Glenn Beck Criticism « Religion for Mormons and other Idiots

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By 1963 there wasn’t a mainstream corporate sponsor or conservative organization that would have anything to do with Willard Cleon Skousen. The American Security Council kicked his arse out saying he’d gone off the deep end. William C. Mott, judge advocate general of the US Navy and ASC member said Skousen was “money mad…totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends.”

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen

That year, Robert Welch, John Birch Society founder, claimed that president Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” and Skousen jumped on it with both feet. Skousen’s clients threw him to the curb. The National Association of Manufacturers, formely gracious anti-Communist sponsors of Skousen’s speaking tours, released an official condemnation of both Skousen and the John Birch Society, expressing its intent to disassociate itself from any individual or party who subscribed to their views. Skousen just wrapped his critics into the conspiracy and authored a pamphlet titled “The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society,”

Except for every High Priest Group in Mormondom, Klingon Skousen laid low for a lot of the ’60s. When he resurfaced at the end of the decade he was promulgating a new family of conspiracies that bundled all the world’s problems into the doings of the capitalist “dynastic rich,” as he called them. Specifically, Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. These culprits Skousen now claimed, were using communist and leftist agents like Ho Chi Minh and the American civil rights movement to accomplish their evil goals.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUvNP4C_rDo&feature=related

In 1969, a 1,300-page book started appearing in faculty mailboxes at Brigham Young, where Skousen was back teaching part-time. The book, written by a Georgetown University historian named Carroll Quigley, was called “Tragedy and Hope.” Inside each copy, Skousen inserted handwritten notes urging his colleagues to read the book and embrace its truth. “Tragedy and Hope,” Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO). Quigley’s book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called “The Naked Capitalist.” Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America’s NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes Skousen’s nephew Joel).

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen

Skousen claimed in The Naked Communist that Commies were out to take over the world because they were evil dominators of the human soul.

In “The Naked Communist,” a lengthy primer published in 1958, he enlivened a survey of the worldwide leftist threat with outlandish claims, writing that F.D.R.’s adviser Harry Hopkins had treasonously delivered to the Soviets a large supply of uranium, and that the Russians built the first Sputnik with plans stolen from the United States. A year before Richard Condon’s novel “The Manchurian Candidate” appeared, Skousen announced that the Communists were creating “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.”

— Sean Wilentz, Princeton University historian^[18]

…Among the theories Skousen charged a healthy fee to discuss was the alleged treason of FDR advisor Harry Hopkins. According to Skousen, Hopkins gave the Soviets “50 suitcases” worth of info on the Manhattan Project, along with nearly half of the nation’s supply of enriched uranium.

http://www.salon.com/news/feat…

Skousen warns readers to be on the alert against a worldwide Marxist revolution dedicated to:

. . . “the total annihilation of all opposition, the downfall of all existing governments, all economies and all societies,” through the creation of “a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.”

To fight the international Red menace, Skousen extolled Brigham Young University as a pre-eminent religious training ground in the “war of ideologies” and urged concerned parents:

“We should not sit back and wait for our boys and girls to be indoctrinated with materialistic dogma and thereby make themselves vulnerable to a Communist conversion when they are approached by the agents of force and fear who come from across the sea.”

(W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist [Salt Lake City, Utah: Ensign Publishing Company, 1958], pp. 2, 377-378)

Richard Dudam, author of the book, Men of the Far Right, wrote:

“Skousen’s book, The Naked Communist, is a Bible of the right-wing movement and is promoted heavily by many of the extremist groups. In it, he asserts that the first Russian sputnik was built with plans stolen from the United States after World War II and that President Batista, the former Cuban dictator, was really a sincere, pro-labor, popular ruler.

“Skousen advises legislators to overthrow Supreme Court restrictions on actions against persons suspected of being communists. He urges businessmen . . . to seek help from the American Security Council [a Chicago-based group of ‘right-wing military men and businessmen’ that operated ‘a private loyalty-security blacklist where employers could check their employees and job applicants for indications of left-wing connections.’]”

http://www.salon.com/news/feat…

The Naked Capitalist on the other hand, now claimed that Communists were only puppets of the dynastic rich. The Council of Foreign Relations and other Liberal internationalist groups were really the minions of these ultra-rich, who wanted to manipulate world events and nations into a single One World Government, or a New World Order.

Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch’s own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

…”The Naked Capitalist,” decried the Ivy League Establishment, who, through the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rockefeller Foundation, formed “the world’s secret power structure.” The conspiracy had begun, Skousen wrote, when reformers like the wealthy banker Edward M. (Colonel) House, a close adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, helped put into place the Federal Reserve and the graduated income tax.

http://www.salon.com/news/feat…

At this point Skousen became the Godfather of countless offshoots and Skousen cells in every conspiratorially oriented organization on the face of the planet. He boasted before he was done, of authoring 44 books and pamphlets, but in my father’s words, he actually just wrote the same book 44 times. His diatribes, particularly corrupted every priesthood quorum in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You could also say he infiltrated the Boy Scouts as well, because in the LDS church they are one and the same. The LDS church is the single largest affiliate of Scouting USA. Entering the 1970’s Skousen led the charge against the American Civil Rights Movement. ET Benson’s grandson Steve writes:

Skousen published a tabloid featuring the screaming headline, “The Communist Attack on the Mormons.” The article asserted that:

” . . . [Professional] Communist-oriented revolutionary groups have been spearheading the wave of protests and violence directed toward Brigham Young University and the Mormon Church,” [employing] “Marxism and Maoism as their ideological base and terror tactics as their method . . .”

Skousen warned that Communists were plotting to manipulate press reports into depicting the Mormon Church as being “rich, priest-ridden, racist, super-authoritarian and conservative to the point of being archaically reactionary.”

He claimed that, in fact, the Mormon Church was one of the Communists’ “prime TARGETS FOR ATTACK” because it is “STRONGLY PRO-AMERICAN” and that the ‘Negro-priesthood issue” was being used as a “SMOKESREEN” to “further their ulterior motives.”

Citing Ezra Taft Benson’s speech, “Civil Rights: Tool of Communist Deception,” he warned that Communist-inspired assaults on the Mormon Church were designed to:

” . . . create resentment and hatred between the races by distorting the religious tenet of the Church regarding the Negro and blowing it up to ridiculous proportions.”

In a letter sent to my grandfather (which, despite its form fundraising format, my grandfather marked in red pen with a handwritten notation, “Confidential”), Skousen warned:

“. . . [The] so-called ‘Council on Foreign Relations’ [has been] “set up . . . to groom ambitious one-world political personalities for leadership in all major departments of the American government from the President on down. . . . Their latest triumph was the election of Jimmy Carter. . . .” [1976]

Skousen ominously claimed that “members of the Establishment have directed foreign policy from Wall Street in the past.” He told my grandfather that because of President Gerald R. Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and other “master-planners,” the “foreign-policy establishment of Wall Street bankers and lawyers . . . moved into the very heart of the Establishment and took over.”
Skousen further declared:

“I wonder how people who say there is ‘no such thing as a conspiracy’ will deal with this one?”

He also forewarned Ezra Taft Benson that the one-world planners intended to celebrate the upcoming “200 anniversary of the United States Constitution by scrapping it.” [1987]

[Skousen had also previously claimed that the US would fall to Communism by 1973.]

In an apocalyptic conclusion to his letter, Skousen, under the sub-heading “We Need Millions of Freeman,” told my grandfather:

“I don’t know how all this affects you, but it puts a fire in my veins. I hope that in this coming year we can double or triple the number of Freeman and eventually we can challenge these advocates of world serfdom and drive them out of power. . . . I pray it will happen soon. And we must do everything we can to help make it happen. That’s what you are helping to accomplish, and I am grateful to you for your support.

(W. Cleon Skousen, letter to “Elder Benson,” January 1977, copy in my possession)
http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_stevebenson_section3.html#pub_28950431

Unable to content himself with any single paranoid theory, Skousen moved from frantic brainfart of idiocy to frantic brainfart of idiocy, as one world-ending conspiracy and one set of heinous traitors after another failed to bring America down into Satanic bondage. In 1971, Skousen founded The Freeman Institute, which claimed it intended to provide BYU students a place to read both sides of any political issue from original sources. The truth is, it got weirder and weirder until was thrown off campus In 1982. It was probably no coincidence that church president Spencer W Kimball was announcing the construction of a temple behind the Iron Curtain in Freiberg Germany, and BYU president Dallin Oaks was battling with world academia to maintain the university’s scholarly credibility in light of Skousen’s wild-arsed political and “historical” hackings, and the spawn of similarly eccentric BYU “scholars” like Hugh Nibley and others, who were inventing the pretend science of “Book of Mormon Archeology,” linking Joseph Smith to ancient Egyptian texts, and delving into Masonic, folk-magic and mystical connections to all of the above.

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

By 1983, Skousen’s Freeman Institute had re-branded itself the National Center for Constitutional Studies (NCCS), and headquartered itself in a survivalist compound in Malta, Idaho. Most importantly, it would be dead as a doornail right now if not for Glenn frigging Beck…

In 1981, the first year of Ronald Reagan‘s presidency, Skousen was asked to be a charter member of the conservative think tank the Council for National Policy, founded by Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series of books. Other early participants included Paul Weyrich; Phyllis Schlafly; Robert Grant; Howard Phillips, a former Republican affiliated with theConstitution Party; Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail specialist; and Morton Blackwell, a Louisiana and Virginia activist who is considered a specialist on the rules of the Republican Party.^[19]^[20] Skousen’s proposals with the group included a plan to convert the Social Security system to private retirement accounts, as well as a plan that he claimed would completely wipe out the national debt.

Although Skousen was not a tax protester, he did campaign for several proposals to eliminate the federal income tax. One proposal, the Liberty Amendment, precluded the federal government from involvement in any activities that competed with private enterprise and returned federally-owned land to the states.

In 1987, controversy erupted in California when the state briefly considered using Skousen’s book, The Making of America, as a textbook for California schools. Statements in the book regarding slavery, and its use of the term “pickaninny” as a label for slave children engendered a heated debate as to whether the book was appropriate.

…In one instance, the constitutional scholar Jack Rakove, of Stanford University, inspected Skousen’s books and seminars and pronounced them “a joke that no self-respecting scholar would think is worth a warm pitcher of spit.”^[18]

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

Now, some of Skousen’s political proposals admittedly sound fine to me. His history however, is rubbish. His obsession with finding a Commie or “Insider” under every bed is embarassingly naïve. In fairness, scholars would likely say the same thing about my scribblings. But I don’t care what “scholars” think any more than Cleon Skousen did, so here’s my main point for you Glenn Beck: Skousen’s fairly rapid demise had been set in motion in his affiliation particularly with Tim LaHaye and their Born Again, evangelical dynasty. What had begun to happen was a homogenization of Mormon loony conspiracy freaks with more mainstream Christian Republican Conservative political organizations. That’s a lot like your ministry Glenn. And by no accident I’m sure, as a Skousen acolyte. The Christian Right however, is Christian. Even if they liked Skousen’s patriotic, conspiratorial lippping-off to the Powers-That-Be, Klingon Skousen and his Mormon zealots already figured into the very center of most of the era’s expanding Apocalyptic Christian conspiracy theories. The more Mormon folklore Skousen worked into the conversations in his primarily Christian Conservative think-tanks, the more his Christian “friends” began to think that they didn’t want Mormons coming to the rescue of the Constitution.

There is no “Nephite Cycle” in the Bible. There is no “White Horse Prophecy” in Christendom. Skousen was just too weird, too insanely desperate to save America, too embarrassingly obvious in his belief that Mormons were Christians, too clearly earnest in his professions that Mormons are going to save the world for Christ, and that Mormonism would be the Constitutional Army of Liberation in America, not the Christian Right.

The bottom line is, Christians have no respect whatsoever for the Constitution. The Constitution is an enlightened document. It arose out of Deism, Masonry, and the European Enlightenment, not the Bible. For God’s sake, for the sake of all mankind, for the benefit of all that is holy, you cannot look at the concepts in the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution itself, and connect them with the oppressive tenets of “Historic Christianity.”

Even ignoring all his other lunacy, Skousen was fundamentally suicidal in falling into lock-step with Christian Nation theories. Declaring America a Christian Nation leads to Carthage Jail, Liberty Jail, the Haun’s Mill Massacre, Johnson’s Army and an American Geneva based upon Calvin’s oppressive “Christian” model.

That’s Satan’s Plan.

Which brings me again brother Beck, to your personal political pornography, throughwhich you must enjoy yourself immensely and repeatedly if your gushing commentaries are any indication: The Five Thousand Year Leap. This is Klingon Skousen’s “inspired” masterpiece:

Since this book was all over the New York Times bestseller list in 2009, and generated an unprecedented interest in this until-now obscure author, it deserves an extended discussion. The book is an analysis of the Founding Fathers of the United States and their political and economic beliefs, written from a decidedly conservative (in the modern American sense) point of view, but the content is not particularly explicitly Mormon to the degree that would alienate readers of other faiths. The title of the book refers to both the author’s belief that the earth was about 5000 years old at the time of the founding of the United States, and also that social and economic progress took a great 5000 year leap forward nearly instantaneously upon the founding of the United States after centuries of slow progress and stagnation. The book was originally published in the wake of a conservative shift in American politics around the time of the election of Ronald Reagan, and more specifically in the context of a western U.S. protest movement against federal land policies circa 1981 known as the “Sagebrush Rebellion” which was especially strong in the “Mormon belt” of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and Wyoming.

The book begins with a discussion of the political spectrum. Skousen asserts that the view of the “far right” as Fascism and the “far left” as Communism is erroneous and that Fascism and Communism are really the same thing: “ruler’s law” (or, law dictated by a single ruler or party). He proposes that a more accurate political spectrum would be: “far right” is anarchy or no government, “far left” is any form of “ruler’s law” or totalitarianism, and the political center is a limited representative government of, by and for the people. The first section moves on to a discussion of the Founding Fathers and places both the Jeffersonian Democrats and the Hamiltonian Federalists in the political center of their day. He draws parallels between the laws and government of the ancient Israelites and Anglo-Saxon common law (and, although Skousen shows no sign of believing in British Israelism himself, cites a British Israelist writer – Howard B. Rand – as his source on this) and asserts that both were the basis of the U.S. Constitution. He believes the first attempt at forming a United States government in the Articles of Confederation failed because they erred too far toward his definition of the right (anarchy), while the strong-central-government faction of the Federalists and most European monarchieserred too far to the left (ruler’s law). The United States Constitution, on the other hand, was right in the center where it should have been. He attributes this to “28 principles” which he believes the Founders held to, and make up the second portion of the book:

Natural law as the legitimate basis of government (he defines natural law here as divine law derived from God)

A virtuous and moral people

Virtuous and moral leaders

Without religion a government of free people cannot be maintained

All things were created by God

All men are created equal

Equal rights, not equal things

Unalienable rights

To protect man’s rights, God has revealed divine law

Sovereignty of the people

The majority of the people may alter or abolish a tyrannical government

Republican form of government (“a republic, not a democracy”)

Protection of the people against the human frailty of their rulers

Property rights

Free-market economics

Separation of powers

Checks and balances

Importance of a written Constitution

Limited powers of government

Majority rule, minority rights

Strong local self-government

Government by law, not by men

An educated electorate

Peace through strength

Avoid entangling alliances

Protecting the role of the family

Avoiding the burden of debt

The United States has a “manifest destiny” to be a blessing to the entire human race

A fascinating mix, that. Many of these principles nobody would argue with; they are foundational to liberal democracy and representative government. Many of them however try to make the case that liberal democracy (Skousen prefers them term “republic” over “democracy”) and representative government can only exist when they are rooted in religion, specificallyChristianity; and that the Founders were God-fearing Christians and this (rather than, say, the values of the European Enlightenment, freethought, and liberal views on religion such asDeism) were what guided the Founders. This attempt at shoehorning liberal representative government together with essentially theocratic views makes this book an early example of a genre of historical revisionism that has since become a staple within the religious right, such as the books by David Barton. Glenn Beck is a Mormon convert and it is likely that this is the reason that out of all the thousands of possible books he could have picked, he chose to bring Skousen’s book out of obscurity as a sort of manifesto; much of the religious right has instead been promoting the more recent books by David Barton. Beck seems to have picked up on the cue and now frequently has Barton on his television and radio shows to promote his ~~nonsense~~ views. Beck’s promotion of Skousen’s work has led many ultraright conservatives to embrace Skousen’s distortion of the political spectrum, mainly for the purposes of blaming both Communism and Nazism on the left.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/W._Cleon_Skousen

For you Gentiles out there, I’m not going to beat this White Horse to death. I’ll just summarize my thoughts by saying The 5000 Year Creep doesn’t give me either religious or political orgasms in the way Glenn Beck seems to experience the book. I’d simply say it’s his least asinine work.

Highlighted by Skousen’s self-damning ignorance of basic Christian theology, there are a number of elements in Glenn Beck’s confused potpourri of populist paranoia that are simply suicidal to Mormonism or any other non-Christian belief system. The first of these is buying into any suggestion that the Constitution of the United States of America is born of “Christian” roots. Anyone who knows anything about Christian history would not find that very enticing, even if he were a Christian.

Christians simply don’t know what’s good for them, and a Christian Nation isn’t good for anyone, not even them. If the nation is Christian, the State defines Christianity and stifles any competing theology. That’s not a good thing. To the average Christian idiot, it sounds great. The Founding Fathers weren’t however, the average Christian idiots.

Make the State Christian, and there’s always the chance you wouldn’t be the right sort of Christian, and end up on the rack or being publicly roasted. Facts are facts, and that’s exactly what every “Christian” society has done—when it was not engaged in the wholesale extermination of non-Christians or “heretical” Christians as it re-defined itself from time to time or its subjects found inspiration in other ideas. And Mormons are not Christians. Mormons would not only be seriously screwed-over in a “Christian Nation,” they already have been. Constantly and repeatedly from day-one. To believe otherwise makes you a lackey pawn, a dupe of what Christian Nation Crusader James Kennedy called “The Holy Conpiracy.”

And how did the Holy Conspiracy work its way around the Contitutional protection of Mormonism Glenn? Do you remember? Do you even know?

In a letter to William Short Thomas Jefferson wrote:

The Presbyterian clergy are loudest, the most intolerant of all sects, the most tyrannical, and ambitious; ready at the word of the lawgiver, if such a word could be now obtained, to put the torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flames in which their oracle Calvin consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not find in his Euclid the proposition which has demonstrated that three are one, and one is three, nor subscribe to that of Calvin that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to Calvinistic creed. [13 April, 1820.]

Perhaps it’s Thomas Jefferson who should be called a prophet here? What else was going on in April of 1820 or thereabouts by the way…say in rural New York? And does this quote from Finis Ewing, pastor of the Cumberland Presbyterian church, the most famous Presbyterian in the history of Mormonism ring a bell?

The Mormons are the common enemy of mankind and ought to be destroyed.

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

http://saintswithouthalos.com/p/hjs_mo_persec1.phtml

Well Glenn, at first Christianity tried to just charge Joseph Smith with plain old heresy—again and again, from New York to Missouri, and when the charges never stuck they tried wrapping heresy around fraud or some other actual legal claim and they still never got Joseph nailed properly after scores of hearings and trials. Then the good Christian ministers of Daviess County Missouri held a little meeting of all the prominent clergy, civil officials, and leading citizens in the fellowship hall. Over coffee and treats they agreed that the Constitution didn’t offer sufficient protection from Mormonism, and if they didn’t do something about it they’d be overrun with Mormon and quickly be the minority vote in the region. So they penned out their own “Secret Constitution,” which the Mormons called the “Mob Manifesto,” in which the swore their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to eradicate Mormonism through any means necessary.

http://www.blacklds.org/mob

The Holy Conspiracy initially discovered that if you bully Mormons away from a public polling place during an election, they beat the crap out of you. They next discovered that if you shoot at Mormons trying to vote they shoot back. Then they learned that if they shot back they could call the governor, who was part of the conspiracy to negate the Mormon vote in the first place, and he’ll gratefully issue an order of extermination for you on the grounds of treason and insurrection. Only the fact that Mormons are pretty damned good with a rifle slowed this genocidal effort down enough that God eventually reached enough still-functionally “Christian” hearts that the regional population, the national population in general, began to ask, hey, isn’t burning, beating, raping, pillaging, slaughtering and tormenting plain dumb white men women and children sort of er, evil or something? (Injins, niggers–yeah. No problem. But white folks?)

When the local Christian clergy tried to get the Mormons eradicated again in Illinois, the Holy Conspiracy had learned its lesson well from Missouri. You didn’t need secret meetings and blood oaths. You didn’t need to try to construct a treatise of your legal or moral apologetics to justify your actions. All you had to do was publish abroad Christ’s permission to exterminate the Mormon heretics and take anything you want of them for plunder, and either just out of greed, bloodlust or even missplaced “Christian” zeal, via the “will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?” principle, a mob will cheerfully arise to oblige. You don’t need to control the whole state militia, all you need is a key officer or two, a mob-friendly detatchment or so, and once they start hollering and shooting and point at the “enemy,” the rest of the regiment will just join in out of reflex. Once you have the Mormons shooting back to defend themselves, well, the game is on, no more explanations necessary. Look at the Mormons. They’re shooting at us. Better kill them all before they do the same to us.

But even the Illinois tactics were transparent enough that “Christians” throughout the nation looked at the “mob” violence of Nauvoo and Carthage, and while nobody could directly claim this time that actual ministers of God were leading the charge under the Christian flag, it was still condemned as inexcusably uncivilized, whether Joe Smith and the Mormons had it coming or not. Sure, in Missouri they tried to trans-substantiate “heresy” into “insurrection” or “treason” but never got it to stick. So again, after a lot of manoevering and legal bullshite, Joseph Smith’s critics in Nauvoo managed to hang “treason” on his “heresy” for acting as chair of the city council and condemning an anti-Mormon printing press. That’s what actually got him killed mind you. But like Missouri, Smith never ended up in court. In Missouri he was allowed to escape to save the state the embarassment of trying to explain their extermination order and resulting attempted genocide. In Carthage Illinois, the militia “guards” protecting Smith just parted one night and let a barely disguised mob of their fellows up the stairs to shoot the hell out of him. Again, it saved the Holy Conspiracy from all the Constitutional bickering and Christianity as usual got what it wanted without the incumberance of due process.

In Utah, the Holy Conspiracy first denied Mormonism admittance to the union as its own State of Deseret, despite more than meeting all requirements. As a state Mormons would be free to be the majority, grow, populate, civilize, and vote their own conscience and cultural or regional interests like any other citizen other of the United States. Congress however, amid much debate, admitted Utah only as a territory, where it could be administered directly by the Christian Congress.

