what romney believes. history of mormanism.

if romney does not have the critical thinking ability to differientiate between a con job and reality how can we trust him to make the best decisions in our interests as out leader?




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Joseph Smith was born in 1805 in Sharon, Vermont to a poor family. He was the fourth child of nine. By the time Joseph was 10, the family had moved five times, from Vermont to New Hampshire and back, always struggling and just getting by. When an untimely frost wiped out their crops in 1815, they filled their wagon and trundled again to Palmyra, on the banks of the Erie Canal in upstate New York, a boomtown of 4,000, twice the size of the place they left. The Smiths cleared land for farming and built a log cabin. But the work was hard and the soil unreliable, and their debts piled up.

In Smith’s century, life and the bearing of life was precarious. The infant mortality rate hung at around 20 percent, and one in 200 births ended with the death of the mother. Women prayed and confessed when it was time for their confinement. Joseph and Emma Smith’s first three children died shortly after birth. At the same time there was a great feeling of optimism and movement in the country — territory to be conquered, fiefdoms to be made, and religious experience to be had. The first three decades of the century became known as “the Second Great Awakening.” In the states and the territories, Americans seemed to feel the need to re-interpret scripture for the new country ever expanding westward. Revivalist fever spread from Kentucky to New England to New York. Skillful preachers put on shows that induced ecstatic revelations, or at least alleviated the boredom and assuaged the terrors of country life. Tent shows were religion, but they were also theater and they were places to socialize.

In Smith’s boyhood, the northeast was a magnet for “the flotsam of the godly,” in the phrase of his biographer Fawn McKay Brodie. The place attracted preachers who were inventing a distinctly American spirituality that emphasized freedom of will over the fatalism of the Calvinists. “To a certain extent the movement was also anti-hierarchical,” says historian Leo Braudy. “But like every anti-authoritarian Christian movement from the Reformation onward, it quickly developed its own hierarchy.”

Near the Smith home in Palmyra, you had the Shakers, who had emigrated from England in 1774, as well as two opposing communes, one headed by free-love advocate Isaac Bullard, the other by Jemima Wilkinson, the “Universal Friend,” who preached sexual abstinence. Faith healers and evangelists constantly passed through, preaching in open-air tents. There was much speaking in tongues. Smith’s own parents both experienced visions, as did his uncle and grandfather. Everyone was talking to God.

In 1823, Smith later reported, he was first visited by the angel Moroni, who revealed to him the existence of ancient golden plates, buried two miles from the Smith home, on which the true story of the gospel was written. Years later Smith, having “purified” himself, took possession of the plates. He kept them covered and advised friends and family that looking at them would mean instant death. Peering into a stovepipe hat and using a seer stone, Smith dictated what would become the Book of Mormon to different scribes. The plates told the story of mankind in a language called “reformed Egyptian.” Among the surprises: in 600 B.C., after being warned by God to flee Jerusalem, a Hebrew prophet named Lehi and his family built a ship and sailed to America.

The hero of the tale is Lehi’s son Nephi. Like Smith, Nephi has five brothers, two of whom (Laman and Lemuel) are bloodthirsty and evil, which causes God to curse them with dark skin. They and their descendants (the Lamanites) will henceforth be “a filthy and a loathsome people.” In America, the descendants of Nephi and Laman struggle for power until finally, in 421 A.D., the Lamanites all but wipe out the “white and delightsome” Nephites. The sole survivor, Moroni, buries the records of his civilization in the hill Cumorah, to be found 1,400 years later by Joseph Smith.

In the early 1820s, Joseph and his father made their living as diviners; Joseph’s tool, even before he found the golden plates, was a seer stone — an opaque white rock a neighbor had found in a well that could reveal the whereabouts of buried treasures. For every neighbor who saw him as a con artist, there were five who found his company so magnetic that they didn’t care when he could not, finally, produce any treasure.

In 1830 Smith published The Book of Mormon: An Account Written by the Hand of Mormon upon Plates Taken from the Plates of Nephi. He gathered a group of believers and shared God’s word, continuing to receive revelations. As time went on, and his congregation grew, God spoke more and more specifically to the people in Smith’s flock, singling them out by name. For instance, when Oliver Cowdery, an early follower of Smith, wanted to receive his own revelations, God ordered him to stop trying: “Behold, I say unto thee, Oliver […] no one shall be appointed to receive commandments and revelation in this Church, excepting my servant Joseph Smith.”

