.org/her-story/biography.php

http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=2514

But the fact remains that by the time national prohibition finally passed, Smith and Grant had already made their church the piously dry example for the nation. And so it remains, as a nearly pointless slap in the face to some 90% of the already religious and most likely to embrace Mormonism population. The modern, mandated Word of Wisdom, the demonized use of enjoyable substances of any sort, is exactly what Heber J Grant defined it to be: A test of fellowship. It’s a gatekeeping device designed by a lazy church leadership to help clean their ranks of anyone not absolutely ready to deny anything and everything and give their all to the cause of paying tithing and putting up more chapels and temples, and filling every moment of their lives with leadership-initiated and defined "programs" to keep them out of trouble.

http://en.fairmormon.org/Word_of_Wisdom/History_and_implementation

http://mormonmatters.org/2008/12/26/temperance-movement-and-the-word-of-wisdom/

http://mormontruth.blogspot.com/2005/10/mormon-prophets-smoking-drinking_08.html

And as Joseph Goebbels, the NAZI inventor of the modern science of "propaganda" could tell you, there is great value in the social concept of shared suffering, or a shared bond of self-denial. Having had plural marriage beaten out of the Mormon doctrinal basket of goodies, later LDS leaders like Joseph F Smith and Heber J Grant found something just as “peculiar” in the Word of Wisdom, to set their people apart from the rabble of the Gentile masses. Something to make them uniquely more overtly holy and chosen than the common Christians who had invaded their happy Mormon hideaway. They would not only deny themselves common alcoholic release, but would extend this proscription to even the mild comforts of coffee and tea. Ascetic dietary restrictions put the Saints almost in the category as the Jews: Chosen. Chosen as hell, and showing it in a really chosen-looking way—by denying themselves of a few simple, mostly harmless but highly enjoyable worldly pleasures.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asceticism

The problem with the current, now longstanding Word of Wisdom hyper-superiority policy, is it spits in the eye of too many other canonical and clearly doctrinal concepts. Word of Wisdom fanaticism says to the world and the congregation alike: If you aren’t ready to do as I as your current prophet say and take this bit of good advice to the extremes of obedience that not even the Lord demanded, then just piss off. You aren’t Celestial Kingdom material, and that’s the only class of member or convert we’ll waste our valuable time on. And the record shows these latter LDS leaders saying essentially that, like this gem from Joseph F Smith:

The reason undoubtedly why the Word of Wisdom was given—as not by ‘commandment or restraint’ was that at that time, at least, if it had been given as a commandment it would have brought every man, addicted to the use of these noxious things, under condemnation; so the Lord was merciful and gave them a chance to overcome, before He brought them under the law.^[12]

http://en.fairmormon.org/Word_of_Wisdom/History_and_implementation

Leaders like Joseph F Smith and HJ Grant’s were motivated by genuine concern for their people, but tyranny is tyranny even if it’s done in the name of making society more orderly and productive for one and all. The now stock argument that the Word of Wisdom was only given as an optional code initially as a favor of the Lord to allow a hundred years or so for the Saints to get used to it, is lame at best. For that to be true, the Lord would have to have delivered at least one follow-up revelation to at least one Mormon prophet explaining His motivations for making it so plainly voluntary, then reverse His strategy by redacting the introductory language that clearly makes it non-compulsory. Otherwise, it’s still the literal, pure word of God exactly as He intended it to read. God said it’s not intended to be enforced or compelled in any way—and every LDS prophet conceded that very clear and irrefutable point right up to JF Smith and Heber J Grant. Their efforts to obfuscate the truth of this "Word of Wisdom," this "revelation from God," have been quite successful over the generations. Today, dropping hot drinks and alcohol from your diet has become 90% of the Mormon culture and faith system—however extraneous it remains to the doctrinal core of the faith. It’s the deal breaker–all in or all out. Even a a non-tithe-payer is given acres of leeway and full acceptance into the bosom of the Mormon faithful. One sniff of cigarette on the jacket at an LDS church supper, or one belch in Sunday School smelling a bit like Jack Daniels, and you’re an instant pariah–the subject of ward council meetings and home teacher personal priesthood interviews.

For all of modern Mormon leadership’s fixation on the dirty three—alcohol, tobacco, and hot drinks, somewhere in the history of the Word of Wisdom, as evidenced by Brigham Young’s massive gut, the Latter-day Saints seemed to have missed all its admonitions against gluttony, fatty, dead-animal-based diets, and the fact that pot is a useful green herb–green herbs being the only other natural substance specifically sanctioned for consumption in the Word of Wisdom, apart from beer. Brigham Young took wine and a little whiskey, drank coffee often, but preferred beer and enjoyed it until the day he died. Beer, in fact was considered a "mild drink" and remains clearly and specifically sanctioned in the revelation that became Section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants.

Here’s the plain and literal truth from the lips of God to Joseph Smith’s ear: Nothing in the Word of Wisdom has ever proscribed alcohol, tobacco, or "hot drinks." The canonization of that revelation indeed in its opening remarks clearly declares:

"A Word of Wisdom, for the benefit of the council of high priests, assembled in Kirtland, and the church, and also the saints in Zion— To be sent greeting; not by commandment or constraint, but by revelation and the a word of wisdom, showing forth the order and will of God in the temporal salvation of all saints in the last days— "

It summarizes:

"And all saints who remember to keep and do these sayings, walking in obedience to the commandments, shall receive health in their navel and marrow to their bones…"

The sad truth here is that Utah culture locked itself up in the fervor of the Temperance and Prohibition eras, and since then has promoted Word of Wisdom snobbery into a policy of fanatical, extreme abstinence, in part due to the drunken influence of the US Army and other civil and governmental "Gentiles" inflicted upon them for several generations as the US Federal government literally occupied Utah by crude force in their formative decades, and in part due to an inability to agree upon what "moderation" is. The now longstanding incorporation of Word Of Wisdom "superiority" into temple-worthiness and membership requirements is precisely the sort of thing the revelation seems to be reassuring the Saints the Almighty did not at all intend. The only implied internal "punishment" for not following it, is a somewhat less healthy constitution. All other “penalties” are strictly extra-canonical. Even counter-canonical. Even anti-canonical.

Mormon anti-alcohol fanaticism even turned against the use of wine in communion–again, even though this is specifically sanctioned in the Word of Wisdom. Jesus turned water into wine. Joseph F Smith and Heber J Grant turned wine into water.

Simply put, even according to neo-Calvinists like the late-great Bruce R McConkie, not even a living prophet has the prerogative to compound and supersede a canonized, direct commandment from God–without of course an equally direct modern revelation that has been equally canonized to contradict the previous commandment. There has rather, never been any such new expansion of the Word of Wisdom proposed by any modern prophet, the policy has simply been socially conceded and sustained in practice by Utah cultural convention. The ascetic, Puritanical notion that "God may not require it but I’ll do him one better…" has perverted God’s original Word of Wisdom into the current, fanatical, Methodistic proscription of anything enjoyable in general. The present Word of Wisdom cult has grown to be strongly reminiscent of the Roman Church’s monastic orders. Likewise, creating a cultural peculiarity along the lines of Kosher law has added to the feeling of Mormon cultural "specialness" in the great bunker of the Wasatch Front. For generations the LDS culture hid itself from "Gentiles" and made great effort to prove to themselves and their neighbors, occupiers, oppressors and the world, that they were every bit as peculiar and "chosen" as the Jews. They believe themselves to be adopted into the House of Israel at baptism. Rigid adherence to the admonition of the Word of Wisdom is simply put, a cultural preference, not a binding canonical demand.

But that’s just me. That’s just me reading literally what God had Joseph Smith write down and called a "revelation." That’s just what the words say in the canonical 89th section of the D&C.

In practice however, Mormon doctrine has always been decided based upon whoever was in charge at the moment. So, if you want to be a Mormon, just stop smoking and drinking until they let you get baptized. After that initial test of your committment, apart from keeping you out of the temple or church employment—which honestly, you and Jesus both can live without if it means the only other option is you not being a member at all—you just do your best to moderate your habits and don’t worry about your "Word of Wisdom Problem," as it will be termed. It’s not like you’re disobeying a commandment or anything. It’s just a cultural prejudice that LDS leadership has elected to enforce as if it were. But wrong or right, it is being enforced as a commandment in the LDS realms of leadership, and the punishment for any infraction of this "Dietary Law" is shunning and banishment from the Body of Christ.

That’s just the way it is.

Prohibition gave us organized crime, the War on Drugs gave us a southern border that is made unlivable by kidnapping, murdering, beheadings and whole towns run by Mexican drug cartels. Promotion of the Word of Wisdom from a bit of good advice to a mandatory set of requirements for membership and temple worship, gave Mormonism the exclusive world-wide franchise on being tight-assed as a way of life. And the LDS leadership and the generations they raised and recruited to fill their ranks, like it that way. They only want other tight-asses to be interested in their church. Their church.

What Jesus thinks about the matter is recorded in the 89th Section of the Doctrine and Covenants. He seems to put an entirely different spin on it. And don’t get me started on our Savior’s history of pastoral preferences found around the taverns and public squares and houses he made his singular ministry. (Hint: It’s in the Bible. New Testament.)

This is just one Saint’s opinion. For my money, the reason God originally made the Word of Wisdom so clearly optional, is because He wanted it that way, and spelled it out up-front because in His omniscience knew that the tight-asses working for him in Utah would beat themselves silly with it until they’d alienated most of His children worldwide for no good reason other than Utah Mormon elitism. And all this mainly in a desperate attempt to distinguish themselves as a “peculiar” people.

Some day, the LDS church may finally decide it’s going to be a hospital for sinners instead of an exclusive hotel for the Saints who are well on the road to the Celestial Kingdom. In the meantime, it will leave you cold and bleeding out in the dark on the sidewalk until you agree to swear off that cup of java, give up smoking, and stop drinking.

Troubling Doctrines Part 1: Underpants and Polygamy

At the moment the 2012 US presidential campaign has begun in full swing. The Republican National Convention just nominated Mitt Romney, sinister and robotic, woman and minority-hating Mormon that he is, as their official candidate. They balanced the ticket with some flaming young Irish Catholic from Wisconsin who used to drive the Oscar Meyer Weiner Mobile. Well, the world is surely coming to an end if these two get into office: One guy who’s made a ton of his own money and is known as a "fixer" of bankrupt operations, and another guy from the working classes known for crafting very clear, concise and effective budgets. I guess the Leftist, Democrat fight is going to eventually have to center around claims of the Romney/Ryan ticket’s combined religious intolerance and backwardness.  Waiting for the October surprise…

In light of this development I thought it wise to review or peruse or re-peruse a number of alleged and actual LDS doctrines the media, the public, and particularly the Leftist media and the Rightist public, seem to be just fixated upon. On with it then.