When Brigham Young got tired of the cronies, whores, and carpetbaggers Washington kept sending out to profiteer off the blood and sweat of the Saints, as Governor, he fired an apparently unreliable guy named Magraw from the mail service, because Mormons had long been maintaining supply trails and outposts from coast-to-coast and simply tagging mail service onto the regular Mormon cargo contracts was faster and cheaper. Magraw turned out not surprizingly to have been awarded his mail contract via his well-placed Washington cronies, and like a good little Holy Conspirator, once again cried that the whole territory was in bondage of Brigham Young and disloyal to the United States. This resulted in Congress appointing a Christian governor, and sending him to usurp Brigham Young with an army of occupation.

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

After a little drama, the Mormons let the new governor come right on in. The army, well, just so they got the message, that they starved out for a year, cut off and surrounded, vulnerable in the canyon. Cummings, the new guy, negotiated entry of the army, and basically nothing much happened. He reported back that nothing much seemed to be going on in the territory worth mentioning and wondered what all the fuss was about. But, the Christian camel having poked its nose into the Mormon tent, eventually the whole beast forced its way inside. And again, Christianity found it could do nothing much about Mormonism. Until it discovered polygamy.

And here’s where the Holy Conspiracy learned it could do with a stroke of the pen what it had been trying to do for decades through all the combined violence of modern warfare: they made polygamy illegal. No, it wasn’t already illegal. Nobody had thought to make it illegal. But this was Calvin’s America, and The Holy Conspiracy forged the polygamy issue into a sword it then aimed at the heart of Mormonism:

Reynolds v. United States (1878)

This was the first of the Mormon cases. Congress had passed a law making it a criminal offense to commit bigamy in any of the territories under control of the Federal government. The defendant, charged with violating this law, asserted as a defense that he was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon Church, and that its doctrines required him to practice polygamy or plural marriage. He claimed further that enforcement of the law against him would violate his religious freedom as guaranteed by the First Amendment.

The Supreme Court rejected this contention and affirmed the conviction….

Marriage, the Court held, is a relationship created, regulated, and protected by civil authority. The monogamous family is the basis of Western societal life, and it was never doubted that government had the power to preserve it by prohibiting polygamy. The fact that the defendant’s religious convictions require him to practice polygamy no more immunizes him from the operation of the law than would a person’s religious belief in human sacrifice immunize him from the operation of the laws against homicide. To permit religious beliefs to justify polygamy would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land and would in effect permit every citizen to become a law unto himself….

Page 109, Church and State in the United States , Anson Phelps Stokes and Leo Pfeffer, 1964, Harper & Row Publishers, New York.

The Court’s reasoning isn’t even out of the Bible. It just pays lip-service to Christian tradition using the code-word “Western societal life” without any Biblical or Constitutional justification at all. Ignoring the spurious human sacrifice analogy, what this ruling actually does it wrest from the hands of God, the formerly Holy Bonds of Matrimony, and surrendered the institution of marriage to the authority of civil officers, who are now, by this precedent, free to administer it according to any currently popular social conventions. Like Gay marriage. Or at this point, polygamy.

Well Christianity, be careful what you wish for—you might get it. You put marriage under civil jurisdiction to feck over the Mormons, and now it’s your turn. You made marriage a strictly social and political issue, and now you’re on the losing side of the social argument, aren’t you? Payback’s a bitch isn’t she? And she doesn’t even make you breakfast in the morning.

Here, anyone wondering why Harry Reid might be a Democrat and a Mormon too ought to have a little look at this:

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jishs/101.3-4/vitale.html

It’s a historical overview explaining how Joseph Smith voted Democrat as well, and more importantly why. As a matter of fact Glenn, in spite of self-righteous Far-Right elitists like yourself and Skousen, rather a helluva lot of Mormons are Democrats. A bunch of them are actually socialists. Probably a lot of actual Communist Party members of the church by now. It’s a big wide world.. It’s not all about Chief Skousen brown-nosing General Authorities and scaring the hell out of them with tales of world-shaking evil headed their way: Howdy brethren–what’s shakin’ on temple square today brother this and elder that. Have you heard the one about the Commie who snuck the tape recorder into the Endowment session and played it all on CCCP1?

OK, I’ll condense it: Joseph Smith was a Democrat because the Democrats like president James Buchannan initially argued that Mormons should be able to have their own state and make their own laws as they saw fit. Because the Democrats, not the Republicans, argued that the Consitution protected religious practices like plural marriages. Because the Democrats argued that specifically in polygamy there is no crime or peril to the greater good from what consenting adults want to get up to in the private sovereignty of their own homes and their own beds. Democrats argued that the citizens of a state or territory ought to be able to rule on the matter themselves according to their own social norms.

The Republicans, like party founder Justin Smith Morrill on the other hand, were arguing that Mormons were heretics and polygamy was as barbarous as slavery, and Mormons had no right to self-government in a “civilized” read: Christian, society:

Under the guise of religion, this people has established, and seek to maintain and perpetuate, a Mohammedan barbarism revolting to the civilized world…. As well might religion be invoked to protect cannibalism or infanticide. Yet we are told, because our Constitution declares that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ that we must tamely submit to any burlesque, outrage, or indecency that artful men may seek to hide, under the name of religion! However, it is impossible to twist the Constitution into the service of polygamy by any fair construction…. Could a man, charged with burglary or rape, find privilege and excuse before any of our courts on a plea that it was an act in accordance with the religion of the prophet Mercury or the prophet Priapus, and that our Constitution permits the free exercise of religion?

Sounds a bit like the Glenn Beck show. Or old recordings of Cleon Skousen.

Once Christianity finally had something with which to “legally” skewer the Mormons, once they’d essentially made at least one purely Biblical doctrine unique to Mormonism illegal on purely “Christian” grounds, they sharpened their anti-polygamy blades keener with every passing year. They wrote into laws test oaths that denied Mormons the right to vote. They defined as “treason,” not the practice of, but the mere belief in polygamy as a Biblically correct principle. Then they made even being a member of an organization that believed plural marriage to be Biblically correct, a confession of “treason.” Then they declared all the lands, funds and properties of any “treasonous” organization should be forfeit to the territorial civil authorities. They banned Mormons from running for office, so soon all civil officers in the territory were appointed by Christians in Congress, or were fellow Christians elected by a tiny Christian minority who ruled the vast Mormon majority of the region.

I want to make this clear, and not just for you Glenn Beckers, neo-Skousenites, or other religious types reading this: The Holy Conspiracy, the “Christian Nation” and its “Christian” Supreme Court, ruled in 1878, that it was perfectly legal and Constitutional to deny anyone who disagrees with “Historic Christianity’s” system of beliefs the right to participate in American politics as either voter or candidate, to own land, property, or associate with like-minded Americans. Mormons were the first official victims of actual “thought crime” legislation. Christians used this one doctrinal tool, this one almost universally agreed-to but utterly harmless Mormon Biblical oddity, to systematically strip the Mormons of every scrap of property they had. They literally stole all Mormon edifices and meetinghouses and rented them back to the church under State supervision at great profit. They made every wife a Mormon husband could be proved to have cohabitated with, a crime punishable by five years in prison. They broke up families, threw old men in jail to rot and die and left the destitute, breadwinnerless wives and children to fend for themselves.

(And of course, they carefully wrote their anti-polygamy laws so the Army and teams of Washington carpetbaggers infesting the state could continue to hump and whore around as much as they liked, as long as they didn’t set up housekeeping or make their multiple-partnered sex a legitimate, permanent arrangement.)

Glenn. That’s how a “Christan Nation” works bub. Sorry. Just is. I’m not guessing here. You’re the guy who keeps telling us to learn from history before it’s too late.

Physician heal thyself.

Christians own their own damned label. I don’t want to fight over it. In any case, Mormons can’t simply steal it and redefine the word as they see fit. That may play well in Provo, but one Mormon backwater town in the desert doesn’t amount to diddly squat in the world of politics and religion—or even the world of dictionaries. The last thing in the universe a Mormon would want to do is hand over Constitutional sovereignty to a bunch of hard-core, Bible-thumping Christians. The Founding Fathers defeated these “Historical” Christians in writing the Constitution. They pulled one over on them–Joke’s on you Calvin, Wesley, Arminius, Augustine, Luther, Pope One and Pope Two. The Great Architect of the Universe faked-out all of history’s so-called “Christians” who had been thus far perpetually claiming to worship Him via beating the hell out of anyone who disagreed with them. The religious and intellectual rebels on the Constitutional panel with free and truly inspired hearts and minds wrote God’s true will into the Constitution instead.

That’s the Mormon position Glenn. That’s Joseph Smith’s “Original Argument.” If you believe Joseph Smith that is, rather than Klingon Skousen. I know who I’ll go with. How about you?

America is not a Christian Nation and I and grateful for that. America is a pluralistic, free republic, and open religious society. We should all thank God, or the Deity of choice for it. Or no Deity at all. Thank the Founding Fathers. You may think me a weird-arse bigot and pinhead for believing anything in Mormonism, but the Constitution allows me to be a pinhead and bigot, and believe anything I want. I just don’t get to exercise my bigotry. That would infringe upon the rights of other citizens who are mutually protected by the Constitution. I can talk about it all I want though. And Glenn, one more time: That sort of religious liberty is not a Christian concept. Period.

Everybody gets their say, and nobody gets to hurt the other guy for saying it. God Bless America. Nature’s God.

Glenn Beck, you and your new “ghost” writing partner, the specter of Klingon Skousen, want to destroy America. You want to destroy the Constitution in order to save the Constitution. You want to put sinners who play cards or curse or skip church in stocks. You want to imprison or drive out homosexuals and free thinkers and scholars and anyone who would care to argue with the clergy to die alone in the wilderness. You want to burn witches and heretics–you just call them Communists and Progressives and Liberals. Glenn, you and no doubt Wee Willy Skousen would contend: that’s not what we want at all. But that’s certainly the way Police Chief Willard Cleon Skousen ran Salt Lake City when he had his crack at a theocracy. Of course you don’t want a Christian Police State Glenn. You preach about the dangers of incrementalism but you and Skousen’s ghost are both apparently too stupid to realize that’s what every single Christian Nation in the history of the world has led to.

The US Constitution is not the product of a Right Wing think tank. It’s the result of hard-fighting, enlightened, classical Liberals. Skousen’s analysis of the world’s political spectrum is the infantile, ethnocentric groaning of a myopic, egocentric, provincial paranoid who’s only ever looked as far as the next church spaghetti dinner for his understanding of either politics or religion. Right, Left, Conservative, Liberal, these are entirely subjective and conditional terms. A Conservative Russian is a flaming Marxist. This terminology has never been either precise or absolute. Without a context and a comprehensive, overlooking frame of reference they are as useless as anything else Cleon Skousen doesn’t quite get. Which is rather a lot. Really Glenn, don’t you have an inkling of discernment in you? What’s “Liberal” in Provo is “Conservative” in Minneapolis. What’s “Conservative” in Austin Texas is Leftist Propaganda in Orem Utah.

I’ve got news for you Glenn Beck, the louts who looted and trashed the 1999 WTO convention in Seattle weren’t from the Right. They were raving Lefties. They were self-professed Anarchists. Anarchy does not come from the Right by any known definition of Right. Police Chief Cleon Skousen was a Right Wing Zealot and he did not represent the face of Anarchy. It’s inane. Skousen argues in effect, that since the Right is always for law and order, as he clearly is, that at some point the absolute most law and order you can have is Anarchy.

Because he’s an ass.

More blatantly Glenn, you and Skousen argue that all the violence today, all the totalitarian, Nanny-State, repressive governmental stifling of basic human rights, religious and intellectual freedom, comes from the Left. In quaint, Hannity or Limbaugh-era terms: The Problem is Liberals you say. You point out example after example and grin smugly, laughing at anyone who doesn’t catch your brilliance—daring the world to challenge your empirical masterwork. But you’ve missed a pretty obvious point Glenn.

Those officious shitebites you keep indicting aren’t Liberals. There aren’t any Liberals any more. Chairman Mao said: sooner or later every revolution goes conservative. Well, it has. They fought the Establishment, they beat the Establishment, and now they ARE the Establishment. They rocked the vote, and now they’re not going to rock the boat, and they won’t let you rock it either. What was radical, revolutionary, and represented the product of allowing period “Liberals” to think freely and explore alternatives to the existing political and social structure, has now been codified, canonized, carved in stone and will be just as vigorously beaten into the captive citizenry as any other retrograde, reactionary, Conservative movement. Opposing ideologies will be eliminated with extreme prejudice.

The guys who politically rescued Mormonism in spite of itself in the early days were Liberal Democrats. The Conservative Whigs and Republicans just wanted to wipe Mormons out. The only totalitarian regime ever to infiltrate and rule in this great land was the Puritan government at Plymouth Colony. America’s Children of the archetypal ruling Christian bastard, John Calvin, made the Taliban look like amateurs.

Willard Cleon Skousen had it all arse-backwards. Don’t follow this buffoon’s intellectual dyslexia ‘round and ‘round until your powers of reason disappear into your own arsehole as well.

If you won’t believe me, if you won’t believe Joseph Smith, perhaps you’ll believe James Madison:

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries. [James Madison, 1803 Letter objecting to use of state land for churches.]

Now, I led with that statement because it sums up my point so well. However, it’s become fashionable these days by “Christian Nation” zealots to claim this quote is not actually one of Madison’s. It has been long attributed to him but its provenance is a bit murky or so they now claim. Whoever said it, it is perfectly phrased to express what Madison would no doubt have said himself. I imagine that because it so perfectly also discredits the Holy Conspiracy’s claim that the Founding Fathers never really meant to build what Jefferson called a wall of separation between Church and State, it would be handy for them if he hadn’t said it. I wonder however, why the Holy Conspiracy is so exercised to disprove the validity of this sentiment, when Madison clearly says essentially the same thing repeatedly in a host of other absolutely unquestionable documents:

During almost fifteen centuries, has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution….

–Page 106, Christianity and the Constitution.

Nothwithstanding the general progress made within the two last centuries in favour of this branch of liberty, & the full establishment of it, in some parts of our Country, there remains in others a strong bias towards the old error, that without some sort of alliance or coalition between Gov’ & Religion neither can be duly supported…. Every new & successful example therefore of a perfect separation between ecclesiastical and civil matters, is of importance. And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Gov’ will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together; [James Madison, Letter to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822, The Writings of James Madison, Gaillard Hunt]

The experience of the United States is a happy disproof of the error so long rooted in the unenlightened minds of well-meaning Christians, as well as in the corrupt hearts of persecuting usurpers, that without a legal incorporation of religious and civil polity, neither could be supported. A mutual independence is found most friendly to practical Religion, to social harmony, and to political prosperity. [James Madison, Letter to F.L. Schaeffer, Dec 3, 1821]

We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth that religion, or the duty which we owe our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion, then, of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man: and that it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. [James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance to the Assemby of Virginia]

The number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state. [James Madison, 1819, in Boston, Why The Religious Right is Wrong about the Separation of Church and State]

http://atheism.about.com/library/quotes/bl_q_JMadison.htm

http://ramonasentinel.com/article/Commentary/Commentary/Separation_of_church_and_state_intended/1844’

Or as George Washington said in 1796 in signing the Treaty of Tripoli:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” [Emphasis mine.]

Click here to see the actual article 11 of the Treaty

http://nobeliefs.com/Tripoli.htm

Every single Christian Nation eventually rises from it’s own repeatedly brutal self-extermination attempts saying, well, that’s all behind us now, we’ve finally fixed the religion—and then evolves into the same violently repressive culture yet again. Over and over. That is not Our Father in Heaven’s plan for America.

What Cleon Skousen missed, what you’re missing now Glenn Beck, is that the 5000 Year Leap made by the Founding Fathers in 1776, was deliberately and carefully aimed as far from the direction of a Christian Nation as they could launch themselves. Now you and your Holy Conspirators want to jump back into the Christian historical pit of darkness. Enlightenment came to America in spite of Christianity, not because of it.

That’s the great Bait-and-Switch ploy you aren’t seeing Brother Beck.

That’s the Christian Cycle Glenn.

That’s Satan’s Plan.

Satan’s Plan.

Glenn.

Written by lrwhitney

28/06/2011 at 18:49

Glenn Beck Part 3: ET Phone Home—Skousen Left a Callback

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Glenn, Glenn, why persecuteth thou me?

Glenn, why do you weep out your passionate faith in Divine Providence when you have clearly set yourself about to thwart it? The God you claim to worship has struggled to make His will known through two-thousand years of faithful but incompetent imbeciles and spiritual jackasses of great loyalty but no common sense. The so-called “Christian” world has repressed, oppressed, hacked, tortured, excommunicated and annihilated itself back and forth with no sense of God at all, much less an understanding of the human condition and the physical universe. Through the generational writhings of this anti-intellectual, spiritual, social, and political cyclone of selfish, ignorant, human opinionating, the Great Architect of the Universe finally brought together just the right handful of truly enlightened souls, on the right continent, at the right time, and in the right circumstances, to help mankind write God’s pure will into human law. God overcame centuries of narrow-minded, dogmatic so-called “Christian” bigots and bullies, craftily slid past the Christian dumb-asses at the Constitutional Convention, and gave us the Divinely Inspired Constitution of the United States of America.

The Constitution guarantees all of God’s children what Mormons call, “Free Agency.” The Agency of Man is not a Christian concept. Free will is an illusion in Christian theology. Man can either be God’s agent or the devil’s agent. Man has no agency of his own in Christianity. No man is innocent until proven guilty, all men are born guilty and worthy only of death and hell. Unless they are “saved” and “born again” into the family of Christ, they are tools of the devil and have no part in a Christian Nation.

It really is that simple Glenn.

I’ve heard you stammering incredulously over it with Christian callers on the radio Glenn: No, Christians do not believe we are all God’s children. You certainly aren’t one as a Mormon. That’s Christian theology. If you don’t even know that simple Christian precept you are truly a religious and intellectual toddler. You know just enough to be a danger to yourself and others-particularly to the church you claim to love. You can Bible-bash Christians all you want trying to sell your universal Mormon brotherhood of all mankind, but you’ll read it your way and they’ll just read it their way. Christians don’t actually read the Bible anyway, they just try to reconcile it against two-thousand years of Christian tradition. That’s why you can’t grin like some religious simpleton, and gleefully just round-up people of good character who fear God, link arms, and celebrate the Constitution as if we’re all brothers and sisters. That you believe it to be so, or that it is ultimately true, makes no difference to your Christian pals who haven’t allowed anyone making that claim walk out of the debate alive for almost two millennia.

Christians actually have no respect for the Constitution at all except insofar as it gives them what they imagine to be a right to ascendency over all other citizens. A lot of Christians for example, dug in at the Constitutional Convention to maintain that the Bible approves of slavery and thus their right to own human chattel had to be sustained by the Constitution as well. That wholly Christian argument took God another several American generations and hundreds of thousands of good Christian fatalities and brutal maimings on both sides of a bloody civil war to wipe clean the shite-sized smear the Christian Constitutional delegates insistently excreted onto the Sainted fabric of the Holy American Constitution.

The single, uniquely Christian contribution to the Constitution is slavery.

Christian theology is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution of the United States of America. That’s as simple as I can make it for you Glenn. Christians want to “restore” the Constitution to their “Original Argument,” the one that puts Christians back in charge of the nation and allows them to rule directly out of the Bible just like Calvin did. Just like the Pilgrims did at Plymouth. The Constitution American Christians condescend to live under today was surreptitiously foisted upon them in 1787. It eventually allowed non-Christians to “take over.” Just like the Mormons did in Missouri and Illinois—simply by being allowed to vote Christians out of power so ‘non-Christians” could run their own lives. That’s what Christianity wants to “correct.” Christianity wants back the right to run your life for you Glenn. And it won’t be pretty for you if they get their way.

The legal code adopted in 1641 as the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, reads as follows:

58. Civill Authoritie hath power and libertie to see the peace, ordinances and rule of Christ observed in every church according to his word. So it be done in a civill and not in an Ecclesiastical way.

59. Civill Authoritie hath power and libertie to deale with any Church member in a way of Civill Justice, notwithstanding any Church relation, offic or interest.

60. No church censure shall degrad or depose any man from any Civill dignitie, office, or Authoritie he shall have in commonwealth.

94. 1. If any man after legall conviction shall have or worship any other god, but the lord god, he shall be put to death.

2. If any man or woman be a witch, (that is hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit), They shall be put to death.

3. If any man shall Blaspheme the name of god, the father, Sonne, or Holie ghost, with direct, expresse, presumptous or high handed blasphemie, or shall curse god in the like manner he shall be put to death….

Page 33, Christianity and the Constitution, 1987, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids MI 49506

Christianity is lying to you Glenn. What Christianity really wants, as clearly exposed in Puritan legal code, is to give civil officers all power and authority to administer Church affairs and administer Church punishments. Your revisionist Christian Nation “historians” phrase it in a way that only points out that the Church is not allowed to enforce its will upon the citizenry. What they don’t point out is that in a Christian Nation, the civil government is given all power to do just that—the State in this Puritan, “Christian America” is empowered to interpret, enact, rule upon, and enforce, Christian, Biblical law, even over, above, or against the persons of or objections of Church officers. The Puritans had no concept of a pluralistic society or religious liberty. They just democratized religious oppression.

Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, the “founders” of Mormonism were born into an ancient Christian tradition that every single one of them found backward, lacking in insight, and filled with reprehensible notions that they believed arose out of a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic nature of God and mankind’s relationship to Him. Long before Joseph Smith claimed to be seeing Heavenly visions and collaborating with Angelic visitors, his entire family was actively seeking more enlightened answers to questions they believed Christianity had been getting wrong for generations. They pondered these questions however, as mainstream Christians. They were familiar with the jargon, the history, the many failings, the irrational dogma of the Christian world. The Founding Fathers of the Constitution of the United States of America found themselves in the same condition.

When I refer to the “Founding Fathers,” I refer almost exclusively to those authors and delegates who had controlling input into the crafting of the Constitution itself. What the others thought is nearly irrelevant.Their ideas got redacted out of the nation. So, yes, a lot of “Christians” had input into the document. It was a document designed to rule a national majority of Christians. You could even say it arose out of a Christian environment. But its authors very specifically eliminated the several central and utterly fatal Christian theological and ideological concepts that had self-destructed every single authoritatively Christian government that had ever existed before. They repeatedly cited clear examples of the failures of Christian governments, and every bit as clearly argued against forming just another one like them.