In early 1831 Smith decided to move the bulk of his small, but growing, church from upstate New York to Kirtland, Ohio, the first stop for the saints on a trek fitfully westward to Utah that would take 16 years, though Smith would ride with them only halfway. Smith’s followers were understandably reluctant to leave their farms and homesteads in New York. He received a revelation, as he often did when people weren’t doing what he wanted, and in this one God promised the saints that in Ohio they would find “a land flowing with milk and honey upon which there shall be no curse when the Lord cometh.”

At the same time Smith ordered another group of saints to re-locate in Missouri, and they settled for a while in Independence, in Jackson County. The moves both isolated the saints and increased their religious ardor. In three weeks the Ohio Mormons baptized 127 new saints, and by the spring they numbered 1000.

They arrived in Kirtland, Ohio during a time when the government was selling public land cheap and the bank system was expanding. America has a long tradition of melding religion and money: “In God We Trust.” Mormonism is unique though; both its original prophet and its God think, at times, like investment bankers. Smith set up his own bank and proceeded to buy land and lend money, bolstered by revelations along the way. The Ohio saints bought much on credit — land and building materials from New York, and they built a temple. But they were out of cash by the time the bills came due. Owing more than $25,000, the prophet was thrown in jail and then released — several times. When he learned he would again be arrested, in January 1838, he fled Kirtland for a Mormon annex that had been established in upper Missouri. That community was called Far West.

Far West was the Mormon’s second attempt to find a home in Missouri. The first had failed rather spectacularly, when the Mormons were driven out of Jackson County in 1833. It had started out well enough; Smith was delighted with the country, with its rich soil and “beautiful rolling prairies […] the plums and grapes and persimmons and the flowers.” He consecrated the site for the new temple that he would build in the “splendid city of Zion.”

The saints boasted openly of their divine claim to the land. They had a way of describing themselves to their neighbors as the chosen people, a move that the un-chosen often find less than endearing. In Independence, the saints published some of the prophet’s recent revelations, such as:


If ye are faithful ye shall assemble yourselves together to rejoice upon the land in Missouri, which is the land of your inheritance, which is now the land of your enemies.

This did not sit well with the settlers already living in Jackson County. Surprised to learn that the newcomers considered them intruders — and enemies — they were further disturbed as new emigrants arrived every day, most of them poor. They distrusted the new “fanatics” who claimed direct access to the most high God. In the spring of 1832 came the first stoning of Mormon houses at night, soon followed by tar-and-featherings and house burnings. In turn, the Mormons formed a militia. When Lilburn Boggs, the already hostile Lieutenant Governor, heard that the Mormons were arming, he called it insurrection. “The Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public good,” he said. “Their outrages are beyond all description.” The state began expropriating Mormon property, and that was the end of the New Zion.
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/thread.php?s=&action=newthread&forumid=27

 

I'm STILL voting ABO in November. I don't fucking care if he believes in Santa Clause.

 

luke . . . .we know, you've told us hundreds of times..

 

What is strange is that Romney actually does not really talk all that much about his faith, mainly he emphasizes his business expertise.

In contrast Obama consistently invokes the Almighty at every public occasion as if he is compensating for something. Of course Obama also heavily credits his pastor, a religious father figure on becoming the man he is.

And yet you will unhesitatingly vote for Obama even if everything he does, his actions and words are contrary to the values that you espouse.

Really makes you wonder who is in the cult here, doesn't it?

 

the difference to me is mormanism is a young religion. we can document it from its first days. romney has to have read the evidence and yet he still can not bring himself to accept the fact that it is a con job.
it speaks to his critical thinking ability.

 

So you think Obama's belief in Christianity/Islam is any better? wtf...

 

Mormonism.............when Christianity is just not crazy enough.

 

Not so free "thinker" is willing to give his own personal messiah a pass on religion. Go figure.

 

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"- from some guy I know you have never heard of.

 

I really don't care too much about his Mormon roots, not nearly as much as his handlers roots. Rove, Cheney, and the Bush mob.

Hey RCG, I saw that PT says he's a Health Care Professional. I asked if he was a nurse or other professional. Did you happen to see an answer?