Mormon Underpants

First up: Magic Underwear.

Now, some jackass indeed staged a one-dickweed protest at the RNC by standing outside waving around some Mormon underpants. The man was clearly a Right Wing Christian Fundamentalist determined to shock his fellow Republicans into not voting for Mitt, based primarily upon the style of his drawers. And yes, official Mormon "garments" are for the most part droopy and frumpy looking. But then again, underclothes are worn under your clothes. So basically, you’d never see them. Mormons therefore, ought to be free to choose whatever drawers they find comfortable and appropriate. The fact that this "garment" is a vestment religiously representing the clothing God fabricated for Adam and Eve when they discovered themselves naked in the garden, is pretty much irrelevant to how well a Mormon digs ditches, paints houses, or runs the Oval Office. The exception to that however, is that invariably, and in essentially all styles, Mormon underwear stretches out, gets floppy, starts creeping up the crack of your backside, or in some styles, splits in two and the pants head for the knees while the top blooms out of the trousers and hangs out from behind or out from under your belly. It is rather unlikely on the other hand, that a Mormon president would find himself irresistibly yanking a wad of his Union Suit-like, bunched-up LDS long johns out of his arse in such a way as to significantly prevent his response to a sudden alert of foreign invasion.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/rnc-protester-shows-up-waving-a-pair-of-underwear-to-slam-romneys-faith/

The only shocking thing about the particular example shown above, revealing a half-naked Brother and Sister Romney in the more “modern” two-piece LDS garments, is Mitt’s apparent use of a dance-belt, nut-cup, codpiece or some other form of enhancement in the groinal regions. Either that are these photo-shop craftsmen are simply paying him a great complement.

Utahns are a simple and superstitious people. (And never very fashionable or stylish obviously.) Unfortunately Mormonism developed in Utah and in its history Utah Mormons have embellished the "protective" properties of the "garment" into actual physical protection from bullets, bombs, fire and sword. In actual fact, the "garment" is only officially billed as a spiritual protector inasmuch as it is a constant reminder that it is God who clothed and protected us from our own ignorance and nakedness after we fell from innocence in the Garden of Eden. It is a reminder that God covers and protects us from the harsh environs of His Creation and the hopelessly inadequate covering of fig leaves we fashioned for ourselves is pathetic in comparison to the protection of God. Now, there will come in response a thousand anecdotal tales of WWII sailors burnt to  a crisp in fuel explosions–burnt everywhere but where covered by their "garments." Rather than debate each and every one, it should suffice to say that no Latter-day Saint is obliged to believe any of them. And no Latter-day Saint is specifically promised any sort of physical or "magical" protection from said garment. It’s a symbolic, purely religious vestment not unlike any of the other “Christian” vestments worn by “Christian” clergy all over the globe.

There are "Born Again" Christians all over the globe, Roman Catholics and others, sporting crucifixes around their necks, Saint Christopher medallions and a multitude of other "Christian" good-luck and protection charms. They all believe in the “protection” of such tokens of their faith in God’s guiding hand. Why then, does both the Christian and Godless-Leftist world, so vapidly obsess over Mormon underwear? You don’t even see that. After all, there is nothing fashionable or "magical" about the average gang-banger’s underpants, but for some reason the “Liberals” and other “Enlightened Ones” who constantly criticize Mormon underwear, on the Right and Left alike, seem far less curious about the symbolic prison and gang origins of saggy-assed trousers. They seem far less obssessive about the whole look of banger-chic for stylistic reasons–even given the fact that their shorts are constantly on public display.

Polygamy

Next on the list of troubling Mormon doctrines, would be Plural Marriage. I’ll match your two Gays and raise you three or four additional wives. The truth is, the US Constitution doesn’t really support the notion of allowing the State to define the nature of marriage. The Christian anti-Mormon crusaders who spun a patriarchy clearly outlined by ancient prophets in a book they consider the Word of God into a vile sexual orgy of craven Mormon lust, found they could not do so based upon appeals to either the Holy Bible or the Constitution, because both leaned entirely in the direction of leaving Mormons alone to marry whom they felt God had ordained them to marry. Christian America chose to exploit popular suspicion and often the disgust of highly ranked but sexually repressed Christian zealots into a mandate for Mormon eradication anyway. Now they’re paying for their eagerness to throttle the Mormons by having thus removed from their arsenal, any legal or Constitutional rationale for denying Gay Marriage. If the State has a compelling interest in maintaining a "social order" merely based upon tradition and public opinion, as the Supreme Court reasoned in Reynolds v US, the case that legalized the persecution and near dissolution of the LDS church based upon their belief in a Biblically sound basis for taking more than one wife just as the Old Testament prophets all clearly did, then all the modern Leftist or radical Gay activist has to do is show that denying Gay Marriage will create a massive public outcry and the breakdown of civil order. Or more simply put, the Christian controlled Supreme Court, in order to skewer Mormons, ruled that a Darwinian Democracy, basically a cultural lynch mob, could simply define Marriage any way it saw fit, and persecute, limit, regulate, or disincorporation anyone or any institution that said otherwise. Christian America, to get Mormonism, handed the entire matter of regulating Holy Matrimony over to the State. Because this reasoning was so selfish, so myopic and egocentric, while it hounded Mormonism out of the polygamy business more or less permanently, it also set the stage for any combination of gay, lesbian, bi-Sexual, transgendered, cross-gendered, or bi-gendered, in any number or arrangement, to appeal to the same precedent and civil government and judiciary in these more “enlightened” times, and grant themselves by popular acclaim, the right to define or re-define Marriage as they see fit. It’s just a question now of compelling cultural force of numbers and social pressure.

Mormonism on the other hand, has so stigmatized itself over the generations because of an abusive and violently repressive beating it has been given by Christian American the practice of, even just the sanction of, or even just the suspicion of polygamy, that the LDS church today is probably the most active anti-polygamist organization on the face of the earth. It’s a bit like "Stockholm Syndrome," where the kidnapped and abused begin to identify with their captors. The LDS church today doesn’t allow plural marriage even in countries and cultures in which this is the standard arrangement. The church has moved full-speed into the isles of the Pacific and other foreign, exotic cultures, where plural marriage has always been the normal social arrangement. Yet, even in these places, modern Mormon leadership demands that investigators in such countries cast off a few wives and narrow it down to one as a contingency for baptism. Apart from being a pretty asinine, Utah-culture-based policy–in a church rife with similarly Utah-culture-based asinine policies–it puts the church in a position of denying both the Bible and the pronouncements of previous modern prophets at a time and place and under conditions where there is no reason whatsoever to compromise what it still openly acknowledges as the "New and Everlasting Covenant."

The LDS church issued an official “policy” statement in 1995 it called a “Proclamation to the World.” It’s also known as the LDS “Proclamation” or “Statement” on the family. It arrived at the moment the church first began to make a serious effort to become a world religion and crawl out of hiding along the canyons and valleys of the Wastach Front. It came after the GI/Big Blue fashionistas in Salt Lake discovered that they’d uniformed and groomed their sexy young elders of the missionary effort in San Francisco’s official togs and butch-hairdoes of the rising young Gay professional community. It sought to explain the church’s position on gender roles and marriage at least to its own—as there was a growing internal, closeted Gay Mormon lobby foolish enough to think they could win out that argument against the Brethren if they just made their case well enough in the scriptures. They failed of course, as had the feminist movement of the previous two decades failed to make any dent in the notion that Mormonism was a patriarchy and a male priesthood was a permanent fixture.

All these several internal movements did was encourage the elderly leadership of the church to so soften the look and feel of the patriarchal nature of the priesthood, with its Divine Right to lead, administer, and preside not only over church organizations but the basic family unit, that presently the modern, caring LDS male is so empathic with the womenfolk of the church, so in touch with his nurturing side, that he in many cases might just as well be Gay. But that’s another doctrine to explore later.

The culmination of this “Proclamation” put Mormonism at the forefront of California’s Proposition 8, Gay marriage battle. Mormonism essentially kicked off the entire “Defense of Marriage Act” movement:

WE, THE FIRST PRESIDENCY and the Council of the Twelve
Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a
woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to
the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.
ALL HUMAN BEINGS—male and female—are created in the
image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of
heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and
destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual
premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose….

http://www.lds.org/Static%20Files/PDF/Manuals/TheFamily_AProclamationToTheWorld_35538_eng.pdf

In the process of clarifying its gender role and same-sex policies however, the LDS church practically precluded itself from ever defending its previous support of a plural-marriage patriarchy on any rational grounds by seeming to be deferring to the Christian social consensus that one man and one wife is God’s specific formula. The wording of the “Proclamation” one might suppose, is sufficiently lenient to have not specified one single union of one single couple. I wouldn’t read anything into that however. And apparently the church has not taken a clear stance upon how many times you get to re-do and re-try this current model of “marriage for time and all eternity” in the “new and everlasting covenant.”