The Founding Fathers believed, as did Joseph Smith, that it was Christian theology itself that inevitably turned on its governed masses, only to torment and destroy them.

Divine Providence, therefore, was working against the founding of a Christian Nation, not for it.

My dearest Brother Beck:

I come to minister, not to be ministered unto. I cannot help you if you will not first admit you have a problem. But I shall do my best Brother Beck, to teach you correct principles in spite of yourself, and in spite of the corrupting influence of your new Mormon conspiratorial-world-view-messiah, Willard Cleon Skousen. To do so I must risk seriously pissing off a couple of generations of sometimes high-ranking “Mormons” who once, or now still, have chosen to indulge Skousen’s uniquely “Mormon” but generally preposterous, political paranoia.

Glenn, you and your Skousenite compatriots have studied the words of the Founding Fathers as Mormons. Unlike the Founding Fathers or their political contemporaries like Smith, Young, Taylor, Roberts and the early Mormon deep-thinkers, you, Skousen, and his Wasatch Front benefactors of whatever Mormon rank, are the product of generations of theological, social and political inbreeding in an isolated valley, in the center of a great empty basin, as far from The United States of America as you all could get at the time. You translate Christian Enlightenment vernacular into Mormonese. You think Mormons are Christians. You think the stuff the Founding Fathers wrote into American canon therefore sounds like Christianity. This is because you are idiots. Simply put, you are ignorant. Your failed perspective has made the history and intentions of the Founding Fathers come out all wrong in your provincial Mormon heads.

Accept this in the spirit of love in which it is offered. If it enrages you enough to think about the possibility of your error, at least I will have done my job here. This is how the world sees you–this is the confused pondering you force every human on the planet to struggle through in order to even begin to understand what “Mormonism” is supposed to be all about. You are incapable of seeing it from where you hunker comfortably down there in your safe, cosey little valley. You have no insight or any sense of natural cynicism out of which you might even ever self-enlighten enough to pose the question that would advance the cause of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints like a 5000 Year Leap. And this is the question: Is it worth it to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that the world has to first embrace the impassioned peripheral ranting and ramblings of the likes of Glenn Beck and Cleon Skousen, to gain access our the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?

The Constitution, the writings of the Founding Fathers, to an educated, intelligent person, actually sound like the conscientious, orderly work of Liberal, Enlightened Christians, Deists, Universalists, Masons, and Free Thinkers. That’s because they were. We can easily read these same heretical charges being spiritedly hurled against the authors of the Constitution from the “Orthodox” Christians of their day who vehemently opposed most of their best ideas.

The Founding Fathers sounded like Mormons. The Founding Fathers sounded like Joseph Smith when he talked about society and politics, and even religion to some extent. You and Cleon are right about that Glenn. That doesn’t make the Constitution Christian at all. It makes the Constitution about as far from “Orthodox” or “Historical” Christianity as those authoring it could make it, as they vigorously tried to shield its sacred prose from the fatal Christian pretexts that run-of-the-mill Presbyterians, Methodist, Baptists, Catholics, and other conventional “Christians” on the panel were trying to wedge between its hallowed lines.

Organized, “Historical” Christianity you must understand, is nothing whatsoever to do with anything Jesus ever had to say. Brother Glenn, all you happy ecumenical guys in your mystical Beckland think you can join hands in prayer for the nation, you think you can slap each other on the back like you’re even talking the same language, but you have nothing politically or theologically in common with most of your new “friends.” You imagine it’s all about being a good person, the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.

Dr. A.H. Barton, of the “Christian Jew Hour,” a national radio program once said:

“If all you’ve got is the Sermon on the Mount and the Ten Commandments, you’ve got nothing.”

For the benefit of the non-Christians and non-Mormons having a read, I’ll simply say that as fecked up as you think Mormonism might be, it’s never been as fecked up as this thing the world knows as “Christianity.” Joseph Smith’s message from God to Christianity in common terms was, you’re all fecked up. Even if you mean well, you’re still totally off the mark. Joseph Smith’s “restored” Gospel contrary to your apparent understanding, was in its day a radically Liberal one, and that’s why the Conservative Christian Establishment killed him. That’s what totalitarian “Christian” societies have always done to those who criticize them.

Joseph Smith preached a Gospel of moderation in all things. Friend Glenn, what you’re doing is nothing close to “moderate.” It’s frigging frenetic in it’s un-moderation. Christianity has not been inherently moderate at all through the ages. You’re just a case in point that proves me out. You’re assembling your own socio-political-religious nuclear reactor and nobody apparently told you about installing control rods—because you clearly don’t have any working for you. Nimrods yes, but no control rods.

Joseph Smith’s first official statement of faith was the “Wentworth Letter,” posted in a newspaper to explain basic Mormon beliefs. Mormons now call this “The 13 Articles of Faith.” The Articles pertinent to this treatise are:

10 We believe in the literal ^agathering of Israel and in the restoration of the ^bTen Tribes; that ^cZion (the New Jerusalem) will be built upon the American continent; that Christ will ^deign personally upon the earth; and, that the earth will be ^erenewed and receive its ^fparadisiacal ^gglory.

11 We claim the ^aprivilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the ^bdictates of our own ^cconscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them ^dworship how, where, or what they may.

12 We believe in being ^asubject to ^bkings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in ^cobeying, honoring, and sustaining the ^dlaw.

http://lds.org/scriptures/pgp/a-of-f/1.13?lang=eng

Glenn, you may want to refer back to these now and again, because this is Mormon canon.

Yes, we as Mormons believe a lot of Biblical stuff will be going on in Israel and the US in the Last Days. I know that’s one of your main fixations, but nobody is saying these days are them. Only you Glenn. And yes, we believe the Constitution is Divinely inspired, exactly as it is, warts and all. It can be fixed and polished as we go. That’s built into the document itself. But contrary to your implied belief, we do believe in supporting mortal governments as mortals, by mortals, for mortals. If Jesus is coming back to run the show He doesn’t need you or me to steal His thunder. He will let us know. He will let everyone know. Until then, feck off with the Armageddon talk Glenn. You missed the boat on that whole Mormon Survivalist Era. Stop trying to drag its sunken hulk back into port and re-float it. The Brethren aren’t even talking a “year’s supply” any more. It’s down to a 72 hour pack for emergency use. That’s just common sense, not preparing for imminent destruction of the universe. When the president of the church announces it’s time to pack up and move to Adam Ondi Ahman, then let’s all get excited. Till then chill out brother. Chill.

Joseph Smith also agreed with his political John the Baptist, Thomas Jefferson:

…It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

Brother Beck…Glenn, your entire fanaticism is driven by apocryphal bullshite from sources outside the LDS canon. You’re doing what I call: crapping on my religion. Most Mormons have the luxury of crapping all over my religion with their spooky Utah folk magic and pseudo-intellectual Pioneer Hillbilly gobbledygook in the privacy of the Wasatch Front where the non-Mormon population just rolls its eyes and ignores the silliness. Not so with you Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck is the Osmond Family of Apocalyptic Paranoia. Glenn Beck is crapping on my religion in front of an international fan base and a much larger growing base of hostile critics of Mormonism anyway, who’s rapiers of easy ridicule you sharpen daily.

I beg forgiveness for you Glenn. I beg pardon from God and mankind both. Glenn Beck is not what Mormonism is about. Cleon Skousen is not what Mormonism is all about, and a prophet of God made that an official declaration in 1979. Has nobody given you the message yet? I know in 1979 you were a stoned alcoholic, but sober up brother. Wake up and smell the 21st century. Mormonism is goofy, but not that goofy. Dangerously goofy.

Glenn, nothing personal, but have you ever wondered why God is striking you blind? What if every time you read a Cleon Skousen passage the ungodliness of it burns away just a little bit more of your sight? Do you need to be struck dumb as well before you get the message? Mormonism is based upon the principle of Free Agency. The Constitution is based upon the principle of Free Agency. The gaggle of evangelical Christian zealots you’re assembling to “save” the Constitution only mean to “save” it from the non-Christians. Like you. They do not believe in Free Agency. They do not believe in an open pluralistic society–with the possible exception of tolerating the least offensive non-Christians as second-class citizens just out of charity. They’re only just enlightened enough to not try to achieve their goals through genocidal Crusades any more. Instead, they’re happy to employ the services of grandiose, self-deluded Quislings like you to reverse all the gains won by our Founding Fathers, and restore America to the Puritan Hellhole of Calvin’s Geneva.

Glenn, you may recall that Satan’s plan in Mormonism, is defined as the denial of choice. Free Agency is the ultimate right of all intelligent beings in Mormon theology. Man can choose to be good or bad. Man is also free to be neither and just waste his time. In Mormon theology, man is not inherently evil, but has won a place on this earth, to experience this learning laboratory, by already proving he has chosen to do good in a previous spiritual existence. That leaves us with stupid. Man is not born evil, man is born stupid. That means you too Glenn.

Because man is stupid and prone to imperfections and mistakes, and because in the presence of a Perfect God no mistakes can be tolerated, God created a lesser, physical reality in which man is free to manipulate objects, influence or lobby or organize his fellow beings, and debate concepts freely, without pissing off God because of man’s natural idiocy, constant screw-ups, generally annoying behavior, and bad judgment. In order for there to be choice however, there must be opposing choices, differing arguments, from which man can chose. So, back to Satan for that.

When this Divine program to advance our immature spiritual selves into a more godly mankind was presented to us all, Mormons believe Satan claimed he could bring all of us back to our Father in Heaven intact, having reached our highest potential with absolute certainty. He made this boast on two conditions: one, he had to have all the power and glory and get all the credit, and two, he needed to force us to do the right thing all the time. Well, God the Father, or Eloheim, said Lucifer’s plan sort of misses the point. Jesus, or Jehovah, said He’d be God’s humble agent, become our physical Creator, God the Father could have all the glory, and Jesus would take responsibility for the sin and error and evil that necessitated out of said Creation, because human failure was integral to allowing mankind the opportunity to grow. As the Creator, Jesus accepts upon Himself the sins of all mankind, and pays our debt to the Father so we might return to Him.

Contrary to popular belief, Mormons believe Jesus got the gig.

Stick with me Glenn, because this is hard doctrine, central, never been messed with, never been contested Mormon theology. You’ll find it in all the training manuals with the Correlation Committee’s stamp of approval. Not like the turd-filled tangential volumes you’ve apparently been perusing. And even just this introductory bit here Glenn, it ain’t Christianity. It’s absolutely foreign to Christianity. They killed Joseph Smith and attempted to annihilate his whole church for teaching it. In Mormonism, God guarantees you the right to choose your own path without either He or Satan compelling or threatening you with hell and damnation or bribing you with a cheap Grace salvation. That wouldn’t be a choice. That would be coercion. That would be Christianity.

The devil in Mormonism, is generally capable only of tempting man with the most subtle, spiritual or intellectual promptings. And man has to be a willing promptee. The devil can only get his way by working on mankind with these ephemeral urgings until man gives in, embraces the idea, and physically acts upon it. In Mormonism, Satan has no body, no authority, no power, and never will, and this mortal period is the only avenue of influence upon mankind or the physical universe he will ever have. In Mormonism, Satan won’t even inherit hell and rule over the damned—Cain gets that post, Cain has a body, made the first cut, served his time on earth, and though he screwed up his mortal chance at eternal glory, he still ranks over Satan, and as the first murderer and inventor of the concept of destroying others to get personal gain, Cain will receive a resurrected body as we all will, only to inherit the job of Evil Overlord of the Eternally Damned. According to Mormon theology, Satan rejected earth life in a big war over the salvation plan in Heaven, where Satan and a third of the Heavenly Host got kicked out of God’s program entirely. So, this earthly span we now enjoy is the devil’s only time to shine.

Satan claimed however, with this tiny bit of power over mankind, he’d rule the world. Now, that only works if you give Satan credit for it. If you don’t buy his boast, nothing happens. Satan can’t physically come after you. In fact Satan blowing his own horn until he appears to be invincible to mankind is one of his first manipulative tricks. Appearing as an Angel of Light is another. Glenn Beck should know that. His new favorite political prophet and insipid Mormon author had Lucifer as a ghost writer.

Lucifer’s greatest ploy is not the half-truth as is often claimed, but the just about a third share of truth. That means you’re eating the devil’s shite at a 2-1 ratio, about as high a level as he can shove that crap down your throat without you noticing it. And Glenn Beck buddy, you take your Satanic Shite with milk and cookies, so you just don’t have a clue what all you’re eating along with the yummy stuff.

Is the devil’s goal to lead you down to hell? No. That’s not even statistically possible, since in Mormonism, only a tiny minority of humanity ever gets sent to “Outer Darkness,” a rough equivalent of hell or damnation, where not Satan rules, but Cain, and only those who deny the Holy Ghost ever get to see what it’s like. All other sins are pardonable, and Christ doesn’t close the door on accepting Him as Savior when you snuff it. Mormons believe in universal physical salvation. Everybody gets resurrected. Everybody gets judged, and nearly all of us are going on to some sort of reward. Earth life itself is already a reward. And yes, if you never stumbled into Him on earth, you still can accept Christ as your Lord and Master beyond the veil and do OK for yourself.

Christianity believes that Satan was literally handed this world after Adam and Even fell. Christians believe our Father in Heaven went off in a huff and turned the universe or at least our little piece of it over to the Adversary. In Christianity, Satan is the god of this earth. Satan is the spiritual Father of all mankind. Satan is the defacto Creator of our corrupted human flesh through a devilish and filthy biological act. Nature’s God is Satan in Christian theology. Anything natural, anything man creates, including human offspring, is for the glory and posession of Satan and unworthy of God’s Majesty. Every living thing, animal or vegetable, the very stone and earth we walk upon, every egg, every sperm, is Satanically corrupted, and every fetus in the womb is heir to damnation. Now, I submit that by internalizing this fundamentally bleak and desperate world-view as its core belief, anything Jesus of Nazareth had to say about being nice to each other has little effect in most cases. Christianity finds itself making bleak and desperately opressive internal laws and then consistently rallies its forces to vigorously and violently export these laws in greater and greater circles of oppression. Why? It’s simple, even if you credit Christians with good intentions, they really believe you are going to suffer eternal torment if they do not convince, or force you to join them. And likewise, they really do believe that if you are not one of them, you are an agent of hell on earth and a danger to good rule and society.

In rather an opposite take on the matter, Mormons believe mortality is a gift from our Creator where we can learn, grow, know joy, and appreciate the sweet by tasting of the bitter—not grovel before an arbitrary God who slapped us together one weekend with some spit and clay while on an inexplicable and mysterious Creative Lark, where we’re damned from the get-go, where God randomly elects to send most of us to hell but decides to save a few of us for Himself according to His whims. Satan has no power to change this program. Indeed, like the Flood, or Sodom and Gomorrah, any time the world or a culture reaches the point where Satan has gained so much influence over mankind that mortal existence is no longer a fair and reasonable test bed for learning wrong from right, God cleans the slate and starts over. Thus, in spite of the devil’s best efforts, future generations continue to have the same opportunity to chose their own way in life.

Now, Glenn, on this latter point I think you may be getting far too anxious.

The Obama Administration is not by far the most decadent and ungodly society ever to disgrace the planet. Not until the US president is hosting gala orgies of sex and carnage, where conquered slave women are being raped to death by donkeys in public sports facilities should you start spouting that level of hyperbole. (Though in your younger days Glenn, I bet that just describes a typical weekend outing to Mexico.) The world has been in far worse shape brother. Far worse. We were able to choose our own destiny before Obama, and we will be able to choose our own destiny after Obama. It’s routine American politics baby. If I’m wrong, I’m pretty sure God will actively purify America all on His own as He has done before. It’s His job. Not yours Glenn. Not the job of the John Birch Society, Willy Skousen, or GBTV.

No, It’s the devil’s main goal in Mormon theology, to simply feck around and generally distress humanity as much as he can with while he still has a chance. And Glenn, he’s fecking with you. He’s having a ball. It’s the only fun he’s ever going to get. He knows he’s not going to bind many of us in chains—we already told him to piss off in a previous spiritual go-‘round. We all stood with Christ in pre-mortal battle against the forces of darkness just to get here. All Satan can do here and now is try to show God what a stupid idea that Free Agency thing is while he’s got a rightful place in the earthly arena. Who knows Brother Beck? You may indeed have a bona-fide call from God—but that just means the devil is going to make an extra effort to feck it up. He seems to be doing a good job of it so far.

Satan, the former light-bearing “Lucifer,” got the job of “Accuser of the Saints.” He got it because he’s the ultimate prick. That’s Satan. That’s who he is, what he does, and how he works. And he’s pricking you Glenn Beck.

Prick. Prick. Prick.

When Satan comes to destroy your soul and drag you down to hell, he seldom comes sporting horns, a pitch-fork and a pointy tail. Usually he comes wearing a pretty dress and singing a sweet song, looking something like Marie Osmond. I’ve said that before and I’ll say it again. And other times he comes looking like your friendly old uncle Cleon with a kindly smile and a comically oversized nose.

Which brings me in earnest to Willard Cleon AKA “Klingon” Skousen. Skousen might well be the penultimate devilish prick. God help us. Why in heaven’s name Glenn, Brother Beck Sir, did you decide to dredge this inane fossil’s handiwork out of the literary dustbin? Why do you weep so profoundly at the scribblings of this half-demented, discredited, disowned Mormon political heretic? What demonic little elf sat on your shoulder and whispered: Let’s have another go at this crazy bastard…! Come on! Just roll this Skousen lunacy right in with your simpering, Chicken Little-prophetic-panic-attacks and you’ll pick up a whole new audience just waiting for a place to vent their pent-up, world-hating xenophobia…

Klingon Skousen is to Mormonism what that other insufferable prick Jean Cauvin is to Christianity. Only the combined life and works of Willy Skousen can rival the inexplicable Mormon participation in the slaughter of the Fancher party at Mountain Meadows for the shame and recrimination it has dumped upon the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Even Skousen’s one-time comrade in Commie-hunting, Ezra Taft “ET” Benson, who boostered Skousen and his John Birch buddies in the early days of the Red Scare, got very silent about the whole topic by the time he became LDS church president, and fully sustained Spencer W Kimball’s official 1979 disassociation of the LDS church with anything or anyone Skousenite.

Both Benson and Skousen got the nicknames I’m using from a large portion of the Mormon faithful who thought these two had just wandered into the planet from outer space when they first started openly talking conspiratorial politics in John Bircheese at formal LDS religious venues.

Cleon Skousen passed away in 2006 at the age of 93. In his last years he was something of a pariah, though he’d been bolstered in his career as this last era’s preeminent LDS BS merchant by two or three high-ranking pals in church leadership. One of them, Thomas S Monson, current LDS president claimed at his funeral service:

“Everyone he spoke to, everyone he taught, is closer to Christ than before they met Cleon Skousen.”

http://www.ldsliberty.org/an-open-letter-to-detractors-of-w-cleon-skousen-and-his-works/

I would counter this by saying it is exactly the warm commentary expected from an old friend who dates back to an era where a lot of would-be LDS church theology was cobbled together by unofficial guesswork in a convoluted jumble of speculation and extrapolation by a bunch of intermountain goobers generations away from any original or authoritative sources, through a process that amounted to just sitting around the general store with a hayseed in your mouth and kicking wild-arsed ideas around. I’m sure Willard Skousen was a gentle, friendly guy who argued his case humbly and calmly. They said the same thing about John Calvin—until you crossed him. Then he tended to haul you into a show-trial, declared you either a traitor or a heretic–it amounted to the same thing–pronounced you invariably guilty, and then preferred to cut off your head. If you really annoyed him, he took your life’s work, used it to light a bonfire, and chained you up on a post next to it and slowly roasted you to death in a public square over the course of hours, so your friends and neighbors can all smell your slowly burning flesh and hear your agonizing screams while you beg for mercy, as an example of why you shouldn’t argue with John Calvin.

I would further suggest that for every person who talked to Cleon Skousen that found him helpful in building a testimony of Christ, a good ten or more were instantly repulsed and concluded that if accepting Willard Klingon Skousen as an inspired prophet of God, and Donny Osmond as a musical genius is required by Jesus Christ for salvation, then hell looks pretty good by comparison. And worse yet, Skousen multiplied his political and intellectually repulsive capabilities exponentially with every new convert he recruited to his paranoid cult of personality, and through every insanely conspiratorial political or “historical” book he published with implied approval of “The Brethren.” Skousen’s underground Mormon network of xenophobes spread the paranoid dread of unknown conspirators like Amway’s pyramid scheme foisted over-priced household products on the nation, till soon everyone had a garage full of the stuff. And oddly enough, it was all the same people.

As Donny Osmond did not recruit “Mormons,” but rather “Osmondos,” so too did Cleon Skousen never bring a single Latter-day Saint into the church, he only ever converted earnest seekers of Jesus Christ into “Skousenites.”

I would submit that Cleon Skousen was the single most divisive character in Mormon history. Having absolutely no ecclesiastical authority whatsoever, Cleon Skousen alienated more otherwise worthy segments of the national and world populations, from even exploring Jesus Christ and His Restored Church, for purely political and philosophical reasons, than any secret, Satanic, Communist conspiracy could have ever schemed to deter from baptism, or a thousand Whores of Babylon could have ever hoped to lead away from God’s light through carnal, sensual and devilish charms.

The real truth is, the John Birch Society that Cleon Skousen and his benefactors in the LDS hierarchy so loved was actually started by KGB sleeper agent and dynastically-wealthy, multi-national grape juice magnate Robert Welch in 1958, to serve as a disinformation bureau that would ultimately discredit the American Conservative Movement by depicting it as the integral product of a fanatical core of self-destructive paranoid schizophrenics. Russia was also confident that once American Christian patriots had been infected with this seed of xenophobia, they would quickly duplicate the hysteria that resulted in most of the town being prosecuted or executed as witches, in colonial Salem. The Kremlin first got the idea from the histrionic self-nobbling antics of Senator Eugene McCarthy a few years earlier. By the end of his delusional episode, McCarthy was so unpopular, and the anti-Communist movement was so humiliated by his example, that the KGB insisted that though it would take a convincingly Capitalistic stooge like Welch and a little prodding, they would still find many willing dupes in the US, eager to take up the cause of paranoia, and continue the job of negating any legitimate American Conservative agenda. Soviet think-tanks felt by this means the very heart of American politics could be rendered divided and the citizenry made mistrustful of both fellow Americans and the government itself. The probable outcome of this effort, the Soviet project heads maintained, would be that America would gradually grow more and more politically and socially crippled, indecisive, and directionless. On the world stage, the formerly All-Powerful United States of America would become totally ineffectual due to its incessant internal in-fighting and radically opposed idealogical and political partisanship.