The LDS church was correct both Biblically and Constitutionally in professing the right to both believe and practice plural marriage. A modern argument that plural marriage as practiced by early Mormons is barbaric and misogynist, would of necessity also make the same charges against the Holy Bible and its authors. No Bible-believing Christian however, can truthfully say that plural marriage, or the general principle of ecclesiastical and familial patriarchy that practiced it both in New and Old Testament times, was condemned or proscribed anywhere within its pages. Since neither can the Mormon hierarchy, it seems almost cowardly that the LDS church would withhold "blessings" from new members not held captive in Utah and Idaho–the two states that at used to have federally mandated test oaths that disenfranchised anyone who is a member of an organization that teaches plural marriage to be a correct Biblical principle, (these oaths are now incorporated into their state constitutions via specific provisions banning plural marriage) and laws with the power to seize all the property and funds of any organization that promotes it–whether it is actually practiced or not. In that context, no doubt, the fear is that the church would be crucified in Utah and Idaho, for what its members do or preach in Africa, Eastern Europe, or the Middle East.

http://en.fairmormon.org/Mormonism_and_polygamy/Early_Christians_on_plural_marriage

http://waspolygamyasininthenewtestament.blogspot.com/

Nevertheless, what the Church, Historic Christianity, Roman tradition or social custom has to say about Biblical marriage practices, the US Constitution pretty much grants any religious order 1st Amendment rights to interpret the Bible or any other Holy writ or tradition, and decide what God sanctions and what He doesn’t in their own terms, barring a “compelling” national or at least public interest in restricting it. The only “compelling” national or public interest the Supreme Court ever produced in its meddling with Mormon plural marriage ordinances, was a vague allusion to "civilized," meaning "Christian" tradition and the fear that allowing Mormons to breed like rats in the desert would allow them to home-grow a political base of voters that would prevent the Christian movers and shakers that ran America in the day, move in as usual, after the Mormons had done all the hard work of trailblazing the wilderness, and through one more new pretext, take all the Mormons’ stuff away again. But more to the point, when the federal government was oppressing Mormonism and writing Orthodox Christian dogma into federal law in its attempt to take control over Mormon occupied Mexican territory now called "Utah," the whore-mongering US Senators, Congressmen, army officers, judicial appointees, and other invading and then occupying forces that crafted and refined these anti-Mormon statutes and eventual state constitutional demands, took great care to insure that the anti-bigamy, anti-co-habitation laws were written in such a way as to allow the occupiers, the army, the federally appointed judiciary, governors and administrators, the ability to hump their brains out with whomever and however they wanted to, as long as they did not legitimize it by setting up housekeeping, gathered up their things, and buggered off later in the evening, after having their way with the woman in question. Now, I say these federally mandated legal requirements were anti-Mormon more so than anti-polygamy, since the goal was the elimination of Mormonism rather than rescuing women from the horrors of being well-kept by Brigham Young and company. When the "liberating" forces of the US limped into the Utah Valley, they were actually quite pissed off that there were damned few women interested at all in being liberated. They did their best however to solicit Mormon wives and daughters to desert their husbands and fathers, and under the guise of "liberation" take up with the camp-following hordes or the randy buggers of the US Army, or the conniving bastards sent from Washington DC to suppress the civil rights of the local Mormon population. Whores and trollops and whiskey for the most part had to be imported, which only added to the outrage of the American "liberators" of the Mormon desert empire.

When forced by continued Mormon legal fighting to rationalize the nation’s Christian crusade against Mormonism via plural marriage, the reasoning of the High Court of all the land was this: If we protect plural marriage under the 1st Amendment because of a religious belief, then somebody else will demand that we let them practice human sacrifice because of a religious belief. To the truly stupid this may actually seem reasonable, and since I’m writing this for idiots of every religious and political stripe, I’ll just point out the fundamental difference between protecting the Constitutional right of any single, or group of consenting adults, who want to play with themselves however they may behind closed doors, or allowing a man and any number of women–or vice-versa for that matter–to cohabitate and share income, chores or sex as they see fit, and the prospect of forcibly seizing one’s fellow citizens and laying them dead on an altar against their will. In the one case, even Roe v Wade should teach us that the Constitution implies a fundamental right to privacy. There isn’t a single anti-sodomy law in the nation that has withstood even a lower-court challenge under the reasoning that it’s just so outrageous that the public and national peace is at stake. In the other case, you’re just killing people. Are you bright enough to see the difference? If not, I for one don’t want you in the church anyway.

Let’s try it this way for you "enlightened" so-called "liberals" or "progressives": If we were to suggest today that catching two gay men cohabitating should be a criminal act worthy of five years in prison at hard labor, and for every additional man found cohabitating with them an additional five years should be added to the sentence, we can begin to approach a more contemporary vision of the idiocy, cruelty, and bigotry of these Christian anti-bigamy laws directed and executed directly against the early Mormons. And if the only "compelling" national, state or public interest in stamping out early Mormonism’s multiple wives is some imagined concern for what happens to the children in these relationships, the answer is almost invariably that they go on to be very happy and well adjusted citizens and many of them now hold high LDS church offices, and many many more of the products of these relationships are in highly placed social, political, business and entrepreneurial enterprises. This overwhelming success occurred mind you, in spite of the federal anti-polygamy witch hunts that stole many of the breadwinners from these families, threw these often elderly patriarchs in jail, and attempted to break apart their families while the Mormon women and children were left essentially to die in a nearly helpless condition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmunds%E2%80%93Tucker_Act

When it proved essentially impossible to enforce their anti-bigamy legislation without a willing wife to confess and rat out her husband and fellow wives and insure a conviction, the Edmunds Tucker Act used the Supreme Court’s ruling in Reynolds v US to craft laws that disincorporated and seized the church’s property for merely teaching that plural marriage was a correct Biblical principle–it was not required to prove anyone was even actually practicing it. Test oaths were drafted in Utah and Idaho that required these constituencies to swear that they were not a member of any organization that espoused the belief in or practice of plural marriage. The entire Mormon population was enslaved and governed by federal appointees who rented back their own church buildings to them and denied them the right to vote or hold any civic office.

http://lrwhitney.wordpress.com/?s=plural+marriage

http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Reynolds_V._United_States

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=98&invol=145

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/reynoldsvus.html

Having made the case for early Mormon plural marriage, if you’re wondering whether LDS or Utah-based folk-fable or doctrine or ideology, is going to be a problem in the governance of the United States of America relative to its past promotion of plural marriage, the answer is NO. If the Lefties have already decided Gay marriage is de rigueur, the Libertarians don’t give a shite what anyone does behind closed doors, and the Anarchists are too busy occupying McDonald’s to know the difference, that just leaves the hard core of the Tea Party and the once-called "Conservative," or more pointedly, "Religious Right" fanatics to piss and moan about Mormons, their secret death squads, satanic symbolism, and multiple wives. The problem this waning segment of the American social landscape is having of course, is that so many of their sainted leaders are turning out to be serial monogamists, fornicators, adulterers, or in the case of a certain unnamed, traditionally very Conservative World Power and religious sect: boy-buggering child molesters and enablers of same. Some of these loosely united Christian pals are out pissing on the funerals of homecoming war heroes, and screaming at their parents, wives, family and loved ones about what a great thing it is that God is killing so many US servicemen and women. I can’t even follow that one intellectually or otherwise. And naturally, all the Religious Right can do is shut about them and keep a low profile. You can’t defend that sort of thing within the Body of Christ in the public, social or political spheres. Internally, of course, those sinners will go to Heaven because they are saved as Christians no matter what. And Mitt Romney’s burning in hell no matter what, be cause he’s neither saved nor a Christian. In the old days, these same nut-cases, these cheating, stealing, lying lecherous hypocrites, would find no trouble contriving an excuse to send him there through fire and sword. Plural marriage was just the most universally convenient issue to beat Mormonism to death with at a national level.

Brief Update on Willard Cleon Skousen

I’ve been responding a bit to several other blogs centered around W Cleon Skousen’s sophomoric ramblings about the "Atonement," and other "deep" or "advanced" folk-doctrines still being hailed as his masterworks. I’ll just summarize my response to these claims briefly:

First of all, we have his highly exaggerated FBI "experience," which consisted almost exclusively of shuffling papers in the outback with no security access to anything of world or national importance. The fact that he was a rabid anti-Communist and J Edgar may have given him a short offhand nod according to Skousen’s camp or that at his death somebody somewhere asked him to give a speech commemorating Hoover’s service to the country, amounts to nothing. In the world of mindless, foaming anti-Communists, there are enough loons to go around that somebody connected somehow to Hoover would end up looking like, or would be made to look like they endorsed W Cleon Skousen. The fact remains that the FBI officially condemned and divorced themselves from his efforts, his ramblings, his writings, his speechmaking, and the official FBI position on Willy Skousen was that he was doing more harm than good, and actually obfuscated, confused, and inhibited the serious work of sorting out credible risks to national security.

As for the recurring claims of Skousen’s devotees that he was fired as chief of police by a lawless Salt Lake mayor who hated the way he enforced the law equally and fairly, and wouldn’t look the other way when the bigwigs had a game of cards–the overwhelming assessment of his stint as Top Cop in Salt Lake City was that his approach to law enforcement was a combination of Barney Fife and Joe Stalin. It is often assumed or even proposed by Cleon’s faithful, that the mayor who fired him was some sort of liberal, or corrupt and lazy, and only resented Skousen’s equal application of the law, even when high city officials were the victims of his zeal. The truth is, J Bracken Lee was a hard-core conservative, every bit as active in the anti-Commie craze as was Skousen, and every bit as straight-laced in his personal morals and habits:

Mayor Lee’s firing of Skousen caused a major shock within conservative political circles – both in Utah and nationally. [For a detailed discussion of the Lee-Skousen feud, see “Political Feud in Salt Lake City: J. Bracken Lee and the Firing of W. Cleon Skousen”, by Dennis L. Lythgoe, Utah Historical Quarterly, Fall 1974, or see Lythgoe’s subsequent book, Let 'Em Holler: A Political Biography of J. Bracken Lee - Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1982.]

In August 1960, Mayor Lee wrote a letter to Mrs. Elizabeth Laine of Arcadia, CA in which he made the following comments:

“To further explain my position, let me say this, that while Mr. Skousen has written a book and talks against Communism, actually he conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government.  The man is also a master of half-truths.  In at least three instances I have proved him to be a liar before the City Commissioners and the newspaper reporters.  To me, he is a very dangerous man because he preaches one thing, practices another, does not tell the truth, and cannot be relied upon.  He also was one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government.”  [HQ 67-69602, #286; 8/8/60 letter from J. Bracken Lee to Mrs. Elizabeth Laine, Arcadia CA]

When the Educational News Service of Fullerton, CA ran a favorable article about Skousen in its March 31, 1960 issue, Mayor Lee sent them a blistering 3-page response (with copies to 13 other individuals who served on the Board of Directors of the News Service).  Among the accusations made by Lee are the following comments concerning Skousen’s 1958 book, The Naked Communist:

“Your article further states that my charge that Mr. Skousen had been using City Police secretarial assistance in the writing of this book was without foundation.  The records will show to the satisfaction of anyone that he did use City Policemen and secretaries both to compile, typewrite, and assemble his notes on this book.  While I certainly do not object to the writing of a book in opposition to Communism, I do not think it is right that City funds and personnel be used to write a book which resulted in personal gain to that writer.”   [HQ 67-69602, #290; 8/16/60 letter by J. Bracken Lee to Mr. Edward T. Price, President, Education Information Inc of Fullerton CA.]

After termination as Police Chief, Skousen then ran for the Republican nomination for Governor of Utah and his campaign literature included the phrase, “Served his country in the FBI 16 years, 4 of them as Administrative Assistant to J. Edgar Hoover during World War II, a top assignment.” [HQ 67-69602, #287; Bureau file copy notation on outgoing 1/12/61 letter to Mrs. Norman Hartnett, Bakersfield CA mentions his campaign literature.]

J. Edgar Hoover received numerous inquiries about Skousen’s description of himself. His replies declared that: “For your information, Mr. Skousen did not have the title ‘Administrative Assistant’ while in the FBI” and “In response to your inquiry, I wish to advise that there is no such position in the FBI entitled Administrative Assistant to the Director”. [See for example, Hoover’s 4/19/61 reply to Rev. Harry C. Carlson of La Habra CA which is HQ file 94-47468, serial #28 and his 11/1/61 reply to David A. Moynan Jr., Chairman of Operation Americanism, Jefferson Parish Junior Chamber of Commerce, which is HQ file 94-47468, serial #37 and his April 10, 1962 reply to inquiry by Mrs. A.M. Donaldson of Cardiff CA which is HQ file 94-47468, serial #46.]

http://vault.fbi.gov/willard-skousen/

http://my.heraldextra.com/forums/Topic4228239-2431-1.aspx

https://sites.google.com/site/ernie124102/skousen

http://www.rickross.com/reference/mormon/mormon726.html

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=83d_1309529018

While on a general level there’s nothing unusual about somebody puffing up a resume to get a job, the fact is, Willard Skousen was a consummate BS artist on every level of his personal, political, religious, and "academic" pursuits. Like Lucifer, master of the half-truth and the credible lie, Cleon Skousen never gained any official sanction from anyone of any legal, political, academic or religious authority and had to rely on bold assertion and vague allusion. He never, for example, and to the possible surprise of most of his fans, published a scrap of anything about anything, political or religious through BYU or any other authoritative LDS institution, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. He was flat out rejected by the First Presidency, shunned at BYU, and eventually kicked off campus and banished from recruiting through LDS connections of any sort by both BYU Administration and the First Presidency in concerted movement.

The problem I have with making an effort at diluting the tendency toward invective in my examination of Skousen and his cultic following, comes from attempting to make a person who should according to all objective criteria, already be overtly silly-looking on his face, look even sillier just to make the point. This situation exists because Cleon Skousen is not an individual to be examined on his singular intellectual or "spiritual" merits. Skousen can only be examined in the context of a multi-generational cloud of gaseous, ignorant postulation and self-promotion, lapped up for decades now by a devout, well-meant, if ignorant cult of personality.

Willy Skousen’s purely "Mormon" minions universally dismiss his clearly paranoid and delusional political hysteria with the oft-used phrase: "I don’t care what his political beliefs are, I’m only interested in his great "gospel" insights." The problem with a "neutral" examination of Willy Skousen on a theological level, however, is that he is the object of adoration of an international fan-base of Mormon worshippers, yet is a non-entity within the ecclesiastical and therefore doctrinal structure of the LDS Church. Any "insights" he may or may not have are meaningless, and he has no particular right or permission much less authority to preach his personal "gospel" to anyone, particularly so vast a gullible and receptive audience teeming adoringly after his every scrap of wisdom, within the ranks of the LDS faith. Willy Skousen isn’t merely a nice old geezer harmlessly weaving Utah folk-doctrine into clever little books he gets you to pay for. He’s a sub-culture. He’s a very dedicated, self-promoting "wisdom" industry. And yet, I am invited to refrain from invective when examining the notion that his often bizarre perspective should be given great credence simply because his followers think he’s a nice guy. Oh yes, he’s not a General Authority, they contend as if it actually makes sense to them, but he had friends who were, and he makes all sorts of allusions to secret insight he got from them that these original sources for "obvious" reasons–nudge nudge–don’t of course ever publish or endorse. He’s rubbed elbows with all the "greats," and gee, he’s such a kindly, spiritual old figure he really ranks up there with Brigham Young and Joseph Smith anyway for all practical purposes. In fact, he’s got such a great insight into what all those scribbled old journals and doctrinal rumor mills have been parsing out for generations, he’s actually more accurate and reliable than any of the "official" Church authorities.

"I’m only trying to give the best answers I can," he softly apologizes to his critics, in an affected tone of humility. "If you can come up with a better answer, I’d be glad to hear it…"

How about this Willard? Shut the hell up. You are not the Answer Man. If the First Presidency doesn’t think it’s important to provide the answers you’re trying guess and fabricate and pull out of your spiritual arse, who are you to second guess both the canon and the living prophets? And who is this other guy that you’re encouraging to make even bigger and better guesses at these, secret, convoluted, cosmic "Truths" you like to make up out of fairy dust and some nebulous comment you overheard in the hall from some GA or the other? This other guy is a good-intentioned patsy you’re perverting, contaminating and corrupting, and dragging down to speculative hell along with you. That’s who this other guy is.

And while you’re getting all offended out there, let me tell you up-front I think that other guy could be you!

Cleon Skousen is a creature of mythology. Cleon Skousen was spreading myth, not doctrine. And now, W Cleon Skousen has become a myth himself. And instead of his presumptuous, spiritual theorizing having the good grace to die with him, his devoted coven of friends and defenders continue to perpetuate his entirely unauthoritative rambling as if his power to seduce the Mormon mind was controlling them from beyond the grave. Why? Because Skousen was one of the first to capitalize on the nearly universally held Utah myth that LDS general authorities are all walking around the temple talking directly to Jesus all day, and are possessed of volumes of great, deep, secret knowledge and wisdom gained in these conversations. And Skousen was one of the first, after William Bennett or say, Sampson Avard, to successfully convince masses of the LDS faithful that there is something so special about himself that all of these great LDS authorities are just begging to have him as their confidant.

"Modern" LDS authorities it is held in Utah Mormon culture, are constrained by the Almighty to "water down" all the "hard doctrines" Skousen likes to allude to, in order to make a mass-appeal more palatable to the ignorant, spiritually retarded masses from which the missionary program has to recruit new membership. After all, those prophets and apostles can’t really tell us all they know about these "higher doctrines," so we’re just lucky to have old Willy on hand to discretely let us in on all the inner secrets. This is not invective, this is not vitriol, this is the premise upon which one has to hinge any acceptance of anything Cleon Skousen has promoted his entire life, spiritually, doctrinally, or for that matter politically. His bogus political claim to have been the personal assistant of J Edgar Hoover is exactly the same gambit he used his entire life in alluding to some vague, but apparently very close and official connection to the First Presidency, various General Authorities, and of course the crowning LDS institute of higher education, BYU. But, as Hoover repeatedly found himself correcting: there never was any such relationship to any of these props of intellectual, moral, mental, or patriotic credibility. Cleon Skousen, simply put, is not a credible person on any level or in any fashion imaginable.

Nice guy maybe–deep thinker, but no credibility. He made a good living spending his whole life pulling Commies and Mormon folk doctrine out of his arse. And God bless him. If people were and still are gullible enough or stupid enough to think he’s some sort of spiritual or political genius that they’re willing to cough up the dough to indulge and support him in his little fantasy world, guess he has the last laugh. Many’s a time I thought of taking up the banner and making a few bucks off the religion, but I just kept coming back to that notion of “priestcraft,” and could never quite separate the concept from what guys like Glenn Beck and Cleon Skousen always end up doing. There’s still hope for Beck I guess, but his facilitation of Skousen’s rebirth as one of the greatest thinkers and patriots ever to come out of an American womb unfortunately puts him in the “more harm than good” category on a dangerous level.

Skousen’s book The First 2,000 Years, published in 1953, included a section on God that can only be described as blasphemous.

Under the subtitle “The Source of God’s Power,” he wrote,

“Through modern revelation we learn that the universe is filled with vast numbers of intelligences, and we further learn that Elohim is God simply because all of these intelligences honor and sustain Him as such…His glory and power is something which He slowly acquired until today, ‘all things bow in humble reverence.’ But since God ‘acquired’ the honor and sustaining influence of ‘all things’ it follows as a corellary (sic) that if He should do anything to violate the confidence or ‘sense of justice’ of these intelligences, they would promptly withdraw their support, and the ‘power’ of God would disintegrate. This is what Mormon and Alma meant when they specifically stated that if God should change or act contrary to truth and justice ‘He would cease to be God.’ Our Heavenly Father can do only those things which the intelligences under Him are voluntarily willing to support Him in accomplishing” (pp.355-356).

http://www.mrm.org/cleon-skousen

The short explanation of the above sophomoric drivel is this: Heresy. We did not all get together and vote God into office, and God is not dependent upon our approval to remain God. There is nothing in the canon that suggests this apart from one crackpot named Willard, who strung a few out-of context scriptures together and then injected his “corellary” as if it had anything to do with the actual content of the scriptures in question. There is no modern revelation that spells out that God’s power is based entirely upon our honor and intellectual sustaining of His position. There is no scripture or modern “revelation” that even suggests that the first time we think God isn’t living up to His bargain He’s out of the job. Skousen is a liar and a heretic.

Even by zany, Utah folk-doctrine standards.

Yes, if God stopped acting like God he would cease to be God, but since it’s not in God’s nature to stop being God it’s not possible. Mormons may not believe God created everything out of nothing, and is therefore more the Great Architect of the Universe than the mythical, Platonist’s immaterial God who speaks everything into being out of immaterial matter, but there’s nothing in Mormon canon or “revelation” that defines the source of God’s power to organize or “create” and command the elements, as the result of some parliamentary procedure through which every other intelligent entity cedes to Him their magical thought energy.

And the really funny thing, in a pathetic sort of “funny” way…a sad, desperate sort of way…is that Willard Skousen is in his own estimation, so allegedly loved and chummy with all these LDS prophets and apostles, that these men of God, according to Skousen, feel they just have to compulsively reveal to our man Willy, bits and hints and pieces of all the restricted information God has commanded them to withhold from mankind, because Willard is such a spiritual and personal buddy with them that they know he’s the only one outside their circle who can handle the Whole Truth. Yes, in Willy’s world, God actually compels these prophets to sneak these cosmic tidbits from God’s lips to Willy Skousen randomly, casually on the sly, possibly over a can of soda while talking about the weather.