Cleon Skousen was a sometime professor at BYU, from 1951-55, to 1967-1978. That’s his only claim to any authority at all. For the record, the preceding paragraph is total BS, but it’s as authoritative as anything Cleon Skousen ever wrote. It’s just a matter of finding patrons who are willing to believe it. After that, it’s all about peer pressure.

I ran into my first batch of Skousenites as a student at BYU while Cleon was in his last two years there. They’re still fumigating the Religion Department of his stink, and they can’t burn his political books fast enough to keep them from resurfacing on campus—thanks to Glenn fecking Beck. Glenn, pal, don’t you know you’re riding the crest of a wave that crashed all it’s most gnarly surfers against the hot red walls of Zion’s Canyon in about 1985 and left them flopping there on the ground, stunned and unable to save themselves from their own stupidity. They’re all still hiding there waiting for the mushroom clouds. And then along came Glenn Beck…

Thanks Glenn.

At least the fallen LDS apostle, the late Paul Dunn confined his fairy-tales to heroic fantasies about his imaginary baseball career on teams he never played with. Dunn’s books were swiftly purged from LDS libraries when he was essentially given a permanent suspension of duties for telling tall tales to missionaries about his pitching exploits. (Faith promoting lies yes…but harmless mostly.) Unlike the ignominious, permanent disappearance of Dunn, Glenn Beck now resurrects the damaged Cleon Skousen, everyone’s favorite long dead and irrelevant, schizophrenic Mormon hack, and elevates his once-cultic revisionist Christian classic to Best-Seller status overnight. Beck’s a late-coming player in a game of 8-ball that was essentially over in the Mormon church a generation ago. The question to ponder, is whether Beck is a mark or whether he’s actually the hustler. If the latter is true, then he’s got a lot in common with Cleon Skousen.

Skousen’s strictly religious contributions to Mormonism are too sophomoric to go into at length. Only the fact that the rank-and-file Mormon is such a bewildered and ignorant student of any religion at all, Christianity, world faiths, or even their own, explains why any Mormon would be fascinated by the circuitous ponderings of Klingon Skousen. Some of his postulates include the speculation that the co-eternal spirits (us) who lived with God in the pre-mortal existence, could have voted God out of His position—that God would cease to be God if we stopped supporting Him.

Skousenites routinely sat around in their little BYU think tanks or priesthood quorums worldwide, claiming the Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus via cloning, or that Jesus was incapable of dying unless He wanted to because he was a self-healing, alien-human hybrid. (God-human hybrid at least.) They occupied themselves pondering the most obtuse claimed “historical” propositions of ancient Mormon leaders out of private period journals or those records popularly attributed to Brigham Young, Joseph Smith or other early leaders, like the enigmatic assertion that Adam was born “of an earth, but not this earth.” When they finally cloned Dolly the famous Scottish Sheep and lab experiment, they went off on a cloning theory binge. They pretended to have “proven” the Virgin Birth via cloning. When they found out cloning only produced females from females, well, that was already one theory floating around John Birch circles anyway. Mormons however, went on to artificial insemination via beaming Divine DNA directly inside Mary’s womb as a better explanation. Skousen and his disciples spread this entire concept of digging out “higher truths” from students and missionaries to stakes and missions and converts all over the globe via his active political and religious fan base.

This is weird shite even for Utah Mormons. It’s flipping blasphemy. The notion that we even need to investigate and understand all the fine points of Celestial reproduction is spiritual pornography. Even his authoritative friend ET Benson said so quietly, as president of the church. Suffice it to say, none of Skousen’s works, none of his theories have ever been endorsed by LDS authority nor advanced into official instructional or commentary materials. More obviously, Skousen was never called to any significant church ecclesiastical office even in his brightest days. But you see, nobody wants to shut down kindly old Brother Cleon, and you know some of his theories sound pretty OK, so you have to give him credit for what he got right don’t you?

That’s how Satan works.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUvNP4C_rDo&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYvgplF0LUI

http://lehislibrary.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/cleon-skousens-intelligence-theory-of-atonement/

http://reperiendi.wordpress.com/2007/06/11/the-atonement-by-cleon-skousen/

To be blunt, the Skousen era at BYU, and the Church Educational System and Seminary programs that he contaminated in the process, were an embarrassment to future generations. My wife, who was born and raised in Salt Lake, recalls one BYU religion professor proposing that the “earth had wings” and the ten lost tribes were out living on these “wings.” No. I am not kidding. Other BYU Skousen-era conjectures deduced that Jesus was actually married to Mary Magdalene, and the wedding He attended in Cana where He performed His first miracles was His own. It was further proposed that Christ had more than one wife, and most likely children. You can just watch The DaVinci Code for the rest. That’s the sort of crap Skousenites thought about all the time. Although I personally know it to be shite, my point is not whether any of this may or may not be correct. The point is it’s pointless. Why even go there then?

It’s hard enough to sell Golden Plates, cabin-going Angels, a non-Trinitarian Godhead and Joseph Smith translating ancient papyrus he bought from a travelling peddler through a shiny rock in the bottom of a hat. Why add yet another layer of improbable-sounding, entirely apocryphal Utah-Mormon pioneer folklore between the core of the faith and the potential convert? It’s plenty entertaining for the bored-arsed Valley Mormons who are forced to sit through one, two, three hours of the same damned meeting discussing the same damned stuff every other day of the week. Yeah, you gotta have something “new” to talk about eventually. But it’s counter-productive as hell in a missionary sense.

I do have to confess that some of Skousen’s political ideology I find fairly sound and productive on its face. But I could also say that Adolph Hitler restored the German economy, built the autobahn, made the trains run on time and designed some pretty snappy outfits. That whole taking over Europe and killing off all the Jews and genetically inferior races thing, well, maybe that went too far. But generally, Hitler had some good ideas about nation building. Likewise, even if 90% of Skousen’s masterwork, The 5000 Year Leap for instance, is reasonable theory, it’s still the 10% of his most central elements that are totally evil that negate anything else he has to say. To wit: Brother Skousen, America is not a Christian Nation, and the Constitution was not pulled out of the Bible’s arse. The Constitution is the work of truly enlightened men, not Christians.

And before you cry foul, Skousen and Adolph had a lot in common:

“The Naked Capitalist” [one of Skousen’s political masterpieces allegedly based upon the work Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley] does not seem like a text that would be part of the required reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited “Tragedy and Hope” author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen’s interpretation of his work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen’s latest pamphlet. Their judgment was not kind. In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused Skousen of “inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary.” Skousen not only saw things that weren’t in Quigley’s book, they declared, he also missed what actually was there — namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists like Willard Cleon Skousen. [Emphasis mine.}

"Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan."

http://www.salon.com/news/feat...

In-between his stints at BYU, Skousen served as police chief of Salt Lake City. He ultimately got sacked from the post in 1960 by a very Conservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, who called him “an incipient Hitler” who “ran the [SLC] police department like the Gestapo. Lee also called him an outright liar:

“Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government,” Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. “The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man [and] one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government.”

http://www.salon.com/news/feat…

Skousen was born in 1913 to American parents in Alberta, Canada. He also had relatives in Juarez Colony Mexico. Colonia Juarez, What you won’t note unless you’re one of the Utah boys, is that these are the two places polygamist Mormon families fleeing the Christian anti-polygamy Crusade in Utah escaped to after the takeover of the territory by Federal troops. They were both out of US jurisdiction. Frankly, those Mormon colonies were even more isolated and more culturally provincial and literally inbred than even the Utah Saints ended up being. And apparently they were so isolated from the reason for their isolation, that Cleon Skousen never understood that his people were banished to these outposts to escape the very Christian Nation he wrote about so glowingly in all of his books.

Skousen moved to California at age 10, grew up, served a Mormon mission in England and Ireland, went to junior college, moved to Washington DC to work in a New Deal farm agency, and then worked for the FBI, gaining a law degree while he was at it. Before his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Salt Lake City, his position at the FBI was little more than a middling file clerk without any particular clearance that would expose him to his oft-claimed “inside” Commie conspiracy information. The FBI in fact, in later years, maintained a file on him that grew to be two-thousand pages long and cited him as a danger to the nation and an encumbrance to the Bureau’s anti-Communist efforts. Ironically, once he hit Salt Lake City, he easily landed his job as police chief based on this FBI “experience,” and even after failing this police post spectacularly, he still parlayed his FBI “credentials” into an ultra-Right Wing anti-Communist empire, because the hard-core pious Mormon Conservative Zealots of Salt Lake City claimed he’d only been fired because he caught the mayor playing poker with some influential friends. Ah, the “insiders” took him down. Poor Willy.

A conspiracy nut is born.

Ernie Lazar, an independent researcher of the far right who has examined Skousen’s nearly 2,000-page FBI file. “Skousen never worked in [the domestic intelligence division] and he never had significant exposure to data concerning communist matters,” says Lazar.

http://www.salon.com/news/feat…

It was during his Calvin-like iron-fisted reign as police chief over Salt Lake City that Willy Skousen became a born-again anti-Communist. This was initially fueled by the McCarthy hearings, the efforts of the John Birch Society, and the resulting Red Menace panic that was extremely high in the quaint, provincial minds of the Utah Mormon community. It was in this period he wrote his first classic, The Naked Communist. He slipped LDS church president David O McKay a copy, which the latter wholeheartedly praised.

In 1950, McCarthy gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he claimed that there were known communists working in the State Department. He went to Salt Lake City next. McCarthy was caught up in a media whirlwind that fanned the anti-communist flames. TheTydings committee was formed. The Democractic Majority that authored the Tydings report called McCarthy’s claims a “fraud and a hoax.” Some Republicans called the report treason.

Joseph McCarthy was dead by 1957, but McCarthyism lived on. Within Mormonism, Cleon Skousen was its hero.

…

Two other minor points of note. First, Ezra Taft Benson was the Mormon Prophet from 1985-1994. He was named to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1943, and served in Eisenhower’s cabinet, with the permission of David O McKay. Ezra Taft Benson was a strong supporter of the John Birch Society. Second, “The Naked Communist” was first published by Publisher’s Press, which was then run by Thomas S. Monson, who is the Mormon Prophet today. (The Mormon conservative website mentions this here).

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/09/19/784154/-Me-and-Cleon

Another pertinent note is that Monson published Skousen’s first book through his own private publishing firm because President Wilkinson of BYU had initially entertained the idea of having Skousen set up a panel to compose a text on Communism for the school’s curriculum. Wilkinson scrapped the whole notion of incorporating any of Skousen’s Communist “expertise” into official BYU academic material when he saw what it actually looked like in print. Apparently Wilkinson had only humored Skousen’s fixation on the “Imminent World Communist Threat” on the recommendation of LDS church president David O McKay. Skousen’s own account of this is comically transparent—he headed a committee of actual scholars who had no interest in exploring his paranoid, conspiratorial babblings. They and Wilkinson eventually palmed the whole project off onto Skousen exclusively, who feverishly worked on it for two years out of their hair. Then Wilkinson blew off the finished product unceremoniously, saying his faculty wouldn’t support it—thus dodging any BYU affiliation with Skousen’s rabid, mad-dog Red-Baiting, while still having satisfied his chairman of the board, president McKay, that he had given it the “old college try.” Skousen completed The Naked Communist as a stand-alone work and in light of Wilkinson’s refusal and probably on the urging again of McKay, Skousen raised some funds for the presswork, Monson picked up the property and published it privately.

http://www.nothingwavering.org/post/16472/2009-11-16/cleon-skousen.html

In 1962 LDS General Conference, McKay recommended that members of the Church avail themselves of Skousen’s book, The Naked Communist, declaring:

“I admonish everybody to read that excellent book of [former FBI agent and then-Salt Lake City Police] Chief Skousen’s.”

(David O. McKay, “Preach the Word,” Improvement Era, 62 [December 1959], p. 912, quoted in D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 1997], p. 82)

Given this sort of endorsement, Skousen became the darling of the Birch-hosted American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. Skousen founded a group called the All-American Society, in addition to his other speaking efforts. Skousen accused all manner of top administration officials with treason and eventually incorporated most of the period government into his claims of Communist corruption. He claimed to have gained this insight from deep FBI contacts.

The two groups competed in describing ever more terrifying threats posed by America’s enemies, foreign and domestic. As the scenarios became more and more outlandish, the feds grew concerned. In an internal memo, the FBI described Skousen’s friend and employer Fred Schwarz as “an opportunist,” the likes of which “are largely responsible for misinforming people and stirring them up emotionally … Schwartz [sic] and others like him can only do the country and the anticommunist work of the Bureau harm.”

…

When Skousen’s books started popping up in the nation’s high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau’s answer was an exasperated and resounding “no.” One 1962 FBI memo notes, “During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing ‘professional [anti]communists’ who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes.” Skousen’s “The Naked Communist,” said the Bureau official, is “another example of why a sound, scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed.”

http://www.salon.com/news/feat…

But you don’t have to believe me Glenn, because BYU once again now has been forced to deal with the stigma of Cleon the Klingon Skousen, thanks to you:

PROVO, Utah — Glenn Beck’s radio show draws roughly 8 million listeners a day.

W. Cleon Skousen gave nearly 15,000 lectures and wrote close to 40 books during his lifetime.

But just because those two, politically conservative LDS voices are some of the loudest, it doesn’t mean they speak for the entire conservative community, several BYU professors said during a panel discussion titled, “Glenn Beck, Cleon Skousen and LDS Conservatism.”

“One of the fallacies about our political culture is that we’ve allowed Cleon Skousen and those on the right to dominate LDS political writing and to suggest that that’s all there is,” said BYU political science professor Richard Davis, “even though that is clearly not the case.”

The discussion organized by BYU’s Tocqueville Project included three BYU professors and Paul Skousen, the son of the late, prolific political writer who was formerly best known for his best-selling book “The Naked Communist.”

However, Skousen has gained renewed interest since Fox News pundit Beck began touting Skousen’s book “The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World, Principles of Freedom 101.”
“It’s easy for me to see why (Beck) would have picked up on Cleon Skousen’s book and found it inspiring,” Davis said. “It fit in with his own performance.”

And that’s a lot of what Beck does — perform, the professors said.

“Most of the books of Beck’s I’ve picked up — are like his manic, ADHD television personality,” said BYU political science professor Ralph Hancock. “He’s just throwing stuff out there. They’re not meant to be read as discursive arguments. They’re just thrown out there to try to entertain people who would rather be Twittering or playing video games.”

Hancock said he agrees with some points made by Beck and Skousen but overall finds their arguments lacking in substance and scholarly research.

“I find in both a trace of anti-intellectualism,” Hancock said. “My interest is to help connect a certain LDS conservative impulse or mood with a more deeply grounded intellectual conservatism. We can’t enter the political field with the argument that all the bad, but smart people think X, but we good dumb people think Y.”

Hancock told students that if they are serious about conservatism, they, and he, need to “study diligently to increase our confidence that our intense feelings are common sense — and can be rationally articulated.”

Paul Skousen took the criticisms in stride and said his dad’s entire life was focused on studying and asking tough questions…. “He was trying to provoke people’s thinking,” he said. “Dad’s invitation was, ‘If someone can do better, please do, but until then, this is what I’ve been able to do.’”

Paul Skousen said his father knew Beck was pushing his book but only watched Beck’s show once or twice before he died.

“Were Dad here today, I think he would enjoy visiting with Glenn Beck,” Skousen said. “His counsel would be, ‘You got to give us some more answers.’”

Hancock offered several scholarly books where those answers could be found.

http://www.mormontimes.com/article/6690/BYU-profs-Glenn-Beck-doesnt-speak-for-all-Mormons

I guess you can see why BYU, “The Lord’s University,” wanted nothing to do with Cleon Skousen’s “brilliant” political rants, and basically still doesn’t want anything to do with the man. For the record, I didn’t want Cleon Skousen to pull any more answers out of his backside. It’s not that he wasn’t intellectual enough, it’s that he was wrong. It’s that he apparently just jumped to half-baked, paranoid conclusions, pointed fingers of conspiracy randomly at convenient targets, and made stuff up.

The following isn’t Skousen, but it’s a good sample of what W Cleon Skousen’s twisted ramblings have lead the so-called “Conservative” moment into. This is a little tract I’ve hung onto from EJ Blackstone, a once popular local Christian conspiracy nut, big-time Bircher, and God only knows what other Right Wing causes he’s affiliated with at this point. In this tract from the Carter era, he says the “illegal” Godless, secular humanist government in Washington has seized America and is acting as the proxy American Politburo, rendering the nation just another slave state of the Soviet Union:

“There are three Supreme Court decisions that essentially declare the U.S. a Christian nation, and the Trinity Decision is only one of them. The Congress has enacted laws that correlates exactly with Marx’s ten points in the Communist Manifesto. This starts with a personal income tax, and moves through a central banking system, redistribution of the wealth, and the abolishment of the Church. The Communists have divided the nation [America] into 10 sub states, and already built concentration camps in three. Each camp holds up to 50,000 inmates, and thousands of Christians who’ve exposed the plot have already been sent there, or been killed.”

Well, I guess Jimmy Carter blew his chance or something. All the Carter administration did was screw things up and wreck the economy. That’s what happens when you vote for a humble Christian peanut farmer and fair carpenter to do a man’s job. No Soviet roundups of Christians that I recall though. I think Carter would have been rounding himself up in one of those.

I don’t know what happened to EJ. He used to skulk around church fellowship halls arranging secret informational meetings about an imminent Apocalypse. Then he just sort of faded out of the local scene in the mid-1990’s. Maybe “they” got him. Maybe he’s in one of those camps. Or maybe he got the secret signal and he’s in a bunker, living on “food insurance” in full communications blackout, still waiting for the Russian takeover. Moscow better get on the ball. I don’t think he had much more than a year’s supply. That’s all Skousen said he’d need—and that came straight from God.

Or maybe the doctors just revoked Ej’s day-pass.

Unfortunately for Klingon Skousen and his Right Wing friends, the whole Berlin Wall coming down thing in 1989 put a large vacant spot in the center of their conspiratorial nut-job pantheon of scary villains. Don’t worry Glenn. As you well know, Cleon finds plenty more out there for us to fear.

I’ll get to those after I rest my typing fingers.

http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2007/08/mormon-bircher-cleon-skousen-was-mitt.html

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/09/19/784154/-Me-and-Cleon

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20030715/ai_n11412122/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20030715/ai_n11412122/

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/

http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm4/page_text.php?CISOROOT=/dialogue&CISOPTR=3884&CISOBOX=1&OBJ=3956&ITEM=121

http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_stevebenson_section3.html#pub_289504316

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/16/us/bicentennial-panel-in-california-assailed-over-racist-textbook.html

Written by lrwhitney

26/06/2011 at 02:01

Glenn Beck Part 2: White Horse Rising

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Like a mighty army moves the church of God; brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod. We are not divided, all one body we, one in hope and doctrine, one in charity.

Glenn Beck is in the business of predicting the End of the World. Glenn Beck is looking for that “Epic Battle,” he keeps alluding to, or Armageddon as the Bible calls it—the ultimate battle of good and evil. Glenn Beck has been sucked into his personal seer-stone and now lives deeply enthralled in his newfound Mormon Apocalyptic Wonderland. It may all be new and glorious to Beck, but the rest of us Mormon idiots suffered through the same shtick some thirty or forty years ago. It included a World Commie domino effect that fell on its face, a Soviet Empire that crapped out, a US economy that collapsed, the price of gold and silver skyrocketing. I even worked a while running a concentrating table in a gold refining installation in West Valley Utah around 1984, where we all carted around five-gallon buckets of gold-sparkling black sands and guarded our paydirt by sauntering around the shop packing heat on our hips. The world was going to end that year too as I recall. Nothing much came of it.

What ended instead was the LDS church membership of rather a lot of Glenn Beck-like “Christian Patriots” who backed some ex-Special Forces borderline paranoid named Bo Gritz for president, on the “Restore America to its Constitutional Principles” platform of the short-lived Populist Party. This party became associated with the Posse Commitatus and Militia Movements and attracted far Right elements like David Duke, former KKK notable who disavowed this past Klan allegiance and tried to mainstream his White Supremist Klan base into a functional political action committee along with a host of other tag-ons with no particular qualifications, like rich Okie, Ross “The Boss” Perot. When Gritz got exposed as a BS artist, and dropped his political aspirations because of reprehensible associates like Duke, and organizations like the Michigan Militia, who’s member Tim McVeigh later blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building, many of the Mormons and Jack-Mormons who did not follow Gritz to his own survivalist base, “Almost Heaven,” in southern Idaho, ended up founding a survivalist community near Cedar City Utah. They’re still waiting there for the mushroom clouds with their gold and guns and tins of beans, and probably tuning in Glenn Beck from their bunkers waiting for the signal to be given.

Glenn Beck wants to take us there again. It’s back to the bunker for everyone. Reset. Reset. Reset. Jargon. Jargon. Imply Imply. Allude Allude. Beckism Beckism Beckism. Coin Copyrightable Terminology…Market Market Market. It all just means the Sky is Falling. Wait till he’s free from Fox. You’ll see some real freaky preaching then.

Patriot City

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

http://www.hydeparkmedia.com/gritz.html

http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/gritz.asp?xpicked=2&item=5

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/03/29/michigan-militia-group-preparing-anti-christ-web-site-says/

http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/militia_m.asp?xpicked=4&item=19

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

http://survivalpreparednessblog.com/10-best-places-to-survive-in-america

All of these Apocalyptic, Christian America groups, like the Christian Front, who marched in American streets in support of Hitler at the beginning of World War II, have a Christian patriotic theme and focus around a world conspiracy out to destroy the United States. They all claim the nation is soon facing Armageddon, the Last Battle for Good over Evil.

Survivalism mind you, is basically Glenn Beck’s central marketing venture now. Clearly the first priority for any of the Christian Patriot or Christian America groups he fraternizes with is to survive the coming crisis—whatever that may be. They all know It’s coming soon. Whatever it is. And you better be ready for it.

http://survivalpreparednessblog.com/

Sure, Glenn Beck does his research and in that respect he’s not so much an extremist as he is a prophet of the blatantly obvious. But there’s always something churning desperately in the subtext with Beck. Glenn Beck a few weeks back said we’re at the start of 121 days of the most important chapter in the history of the world. Glenn Beck has a huge rally scheduled to save Israel venued on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This he rushed into production safely before Roshashona 2011. I don’t know why it’s always around that holiday but they sure love to plug that date into their calendar of world endings. Beck’s 121 day count is in the same ballpark as all the others. But of course, Glenn Beck doesn’t know what, for sure, if anything is happening when put to the light of scrutiny, so he’s off the “false prophet” charge and free to scoff and mock others who dare set dates.