The fact remains however, that these great and Godly crumbs of wisdom Skousen has allegedly picked up during these exchanges, are no more real than the fantasy narrative he created while shuffling generic, unclassified, functionary papers with the FBI in various crapholes of the Midwest, until by the time he was applying for the job of chief cop in SLC, his imaginary portfolio had evolved into a hefty tome that promoted him to the ignorant hicks of the Wasatch Front as Hoover’s Right-Hand Man and seasoned champion of numerous World Commie Hunting adventures. The irony here is that, well, if anyone of normal intelligence and an ounce of healthy skepticism thought about it for more than a second, they would realize that, while Cleon is so allegedly chummy and beloved by the apostles and prophets that they can’t resist spilling their eternal guts to him every chance they get, somehow neither the LDS leadership nor God Almighty ever once thought to extend a call that would put him officially and legitimately amongst their company where he could openly talk with Jesus and receive the whole enchilada of universal knowledge. What was God thinking about when he overlooked that?

Furthermore, it should be equally obvious that whatever casual side-commentary apostle "Mormon Q. Mormon" passed on to one Willard Cleon Skousen in the hallway of the Church Offices or inadvertently at some speech or outing or devotional gathering, is likewise as irrelevant as anything Skousen himself had to expound upon these mythical, covert insights. No single LDS authority has any calling or authority to expound, expand, or invent "doctrine" above and beyond the Standard Works, and the official, correlated materials authorized by the First Presidency.

End of debate Cleon. There are no "higher" doctrines. There are only "doctrines," and stuff neither we nor the Brethren have any right or authority to comment upon. Doctrine is defined by the First Presidency and officially published. And they get it from God only if God wants it gotten. You aren’t and never have been invited into that inner circle of authority. Sorry. But you know that now because you’re dead as a doornail. Unfortunately you can’t come back and tell Glenn Beck and your new fan base just how full of shite you were.

As I’ve said before, Hitler was a nice guy if you were one of his crowd. This isn’t a personal attack, this is a sociological examination of the Skousen phenomenon. Popularity is no indication of correctness or "inspiration." The NAZI’s were incredibly popular–if you were a German recovering from a really crappy treaty that destroyed your economy after WWI. That indeed, Adolph Hitler or Cleon Skousen had a few bright things to say is true, but on balance, less important to me or the history of the LDS Church than the fact that no matter what Skousen had to say, or how "bright" it seemed to appear to either you, me, or friends in the ecclesiastical structure at times, the bottom line is, he remains a nobody in the LDS theological scheme. In that context, Cleon Skousen had no more "authority" to delineate the Lord’s Word than Adolph Hitler. It matters not in an LDS context, what either had to say therefore.

But the comparisons to Hitler don’t end there. Skousen actually embraced many of the cultural myths the NAZIS employed to win the favor of the German population and seize power, including the notion of an Anglo-Saxon chosen Master Race who stemmed from the ancient lost tribes of Israel, guided to the British Isles and finally on to found the United States of America. That remains to this day the chief article of faith for America’s Neo-NAZI’s and the KKK. Those are not good ideas any church would want associated with any of its members even casually, unofficially.

Naturally, any time a Glenn Beck or Mitt Romney pops up in the public face, there also, pops up old uncle Cleon with his big nose, bigger head, and very small white-supremist ideas—permanently connect to the LDS church for time and all eternity. Cleon Skousen’s notions about religion and politics are like rank, spiritual, intellectual, philosophical farts that linger vaguely in the air for generations, contaminating and fouling the clear air of both political and religious reason. Wherever a noted LDS figure make progress in the public eye in any given field of endeavor, you will eventually catch a whiff of Willy Skousen’s permeating stench and find the public nostrils forced to contend with it first, recoiling and sniffing through the fumes of Skousen’s gibberish to get at the actual topic in current relevance.

Like this recent Romney article from Mother Jones, featuring an interview from the last election:

If Romney hasn’t read Skousen’s political philosophy, that’s probably for the best. His professor’s grand theory of American history was founded on a set of beliefs that had little to no basis in reality. He believed that the Founding Fathers were directly direct descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, whom he said had migrated to the British Isles—and that by extension, the Constitution was the direct descendant of the ruling system of the ancient Israelites. In Making of America, the textbook that Mickelson referenced in his conversation with Romney, Skousen quotes from an essay which argues that "one of the blessings of slavery" was that slaves’ marriages were fleeting, and suggests that being bought at auction improved slaves’ self worth. The real victims of slavery, the author suggested, were the white owners. The book also referred to black children as "pickaninnies"—which prompted lawmakers in California to block the text from being used in classrooms. In Skousen’s book, the model Supreme Court decision was Dred Scott, which correctly demarcated the limits of federal power; Roger B. Taney, who wrote the majority opinion in that case, was the model Supreme Court justice.

Although he didn’t seem familiar with Making of America, Romney was almost certainly aware of his ex-professor’s reputation. Skousen’s academic colleagues began to push back against his teachings while Romney was still a student at BYU. As Alexander Zaitchik reported forSalon, some of Skousen’s colleagues at BYU insisted on teaching his economic treatise, Naked Capitalism, which theorized that a global cabal of bankers was quietly controlling the world from behind the scenes. (Naked Capitalism was a sequel to Naked Communism, which argued that the Soviet Union was just a pawn in larger effort by the United Nations to control the world).

Skousen’s crackpot theories eventually drew the attention of the leaders of the Mormon church, who were determined to distance themselves from Skousen’s sermonizing. The church, Zaitchik reported, issued a formal order instructing clergy not to promote Skousen’s work (he had started an anti-Communist civics group called the Freeman Institute) from the pulpit, lest anyone get the wrong impression about the church’s beliefs. Romney, a former Mormon bishop, would have had to have been living under a rock not to know about Skousen’s conspiratorial reputation.

After his heyday in the 1980s, Skousen faded into irrelevance, only to be resurrected at the dawn of the tea party era. Glenn Beck, who called Skousen’s Five Thousand Year Leap "years ahead of its time," made its ideas the centerpiece of his 9/12 movement and wrote the foreword to a new edition of the book. Texas Gov. Rick Perry said that Skousen "shares his views" on the founding of the country and touted him in speeches to evangelical audiences. Constitutional seminars based on Skousen’s theories of an Anglo-Saxon chosen people popped up across the country.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/04/mitt-romney-cleon-skousen-nutty-professor

Cleon Skousen was and remains a crackpot. That’s not a personal attack, that’s just a fact. Willy Skousen had not, has not, and will never have, any more authority to babble about "doctrine" or the makeup of the universe than I have. Or any of you have. The only difference between you or me and Willard Cleon Skousen is a few buddies who ended up in the LDS hierarchy, and a shameless knack for self-promotion. Why anyone would defer to Skousen in any doctrinal matter baffles me, and why so many feel their own spiritual or intellectual discernment is so humble in comparison to Skousen’s inflated estimate of his own entirely unauthorized speculations, is just plain insulting to the general LDS membership.

And particularly, why anyone discerning enough, or honest enough to confess that Cleon Skousen evidences some very befuddled, even bigoted and ignorant thought processes and personal beliefs in his political novels, and yet would be unwilling to concede therefore that his religious literary efforts cannot be any more reliable given that they are the product of the same twisted and demonstrably limited mental capacity, is baffling.

My invective is not directed at Willard Skousen so much as those who worship him. Unfortunately, I can’t say that he didn’t deliberately and very actively recruit his following. No, he wasn’t excommunicated or preaching overt heresy and rebellion. He remained "liked" by most LDS General Authorities. But he simply couldn’t shut up and let certain questions go unanswered. Like many Latter-day Saints, Cleon felt his personal intelligence or “inspiration” entitled him to insight into any subject in the universe, literally any subject in the universe, and God would provide the answer. Anywhere there was a gap or an opening in LDS dogma where Willard Skousen could stick his intellectual crowbar in and wedge himself inside, there he would be–for time and all eternity.

The only thing worse than a vicious tyrant and self-promoter like Hitler, is a kindly, lovable, well-meaning old codger like Cleon Skousen. It’s easy to see the faults and the damage an Adolph Hitler is doing to God’s Creation. It’s not so easy to identify and condemn the damage a chummy Uncle Cleon" is doing to God’s organization on this planet. In fact, it’s easy and credible to internalize and incorporate his postulations into your daily "belief system." And then you’re no longer a Latter-day Saint, not even a "Mormon." Then you’re just a Skousenite.

And that’s the way Satan really works. Through a kindly, mild-mannered, Cleon Skousen. That’s the true Satanic genius–not force and oppression, but a carefully administered and reasoned program of distraction and dilution and corruption. You don’t go through the Aryan Master Race and by force destroy the work of God. You lay the seeds of perversion and corruption and sophistry, through a kindly old Uncle Cleon.

In the latter days even God’s elect will be deceived. That’s God’s Word talking about us. That’s you and me. That’s perhaps particularly addressed to the LDS Church and its leadership, and even more so, the likes of Willy Skousen or any of those who would make his LDS mystical subculture their primary source of information and inspiration.

Joseph Smith—Matthew 1:22

22 For in those days there shall also arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders, insomuch, that, if possible, they shall deceive the very elect, who are the elect according to the covenant.

WTF? (What the Fudge?) Deseret News

The Deseret News has been the official organ of the LDS church since its foundation in 1850. (I know it’s strange and antiquated nomenclature. I know it sounds a bit naughty–but’s it is indeed the proper use of the word folks.) That’s barely three years after Brigham Young dragged his sick and tired guts over the pass, sat up and leaned from the back of the wagon and said “This is far enough.” (Yes, that’s what he actually said friends.) It inherited a grand tradition of being the only publication pretty much in the nation to stick up for the Mormons when the whole world was all too eager to slap them down with or without any justification at all. I suppose it still fulfills that mission, and times have not changed all that much for Mormonism, politically and socially speaking. Consequently, like all other historical Mormon tabloids, the Times and Seasons, or Millennial Star for instance, this “news” paper is essentially edited by the LDS Correlation Committee like any Latter-day Saint textbook, teaching manual, or conference talk would be. Even though it strains for “objective” journalism, to be “fair and balanced,” this is functionally impossible given that it is owned and managed directly by the Corporation of the First Presidency.

When the Deseret News prints an article, particularly online, and then invites its readers to give commentary, like most public presses, its editorial team urges a “civil” exchange of ideas. But at the Deseret News, in a practical sense, what “civil” really means is hard to say. The online robot filter is clearly programmed to reject comments based upon trigger words or phrases, including punctuation marks–in a very mysterious fashion, both intentionally, and as I have seen, arbitrarily. I have repeatedly attempted to post even highly pro-LDS rebuttals to anti-LDS articles the Deseret News has presented, and found them rejected. On the other hand, I’ve had comments I was convinced would never get through immediately approved. And I constantly compare my verbiage with that of those often imbecilic louts who have made it onto the page. I have routinely been rejected for “inflammatory” rhetoric and so forth, and yet found scores of contributors approved to post seething articles of hatred and bitterness laced with the most profoundly aggressive and offensive language and claims against their ideological foes, those damned “Mormons.”

But then, you have to take into account that these “letters to the editor” are being filtered by a Mormon. This is either a virtual Mormon or a human Mormon. Mormons are easily confused and frightened by arguments constructed with logic, clarity, and a good vocabulary. Some day I will test the Deseret News auto-screener by inserting “KKK” or “Nazi” into some otherwise pleasant comment, because I’m willing to bet there is a long litany of individual trigger words that automatically kick out the contribution however correctly or pertinent to the point being made the challenged word may be. The question is, how much of my life do I have left to waste on this fool’s errand?

For instance, you probably couldn’t say, “Yes, this Southern Baptist preacher calls Mormons racist, but his great grandfather owned slaves and his old man was a Grand Wizard in the KKK, and his Christian peers fought a bloody Civil War trying to impose the institution of slavery nationwide by virtue of its boasted Biblical sanction by God.” Even if all this were true, and you had the pictures of the guy in Klan robes hanging some unlucky black hobo from his church’s front gable as the highlight of a Sunday school picnic, that would likely be rejected simply for tone. Or because its not a pleasant reality. Truth and validity of the argument is not the prime indicator to whoever, or whatever is weeding out this “semi-public” access to the official Mormon public journal. The “Truth” may set you free, but not here in our newspaper please. Too much naked honesty is unseemly. Not if anyone might be upset by it. And that’s one more thing that’s wrong with Mormonism. For the past hundred years of so, Mormonism has been attempting to harmonize and spit-polish its wild, radical, roughhewn image, and tone-down the crazy rhetoric. The Modern LDS church wants to mellow out both past and present, the train of  historically heated in-house debates over doctrine, policy, and social direction. However well-meant these tempering movements have been, or in some cases, however these several personally instigated, ignorant attempts at editorial  randomness, what it has done over the generations, and continues to do in an exaggerated fashion, is stifle creativity on a broad basis amongst the membership, actively repel the best and brightest from joining the church in the first place, and utterly frustrate a free exchange of ideas concerning all things Mormon, both in and out of the church.

That’s today’s Mormonism in a nutshell.

http://www.media.utah.edu/UHE/d/DESERETNEWS.html

It is only fair to note that the Deseret News’ rabid anti-Mormon competitor, the Salt Lake Tribune, who’s masthead touts it to be “Utah’s Independent Voice Since 1871,” has approved every single thing I’ve ever contributed. And by that I mean, for and against the LDS church. Having said this, I must also say that It’s masthead of course, is a huge lie. The “Trib” was founded by embittered, professional Mormon haters who wanted to stick it to Brigham Young any and every way they could. They wanted to evoke a national hatred of the LDS religion, and invite drunkards, freeloaders, filthy capitalists and exploitation artists to come from all corners of the nation, of the world, to fill up the Mormon’s sheltered valley with Gentile customers for the Gentile merchants, tradesmen, and laborers that made up the Trib’s constituency. They wanted to drive the Mormons out, so the Gentiles could do business as usual amongst themselves, without a load of sanctimonious, proprietary Mormon socialists fouling their dreams of a capitalist empire in the desert.

The founders of the Tribune obviously had a case against the Deseret News being the editorial puppet of the LDS church back in the days of Brother Brigham. And the Tribune was clearly the propaganda press for everyone else. But the Tribune has radically mellowed its anti-Mormon stance over the generations, and evolved into a fairly generic journalistic effort serving the entire population of the “Valley.” However, little has changed with the Deseret News in its editorial policies and goals since its introduction. At the Deseret News, today as ever, every jot and tittle is subjected to committee action. At the Tribune, when you submit a comment online, there is almost no wait for moderation, no nagging about going over 200 words. No rejecting my inclusion of links to my blog. It’s type type type, “send” and there it is essentially instantly. Granted, I’m sure there’s an F-bomb filer always engaged and whatnot, but the point is, when constructing a rebuttal or counterpoint, I make the best case in my own words and short of calling somebody a sh**head or something, I know it’s going to be published. The Deseret News on the other hand, though it contains a higher percentage of articles I’d like to comment upon, and by that I mean I would be posting nearly always in favor of the LDS point of view, forces me to guess each and every word, each and every sentence and phrase, actively backseat-driving my work, nagging me over my shoulder. I’m always wondering if this word or that sentence is going to randomly set off some virtual, cyborg-editorial policy, or some “moderator” is going to get snotty an high-handed over it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Salt_Lake_Tribune

Now, most people just crank out some mouthy punch line and that’s that. Those seem to get through fine most of the time even for me. If on the other hand, you care to take the time, thought and energy to refine and then condense into their tiny word limit, something truly insightful, well, what’s the point? Literally half the time at the end of a session I click off an attempt to upload pure genius to the Mormon masses, only to wait sometimes for an hour or more, for the emailed rejection notice, which really gives no sense of what to do to correct the commentary and make it acceptable. After sometimes a half hour or more of comparing my language and style with those comments that did get published, I still have no sense of why mine shouldn’t have been published as well. What a waste of my time and brainpower. So basically, why bother?

And that’s why Mitt Romney is such a crap campaigner. Mormons don’t know how to argue, to connect the logical dots of a related family of concepts and principles, and then construct a meaningful debate with an elegant vocabulary that challenges the mind. What Mormons learn how to do is find out who’s in charge, learn the “right” answer, and then conversation revolves around who can agree with each other the most. You don’t flex much in the way of either polemic, rhetorical, or forensic gray cells in that environment.

You can’t even be sure at the Deseret News if you really are being rejected for editorial reasons, or if it’s just the Mormon attraction to pathetically inadequate software that would have been clunky and disfunctional twenty years ago–because every scrap of technology from the MLS to lds.org seems to be written by half-trained BYU grad-monkeys who’s chief qualification for the job was a current temple recommend and a basic understanding of how to plug in the computer. And you can’t even be sure that Mormon software isn’t really meant to be that un-intuitive because to a geriarchy still suspicious of FM radio it may actually make sense to them for a search engine to not be able to return a single reference in the LDS canon relating to “Jezus” because of a one-letter miss-spell IE:

Did you mean jets, Jews, fez’s, genus, jeans?

Sorry, your search returned no results.

I’m just saying, a search engine that can’t guess “Jesus” when given “Jezus” is pretty frigging stupid. But not half as stupid as the team of  little Mormon hacks writing code on the project. And not even fractionally as stupid as the invariably long chain of Mormon supervisors and managers, and the attendant ecclesiastical leadership that never seems to catch out the thousands and thousands of other bugs and inadequacies in the basic design and function of LDS software and website layout. When you close the circle of acceptable input to those inbred and raised in that tiny mountain hideout called “Utah,” you do not get the best and brightest. You get active Mormons who only know what they have been told their whole lives, and can only judge by what they’ve seen around them. That is a universal fault with Mormon leadership and organization. Mormonism puts loyalty and ideology ahead of talent and knowledge or worse yet, ahead of basic intelligence.

Mormonism is frightened by intelligence. Mormonism thus, avoids, dodges, circumvents, or if need be, crushes it whenever it becomes too apparent anywhere in the system, be it embodied in person, place, or thing.

For purposes of illustration, I’m going to give you this link to a recent Deseret News article:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865552050/Florida-pastor-calls-for-Romney-to-renounce-his-racist-Mormon-religion.html?s_cid=comment-email-a

This is a case-in-point exercise. I’m sure if somebody at the Deseret News gets uptight over it they’ll be screaming about “fair use,” and “intellectual property,” but all the communications law classes I took at BYU suggest my arse is covered on a number of grounds including using their intellectual product for the purposes of criticism, or education. I don’t know however, how educational it will be, because even I don’t know what it is possible to learn from the obtuse and asinine process used by the Deseret News to determine what they consider to be acceptable, publishable, reader commentary and discourse. If for some reason they take that link down or you can’t get there, here’s essentially the complete article. It was so well written when I tried to clip it for brevity I found that every single paragraph was doing a necessary job and to lose anything from it would be an insult to its author. But I did truncate it a bit anyway for legal reasons:

Florida-pastor-calls-for-Romney-to-renounce-his-racist-Mormon-religion

Related: MormonVoices calls for Santorum to disavow pastor

Claiming “the Mormon religion is prejudiced against blacks, Jews and native Americans,” Rev. O’Neal Dozier, a Florida pastor, held a press conference Monday morning to call upon presidential candidate Mitt Romney to renounce what Dozier characterized as “his racist Mormon religion.”

According to Anthony Man of the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Rev. Dozier said “the purpose of this request is to foster and maintain good race relations here in America,” adding that “the Mormon religion is prejudiced against blacks, Jews and native Americans.”

Officials of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints didn’t offer a specific response to Rev. Dozier’s claims, although Man referenced previous LDS statements on racism, which indicate that “people of all races have always been welcomed and baptized into the church since its beginning” and “the church unequivocally condemns racism, including any and all past racism by individuals both inside and outside the church.”

Man reported “Dozier, who is black, said the purpose of his event, at which he was joined by three other Broward ministers, was to highlight the past racism of the Mormon Church.

“But it’s impossible to separate Dozier from politics,” Man continued. “He’s a Republican Party committeeman and is the honorary Florida chairman for Rick Santorum, who is Romney’s principal opponent for the party’s presidential nomination.”

…

Among Dozier’s claims is that the Book of Mormon says that God made “the black African people (to be) disgusting, detestable to white people … [and] further degrades black, African people by saying they are uncultured, unattractive, unpleasant, lowlife, wild and unintelligent.”

“This is not true,” said MormonVoices, a website sponsored by the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, in an unsigned commentary posted Sunday:

“The Book of Mormon’s most direct teaching on the status of different races in God’s sight is in 2 Nephi 26: 33: “(The Lord) inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.”