I get the feeling that Glenn Beck is only able to intimate and hint about something “big” he’s working on, because at any given moment he’s probably still pulling it out of his own arse. But, there’s only a certain strain of crap that gets pulled out of the average Mormon arse, because they’re all part of a system that feeds them on a particular diet of very specific prophetic desperation. This gets digested, works its way through the individual’s system, and emerges as a the same familial feces over and over again through the generations. And every generation, some self-ordained Mormon visionary barely out of his Gospel training pants gets fascinated playing in his own prophetic poo and starts flinging it all over the rest of us.

Glenn Beck is a babe in the woods. He’s missing the “oops…now I’m just being a jackass” chip that shuts the brain down when it goes completely daffy. He means well but he’s fatally naïve. Beck daily warns how Lenin used students, intellectuals, artists and social revolutionaries to pull off the Russian Revolution, and when that was secure, Beck cautions us sternly that Lenin purged all these revolutionaries and installed the Communist Party with Lenin himself as the sole dictator of Russian politics. What Glenn Beck obviously doesn’t see, is that the Christian Nation movement he’s trying to rally from its 1980′s deathbed will do the same thing to him.

Glenn Beck, simply put, is neither one in hope nor doctrine with the Christian Right, the Patriot Movement, the evangelicals, the Silent Majority, or whatever else you want to call his growing flock of Christian political comrades. Glenn Beck is doing nothing new in the Christian Patriot game, he’s just a Mormon so he’s more organized and adept at running “programs” than previous Christian-only efforts. His religious ethos is more inclusive as well. Nevertheless, Glenn Beck will be the first guy out on the street when his own American Crusade liberates his New Jerusalem from the heathen infidels. His Christian comrades-in-arms think he is one. On some level what he’s engaged in amounts almost to self-hate, like a Jew collaborating with the NAZIs to ferret out his brothers and sisters so they can be rounded up and sent to the furnaces.

People look at Glenn Beck and ask, how can both he and Harry Reid be Mormons?

All Mormons actually started out supporting the Democrat Party. The Republicans founded their party upon two main planks: the elimination of the “twin relics of barbarism: polygamy and slavery.” Until the whole polygamy issue came up well into the Utah period, the Democrats were the only party who thought Mormons were mostly harmless, very industrious colonizers, a great block of votes to win in any case, and thus worthy of at least some political protection.

Originally, Mormon communities held all things in common, and when that failed, Mormons still used a systematically communal approach to building, buying, apportioning land and other temporal and governmental matters. Beck however, seems unaware of this near-socialist Mormon heritage or the church’s historical attachment to a Democrat Party that at least at one point was half-conducive to the notion of letting the Mormons found their own state, make their own laws, and live their own religion free of Federal interventions.

So, when I ask my “Still Small Voice” what’s really hauling Glenn Beck’s eschatological wagon so speedily down the road to Doomsday, a whisper comes back in the night saying, it’s three big horses, a red one, a black one, and a white one. A little impression comes to me that Glenn Beck has become indulged in the perennially re-surfacing tradition of what its Mormon proponents like to call the “White Horse Prophecy.” Beck doesn’t specifically quote any this twisted basket’s payload of horsepucky scraped off the barn floor of LDS history. I can smell it on him though. He’s embraced the stink of it if not the literal word of it.

The White Horse Prophecy itself, the centerpiece of a sub-Mormon folk religion, is a “revelation”—as they who believe in it claim—alleged to have been given to Joseph Smith in 1843. It wasn’t written down for a decade, and is based upon the anecdotal memories of two elderly Saints who claim to have heard Smith utter it off-the-cuff one day in his front yard. In this “revelation,” Smith allegedly prophesies that the US Constitution will hang by a thread in the Last Days, but the “boys from the mountain” as it is often colorfully paraphrased in boastful Utah re-tellings, will come riding to the rescue and save it.

The White Horse Prophecy is easily dismissed as grandiose, bunker-mentality-driven braggadocio on its face. Utah had the US Army headed out to subdue Mormonism at the time. It was also a very convenient “memory” that surfaced in time to bolster the Mormon settlers’ notion that they’d made the right choice in heading West, and that America was still God’s Chosen Nation, in spite of the fact that its government and half its citizenry had been trying to kill them all and stamp out their religion from the first day Joseph Smith came out of the trees as a callow youth and said Christianity was all messed up.

http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=utah+war&safe=active

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

http://www.media.utah.edu/UHE/u/UTAHWAR.html

LDS president Brigham Young led Mormonism west after the assassination of Joseph Smith. He picked up the subject of the White Horse Prophecy, and reinforced its central theme, In an Independence Day celebration speech in the Salt Lake Tabernacle on July 4, 1854:

“Will the Constitution be destroyed? No: it will be held inviolate by this people; and, as Joseph Smith said, ‘The time will come when the destiny of the nation will hang upon a single thread. At that critical juncture, this people will step forth and save it from the threatened destruction.’ It will be so.”

http://www.reliefmine.com/articles/prophecy/94-the-white-horse-prophecy

http://www.lifeongoldplates.com/2008/11/beck-hatch-constitution-hanging-by.html

http://www.utlm.org/onlineresources/whitehorseprophecy.htm

http://www.fairlds.org/pubs/whitehorse.pdf

President John Taylor, who succeeded Brigham Young, while speaking on Sunday afternoon 31 August 1879 in Logan Utah, expressed similar sentiments:

“…The day is not far distant when this nation will be shaken from centre to circumference. And now, you may write it down, any of you, and I will prophesy it in the name of God. And then will be fulfilled that prediction to be found in one of the revelations given through the Prophet Joseph Smith. Those who will not take up their sword to fight against their neighbor must needs flee to Zion for safety. And they will come, saying, we do not know anything of the principles of your religion, but we perceive that you are an honest community; you administer justice and righteousness, and we want to live with you and receive the protection of your laws, but as for your religion we will talk about that some other time. Will we protect such people? Yes, all honorable men. When the people shall have torn to shreds the Constitution of the United States the Elders of Israel will be found holding it up to the nations of the earth and proclaiming liberty and equal rights to all men, and extending the hand of fellowship to the oppressed of all nations. This is part of the programme, and as long as we do what is right and fear God, he will help us and stand by us under all circumstances.”

On 25 March, 1839, Joseph Smith, while imprisoned in horrific conditions on ostensibly false charges by a deputized lynch-mob in Liberty Jail, wrote:

“The Constitution of the United States is a glorious standard; it is founded in the wisdom of God. It is a heavenly banner; it is to all those who are privileged with the sweets of its liberty, like the cooling shades and refreshing waters of a great rock in a thirsty and weary land. It is like a great tree under whose branches men from every clime can be shielded from the burning rays of the sun. . . .”

As far as the Mormon loyalty to the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution goes, this is what I call, “Hard Doctrine.” It’s not now nor has it ever been in doubt, it is central and essential to the whole religious orientation of Mormonism. I could cite numerous references supporting this notion from a multitude of LDS presidents over the years. But there are also some more specific elements in the White Horse Prophecy that have always been highly dubious. In the words of Joseph Fielding Smith as an Apostle of the LDS Church, in October Conference of 1918:

“I have discovered that people have copies of a purported vision by the Prophet Joseph Smith given in Nauvoo, and some people are circulating this supposed vision, or revelation, or conversation which the prophet is reported to have held with a number of individuals in the city of Nauvoo. I want to say to you, my brethren and sisters, that if you understand the Church articles and covenants, if you will read the scriptures and become familiar with those things which are recorded in the revelations from the Lord, it will not be necessary for you to ask any questions in regard to the authenticity or otherwise of any purported revelation, vision, or manifestation that proceeds out of darkness, concocted in some corner, surreptitiously presented, and not coming through the proper channels of the Church…”

Joseph Fielding Smith incidentally, went on to become LDS church president. In addition to his authority on the matter, on this occasion, he was immediately followed by his father, Joseph F. Smith, who actually was president of the church at the time, and his father was even more blunt in his dismissal of the White Horse Prophesy:

“The ridiculous story about the “red horse,” and “the black horse,” and “the white horse,” and a lot of trash that has been circulated about and printed and sent around as a great revelation given by the Prophet Joseph Smith, is a matter that was gotten up, I understand, some ten years after the death of the Prophet Joseph Smith, by two of our brethren who put together some broken sentences from the Prophet that they may have heard from time to time, and formulated this so-called revelation out of it, and it was never spoken by the prophet in the manner in which they have put it forth. It is simply false; that is all there is to it.

These sorts of official condemnations not withstanding, Mormon conspiracy buffs stick to the White Horse Prophecy like flies propelling themselves eagerly into a pot of honey. Or, more accurately, like flies to a pile of shite, because most of them lay eggs in it and keep hatching brood after maggoty brood of self-created pests ever buzzing around it. The current evolution of the LDS White Horse subculture festered up during the last forty years, starting with the Ezra Taft Benson-era Mormon John Birch Society Generation.

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

John Birch was an American GI killed just after WWII by Chinese Communists. Birch is purported to be the first casualty of “World Communism.” After the death of infamous Communist witch-hunter Senator Joe McCarthy in 1957, a hard-core McCarthyite from Indiana named Bill Welch founded John Birch’s namesake society in 1958 to continue hunting out commies wherever they may be found and throttle the Red Menace. In most areas, by the 1970’s, Birch elements had broken into separate wings because the Roman Catholics found they were being badmouthed behind their backs between the Born-Again evangelicals and the Mormons–both of whom tended to rate the Roman Pope as the anti-Christ and their Holy Mother Church as the “Whore of Babylon.”

The evangelical or just plain “Christian” faction broke free of the whole John Birch thing toward the late 70’s, and let the Birch Mormons quarrel with the Birch Catholics. “World Communism” essentially collapsed with the Soviet Union in 1989. By then, Christian Armageddonist and evangelical Rapturists were booking their own shows from church hall to church hall across the nation and were freely publishing books and making films and videos on their own, unencumbered by having to be diplomatic in their Last Days scenarios because of Mormons or Jews or Masons or Catholics who might be at a Birch meeting.

Instead of disbanding, slapping one-another on the back shouting, “Mission accomplished,” as the Berlin Wall came down, the John Birch Society decided to keep making money instead. It found a new series of “One World Government” related conspiracies to pander to its already paranoid membership based upon the “Insiders,” a muddled pantheon of capitalists and aristocrats and privileged classes like the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Royal Families of England and a few other countries, the Committee of Three Hundred, and so forth, who the Society now claimed had been the real enemy all along. In short, the John birch Society became a conspiracy nut magnet.

The Mormon chapters of the John Birch Society however, became a Mormon conspiracy nut magnet. In Utah, It became difficult to delineate the difference between a Mormon priesthood meeting and a chapter meeting of the John Birch Society. And Mormon conspiracy nuts brought with them pet Mormon conspiracies that were unique to the Utah pioneer bunker experience.

The Christians, and evangelicals in particular who remained in the John Birch Society helped move its main conspiracy centers around nefarious plots by the United Nations and FEMA to round all Christians up into 50 concentration camps they claimed were already built, one in every state, headquartered in the then being built new automated luggage centre at the Denver Airport. There they would either be forced to accept the “Mark of the Beast,” which was to be a barcode tattoo and set of implanted transmitters connected to the World Central Computer, or they would be killed. (Not kidding.) As the Birch Society moved into the 1990’s, Mormons would have been just tickled to death to explore all of these emerging Christian Birch conspiracies, but, Mormons weren’t the targets of this sinister secret government in the Christian narratives, they were part of it. Along with the Jews and the Masons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P-hvPJPTi4

As bizarre as professional cult-escaper/exposer Bill Schnobelen’s claims have been, in the 1990’s, he has to be credited with being one of the most effective Christian evangelists of doom to fully inject anti-Mormonism into the whole pastiche of Christian xenophobic conspiracy theories. Christian conspiracy nuts were so willing and eager to incorporate anti-Mormonism into their end-of-the-World paranoia, that they lapped up anything this repeatedly debunked fraud had to say. They did so on his word alone, claiming to have been a secret-ultra-high-ranking kingpin in the Masons, the Illuminati, Wicca, a Druidic High Priest and a practicing vampire. He also claimed he was also a Mormon for five years—which of course, means he had complete access to all the Mormon “secrets.” According to Schnobelen, one of these secrets is a duplicate Oval Office in the Washington DC LDS temple with powerful transmitters and receivers in the temple spires designed to manage the Mormon Empire when the Mitt Romney takeover of America comes. These communication towers are so powerful they disrupt local communications and endanger air traffic overhead so that planes no longer fly over it. Schnobelen can reveal these great sorts of plots against humanity, apparently because death-oath-bound, Satanic, World Domination cults like the Mormons, the Illuminati, Masons and Druids, just hand hyper-secret knowledge to anyone who joins up and hangs out a while. These unholy secret orders also don’t apparently do anything but make idle threats when some self-important dickweed trips around the planet exposing these “secrets” to the whole world, and cashing in on the resulting Christian panic.

http://fanaticforjesus.blogspot.com/2011/03/bill-schnoebelen-and-mormons-temple-of.html

http://www.ronpaulwarroom.com/?p=890

http://markdice.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=115:bill-schnoebelen-qformer-illuminati-memberq-is-a-fraud&catid=66:articles-by-mark-dice&Itemid=89

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread337402/pg1

Going into the New World Order and a new century, Mormon John Birchers, unable to play in the evangelical sandbox, leapt gleefully back into their High Priest Groups at the local ward, and re-invigorated their long-time friend, the White Horse Prophecy. They incorporated it into a complex matrix of all the best conspiracies of the world—removing any anti-Mormon elements as they came to them. Now, most of these world-class conspiracy theories were originated by Protestant “Christians” and link everything bad in the world to Jews and Masons, with a shot or two at Roman Catholics and/or the Knights Templar, who again, are purported to be the progenitors of the Masonic orders—or at least some lines of them. The latest combination of these elements has become a popular film and book sensation known as the Da Vinci Code.

http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/thedavincicode/index.html

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

http://web.mit.edu/dryfoo/Masons/

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

http://www.templarhistory.com/

The Davinci Code’s author and the related theatrical feature film’s director openly confess that it’s all a load of BS. Even though it ruthlessly invents and distorts history and craps all over the Roman Catholic faith, they claim it’s only meant for entertainment and they mean no harm by it. But conspiracy jerks all over the world read it and watch it as documented fact.

Mormons have trouble buying into the secret society hysteria on a couple of levels. First of all, Christians have been saying that Mormons are themselves a dangerous secret society for generations. Also, Mormons love Jews, in fact, they led the world in Jew-loving before the Christian Zionists ever realized Jews were blood kin to Jesus and blessed by God. Mormons were Jew-lovers before Jew-loving became fashionable. In a Mormon secret-conspiracy mill, the “World Jewish Banking Conspiracy” which is a central staple of these sorts of One World Government theories, isn’t really going to gain any traction. Sure, there’s a World Banking Conspiracy the Mormon buffs would say—but you can’t hang that just on the Jews. Also, Joseph Smith was a Master Mason. Anti-Masonic conspiracies always link to Mormonism in the Christian conspiratorial mythology. A lot of the Founding Fathers were Masons as well, and the Founding Fathers incorporated a lot of Masonic philosophy if not theology into the US Constitution. Mormons love both the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution. They see Masonic participation in the founding of the nation and the writing of the Constitution as enlightenment, not a Satanic plot to enslave American Christians. It would be hard to sell a Mormon who knew his stuff, on the American Revolution as a dark conspiracy effected by the Illuminati that was not intended to establish a haven for intellectual and religious liberty, but really intended to establish a Godless “One World Government.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m89SB59DT34

http://www.masonicinfo.com/illuminati.htm

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

I don’t know what the Roman Catholics Birch fans did when the Russian balloon deflated instead of “going up,” because they met in their secret John Birch cells just like Lenin’s Marxist cells, but again, they too became increasingly annoyed with finding themselves connected negatively to John Birch conspiratorial dogma. Eventually however, without a universally hated pinko in every union and a commie under every bed to focus on, the John Birch Society became increasingly annoying or at least limited and unfulfilling to its Mormon constituency.

As the John Birchers were battling out the end of the twentieth century, yet another conspiratorial nut-branch spun off along libertarian or liberal lines during this period, based upon the example of one Lynden LaRouche. These tended to make the US Government itself the villain in its scenarios, starting with the Kennedy assassination, and of course culminating now in the “911 Truther” movement and related cabals who became convinced GW Bush was Hitler incarnate and the US would be a Police State before the end of his rule. Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, became an even easier target for their theories, since he promised to un-do all the Bush era “Homeland Defense” measures and instead upgraded, renewed them, invaded Pakistan, and started lobbing bombs and missiles at Muammar Khadafi

The LaRouche spin-offs tend to be non-religious and often agnostic or atheistic, they don’t figure into the Glenn Beck story except as occasional foils. For all intents and purposes however, they look exactly like the evangelical or Conservative, Religious Right conspiracy nuts, it’s just that they don’t want to put Jesus in the Oval Office. They are a type and shadow, an illustration of how these paranoid groups are capable of sticking their fingers to the conspiratorial wind, and often quickly shift their players and culprits from year-to-year, election-to-election, adapting to any incoming political regime or world theater players, to perpetuate their deluded theories no matter how many times their “well-proven” scenarios don’t pan out, or their “irrefutable evidence” is debunked. These too, play the “Patriot Game,” but in fact, they don’t seem to want a Congress or House or Oval Office at all, or anyone in government at any level telling them what to do at all. And there’s probably a few Mormons or other “religious” folks mixed in there with them.

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

http://www.infowars.com/alexjones.html

As we came to the end of 21st century there were a lot of patriotic, God-fearing conspiracy nuts looking for a new conspiracy nut messiah. They were also looking for some new conspiracies that didn’t personally implicate themselves. They didn’t want to have to believe anything too far-out because they’d been burned several times before on that score, and they didn’t want to hang out with lawless, dope-smoking libertarians.

Enter Glenn Beck. Enter the mainstreaming of Mormon eschatology. Enter the evil Progressives, the enemy for the new generation of conspiracy freaks. Enter “Spooky Guy,” George Soros. Who wouldn’t couldn’t help but be enthralled in the machinations of this Godless, manipulative, multi-billionaire who helped NAZI’s harvest Jewish property as a kid? Soros is a lifelong fan of Progressive Fascism who currently speaks openly about his wishes to bring forth a World Socialist Utopia. If an ecumenical, patriotic culture of conspiracy freaks is to succeed, it will need great villains, common to all sides, and Soros certainly fits that bill.

Beck is also in the process of resuscitating the Russian Federation as a credible threat to world and domestic security. “Crazy Ivan” is too good a foe to lose for Apocalyptic purposes. The Chinese just seem to be making sneakers cheaper than anyone else. The North Koreans would like to be menacing, but they still can’t lob anything over our back fence. And then there’s the Muslims. Beck has a much harder time than many others in his field, in admitting that there is some sort of “sane” Islam. He doesn’t seem very aware that the Salt Lake church has been chumming up to rich Muslims like the Kashogi family for ages, and teaches that the “Children of Ishmael” are also protected by God and heirs to the blessings of Father Abraham.

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

Glenn Beck, for all his great ability to read books, apparently hasn’t yet read any on the Crusades. I know he’s read up on American Christians kicking the crap out of Native Americans and Mormons, but in all his lecturing on the evils of Islam, he’s never once mentioned the Mother of all Wars, so far as the middle east is concerned, the “liberation” of Jerusalem, the rape, murder and pillage of Palestine that we still call the “First Crusade.”

The word “Crusade” literally means carrying the cross of Jesus ahead of you in battle as you slaughter, steal and destroy everything and everyone falling before your mighty Christian army, just to teach the infidel how mighty Jesus is. Christians still use the word like it was a good thing.

The first Crusade of 1095 or so, was conducted exactly like a “Jihad” to recapture the Holy Land. The first batch of knights to head out of European “civilization” to rescue the birthplace of Jesus from the heathens, ran short on their hastily gathered food and other stores in what is now Germany, and decided just to plunder and murder the local Jewish villages instead. They never made it to the Crusade. It gets worse from there, but most Christians still maintain that God commanded the English and European nobles to commit this bloody mayhem because the Muslims and Jews had it coming.

http://christendomsfolly.xanga.com/677903221/item/

Even a casual researching of what actually went on during the Crusades should convince the most faithful Christian that these Crusaders were not very Christ-like at all. Those Christian Privateers who managed to find Palestine, rode into Jerusalem and slaughtered every Muslim man there, and many of the women and children. Then they seized the surrounding lands and booty from the surviving locals, divided it all amongst themselves and set up little fiefdoms.

The Palestinian natives all looked the same to the Crusaders, with those towels on their heads of course. So the Crusaders just killed everyone who looked brown and they couldn’t understand–including the Christian guardians who’d been servicing and protecting the holy Christian sites and shrines for hundreds of years. And of course they killed off a lot of Jews while they were at it. Killing Jews wherever and whenever they popped up was just standard operating procedure for a Christian Knight. Where do you think the KKK got their pattern from?

http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/firstcrusade/Overview/Overview.htm

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/medieval/history/highmiddle/bernard.htm

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

http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/the-first-crusade.htm

Beyond Glenn Beck’s fairly sane analysis of current political and social movements around the world, and his ability to reasonably identify and prove who the bad players are in all of it–he always leaves you with the impression that there’s something he’s holding back because the world just can’t handle the truth. I wouldn’t say Glenn Beck keeps a consulting a copy of the White Horse Prophecy just off-camera, pinned to the wall with yarn strings connecting its passages to notes, news clippings, and photographs just like on CSI. But when there’s a horse in the room with you, the room smells horsey.

The White Horse Prophecy was allegedly delivered by Joseph Smith on May 6, 1843, following a review of the Nauvoo Legion, the large and well-ordered defense force of the newly founded Mormon base city in Illinois. Two rank-and-file Mormon members, Edwin Rushton and Theodore Turley are the source of this story.

At this review of his troops, Joseph Smith is said to have taken a glass of water in the heat of the day, raised it to his troops and said, “I drink to you a toast to the overthrow of the mobocrats.” The next morning a critic of the church dropped by Smith’s house and commenced cursing him loudly and profusely for making that toast. Smith ordered him out, and hearing this commotion from the street, Turley and Rushdon approached the Mormon prophet to console him over this rough treatment. Smith allegedly told them, “We will have worse things to see; our persecutors will have all the mobbings they want. Don’t wish them any harm. For when you see their sufferings you will shed bitter tears for them.” Edwin Rushton then records:

While this conversation was going on we stood by his south wicket gate in a triangle. Turning to me he said: “I want to tell you something. I will speak a parable like unto John the Revelator. You will go to the Rocky Mountains. And you will be a great and mighty people, established there, which I will call the ‘White Horse of Peace and Safety.’ When the Prophet said you will see it, I asked him, “Where will you be at that time?” He said, “I shall never go there. Your enemies will continue to follow you with persecutions and will make obnoxious laws against you in Congress to destroy the White Horse, but you will have a friend or two ‘to defend you’ to throw out the worst part of the laws, so they will not hurt much. You must continue to petition Congress all the time, they will treat you like strangers and aliens, and they will not give you your rights but will govern you with strangers and commissioners; you will see the Constitution of the United States almost destroyed; it will hang by a thread, as it were, as fine as the finest silk fiber.”