…

Writing for Mediaite about the Dozier press conference, reporter Alex Alvarez said “this will likely prove a difficult battle for Rev. Dozier given that 1) past attempts at getting people to renounce their belief systems have, for the most part, been rather difficult, and 2) the pastor’s own faith and interpretation of scripture have been marked by controversy and allegations of prejudice as well. Those who live in glass houses, as they say, should be careful of casting the first stone. Or something like that, no?”

Dozier was described in a Mother Jones story as a “Bush-connected Islamophobic pastor who says gays ‘make God want to vomit.’” His bio on his church’s website says he is a Vietnam vet who played in the NFL in 1974 and who worked on the campaigns of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and President George W. Bush, including making radio ads for the president, and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist.

A New York Magazine story about Dozier’s press conference where he made his remarks said that Santorum touted Dozier’s endorsement of Santorum yesterday.

About the Author

Joseph Walker

Joseph Walker began his professional writing career in 1980 as a staff writer for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, eventually becoming the newspaper’s television and live theater critic. He left professional journalism for 20 years to work in more …

So, I’m all inspired by this guy’s excellent article, and I scroll down, read some inane comments, and then I’m compelled to put my own two-cents worth into the argument. And that’s exactly how it’s supposed to work—right? Here’s what I tried first:

I think the “black” pastor here has a lot of hutzpah to criticize a church for racism against “Negroes and Jews,” who’s founder, for one thing sent one of his first missionaries, a converted Jew, to the Holy Land (not Utah, the other one…) to dedicate “Palestine” to the gathering of Israel. Joseph Smith was assassinated for among other things, running for US president on an abolitionist ticket, and was murdered by a mob to the urging and applause of this “Christian” pastor’s southern peers of the day, for inviting “free Negroes” into his fold. Joseph Smith personally ordained several “Negroes” in period vernacular, to the priesthood, and died at the hands of the pre-cursors of the KKK, the “Regulator” or “Militia” movement–southern, Jew-hating, “Christian” white-supremists who were afraid of the growing Mormon social and political influence over the mounting issue of slavery. Two-hundred words doesn’t even allow me to touch upon just how ignorant this pastor’s pretensions are regarding LDS doctrines. If I were allowed to add a link I would, because I’ve blogged hundreds of pages dealing with this sort of ignorant prejudice against Mormonism, and I mean that in a dictionary sense.

That got rejected initially, because it was over 200 words, so what you see here is the second draft, minus only about ten words, ten very excellent words that added a lot, but it came in at 195 words in this form, and clearly should have passed that filter requirement. This was not cut and pasted, it was composed in real time in the little dialogue box on their own web site so there could have been no formatting problems. So I read it and read it, and tried to figure out what was triggering the filter—keeping in mind that the whole point was about the KKK and slavery, and the rebuttal would be pointless if I was not going to be allowed to talk about the KKK or the Christians who founded it. After another try or two, this is what came back:

Dear LeRoy Whitney,

Thank you for commenting on Florida pastor calls for Romney to ‘renounce his racist Mormon religion’ on DeseretNews.com.

Unfortunately, your comment was not approved for one of the following reasons:

* Comment was off topic or disruptive.
* Comment included obscenities or vulgarities.
* Comment included name-calling, epithets, racial slurs or other derogatory statements.
* Comment included personal attacks.
* Comment included advertising or other promotion.
* Comment included copyright infringement or plagiarism.
* Comment included web links, excessive ALL-CAPS or punctuation, excessive length or violated other formatting rules.
* Comment included personal information.

We would invite you to edit and resubmit your comment using the following guidelines:

* Comments should be thoughtful and helpful to your fellow readers with additional insight or counterpoints to the article.
* Avoid personal attacks and other inappropriate responses to fellow readers.
* Treat other readers as you would if you were speaking to them from a microphone, looking them in the eyes, then passing the microphone cordially to the next contributor.

If you would like to revise the following comment to comply with DeseretNews.com policy you may resubmit it by logging in and commenting directly from the story again.

********************

I think the “black” pastor here has a lot of hutzpah to criticize a church for racism against “Negroes and Jews,” who’s founder, for one thing sent one of his first missionaries, a converted Jew, to the Holy Land (not Utah, the other one…) to dedicate “Palestine” to the gathering of Israel. Joseph Smith was assassinated for among other things, running for US president on an abolitionist ticket, and was murdered by a mob to the urging and applause of this “Christian” pastor’s southern peers of the day, for inviting “free Negroes” into his fold.

********************

If you have further questions about comment moderation, please visit our Comments FAQ Page http://www.deseretnews.com/site/comments.

Regards,
Deseret News Editorial Team

This email was automatically generated by DeseretNews.com. Please do not reply. To unsubscribe from further comment notifications, click here.

You can see from the quote they returned that I’d already pared down my enthusiasm quite a bit, but the above version only made the Deseret News’ autobot madder at me. My comment was indeed on topic, it was not inflammatory, it was not obscene, or vulgar, did not employ racial or other epithets, it was not riddled with quotations, even though I used quotation marks, any one of which the jackass computer probably challenges as possible plagiarism or copyright violation because it is as stupid as its Mormon programmers and site managers. People who steal copy don’t put it in quotes. Morons.

This matter had by now become a point of honor. So I persisted in attempting to thwart whatever human or droid agent was acting against me at the Deseret News:

Dear LeRoy Whitney,

Thank you for commenting on Florida pastor calls for Romney to ‘renounce his racist Mormon religion’ on DeseretNews.com.

Unfortunately, your comment was not approved for the following reason:

* Comment included web links, excessive ALL-CAPS or punctuation, excessive length or violated other formatting rules.

We would invite you to edit and resubmit your comment using the following guidelines:

* Comments should be thoughtful and helpful to your fellow readers with additional insight or counterpoints to the article.
* Avoid personal attacks and other inappropriate responses to fellow readers.
* Treat other readers as you would if you were speaking to them from a microphone, looking them in the eyes, then passing the microphone cordially to the next contributor.

If you would like to revise the following comment to comply with DeseretNews.com policy you may resubmit it by logging in and commenting directly from the story again.

********************

I think the pastor has a lot of hutzpah to criticize a church for racism against “Negroes and Jews,” who’s founder, for one thing sent one of his first missionaries, a converted Jew, to the Holy Land to dedicate “Palestine” to the gathering of Israel. Joseph Smith was assassinated for among other things, running for US president on an abolitionist ticket, and was murdered by a mob instigated by an organized movement by southern, “Christian” pastors for inviting “free Negroes” into his fold, a proposition they claimed would weaken and corrupt the institution of slavery, which they held to be a proper American practice that was Biblically ordained.

********************

I can’t tell you why the Deseret News emails turned all my quotation marks into these characters: [ "] when displayed in Windows Mail or Windows Live Writer.  What you see there at the end of the last sentence displays as a quotation mark, not the string of goofy, random characters I typed in. Obviously, if I type in those random characters, something like #@$^&*, and post them into this blog they display as quotation marks, so I can’t actually show you the exact characters I mean. But my point is that one problem has to do with those characters and the use of quotation marks.

In fairness, before this game is over I’ll try deleting all quotation marks in that submission, and see if that gets through. In fact, I’ll do that right now. In the meantime, here’s another troubled submission I tried to make on a related topic, again, in real time, typing directly into the Deseret News’ contributor’s box. I’ve just submitted this commentary to that other thread again, removing the quotation marks over “Christendom”:

Dear LeRoy Whitney,

Thank you for commenting on It’s unjust to say LDS Church is anti-Semitic on DeseretNews.com.

Unfortunately, your comment was not approved for one of the following reasons:

* Comment was off topic or disruptive.
* Comment included obscenities or vulgarities.
* Comment included name-calling, epithets, racial slurs or other derogatory statements.
* Comment included personal attacks.
* Comment included advertising or other promotion.
* Comment included copyright infringement or plagiarism.
* Comment included web links, excessive ALL-CAPS or punctuation, excessive length or violated other formatting rules.
* Comment included personal information.

We would invite you to edit and resubmit your comment using the following guidelines:

* Comments should be thoughtful and helpful to your fellow readers with additional insight or counterpoints to the article.
* Avoid personal attacks and other inappropriate responses to fellow readers.
* Treat other readers as you would if you were speaking to them from a microphone, looking them in the eyes, then passing the microphone cordially to the next contributor.

If you would like to revise the following comment to comply with DeseretNews.com policy you may resubmit it by logging in and commenting directly from the story again.

********************

The Bible is far more anti-Semitic than the Book of Mormon. And the source of this criticism is directly form the greatest prophets of “Christendom” and the Jewish tradition alike. The difference is, Mormonism never in its history called the Jews anything other than God’s chosen people, however they messed it up, and has always maintained that the covenants the House of Israel made with God are still intact and will be fulfilled in the Latter Days. Baptism for the dead has to be understood as an act of leaving a set of tickets in the box office for the departed. If they want to come in and see the show all they have to do is pick them up on their way in. If not, well, no harm or insult is either intended or possible in this arrangement. Worst case: Mormons are idiots who eventually will see that their good intentions were misplaced, and their energy was wasted for nothing, and they’re the ones left out of the production in the end. If that’s insulting, whatever should we say about the harsh words of Calvin and Luther and the various Eastern and Roman Christian leaders through the ages?

********************

You can see that the above comment triggered a far more lengthy list of reasons for rejection, again, none of which seemed to relate to anything I wrote. I could for instance, remove the word “idiot,” because that may be a trigger. But I don’t know that. It could be that the editorial fool engaged to make the decision, human or artificial, thinks I’m calling Mormons “idiots.” But I don’t know that. I’d have to try removing that allusion, which is actually a pro-Mormon statement, a left-handed complement, but it’s obvious at this point that what this inane filter system does–a system you can’t simply avoid by phoning or PM’ing or emailing the “moderator” and asking what you’d have to drop to avoid triggering rejection—is discourage anyone with a brain and the motivation to share it from bothering themselves with the Deseret News. You are then left, as in Mormonism itself, with a lot of people with no brains who want to share what they have to offer anyway. And they are eagerly urged and allowed to do so by the equally brainless Deseret News moderator.

And now brothers and sisters, I am electronically interrupted by some fresh and curious new information coming into my email box. I should withhold it dramatically for a big close to this spiel, but I’m going to reveal something that probably makes this whole effort moot, and makes me look a bit foolish to the techno-geeks out there, but my goal here is honesty. Here’s what I just got back in my email from the Deseret News:

Dear LeRoy Whitney,

Thank you for commenting on It’s unjust to say LDS Church is anti-Semitic on DeseretNews.com.