…”The time will come when the banks in every nation will fail and only two places will be safe where people can deposit their gold and treasures. These places will be the White Horse and England’s vaults.”

It rambles on a while and talks about the two Popes reuniting, gathering Jews from the world nations, keeping Russia in check, putting down the Turks and liberating the Holy Land, (Israel, not Utah) and so forth. It uses a white horse to represent the Mormon’s Zion State Smith allegedly envisioned and a couple of other horses figure in there as well, but it’s anybody’s guess what they represent. This Apocryphal vision isn’t unique. There are several similar documents and allegedly prophetic stories along the Mormon trail. They are sometimes called “folk doctrines,” or “faith promoting rumors.” Alleged witnesses and journal-keepers throughout the history of Mormonism have repeatedly jotted down thousands of random ponderings allegedly from Brigham Young, Joseph Smith and other Mormon “authorities.” These records have been religiously (pun intended) maintained but most of them never canonized or even officially debated.

The Problem with Glenn Beck is, first of all, he thinks Mormons are Christians. Worse yet, he thinks Mormons and Christians have a common interest in preserving America as a nation founded upon the freedom to worship God according to the conscience of every individual citizen. Glenn Beck thinks American Christians understand that the United States is a pluralistic society, a Constitutional Republic founded on the free agency of man and the common belief in Nature’s God.

Glenn Beck is a Useful Idiot of the Holy Conspiracy.

In fact the Holy Conspiracy was eagerly promoting a Common Law theory called “jury nullification,” in its heyday ten or twenty years ago, which means any jurist on a case who believes the law in question is ungodly, has the Christian duty to vote the accused innocent, thus nullifying the law. Conversely, even if the Christian jurist knows the law or charges are spurious, but the accused has it coming from God, then it is good Christian stewardship to vote “guilty” regardless of the evidence. Specifically this was addressed to those “Christian Patriots” in the day, who were accused of bombing abortion clinics, caught refusing to pay income tax to an evil federal government, and so forth. It’s exactly the sort of “Christian” stewardship that let Joseph Smith’s killers got off.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/nyregion/26jury.html?_r=1

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/084742-2011-02-28-jury-nullification-advocate-is-indicted.htm

You can’t blame Glenn Beck for being confused about his non-Christian status. Some years back the Mormon church engaged in a multi-multi-million dollar missionary and media effort to convince the world (and themselves) that Mormons were Christians like any other Christian. (At the time Beck may have been too drunk to notice.) In most Christian circles this attempt at re-branding gained Mormonism almost nothing however.

Mormon authorities often make public proclamations actually bolstering the belief that America is fundamentally Christian by Law and Constitution. This is precisely the legal premise upon which Mormonism has been beaten and driven into second-class citizenship for nearly two centuries. Dallin Oaks, one of Mormonism’s most respected academics, former president of BYU, and currently an apostle in the Council of Twelve, quoting former Mormon president, David O. McKay said:

“Recent rulings of the Supreme Court would have all reference to a Creator eliminated from our public schools and public offices. [1962 NY vs. State Board of Regents] “It is a sad day when the Supreme Court of the United States would discourage all reference in our schools to the influence of the phrase ‘divine providence’ as used by our founders of the Declaration of Independence. “Evidently the Supreme Court misinterprets the true meaning of the First Amendment, and are now leading a Christian nation down the road to atheism.”

July 1990 Ensign of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, SLC Utah.

Glenn Beck is certainly ignorant of his non-Christian status and indeed a lot of modern American Christians clearly find Glenn Beck’s message quite attractive. This is only due to reciprocal ignorance on the part of the average Christian. They’re often as blissfully unaware of the fundamental doctrines of “Historic” Christianity as Glenn Beck is.

There are no “unalienable rights” granted to man by their Creator in the “Historical” Christian scheme of things. There is only “God’s Will,” and everything that exists is subject to it. The only choice mankind has is to obey “God’s Will” or burn in hell. Those doomed to hell have no business in a “Christian Nation” at all, much less voting on anything.

The Founding Fathers on the other hand, believed that an educated population could rule itself in a just and upright manner, without King or Clergy giving it binding orders. Almost all of organized Christianity to date, has always maintained that man is fundamentally incapable of ruling himself, and that whenever man is given license to choose his own fate, make his own rules, use his own judgment, he will invariably choose to serve his natural evil desires, seek his True Father, his earthly Lord and Master, Satan.

In orthodox Christianity, the closer man thinks he comes to understanding Truth, the farther he can be sure he is getting from it. If it strikes man as good, right, true and logical, you can be sure it is Satan’s program.

Unlike the Founding Fathers, or Mormons for that matter, Christianity holds the core belief that good is only good because God says it’s good. If God said bad was good, it would be. If God says kill babies then baby killing is good. In Mormonism by contrast, truth exists in its own sphere. Truth is truth because it inherently is. God does good because it’s inherently right and God is inherently good. In Mormonism, baby killing is just wrong because it’s wrong to take innocent life. It’s what Mormons call an “Eternal Principle” and not even God can alter the truth of it.

In Christianity, God defines what’s good and what’s evil. God defines what’s true and what isn’t–and this via an incomprehensibly alien mind that humanity could never make sense of anyway so blind obedience is the only proper response to anything “God” (or his agents in the clergy usually…) commands. The Ten Commandments are only true principles because God says they are. There is no intrinsic right or wrong in any of it. Man cannot fall back on his own feeble wisdom and do what he considers to be right as he sees fit—because only God can tell man what that is, so again, even making the right choice without God is wrong. Even thinking you can choose the right without God’s direction is literally damned arrogance.

The concept of human choice doesn’t even exist in “Historic” Christianity. In Mormonism, or the Deist/Masonically-influenced US Constitution, the “Free Agency” of man is the whole point of mortal existence. It’s a training ground whereby mankind makes choices and learns right from wrong until knowing and loving good while dodging and shunning evil becomes an inherent part of man’s character. In Christianity, choice is an illusion.

“You can be a slave of Jesus, or a slave of the devil. Is there any other choice? No there isn’t. Freedom is a myth but you can choose what you’re going to be a slave to, and what you’re going to be free from.”

Father Al Lauer, “Daily Bread,” 15 February, 1989.

“Historic” Christians have always understood that they are saved no matter what, but on the other hand, even the good done by heathens and infidels, or heretics like Mormons, are counted as evil by God and they’ll burn in hell anyway. Christians who kill or repress or brutalize their religious or political opponents at worst will realize how wrong they were at some point in the Final Judgment. But as I say, the Final Judgment is already known and the “Christians” win. More importantly, “Historic” Christianity has always maintained that man is inherently evil, not, as our Founding Fathers maintained, “Innocent until proven guilty.”

And still, Glenn Beck does not catch on to these basic differences between his view of God and Government, and that of rather a large part of his throng of public followers. Glenn Beck is preaching Mormon ideology to the same people who burned his pioneer Mormon forefathers out of Missouri, murdered his founding prophet Joseph Smith in Illinois, and raped, pillaged, starved, robbed, chased, and slaughtered his early American “Saints” out of the United States entirely, into Mexican Territory. And when it looked like the Mormons weren’t going to die off all on their own in this desolate wilderness, the forefathers of his modern Christian supporters sent out an army of destruction, followed by troupes of Baptist, Methodist, and other “Christian” forces of “civilization,” to tyrannize and browbeat his forefathers through cannon, ball, and legislative pen. The great-great-grandparents of those who now buy tickets to his “inspiring” shows voted to socially and politically persecute, and eventually legislate the Mormon church and all its members into poverty and second-class citizenship, until they were legally denied any power of self-determination and stripped of their Constitutionally guaranteed rights of franchise.

In only one variant of the American Christian war against Mormonism, this is how the good Christians of Missouri explained their attempted Mormon genocide in 1833:

We, the undersigned, citizens of Jackson County, believing that an important crisis is at hand, as regards our civil society, in consequence of a pretended religious sect of people that have settled, and are still settling in our county, styling themselves ‘Mormons;’ and intending, as we do, to rid our society, ‘peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must,’ and believing as we do, that the arm of the civil law does not afford us a guarantee, or at least a sufficient one, against the evils which are now inflicted upon us, and seem to be increasing, by the said religious sect, deem it expedient, and of the highest importance, to form ourselves into a company for the better and easier accomplishment of our purpose….

It is more than two years since the first of these fanatics, or knaves, (for one or the other they undoubtably are) made their first appearance amongst us, and pretended as they did, and now do, to hold personal communication and converse face to face with the Most High God; to receive communications and revelations direct from heaven; to heal the sick by laying on hands; and, in short, to perform all the wonder working miracles wrought by the inspired Apostles and Prophets of old.

…More than a year since it was ascertained that they had been tampering with our slaves, and endeavoring to sew dissensions and raise seditions amongst them….

In a late number of the Star, published in Independence by the leaders of the sect, there is an article inviting free negroes and mulattoes from other states to become “Mormons,” and remove and settle among us. This exhibits them in still more odious colors…for it would require none of the supernatural gifts that they pretend to,to see that the introduction of such a caste amongst us would corrupt our blacks, and instigate them to blood shed.

They openly blaspheme the Most High God and cast contempt on His holy religion by pretending to receive revelations direct from heaven, by pretending to speak unknown tongues, by direct inspiration and by divers pretenses derogatory to God and religion, and to the utter subversion of human reason.

…

Under such a state of things, even our beautiful county would cease to be a desirable residence, and our situation intolerable. We therefore agree that after timely warning, and receiving an adequate compensation for what little property they cannot take with them, they refuse to leave us in peace, as they found us we agree to use such means as may be sufficient to remove them, and to that end we each pledge to each other our bodily powers, our lives, fortunes and sacred honors. [Emphasis added.]

History of the Church, Volume One , pages 374-375.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Mormon_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AMissouri_Executive_Order_44

http://www.sidneyrigdon.com/dbroadhu/NY/miscNYS2.htm

The Mormons called this the “Mob Manifesto.” The old Christian settlers called this the “Secret Constitution.” the State of Missouri called it “Executive Order #44.” There are still Christians willing to openly argue that it was a reasonable reaction to what they considered some very annoying Mormon neighbors. Christians believe they have a Constitutional right to not be annoyed by non-Christians. I mean this literally, and so do they.

Glenn Beck is fond of using the phrase: “We pledge our lives, fortunes and sacred honors,” or variations thereof, in rallying his mobs of fans into swearing oaths of loyalty to the Constitution of the United States. Apparently he’s not bright enough to realize this phrase was the same phrase used to pledge his own destruction, forsworn generations ago by the very Christians he now seeks to rally for what he thinks is the common good of the nation.

Brannon Howse, founder of Worldview Weekend, which organizes Christian conferences, before Beck’s Washington DC rally in 2011 warned:

“The Apostle Paul warns Christians against uniting with unbelievers in spiritual endeavors. While I applaud and agree with many of Glenn Beck’s conservative and constitutional views, that does not give me or any other Bible-believing Christian justification to compromise Biblical truth by spiritually joining Beck.”

David Shedlock, writer with the evangelical blog Caffeinated Thoughts commented on the same subject:

“Jesus Christ’s Church has universally rejected Mormonism’s Anti-Trinitarian theology and its claim that mortals may become God. Beck asks Christian leaders to ‘put differences aside,’ but Beck himself daily peppers his broadcasts with Mormon distinctives because he cannot keep his beliefs to himself.”

Richard Land, the Southern Baptist Convention’s head of Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission in a recent NPR interview said that Glenn Beck’s Mormonism “is not a Christian faith,” though he accepted that president Obama’s liberal Christianity which supported abortion and a host of other ills, was orthodox. Land suggested that, “Perhaps the most charitable way for an evangelical Christian to look at Mormonism is to look at Mormonism as the fourth Abrahamic faith.”

Time’s Amy Sullivan notes in a recent column by Russell Moore, dean of the School of Theology of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, that Moore dismisses Beck for preaching a “watered down theology that’s short on the gospel.”

http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/01/04/glenn-beck-and-the-new-evangelical-ecumenism/

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0810/Baptists_vs_Fox_News_at_prayer.html

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/27/some-evangelicals-on-defensive-over-partnering-with-glenn-beck-a-mormon/

Like the evangelicals today who openly criticize Glenn Beck for doing what they wish they could be as successful at doing, the Secret Christian Constitution was authored in Jackson County Missouri, in 1833 by a committee of Christian clergymen. This tribunal was headed by one Reverend Benton Pixley, Baptist, with clergy associates named, Bogart, who was a Methodist and captain in the state militia, as well as Reverends Isaac McCoy, Finnis Ewing, Fitzhugh, Kavanaugh, Lovelady, Likens, Hunter and others, all of whom persistently published anti-Mormon inflammatory tracts and corresponded to local and Eastern papers with libelous abandon against Mormonism.

Pixley was referred to by the Mormons as “a black rod in the hand of Satan.” He had been sent to “civilize” (Christianize) the heathen of the West. He told the Indians that the Mormons were devils who would destroy them. He told the “Old Settlers” that the Mormons were in league with the “savages” and the slaves, and were trying to drive them from their rightful place.

Not to be outdone by Benton Pixley and the Baptists, Reverend Finnis Ewing, head of the Cumberland Presbyterian church, is credited with publishing the definitive anti-Mormon credo:

“The Mormons are the common enemies of mankind, and ought to be destroyed.”

The signers of the Secret Constitution first secured the support of most of the local elected officials and officers of the law. They had long been inciting anti-Mormon incidents under various conspiratorial rationale, and the local rabble was just busting to panic. The situation came to a head on election day in the town of Gallatin. First, a group of Mormons had to box their way into a public polling place that had been blocked by a Christian mob organized by a Christian candidate who claimed they would take over the county if they were allowed to vote. The Christians retreated from the fisticuffs, led by their candidate, and swore to return with firearms. The Mormons came back with their own and shooting commenced.

The Mormons appealed for state protection and the governor sent troops out. Guess what: the troops didn’t protect the Mormons at all. They joined forces with the freelance mobs rallied by Christian ministers and local politicians who had besieged the nearby Mormon settlement of DeWitt, and was trying to starve out its population. One state detachment led by the noble Christian minister, Captain or “Reverend” Bogart, raided the village of Haun’s Mill, trapped most of its men in a blacksmith’s shed, and picked them off through the wide cracks in its log sides. Sardius Smith was a child of ten when a militiaman named William Reynolds found him cowering under the bellows after the battle, and blew off the top of his head saying, “Nits will make lice, and if he had lived he would have been a Mormon.” Reynolds bragged about watching the boy’s lengthy death struggle at local grog shops for years afterward. In the same battle, Captain Bogart demanded the surrender of an old man, took the old man’s gun and killed him with his own weapon, and then laughed gleefully as he hacked the body to shreds with a large knife. He and others hacked several of the dead and dying to pieces as well, and left them as an example for those who later had to come claim the dead.

But Reverend Bogart wasn’t so victorious against armed and prepared Mormon defenders. The esteemed Methodist minister had taken his mob-militia through the countryside and began raiding Mormon settlements as he came upon them. It didn’t take long for the Mormons to organize a counterforce, and when Mormons began very effectively taking his troops down right and left, Bogart sent a dispatch to Missouri’s governor Boggs, claiming that the whole county was being overrun by a lawless, marauding Mormon army. In return for winning the election, Lilburn W. Boggs issued a “fire at will” order of extermination.

Armed with the Governor’s authorization, Reverend Bogart fulfilled the aims of Pixley’s Secret Constitution in the rape and pillage of Far West, where most of Mormondom had surrendered for protection to regular state troops. But by the time all was said and done however, the regulars were so infiltrated with Bogart’s mob-militia and other adventurous types, that as the last weapon was grounded, a “whoop” went out from the soldiery around them. The entire, penned-in and now unarmed Mormon population was set upon and openly brutalized for weeks under the approving eyes of at least twenty Christian clergymen who held court with the militia over the fate of their conquests. Women were strapped to benches and raped to death in full public view while Christian clergymen debated the “heretical crimes” of Joseph Smith within earshot of the screaming.

Smith himself was chained in a public square in the winter rain while Christian militiamen cracked open the skull of a companion so they could challenge Smith to heal him. Smith was forced to watch the brains of his friend slowly ooze out beside him in the storm as they faded into death.

(See Essentials of Church History, or any Mormon history or the Missouri legislative record for the details. Don’t bother looking in Christian retellings, they omit the raping and pillaging and burning and looting and murder and mayhem.)

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

http://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/resources/findingaids/miscMormonRecords.asp?rec=eo

It’s a recurring theme, I know. I just can’t express the irony of Beck’s affiliation with these sorts of “Christian America” zealots clearly enough in words: “Historic” Christians have no substantial respect for, or belief in the Constitution, its officers and legal tradition, nor the democratic process in any form, except insofar as these continue in their estimation to coincide with “Biblical” or traditional Christian doctrines and objectives:

“When you’ve got a religious system that denies the divinity of Jesus Christ and the power of the shed blood of Jesus on the cross, then you’d better believe I’m prepared to go to war!”

Bob Larson, “Talk Back,” 8 May, 1991.

“It [Christianity] is a belief that completely molds the lives of those who believe in it.”

James Kennedy, “Truths That Transform,” 15 May, 1991.

Now, apart from complaints about Glenn Beck stirring up the Old Christian Settler’s slaves into rebellion—Beck has received essentially the same criticisms from modern Christian leaders that were used by period Christian clergies in the dawn of Mormonism to kill Joseph Smith and his fellow Saints off. So, on top of dealing with the crushing antagonism of the Godless Secular Humanist/Commie/Progressive social engineers he makes his specific political targets, Beck should also be well aware that he will never be a member of the Christian club. Not even on a political level. The Bible is Christian politics.

It’s not a question of Beck’s intelligence that makes him such an idiot. It’s a question of discernment and not having any natural, healthy cynicism. Mormons in general have neither discernment nor any instinctive skepticism. Glenn Beck has less healthy wariness than most, because there’s nothing more self-righteous or self-absorbed than a reformed hooker. In Beck’s case, make that a Mormon alcoholic. And having conquered that, he now is compelled to make his life worth something, something BIG. SOON. Something. Tune in tomorrow to hear what’s coming next…

While I believe he’s earnest and does his homework, frankly, he’s basically the guy you read about in 1 Corinthians 4:10, making himself a “fool for Christ.” It’s admirable in a way, but embarrassing to watch. Glenn Beck knows that politics is just war by other means. How can he not see that the Christian political soldier marches on to war to enforce this ideology:

“You just look around and see everything that is just and right and good has come at the influence of evangelical Christians!… The unbelievers will be cast into the Lake of Fire. I did not write that. I could not. But the Lord did.”

David Briese, Southwest Radio Church, 14 June, 1991.

Bob Shmitgal makes plain the inescapably negative Christian psyche better than I ever could:

“The humanist idea that I have the goodness in me to become what God created me to be is leading people into hell. Within us there is no good thing without Christ. Even the good things we do without Christ are evil.”

26 November, 1988, “Looking Up.”

The Trinity Decision was a petty US Supreme Court ruling back in 1892, that allowed a local church to import a minister and sidestep some federal protectionist immigration labor laws in doing so. It’s a waste of time to fully delineate the case but the Christian Nation movement is simply in love with it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Holy_Trinity_v._United_States

http://candst.tripod.com/holytrin.htm

Dr. James Kennedy, and his “Truths That Transform,” on-air ministry led the last century’s Christian Nation movement’s advance into unceasing public Christian intimidation of “non-Christians.” On 26 September, 1988, at the peak of the Last Temptation of Christ mania, he wrapped up his condemnation of the “pagans” responsible for said motion picture, by citing the “Trinity Decision’s” alleged Christening of America as a Christian Nation. Then he outlined the “mission” of the Church in this “Christian Nation”:

“#1 Witness and multiply. If each Christian makes one convert, it would produce a Christian majority overnight.

#2 Obey the Cultural Mandate. Influence young people, the professions, and the press.

#3 Pray to recapture the Christian heritage surrendered in politics.”

Kennedy got blunter in later broadcasts:

“Am I trying to Christianize America? You bet your boots I am…! I’m not only trying to Christianize America, I’m trying to Christianize every nation in the world…! [America was founded] as it says in the Mayflower compact, the birth certificate of America, “for the advancement of the Christian Faith.”

[8 November, 1988.]

“Only those living licentious and degraded lives would object to a Christian government…. We, without a doubt, have far more heathen in America today, than when the Pilgrims stepped off the Mayflower onto Plymouth Rock.”

[Election day, 11 November 1988.]

“I am a conspirator. I am part of the Holy Conspiracy. And I am a conspirator with Christ in the greatest movement in history to change mankind…. The very word [mankind] is ours…. And in case you didn’t know: our side wins! I’ve read the end of the Book! …One day our Lord will crush the head of every serpent…”

[4 December, 1989.]

News for Glenn Beck: You’re a serpent. Think about it. With friends like that, who needs mobocrats?

There’s a fine line between vigilance and paranoia. Glenn Beck doesn’t know what’s on either side of that line.

I know where Glenn Beck is going. I know where Glenn Beck is leading you. Glenn Beck is leading you to a basement full of mildewed textured vegetable protein chunks in five gallon buckets next to your wheat storage. He’s leading you to boxes and cans of freeze-dried ice cream and dehydrated peas. He’s leading you to fifty-gallon drums full of treated water and a hand-powered wheat grinder. He’s leading you to a garage full of 30-pound tins of US Civil Defense candy and protein wafers from 1962 packed out of the subterranean boiler room of the Downtown Athletic Club in 1972 when your ward got to clean out and distribute these expired survival commodities as they disbanded the program. He’s leading you to a lifetime of waiting for three, four, five maybe six “balloons” to go up before you finally tell him to piss off, you want your garage back, and you’re finally going to clean the rotting survivalist crap out of the basement and put in a pool table.

And then you’ll putter along with the rest of us pretty much as usual through another half a lifetime of the same old crap waiting patiently to die, while Glenn counts his gold coins and enjoys life in the catbird’s seat.

Written by lrwhitney

18/06/2011 at 01:17

Posted in 18 Glenn Beck Part 2: White Horse Rising

Tagged with 911 Truthers, anti-mormon, apocalypse, Armageddon, Blaze, Bo Gritz, Christian America, Christian Front, Christian Militia Movement, Christian Patriot, Christmas Jar, Christmas Sweater, end times, GBTV, gbtv.com, George Soros, Glenn Beck, Glenn Beck Apostate Mormon, Glenn Beck Blog, Glenn Beck Criticism, Glenn Beck Exposed, Glenn Beck Fox, Glenn Beck Mercury, Glenn Beck Mormon, Glenn Beck TV, Illuminati, John Birch, last days, LDS folk doctrine, Masonry, Masons, Media Matters, mediamatters, Militia Movement, Mormon mythology, Mormon War, new world order, one world government, Patriot Movement, Progressive, Rapture, Restoring Courage, Restoring Honor, second coming, Secret Constitution, shadow government, The Blaze, theblaze.com, white horse prophecy, White Horse Prophecy Debunked

Glenn Beck Part 1: High on a Mountain Top…

with 2 comments

Until Glenn Beck came along, the only televangelist I ever found intriguing enough to give a damn about was decades back when Jim Bakker was building his impressive “Heritage Village” and Heritage USA theme park, which once almost rivaled Disneyland. Bakker had his time in the sun back in the mid 1980’s to about 1987, in the heyday of televangelism. It was a time when any evangelical, born-again, charismatic, freelance, weird-arsed pastor of some half-legitimate denomination could invent his own religion from scratch and promulgate whatever quasi-Biblical theories he pulled out of his backside and put it on the broadcast airwaves in almost complete secrecy. Nobody but the zealots were watching what went on, and you had to know what backwater radio or TV channel to dial in at some usually unpopular hour of the day to get the message. They had a favorable Conservative administration going for them and it was years before YouTube or Facebook made it a sure bet you would find every dumb-assed thing you said five minutes ago spread all over the globe for everyone to laugh at. The fact is, Bakker had me just about convinced that he was at least sincere in his Christian intentions when I suddenly found him exposed for frolicking with a church secretary in the storage closet on the cover of all the tabloids.

http://www.thepropheticyears.com/wordpress/jim-bakker-is-back-on-the-air-and-cooks-up-a-new-village.html

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

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

http://www.lifeinthespiritradio.net/

http://www.heritageconferencecenter.org/

All Glenn Beck needs is a heavy coat of mascara to make those crying jags visually spectacular and he’d even equal good old Tammy Faye Bakker’s shows of sincerity as she begged the viewing audience to help save their ministry for the good of the children and families they were serving. Not my main point. Sort of a cheap shot. But it had to be said.

Jim and Tammy’s “ministry” fell into one of the categories of the tent-show fraternity I’d have to classify as the “Drama Queen” school of fund raising. Faith Healers would be another sub-category of the broadcast revival tent circuit. Another evangelical branch calls itself the “Faith Message” or “Whole Gospel” ministry. The Drama Queens make their money and converts by building some huge, ostensibly beneficial monument to their own greatness or charity—like a Christian Family Theme Park, or a Children’s Medical Center, or a University. Every week then they invent (usually legitimate) some financial crisis that will destroy all their great work within days if such-and-such a donation goal is not met. The Faith Healers ostensibly obliterate cancers and tumors, re-grow kidneys and broken bones, speak holy-sounding gibberish whenever plain English isn’t selling the crowd, and for this entertainment their followers are so impressed by these Spiritual gifts that they throw money at them. The Faith Message types tell you that God wants you to be rich and all you have to do is prove your faith by sending them your paycheck every week and God will return it tenfold, or an hundredfold. They’ll also bless handkerchiefs and mail you one for a price as a “prayer cloth,” whatever that is. And of course, they all diversify and cross in and out along any of these lines as opportunity arises. Glenn Beck too, expropriates many of these techniques but his message doesn’t much fit into any of these main mission statements. Glenn Beck is however, a very keen member of what I call “The Prophet’s Club.”

Glenn Beck has strapped his saddle on the big White Horse of prophecy, mounted his steed and now wants to take us all along for the ride.

Glenn Beck didn’t invent eschatology—the peculiar Christian hobby of pondering mostly Bible-based “End Time” scenarios. But he’s the leading exponent of the craft today. But again, he’s functioning on a slightly different plane of existence than say, Hal Lindsay, the 1970’s Christian author who wrote the oddly popular The Late Great Planet Earth, popularizing his Zionist fables about the Book of Revelations that fadded out a generation ago but keep getting revived.

lategrat http://www.hallindsey.com/

The thing about predicting the End of the World is, if you keep at it long enough eventually somebody will be right.

Obviously, as a Mormon, Glenn Beck also isn’t quite in sync with Lindsay’s fellow dispensationalists, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, who in 1995 began their sixteen volume best-selling Christian series called Left Behind, attempting to scare the bejeezes out of their Christian readership just enough to cling to their faith in Christ–but hopefully not their wallets. Or, God forbid, give all their money and property away before buying the complete series.

http://www.leftbehind.com/

Lindsay, LaHaye and Jenkins’ Rapture craze is still limping onward into the 21st century. Christians, mostly young ones, still buy their books, watch the particularly lame movie offshoots mostly under duress on a youth night with the hip young pastor “Bob” who wears a turtleneck and sweater vest instead of vestments or a suit and tie, and for those whom this Rapture scare is still new enough to be rapturous, they find consolation and peace in imaging they will thus avoid the imminent tribulations fated for the infidels and lesser Christians at the rise of the Antichrist, in their chronology, some seven years or so before the Glorious Second Coming in “Power.”

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

http://www.hallindsey.com/

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

Granted, Glenn Beck’s founding Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith, was himself well into the dispensationalist, End Time-scenario camp. Dispensationalism was a school of Biblical examination that evolved most vigorously going into the first frenzied expectation of Christ’s mighty return at the end of the first millennium AD. It received another big boost going into the turn of this last millennium. Sadly, the program of the Second Coming repeatedly failed to go as its watchers and scholars planned, so the various Christian, Mormon and other apologists attempted to explain inconsistencies and outright contradictions in the way God and His relationship to mankind was portrayed in Holy Writ by making God’s Word contingent upon a related timetable of human development or Divine cultivation of the human race. If God didn’t “change” it seemed that at least the way he dealt with man, his rules, his commandments, his timing, math and calendaring, even his physical nature or lack thereof apparently did, as recorded through the ages, and throughout a host of changing environmental, social, and political venues all over the Bible, particularly between the Old and New Testaments. So theologians invented (I mean found evidence in the Bible…) that God had actually planned His Creation (and un-Creation) timetable in distinct epochs, or “dispensations,” each with sometimes radically different game plans, schedules, and therefore rules.

Unlike Christians, Mormons gravitated to a concept of non-fixed dispensations, of no particular set time period. The whole business of Apocalyptic Bible math never really figured into the Mormon Second Coming narratives. Date setting at least in official Mormon circles has never had much to do with their constant expectation that it could happen at any moment without warning. Or not. And early Mormon depictions of Jesus returning showed Him zooming down the Salt Lake Valley from On High to pop into the Salt Lake temple apparently.

In several Christian eschatological schools there emerged a promised period known as the “Rapture,” where the followers of Jesus would be caught up in glory at His Coming. Only after His chosen ones were safe in His bosom would God let all the bad things prophesied in the Apocalypse begin, like the seven-year rise and rule of Satan or the Anti-Christ on earth. This was first popularized by John Nelson Darby in the 19th century. As the time of “Tribulation” commences, it is generally boasted that the Christians (the true ones that is) would get a ringside seat in Paradise to watch their foolish non-Christian mortal compatriots suffer below. These theories are based in Biblical verses like 1 Thessalonians 4:15–7 . The pre/mid/-Tribulation Rapture theories became extremely popular around the turn of the 20th century. Hal Lindsay made the pre-Tribulation version most fabulously popular at the present.

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

http://executableoutlines.com/end/end_01.htm

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

Important “dispensations” in Christian and Mormon eschatology include particularly what the Mormons call the “Dispensation of the Fullness of Times,” in which Jesus returns in glory. In Mormon theory, and many Christian schools, there follows a thousand years of perfect, Godly earth life where evil is swept clean from the planet. Before that however, there is also this Tribulation time, featuring a the direct rule of Satan on earth and a big hairy battle to kick him and his followers out when Jesus comes. Generally, it is proposed that there are seven of these dispensations throughout Biblical time, and a lot of dispensationalist thought connects directly to the “Seven Seals” mentioned in Revelation 8. This passage discusses the opening of some figurative, “Seventh Seal,” which also has seven subsets of prophetic or allegorically predicted historical events that then ensue. Again, generally, with a few other favorite scriptures like the prophetic writings of Daniel, which they link all together, those who either try to narrow down the season of Christ’s Return, or those who actually try to name a date or a year, imagine it’s just a question of figuring out the symbolism, connecting it to current events and world players, and BINGO!

http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/sbs777/prophecy/revbook/trump1-5.html

http://www.gotquestions.org/seven-seals-trumpets.html

http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/sevnseal.htm

It is often assumed in the Mormon church that Joseph Smith, like his Christian competitors, spoke a lot about the Book of Relations or the End Time prophecies of Daniel and overtly engaged in promoting the imminent End of the World. This isn’t really true. He seems instead to have addressed the whole matter of sign-seeking and date-setting and Second Coming-guessing only to shut up those amongst his flock who were so caught up in the notion that Jesus would be in town by the weekend, that he felt obligated to set them straight.

http://www.exmormon.org.uk/tol_arch/whyprophets/prophets/j_smith.htm

In all honesty, while Glenn Beck may have it all figured out, not even Joseph Smith entirely nailed the subject of Christ’s Return before he was murdered. Indeed, neither the Mormon nor the Christian has ever been in agreement even amongst themselves over the order in which these Apocalyptic dispensations or inter-dispensational events will take place. Conclusions drawn from even the canon is up to great debate and there is no consensus. Furthermore, Apocalyptic prophecies outside the Bible have always been sucked into the eschatological whirlwind of signposts and revelatory wonderments, from Nostradamus (Nostradumbass as I call him) to the contemporary apostate Mormon version, the “Parowan Prophet.”

In 1984, a fringe lunatic in the outer reaches of the Utah wilderness named Leland Freeborn, foresaw nuclear mushroom clouds rising over the Wasatch Front and it got published in a regional rural tabloid. For a week or so his babblings sent half the state into U-Haul yards to load up their survival kits and head into the safety of Monument Valley several hundred miles south. The other half the state had “End of the World” parties at BYU and in public parks throughout Salt Lake City. The lines of believers-vs-scoffers were not drawn upon the usual Mormon/non-Mormon lines either. If that weren’t dumbfounding enough, the same character is still in business and has authored numerous “prophecies” right up to the present, which also haven’t come close to panning out. These include nationwide riots that the Russians were supposed to foment and take advantage of to lob nukes at the US after the election of Barack Obama, which Freeborn forecast in 2008.

http://www.parowanprophet.com/prophet%20intro.htm

http://www.parowanprophet.com/

http://www.livescience.com/3159-parowan-prophet-predicts-nuked-christmas.html

In the Mormon continuum, those same ostensibly devout Mormons who in 1984 trotted off to the canyons on the say-so of one of their apostate nutcases, were already food storaged-up and had head-fulls of paranoid Cold War nuke-yuh-lur hole-uh-cost scenarios and generations of LDS leadership perpetually urging each member to store a “year’s supply,” stemming primarily from the Great Depression era dustbowl mentality. Mormons have been infiltrated for decades now by political theories about a Soviet invasion and destruction of America, and this originally from the John Birch society, which became an insidious polluter of Mormon popular doctrine in the very late 50’s and early 1960’s, when church leaders like then apostle, and eventually president, Ezra Taft Benson, said it was the best thing since sliced bread. Mormonism has been sprung tight and fully cocked on a hair-trigger for generations, just waiting for the word to come down from On High or “The Balloon” to go up.

The Christian camp was also affected by the emergence of late-50’s Birch Society political conspiracies, but had always entertained its own uniquely paranoid evangelical fears as well. Since the late 70’s a faddish wave of Christian doomsayers that struggles for life still today, has produced numerous even more widely attended evangelical Christian versions of Utah’s quasi-Mormonish Leeland Freeborn. This began with American cultural overthrow theories centered around “cults,” which word incidentally, they so entirely re-defined in popular usage to always infer a Satanic or evil connotation that academia abandoned the word in favor of “newly emerging religions” in the 1980’s.

Most Christian prognosticators of Doomsday generally grasp at any prominent natural disaster, or rise of any petty tyrant in the political world, even the success of any particularly powerful capitalist who seems to be getting his way too much, as a timeline marker they link to one intellectually challenged Biblical signpost or another. None of them ever sticks entirely to the Bible or “orthodox” Christian sources any more than the Mormons and quack-Mormons stick to their “authorized” sources. Not even the late Walter Martin, author of Kingdom of the Cults who first got the “cult” epithet to stick to Mormonism in the early 1970’s, actually based any of his dire warnings of a coming swarm of Satanic Pagans and Mormons, on either the Bible or for that matter, reality. His believers of course claim however, that this is exactly what he did—drew his conclusions entirely from the Bible.

Walter Martin in fact set himself up to be America’s primary judge of Christian orthodoxy, and his first effort in 1955, was to declare the Seventh-day Adventists “orthodox,” subclassing them as in the evangelical branch of the Church. This really pissed off most of evangelicals, but Martin stuck to his guns and went on to found the Christian Research Institute in 1960. The Christian Research Institute, went on to stick the label “cult” to anyone or anything Walter Martin didn’t think made the Christian roster, and he kept at them until it stuck in popular culture. He didn’t just go after Mormons and Moonies, he scrapped with many of his contemporaries in the “Christian” ministry field, and even hosted a self-descriptive radio show he titled, “The Bible Answer Man.” Martin and his CRI were one of the first pillars of a resurging American Christian purity movement that became the current Christian Nation Movement. The whole train of thought moving this forward is the notion of first purging the Church of “cults” and false Christians, and then purging the nation of them.

Walter Martin, the man who wrote The Rise of the Cults in 1955, and put Mormonism squarely in the threatening pack of “cults” on the rise, is also the mentor and forefather to most of the people Glenn Beck is now trying to rally behind him to put God back on the political throne of the United States of America. Unfortunately for Beck, they’re fine with putting God back on the throne of American government, they just don’t think it’s Glenn Beck’s God they want there.

Going into the 1980’s, evangelical Christian hucksters began expanding upon Walter Martin’s anti-“cult” theories. Foremost of these would be subsequent witch hunters like Bob Larson and his Talk Radio conversations with demon-possessed teenagers, Bill Schnoebelen and his travelling xenophobe show where he reveals the dark secrets of every Godless secret order ever rumored to exist because he’s apparently been a major officer in all of them at one time or another, and the likes of the infamous Ed Decker and Dave Hunt, who really boosted anti-Mormonism in 1984, when they found the perfect boogie man for the young naïve Christian by making up outright fables about Mormonism and “proved” it clearly to a generation of Christianity’s most gullible servants by combining mostly fake footnotes and a load of nonsense with every anti-Mormon rumor ever recorded over the generations into the comically inflated book of blood libels, The Godmakers. Seeking bigger and bigger spiritual thrills, Christian conspiracy nuts moved their efforts forward into an evangelical social movement against what they now called the “occult,” taking it up a notch.

While not politically organized at first, the 70’s-late 1980’s burst of Christian End Time fury was propelled by theories about a fictional rise in Ritual Satanic Abuse, witchcraft, and devil worship in general. This occultic connection fad died out of the Christian medicine show circuit towards the end of the 1990’s, when several psychological investigations proved that these spook finders had created an hysterical mental illness plague they’d hyped into existence themselves. It was a classic case of self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, by then many of them were calling themselves “prophets,” and had redefined the word enough at least in the Charismatic sects to be comfortable applying it to themselves and those they felt spoke for God, even if it was in a stream of glossallalial gibberish. Bob Larson’s dialogue with teen demons got repeatedly exposed as nothing more than the classic use of a shill on the other end of the phone, and his travelling exorcism show likewise got caught with it’s pants down when various journalists exposed his use of shills and paid players in the act. Larson turned out also to have invented a “Vanilla Ice” sort of phony rock-and-roll background he used as a basis to impress his teen ministry client base. He claimed Jesus saved him from a debauched history of playing rock music at Christian youth dances, where he deliberately corrupted whole churches. Turns out he never had much of a band, it wasn’t very edgy anyway, and those who remember those youth dances say his tales of debauchery and drink were total bunk. Bob had his fake epiphany, formed a youth anti-rock ministry, and Bob and Christianity’s youth were saved etc. In his dreams that is.

When the Christian public actually got to the point that it knew enough Mormons that didn’t find Mormonism scary enough to pay money to see it berated, Decker and Hunt did their best to move into the anti-Masonic, “cult,” and various evil conspiracy trade. They also tried to boost their claims against Mormonism in light of several exposes of their utter lack of scholarship or basic accuracy in The Godmakers, and tried to pin the full “occult” label onto Mormonism. They hopped up their anti-Mormon efforts with a movie release and expanded their asinine circus act which featured models prancing onstage in “Mormon Magic Underwear,” and so forth, took it on the road around the nation’s church basements and fellowship halls, until at one point even the seasoned, venerated, anti-Mormon ministry run by Gerald and Sandra Tanner had to tell them basically to shut the feck up because they had no idea what they were talking about.

And to round out the era, Walter Martin suddenly died in 1989 and Hank Hanegraff, his sidekick for years, took over the CRI and the post of Bible Answer Man—and went about almost immediately reversing most of Martin’s theology, by thoroughly trashing the entire concept of a Pre-Millennial Rapture and Dispensationalism in general.

13894392 http://www.raptureready.com/who/Hank_Hanegraaff.html

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

http://www.fairlds.org/The_God_Makers/

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

http://www.masonicinfo.com/schnoebelen.htm

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

http://www.withoneaccord.org/

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4208453336947193899#

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

http://www.cornerstonemag.com/features/iss100/larson.htm

In fairness to Glenn Beck’s Christian friends and rivals, the Bible does talk about an event Christians can reasonably call the “Rapture,” in general terms. The most popular timing of this event however, in historical terms, has been after the Tribulation period. The Tribulation is basically shared ecumenically in the Apocalyptic trade. The highly debatable pre-Tribulation relocation of Christian ascension to Jesus however, allows the faithful to skip out on the openly Satanic domination of mankind the Tribulation is predicted to hold for anyone around to see it. All I can say is, this seems basically just a rather convenient recruiting tool.

In most modern End Time scenarios, Christian, Mormon, or otherwise, the Antichrist takes over the UN, seizes control of Israel, and presents himself to the world as its Savior. Somewhere in there the world fights the ultimate battle of good over evil in the valley of Har Megiddo, or Armageddon, which again is something the pre-Tribulatory Rapture proponents say the faithful get to avoid. Unfortunately, Even following a single narration of all the available and highly varied End Time theology is too complicated to outline in a few volumes, much less a few paragraphs. The whole End Time calendar suffice it to say, is and always has been highly subjective and only vaguely doctrinal in whatever Christian sect or denomination it has been formulated. This includes the Mormon version–or, make that Mormon versions.

Contrary to popular belief–even in the LDS population itself–the LDS church has never officially gotten into the “Chicken Little” business, except in the most vague and general way of urging preparedness for when it happens, whenever that might be, always however, conveniently including the allowance that it could happen at any time—including immediately. This nudge and a wink about possible End Time imminence from latter-day prophets is every bit as motivating to the Mormon body of faithful as a specific date and time would be to any run-on-the-mill devout Christian who has been sold on nailing the Rapture down to the split-second via strict Biblical numerology.

In order to homogenize John Birch-like political conspiracies, current events, a delusional sense of chosenness and paranoid fear of non-Christians or “cults,” most so-called “historical” Christians who specialize in these End Time Biblical passages, have had to accept key changes in their attitude toward the “Christ Killers,” or in polite terms, the Jews, as they have been clearly described by very many Christian Church Fathers through the centuries. That the Jewish race has been cursed by “historical” Christianity is not debatable given the plethora of historical Christian literature and dogma blatantly saying so. Luther and Calvin both were raving anti-Semites so you can’t blame it all on the Popes either. The reason for this Christian evangelical change of heart on the subject of Judaism, is that by actually reading many of these prophetic Biblical scriptures, these modern Christian scholars and Apocalyptic dabblers came to the sudden realization that the Jews are in fact still God’s Chosen People. Jesus, they realized, was a Jew. Jesus was also apparently quite happy being a Jew. Jesus came specifically to minister to his own people, the Jews, not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, not the Holy Roman Empire, not the Eastern Church founded by the Hellenized, Roman Jew, Saul of Tarsus, who wanted to kill Jesus. (St. Paul.)

In normal context Christianity has been able to explain away the Jewish Biblical blessing by claiming that they had their chance and blew it. They killed their own Messiah. Through Paul, most Protestants and the Eastern Church claim God took His blessing to the Gentiles and cast the Jews all over the face of the earth, cursing them as punishment. The Jews therefore have always made a comfortable fit in a host of Birch-like World conspiracies. For the Christian eschatologist however, in putting all the canonical evidences together and trying to make sense out of them, it became obvious that the re-establishment of the nation of Israel, the rebuilding of the temple there and an expected righteous Jewish return to the sacrifices of the Law of Moses, would be central to the whole series of Biblical events wrapping up man’s time on earth. This got them tagged with the epithet, “Christian Zionists.”

http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Facts+About+Israel/State/ZIONISM-+Background.htm

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

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12516.htm

http://www.christianzionism.org/

http://www.911-strike.com/christian-zionists.htm

Mind you, not all Christian prophets of doom are on board with the idea of inextricably linking the End Time fate of the United States of America and the return of Christ to receive a Jewish Zion in Israel. Rather a lot of them figure Jesus and His New Jerusalem will be moved to southern California or something, and the Jews are going to be left holding the the bag as He thumbs his anthropomorphic nose at them while the Destroying Angel bakes them in a smoking crater after Armageddon. Many of them think Jesus is coming, and He may be coming back to Israel, but when He gets there it’s payback time for thems what done Him in.

At a rally sponsored by Jim Robison’s "Religious Roundtable" in 1980, Bailey Smith, then president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said:

"It is interesting at great political rallies how you have a Protestant to pray, a Catholic to pray, and then you have a Jew to pray. With all due respect to those dear people, my friends, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew."