This message is to inform you that your comment on It’s unjust to say LDS Church is anti-Semitic was approved. Thank you for your participation in keeping our dialogue civil and enlightening. We hope you’ll continue to engage in the online conversations on DeseretNews.com and look forward to seeing more from you in the future.

Regards,
Deseret News Editorial Team

Well well well… What then, you now ask, did I change to get my comment through? As I said, I took “Christendom” out of quotations and not a thing else. It’s there on the Deseret News site exactly as printed above, complete now I see, with the typo “form” instead of “from.” Here’s the link:

http://www.deseretnews.com/user/comments/765559692/Its-unjust-to-say-LDS-Church-is-anti-Semitic.html

This development only confuses me more, and now that I made it past the filters, the Deseret News still pisses me off, because the Deseret News doesn’t allow you to edit comments. I can’t fix that damned typo and now I’ve called everyone’s attention to it so I’m going to be the persecuted subject of spellcheck Nazis everywhere for as long as the web holds up and the Deseret News manages to keep their article online.

Oh well. Foiled again. But, back to Mormons hating Jews and Negroes… Here’s about the fourth try I had at getting into the commentary about the Florida pastor and his call for Mormon racial repentance:

Joseph Smith for one thing sent one of his first missionaries, a converted Jew, to the Holy Land to dedicate “Palestine” to the gathering of Israel. Joseph Smith was later assassinated for among other things, running for US president on an abolitionist ticket, and for inviting “free Negroes” into his fold, a proposition his local Christian pastors claimed would weaken and corrupt the institution of slavery, which they held to be a proper American practice that was Biblically ordained.

I defy anyone to rationally explain why that should be rejected, even by the nebulous and silly criteria cranked out by the Deseret News robot responder system. You could say I was critical of Christians or Christian pastors, but frankly, it was the early LDS era pro-slave local Christian pastors who produced this albeit black, modern-day anti-Mormon whiner. They’ve been out there for generations, openly killing Mormons, Indians, Negroes and claiming it was their right to do so out of the Bible. They’ve just historically been beaten away from the slave argument is all. I thought I was being rather diplomatic about it. But I don’t have to guess here folks. I don’t have to blindly assume I’m being cheated out of my God-given right to input my wisdom into the Deseret News. Here, have a read of these following charmers. All these bone-heads made the cut and said far more inflammatory and far less intelligent or informative things, a few of which I’ve highlighted so you don’t miss them:

Andermart
Pullman, WA
Oh my word. Get a clue. Sounds like some congregations need to denounce their pastors. Why can’t these men do a little research before they make such remarks. Please.

12:31 a.m. March 13, 2012Like (29)

JM
Lehi, UT
As a Christian I try not to judge others. …The United Nations has determined that the racism of mainstream Christianity led to the enslavement and genocide of maybe a hundred million people. And, anti-Semitism was much more a mainstream Christian and Muslim thing, than LDS….

1:58 a.m. March 13, 2012Like (18)

Moontan
Roanoke, VA
I truly get embarrassed for people who pontificate on subjects about which they know nothing. If one absolutely must criticize the Church, one should at least come up with something new. With allegations of racism, they are not only kicking a dead horse, but they’re spreading the ashes of its decayed bones. Read Church material or visit a ward meeting; that should dispel any myth about racism. The pastor says we discriminate against black people, Jews and native Americans. He forgot to mention women and, probably, left-handed people like me. Any self-respecting critic would have included those.

7:02 a.m. March 13, 2012Like (11)

raybies
Layton, UT
So this guy’s not only a pastor of a church that clearly would benefit by giving Mormons a smack-down, he’s also a republican leader representing Santorum… Can’t imagine why he’d want to make ridiculous inflammatory remarks about Mormons and Mitt.

13, 2012Like (7)

Max
Charlotte, NC
How conveniently he forgets that those good ole southern Christians used to enslave blacks and even murder them. That sounds far more racist to me than anything the LDS have done. This guy is about as uninformed as they come and is an embarrassment to the Santorum campaign. I would think that Santorum would back away from him immediately.

7:24 a.m. March 13, 2012Like (28)

coleman51
Orem, UT
I think that we only need to look at racism among Southern evangelicals in our history to see how disingenuous these remarks really are. Perhaps the good pastor should look at his own church before he spouts these over-the-top epithets toward the Mormon Church. We certainly did not participate in the gross injustices during the Jim Crow era nor did we don white robes and burn crosses.

8:08 a.m. March 13, 2012Like (6)

DonO
Draper, UT
It’s all a matter of market share for these mega-churches. You won’t find any of these so-called Christian preachers having anything good to say about the Mormons because of LDS proselytizing efforts. Mormons take members from the churches and dollars from the collection plates.

8:24 a.m. March 13, 2012Like (7)

BYU Papa
Cedar Hills, ut
I think that Santorum and Doziar are just trying to do President Obama’s job for him. Are they secretly really Democrats. Their ridiculously stupid comments which they know are not true just serve the weaken the Republican Cause.

8:30 a.m. March 13, 2012Like (12)

Serenity
Manti, UT
This minister is fueled by high emotions based on inaccurate and contrived information. This ranting is a pro-Santorum, anti-Romney soliloquy and nothing else. He wants to sway the populous, especially the ignorant, toward his candidate and away from Romney. There are those who believe everything which comes forth from the mouths of their lying ministers without ever questioning or doing research on anything they say.

8:37 a.m. March 13, 2012

Make of that what you will.

And finally, I leave you with a mystery. My penultimate attempt at commenting about Romney’s racist religion was basically my original try, with all the quotation marks  deleted, but without the apostrophes removed. Since both of those seem to garble into random code symbols that may be interpreted by the censorbot as figurative cursing–!!@@##$%^!!!!, I should probably try it again without the apostrophes. But I have no more will to live at this point. I have just completed that attempt and received another rejection. It was the exact same text. Though both were rejected, if you look at the previous attempt above, and compare the list of offenses the Deseret News found in that, you’ll see that here, by virtue of simply taking the quotation marks out of the piece, they dropped nearly all of their objections.

Yes, quotation marks have something to do with the AU involved here. (Artificial Unintelligence) What we also see, however, is that it’s not just the apostrophes and quotes. And ironically we see, that reverting to the most contentious version I tried, provided me with the mildest criticism from the Deseret Newsbot. This essentially unedited version, he/she/it concluded, was only off-topic (still a lie) and/or disruptive—the latter being highly subjective in light of the scores of far more inflammatory comments he/she/it allowed into the thread:

Dear LeRoy Whitney,

Thank you for commenting on Florida pastor calls for Romney to ‘renounce his racist Mormon religion’ on DeseretNews.com.

Unfortunately, your comment was not approved for the following reason:

* Comment was off topic or disruptive.

We would invite you to edit and resubmit your comment using the following guidelines:

* Comments should be thoughtful and helpful to your fellow readers with additional insight or counterpoints to the article.
* Avoid personal attacks and other inappropriate responses to fellow readers.
* Treat other readers as you would if you were speaking to them from a microphone, looking them in the eyes, then passing the microphone cordially to the next contributor.

If you would like to revise the following comment to comply with DeseretNews.com policy you may resubmit it by logging in and commenting directly from the story again.

********************

I think the black pastor here has a lot of hutzpah to criticize a church for racism against Negroes and Jews, who’s founder, for one thing sent one of his first missionaries, a converted Jew, to the Holy Land (not Utah, the other one…) to dedicate Palestine to the gathering of Israel. Joseph Smith was assassinated for among other things, running for US president on an abolitionist ticket, and was murdered by a mob to the urging and applause of this Christian pastor’s southern peers of the day, for inviting free Negroes into his fold. Joseph Smith personally ordained several Negroes, in period vernacular, to the priesthood, and died at the hands of the pre-cursors of the KKK, the Regulator or Militia movement–southern, Jew-hating, Christian white-supremists who were afraid of the growing Mormon social and political influence over the mounting issue of slavery. Two-hundred words doesn’t even allow me to touch upon just how ignorant this pastor’s pretensions are regarding LDS doctrines. If I were allowed to add a link I would, because I’ve blogged hundreds of pages dealing with this sort of ignorant prejudice against Mormonism, and I mean that in a dictionary sense.

********************

Like many other things in Mormonism, I will quietly sit here and patiently take it from this Divinely inspired institution, and pray the Brethren get it figured out for me some day. It has been fecked up for a decade and more, and it will no doubt continue to be fecked up for another decade and more. The Deseret News comment censor will continue to piss off earnest investigators and critics and faithful Mormons alike until sometime in the distant eternity (like the issue of the Negro and the priesthood) some aged ecclesiastical functionary born and raised in the computer generations has been called to enough positions in the church to make his way to the upper floors of  Church Headquarters, and points out to his fellow “Brethren” just how embarrassing the Deseret News filterbot, and all other LDS software and web interfaces really are. By then of course, the Lord’s chosen computer hero’s technological skills and sensibilities will unfortunately have fallen twenty or thirty years into obsolescence just like his predecessors.

Meanwhile, thousands like me are being shunned by the Deseret News for no particular reason. The fictional “Editorial Team” obviously don’t even know, want to know, or care. They may have actually designed a random commentary rejecter system on purpose. It just randomly finds an excuse to filter heartfelt, passionate insight, slaved into print by a readership that really cares about the article they wish to address. Why? Letters to the Editor are a nuisance. Reason enough. They take up space and bandwidth leaving no room for ads. Randomly rejecting a certain number of them would only be “fair.”

And yes, in my final attempt, I did discover how to get my comment printed in the Deseret News. Oh yes, I achieved victory. It was a victory I new I would eventually come to from the very start. But it was only a victory…of a sort:

Dear LeRoy Whitney,

Thank you for commenting on Florida pastor calls for Romney to ‘renounce his racist Mormon religion’ on DeseretNews.com.

This message is to inform you that your comment on Florida pastor calls for Romney to ‘renounce his racist Mormon religion’ was approved. Thank you for your participation in keeping our dialogue civil and enlightening. We hope you’ll continue to engage in the online conversations on DeseretNews.com and look forward to seeing more from you in the future.

Regards,
Deseret News Editorial Team

And so I made it into print at the Deseret News. There was an editorial price to pay however:

LR Whitney
MINNEAPOLIS MINNESOTA

I think this pastor has his wires crossed. Mormonism has never been racist. Why can’t we all get along?

10:13 p.m. March 16, 2012