The late Jerry Falwell, Founder of the Moral Majority, and one of the “Christian Nation” movement’s first notable Christian Zionists, tried to recover:

"This is the time for Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mormons, and all Americans to rise above every effort to polarize us in our efforts to return the nation to a commitment to the moral values on which America was built."

Religion in America , W. Hudson, 1987, MacMillan, page 400, and also on page 186 of Southern Baptist Holy War , 1986, J. Barnhart, Texas Monthly Press, Austin TX.

Glenn Beck as a Mormon wasn’t the first to come up against Christianity’s problem with an Israel-based Apocalyptic orientation. The late Jerry Falwell, the late James Kennedy, founders of Christian lobby groups like the CRI, the American Family Institute and others, the originators of the latest Christian Nation movement, were banging heads with their own kind on the issue for over three decades before Glenn Beck ever climbed out of his bottle, got out of “Morning Zoo” Top-40 radio and discovered both God and the Talk-Jock format apparently at the same moment.

Though the Christian Nation movement is often linking the Ten Commandments with the Sermon on the Mount as the "Judeo-Christian" basis of American law and justice, neither of these is actually even implied in the Constitution. And most Christian Constitutional advocates would have a hard time accepting anything "Jewish" from the pages of the Bible except for those Ten Commandments. In reality, the Christian Nation tent a very small and exclusive one Mormons have never been, and never will be invited into with universal applause. If “authorities” and founders of the Christian Nation movement like Walter Martin don’t even think Roman Catholics make the cut, Mormons and Jews won’t ever pass the muster.

http://apprising.org/2008/10/12/dr-walter-martin-speaks-on-the-roman-catholic-church/

http://www.waltermartin.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2067

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3s0rn7InSQ

While Christians are late in combining their “Christian Nation” theories with Apocalyptic Zionism, Mormons, if nothing else, have in fact led the charge in promulgating, and probably inventing, American Christian Zionism. As early as 1840-41, at the height of his own persecution and travails, Joseph Smith sent the Jewish convert Orson Hyde to Palestine to dedicate the land for the gathering of Israel. Most of Christianity at the time was very keen on seeing that this Jewish national and cultural reassembly did not happen. For instance, a lot of faithful Russian Orthodox lads presumed to throw Christ’s deadly retribution at the Jews very directly in the Czarist era pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some good Lutheran boys followed the trend toward ridding the Christian Master Race of the Jewish pests in NAZI Germany–trying to insure that the “diaspora” became the “die-outspora.” In contrast, the Mormon Orson Hyde was charged with the assignment to dedicate the Holy Land (not Utah mind you, the other Holy Land) for the rebuilding of Solomon’s temple, the return of Israel from the diaspora, and the coming of the Lord to receive and bless His Chosen Ones. (And Glenn Beck plans to be there when it happens, so get your tickets soon…) In the meantime, Joseph Smith was laying out street maps and architectural plans for the raising of New Jerusalem at Adam Ondi Ahman (billed as the site of the original Garden of Eden) along the east bluffs of the Grand River in Daviess County Missouri. In short, Mormons have always connected the US and Israel as the two choice nations uniquely sanctioned by God at the End of Days.

Mormons are so pro-Jew they believe that baptism into the church constitutes an adoption into the House Of Israel. They believe descendants of the tribe of Levi have the right to preside as a local bishop without counselors. For generations they called non-Mormons "Gentiles," unless they were Jews.

http://lds.org/scriptures/history-maps/photo-10?lang=eng

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire

Now, Glenn Beck and most other Mormons may mock the ongoing parade of Rapture-based Christian prophets of doom in the media today, but the truth is, Mormonism has never been lacking in any of the same sort of speculations from the time of Joseph Smith onward. The early Saints wrote and acted both politically and doctrinally as if they thought Christ might show up at any moment, or at least by next week—a couple of months, maybe a year tops. The whole point of the Church of Jesus Christ (of Latter-day Saints, which was tagged on when Smith ran into legal trademark complications) is to establish an infrastructure through which the returned Lord can administer the Kingdom of God on Earth.

As I began this tome, Glenn Beck was preparing to go on the air and lampoon the latest Christian shmuck to have predicted the Rapture and goofed. Apparently this particular dipchip made the same prediction about a decade ago and missed that one too—but blamed it on a math error and got away with it again this year. Before I had completed my research and started back into my first editing phase a day later, the dork had by then announced that it was an “Invisible Judgment Day,” and that the actual Rapture was going to take place on October 21st—five months off again, due to some damned accounting quirk. Prophecy moves pretty fast these days, so I guess if you’re reading this after 21 October 2011, you’ve been “Left Behind.”

http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-spokane/planet-earth-misses-scheduled-may-21-2011-rapture

http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/outreach/tracts/may21/

http://www.longislandpress.com/2011/05/18/may-21-2011-judgment-day-2/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/patheos-on-faith/post/why-may-21-2011-isnt-the-end-of-the-world/2011/05/20/AFoL3u7G_blog.html

Glenn’s target for particular lambasting the last month or so, has been our latest Rapture predicting cluck, an 88-year-old self-described “Bible student” who is probably going to meet Jesus soon one way or another in any case. His name is Harold Camping, and he’s head of something called “Family Radio Ministries.” He is not the first Christian minister to have to run and hide after one of these false Rapture alerts. There have been hundreds if not thousands of them since it became popular to predict the end of the world, back around the turn of the first century AD.

Beating Camping to the boast this Rapture season, some other Christian twit named Phil Rogers blogged the Rapture date to be January 27th 2011, then corrected himself the day before, and added ten more days for addition mistakes. Then he apologized for the whole thing ten days later, and is still predicting and re-predicting the Rapture based upon other absolutely clear Biblical theories that likewise make his numbers certain.

http://www.fivedoves.com/letters/jan2011/philr127.htm

http://www.fivedoves.com/letters/feb2011/philr29.htm

The Jehovah’s Witnesses still lead the tally board in utterly failed Christ Returns, with scores of them over the last hundred years in their sect alone. In 1988, popular radio preacher and author of 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be In 1988 and On Borrowed Time, Edgar Wisenant, predicted the Rapture would come during Roshashona of that year, early September. Needless to say, the only person who disappeared from the face of the earth on Roshashona in 1988 was Edgar Wisenant.

http://www.charismamag.com/index.php/fire-in-my-bones/23081-dont-get-infected-with-last-days-fever

http://www.newagegod.com/HURImedia/HuricG2.htm

http://www.bible.ca/pre-date-setters.htm

http://www.bible.ca/Jw-Prophecy.htm

Glenn Beck is the first commercially successful and widely respected Mormon mass-media evangelist. He’s so far succeeded in this effort by fixating upon only the most universal and superficial, beattitudinal-type Judeo-Christian elements of Biblical wisdom. He’s augmented this by superimposing a presumed common End Time belief over current political and world events that are clearly observable and fairly predictable, while only making the vaguest allusions to the attendant Apocalyptic, Biblical or theological implications of these world-changing elements, leaving his audience free to imagine whatever the hell connection they might want to make. Beck every day in effect, prophesies something big is about to happen, and every day never quite gets around to telling us what it is. And the next day, we all tune in again to see if this is the day he actually spells it all out for us. But no. Just another litany of the dozen or so elements he got “right,” over the year, and a promise at the very end of the show he’s in the process of developing something that will “blow your mind,” but isn’t free to divulge yet.

There is nothing new in Glenn Beck’s bag of tricks. Glenn Beck is what Utah Talk Radio was in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, when I was living in Provo. Beck may not even know that, being originally from the Pacific Northwest as I am. I don’t think Glenn Beck has ever been exposed to the full spectrum of Mormon survivalist, quasi-prophetic lunacy. He doesn’t seem to have been exposed to it long enough to grow jaded, disappointed, and then finally painfully bored with its writhing, evolutionary paranoia that cuts and pastes Holy Writ into regional Mormon folklore, repeatedly trumping up a frenzied narrative pointing to the “Next Big Thing,” that only ever comes up bust. Last week’s collage of random prophecies are shredded and re-pasted into a new roadmap of the Apocalypse, and the process begins again with a new script and a new prophetic leader.

Make no mistake about Glenn Beck. He’s a televangelist. Glenn Beck is running a broadcast ministry. In Mormon culture, this is unprecedented, and the notion of being paid to deliver the Word of God is what Mormons call “priestcraft,” and gets you excommunicated. So he’s treading a thin line there.

Glenn Beck’s argument against the charge of running a religious ministry would no doubt be that he does not specifically proselytize anyone into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He would argue that his message is a universal faith in God, and God’s plan for the United States of America to be a haven for all believers in the “God of Creation,” or “Nature’s God,” as the Founding Fathers often referred to the Supreme Being. What Christians won’t immediately understand, is that this “Savior of the Constitution” scenario is an integral and centrally important principle of the Mormon “Gospel.” There’s nothing inherently sinister or nefarious about this Mormon doctrine at all mind you. Unlike “Historic” Christianity, there is no suggestion or even much of a desire in Mormonism to promote some sort of exclusively Mormon utopian American Government. Mormons simply believe that they are free to exercise their Constitutional rights to vote and motivate and lobby American society and law in as Godly a direction as they can manage within the bounds of the law. If that ends up with Mormons grossly outvoting everyone on everything then so be it. When they talk about “saving” the Constitution, they really mean saving it. For everyone—even the Christian bastards who have been hounding them since 1820. In the Mormon scenario however, nobody should be hounded like that ever again. This is likely one reason the American Family Association rated Mormon Senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, one of the most pro-homosexual legislators of 1990 and scored him low on abortion and many other conservative Christian political staples.

http://www.votesmart.org/issue_rating_category.php?can_id=53352

http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/02/03/Orrin_Hatch_Open_to_DADT_Repeal/

Ironically from the Left, Orrin Hatch finds many, including the pro-Gay lobby calling him a homophobic moron for saying that Gays and Lesbians didn’t pay tithing because politics was their religion. Not to mention the whole recent California Proposition 8 movement that singled out Mormons in general for opposing an initiative to make Gay marriage legal in that state. Oxymoronically, Mormon Senator Harry Reed, Democrat from another state largely founded by Mormons, Nevada, as Senate Majority Leader, led the party that was entirely opposed to Proposition 8.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_(2008)

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-protest7-2008nov07,0,3827549.story

While the Gay Lefties are beating him up, we see that coming from the other direction, the John Birch society–which the Mormon church at one time practically owned–has gone to town on Orrin Hatch for not being a real conservative.

“The distaste for Hatch focused on what many Utah residents see as his capitulation on abortion, gun ownership, and homosexuality. As they arrived at the convention, delegates were handed a letter documenting Hatch’s softness on the all-important right-to-life issue. Some delegates were angered over his refusal to sign a pledge to veto judicial candidates who aren’t opposed to abortion. Upset supporters of the right to own a gun claimed that the Virginia-based Gun Owners of America had correctly blasted him for supporting several measures targeting private ownership of weapons, including a ban on an assortment of weapons in a huge crime bill, controls on sales at gun shows, and enforcement of trigger locks. Others recalled that, in 1990, the American Family Association publicly criticized Hatch for supporting the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and its "funding of pornography and anti-Christian art."

http://www.ldsfreedomforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=87

And that’s also why Mormons are the common enemy of all. Remember that phrase, because it is the key to understanding the religion. The Left lumps Mormonism in with the foaming fundamentalists, and the foaming fundamentalists have been killing and oppressing Mormons for generations as dangerous heretics.

Glenn Beck would likely not see himself as a missionary, but he does indeed attempt to bring people to Christ, he does so however—as Glenn Beck or most Mormons would understand Christ. Beck does so with the inherent Mormon acceptance of anyone who accepts God under any name or title. To be even plainer, if you don’t sign up with the Mormon missionaries for a dunk, you’re still going to a heavenly paradise more grand than you could imagine. Christ’s sacrifice is universal and His Grace is freely given to all who accept Him—and nearly everyone will accept Christ either here or hereafter, because Mormonism doesn’t close the books when you kick the bucket.

Glenn Beck has no dogmatic reluctance to embrace anyone as a brother or sister in his personal or political work, because Mormons literally believe, unlike Christians, that we were God’s children before this mortal life, we are still God’s children, and we will remain brothers and sisters in the Great Beyond whatever our ultimate reward there may be. Mormons easily accept in a patriotic sense, anyone willing to admit some higher power exists and that this higher power has set America above the worldly rabble of nations to insure freedom and liberty for His/Its children.

The Christian perspective on the status of non-Christians however, is that they’re children of Satan. Full Stop. They burn in hell. Thus, in the Christian’s political realm, non-Christians can only have a Satanic and destructive influence on America, if allowed any political power whatsoever.

On 10 November, 1988, on "The Voice of Americanism," Dr. Stuart MacBirney recalled his impressions of the summer’s Olympic games:

"As I sat watching the ‘friendship dance’ performed by thousands of Korean traditional dancers, filling the field of Olympic Stadium, while others touched their tear-filled eyes in an expression that the East and West cultures stem from common roots of the Human Family, the Christians watching were left with a sick revulsion at thousands of deluded pagans, pretending we’re all part of the same Human Family, when in fact they are Buddhists and Hindus, sinners condemned to hell, and trying to lure us all into the pit with them."

http://newstalgia.crooksandliars.com/gordonskene/voices-shrill-dr-ws-mcbirnie-and-vast

There is no universal morality or "Judeo-Christian ethic" for those patriotic, American evangelicals fond of claiming to be “historic” Christians. "God" is the “Word” and the Word is the Bible. In the Christian scheme of things, social, personal, and political freedom is the total submission to Jesus Christ, God, AKA the Bible . The nation can only be free by subjugating "man’s law," to the Holy Bible. Christians believe no man can be Free unless yoked to the Bible.

James Robison was quite active in the pre-Beck Christian America frenzy before the turn of this century. Those Christian ministers as honest as Robison confessed openly that the entire movement they represent is literally arguing to scrap the legal structure of America in favor of the Bible.

"And if you do not believe the Bible, we have no basis for fellowship. And by believing the Bible, I mean believing that it is the inerrant, infallible, inspired Word of the living, eternal God, that it’s God breathed, and that it must be proclaimed without apology in the power of the Holy Spirit."

Page 123, Robison’s, Thank God I’m Free .

In the Religious Right boom times of the late 20^th century, Christian geniuses like the late James Kennedy even coined a word for what they were doing. Kennedy called it the “Holy Conspiracy.” He was joined by other noted Christian patriots like the late Walter Martin, Hank Hanegraaff, and the Christian Research Institute as it sprang up to fight “cults” and recapture America for Jesus. They published "Christian" voting guides and sponsored "God in Government" conferences to tell you and your elected officials precisely how to exercise "good Christian stewardship." But the Mormons weren’t invited to the last Christian America revolution. When the Mormons all rushed in to get a piece of it, they found the national association of “Christian” Boy scouts didn’t even want them at their Camporees.

http://jonrowe.blogspot.com/2005/07/holy-trinity-decision-another-favorite.html

http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_boyscouts.html

http://dailyross.com/2010/02/the-bsas-mormon-problem/

http://www.suite101.com/content/mormon-parents-rejected-by-presbyterian-cub-scout-program-a299180

The same LDS apostle/prophet, Ezra Taft Benson, who got Mormons into the John Birch Society by droves, was a lifelong booster of Scouting. He started in 1918 as an assistant Scout Master as the Mormon church was superseding it’s youth internal organization, the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association with Scouting USA. Young women remained in a separate internal church organization, but the young men were soon surrendered to Lord Baden-Powell until its entire young male religious training program was just a Mormon sponsored branch of Scouting USA. Like the Birch Society, Benson thought the Boy Scouts were very butch, well disciplined, patriotic, and wonderfully woodsy. On May 23, 1949 he was elected to the National Executive Board of the Boy Scouts of America. He attained all three of the highest national awards in the Boy Scouts of America—the Silver Beaver, the Silver Antelope, and the Silver Buffalo—as well as world Scouting’s international award, the Bronze Wolf.^[6]

In the early days of Mormon Scouting, most boys loved to dress up, run through the woods, build camp fires, pitch tents and teepees, and pretend they were Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone. Mormon kids, and their older, often no more sophisticated counterparts in leadership, were no different, they just preferred to dress up and pretend to be Jim Bridger or Orrin Porter Rockwell. (Rockwell was Joseph Smith’s personal bodyguard, and Bridger was a mountain man and scout who opened up the Intermountain West.)

The Scouting takeover of the Mormon young men’s program was not without protest. A generation of Mormon parents and grandparents, in spite of authoritative Mormon Scouting boosters like Ezra Taft Benson or recent president Gordon B. Hinckley, thought of Boy Scouts as foul-mouthed ruffians and pyromaniacs unfit for church association. Two or three generations had to pass away before the opinionated Mormon pioneer stock would universally concede that Scouting, as re-defined by Mormonism, is God’s Divine plan for their children and grandchildren.

President Hinckley could have indeed bailed out on Scouting a few years back, amid screaming controversies of Gay inclusion and Christian Scouting’s rejection of Mormonism in their national encampment events. Hinckley instead even more firmly entrenched the Mormon church in the Scouting program. The personal qualities Mormons seem to love most are perfectly embodied in Boy Scout lore and culture, according to the late Gordon B. Hinckley, who felt if every boy could be a Scout it would empty all the prisons. Unlike the Birch Society, which was never compulsory, just highly promoted, becoming a Boy Scout, and in recent years, becoming an Eagle Scout, is enforced as a required rite of passage in order to insure proper LDS credentials in later dating, mating, and employment endeavors within the Mormon community. LDS colleges and universities actually offer a program in professional Boy Scouting. http://www.ldsscouting.org/index.shtml

Scouting is just the sort of “program” Mormons have evolved and gravitated to in every aspect of their religion. Mormonism in large part is a collection of glorified clerks, bankers, bureaucrats and functionaries who worship the notion that exaltation can be organized, engineered, and manufactured by structuring the perfect universal “program,” and then cramming generations of youth and converts through it to construct a body of believers of absolutely reliable character and totally common experience. Mormons even boast of their leadership as being unexceptional people, common people. In Mormonism there is a glory in not being unusually gifted. Even Mormon leaders are believed to have been chosen because God has called them not because of their genius and personal value, but because they are the most humble of the bunch and the least interested in running the show. The problem with the Mormon approach to Scouting is exactly that. It’s not a program designed to bring out the best and brightest in the best and brightest. It’s a mandatory indoctrination designed to elevate you to the highest degree of youthful glory, exactly like very other good Mormon boy, and prepare you to follow-up your young life’s goal (Eagle Scout) with the next compulsory goal, your mission. And after that a temple marriage and children. And after that you make bishop, or stake president, or even higher church calling, all for quietly doing what you are told and not making waves. This process will repeat itself mindlessly, until Jesus comes and Personally explains what it’s actually all supposed to lead up to.

Because Scouting is now the official Mormon boy’s club, if you aren’t thrilled with tying square knots or having the bigger kids at camp steal all the canoes so you have to walk twenty minutes to meals three times a day clear around the lake while they paddle over easily in a couple of minutes, then it must mean there’s something wrong with you. Everybody else loves it—including “prophets of God” who have not just sanctioned it, but required it of you. In the Mormon world, Scouting is God’s assignment, and if you drop out, you drop out of God’s program.

Scouting organizations outside of Mormonism have severely criticized Mormon Scouting as a “joke,” that “cheapens” the Scouting name. Having seen their complaints from the inside, yes, it’s absolutely true that Mormon Scouting features “merit badge marathons” where its youth go from room-to-room around the ward house, passing merit badge requirements at stations every five or ten minutes. When a Mormon kid gets his Eagle Scout Award, they actually pin the badge on his mother.

http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/01/13/the-merits-of-the-boy-scouts/

http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/02/15/34213.htm

http://www.boyacks.com/scouting/

http://reachupward.blogspot.com/2007/10/mediocre-lds-scouting.html

http://www.scouter.com/forums/viewThread.asp?threadID=292052&p=6

http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2009/02/scout-sunday/

Scouting’s Godfather, Lord Baden-Powell, apparently idled away his time while the mighty British Empire and all its men, weapons and resources were at "war" with Dutch South African farmers or the odd wild native villager, by writing children’s fables about "Red Indians," trailblazing, tracking, woodsmanship and frontier exploring. As he had begun his military career as a forward scout, in these grand retellings of his adventures and diagramming’s of his scouting skills, he inadvertently fantasized himself into building the secret boy’s club he never had as a child, because his nannies never let him play with the rougher, common boys. Which in hindsight, it appears, he may have had sexual desires for. But perhaps I’m too hard on the old chap. Scouting was a very Victorian sort of British fad and Baden-Powell was just the dashing, repressed homosexual example of the Glorious British Empire to booster it.

And of course, Baden-Powell was a Master Mason, so he had that going for him. Again, the whole Masonic brotherhood scenario is paralleled in the Boy Scout system of mastering skills and gaining knowledge. The same set of religious and philosophical beliefs espoused in Scouting are also common to the writings of the Founding Fathers, the Masons, and Mormon theology. Scouting is therefore just a perfect fit for the indoctrination of the young Mormon into LDS political, patriotic, and religious dogma.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtA-o9QPZA

http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/baden-powell.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtA-o9QPZA

http://www.glgarden.org/ocg/archive1/baden.html

http://scout.org/en/about_scouting/facts_figures/baden_powell

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/7393323/Lord-Baden-Powell-invited-to-meet-Hitler-MI5-files-show.html

Mormons have no active part in Masonry today, mostly because Masons don’t like the way they just move in and take over the lodge. But unlike Christians, Mormons look upon Masonic involvement in the nation as a good thing, not a demonic plot to enslave Christians. Masonry promotes healthy, God-fearing principles. Like the Scouts. In the Mormon world, patriotism, church, the Boy Scouts, holding big conferences, sitting in meetings and forming committees, it’s all a way of life. It’s all the same thing, nothing sinister, nothing all that secret, just organized. Faith must be organized—perhaps a holdover from the Methodist input to Mormonism. In that light, evangelical criticism of Glenn Beck is absolutely correct when his detractors claim he can’t keep his personal religion to himself. Beck can’t do that any more than they can. Not even quasi-Christian political action movements like the Boy Scouts and the late-great John Birch Society could tolerate Mormonism once Mormons actually started making significant operational decisions for these groups. Then the Mormons became a threat. Mormons just weren’t flying the right "Gospel Flag." And still aren’t. And never will.

Robert Slaydon, "Life in the Spirit," from an undated show in September 1988:

"Lots of religious ships are not flying the Gospel flag they’re flying its cousin’s flag. If a ship isn’t flying the right religious flag we’ve got every right to take our nuclear bombs and blown’em outa the water!

A man of God is a man of war! "

Written by lrwhitney

14/06/2011 at 00:07

Religion for Mormons and other Idiots

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