So Just Who Do These Mormons Think They Are?

And why should anyone pay attention to them?

In the Book of Mormon, 1 and 2 Nephi, we read of the highly stressful relationship of the two oldest sons of Lehi with their brother Nephi. This young whippersnapper, though he is the the fourth son, keeps taking over the leadership. On the trek back to Jerusalem to obtain the brass plates from Laban, Nephi refuses to allow them to return to their father empty-handed. Even a good beating from them can't make him see the clear sense of the thing.

When his bow breaks he makes a new one, enabling him to continue to hunt and bring fresh meat to the cooking fires. Apparently he thinks they are all dependent on him. Then he gets the crazy idea that he can build a ship. Well, actually he does build or at least supervises the building of the ship. So he wants us to load our wives and children and our aged parents on board this thing and set out on the boundless ocean. What if we get caught in a storm far from land? Another beating ... he deserves it.

Laman and Lemuel seem to be constantly angry. The clear supremacy of their position as the older sons is being threatened, ignored. Why should they bow to the authority of their younger brother? Just who does he think he is?

Now go even further back in time to Joseph the son of Jacob. He had ten older brothers. Joseph is the son of Rachel, the greatly-loved wife, and their father keeps playing favorites. Then we are told of a series of dreams,(Gen. 37:2-11), in which Joseph is shown to take precedence over his older siblings.

They react about like Laman and Lemuel would many centuries later. Not daring to kill the smart-alecky little brother outright, they try to rid themselves of him by selling him to slave traders bound for Egypt. Eventually he is proven right of course, and saves them all from famine.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana

We  see the pattern set by Joseph and his older brothers (and indeed by Cain, the elder brother, and Abel, the favored son) and followed by Laman, Lemuel and Nephi repeating itself in the Christian world today.

In the early decades of the 19th Century, a young boy with the everyday name of Joseph Smith had the temerity to proclaim a new version of the Gospel of Christ.

What?? cried the priests of the old traditions. How dare he? How dare he claim that he knows something of God that we don't know? Haven't we been to seminaries? Don't all those letters after our names mean anything to him? We've studied all the commentaries while he can barely read English. His handwriting is so poor that he must have someone else write down what he dictates. And he talks about translating ancient documents!

Now he claims to have seen God, or rather Gods. God the Father and God the Son; separate beings, he says, when we have proclaimed for centuries that "they" are one, that they have no physical, visible bodies. Joseph Smith hasn't even been to church enough to have learned the Nicene Creed!

Then this lunatic had the nerve to try to tell us what to eat, and how to care for our bodies: eat fresh fruits and vegetables, he said, cut back on the meat. No coffee, tea, alcohol or tobacco, either. (D&C: 89) How does he think men can get together and talk things out without a little nip? Know what I mean?

He raved about space-time: Doctrine and Covenants 130:4–5.

Is not the reckoning of God’s time, angel’s time, prophet’s time, and man’s time, according to the planet on which they reside? I answer, yes.

He talked about the conservation of matter/energy:

The pure principles of element are principles which can never be destroyed; they may be organized and re-organized, but never destroyed. They had no beginning and can have no end. (TPJS 350–52)

O the impertinence of it all!

This farm kid, who'd never been to university, thought he knew things that ...well, you see the problem.

Today there is a great deal of talk about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and their "strange"  "new" ideas. Of course these are not new ideas at all. They only seem new to those who have not familiarized themselves with the very old ideas.

One of our number seems headed in the direction of the White House, and our "older brothers" in Christianity are in panic mode, kicking and screaming as in days long gone by.

Just who do these Mormons think they are? And why should anyone pay attention to them?

We Give Thanks for Our Freedoms: Spirit, Body and Mind

 

Abraham Lincoln: Proclamation

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well as the iron and coal as of our precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.

As the 18th century ended and the 19th began, the spirit of liberty was strong in the land. The Revolution was over; men were freed from the tyranny of an unjust government.

But stronger than the Redcoats, many of the old ideas still kept us captive.

Early in the 19th century, the Lord sent forth three men who turned the world upside down, shook it open, and set the captives free.

The first of these, Joseph Smith Jr., was born December 23, 1805.  Three years and two months later, on February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day.

 Man was never to view himself or his God in the same way again.

Joseph Smith and Abraham Lincoln were born in frontier circumstances. Each attended school only briefly, and each was enormously self-educated. Darwin came from a prosperous family and had a university education. No one who knew any of them or their families could have guessed their importance to the world.

Each produced a seminal document:

Joseph Smith Jr.: the Book of Mormon

Because of this "unlettered farm boy" and the message he brought, man (in the anthropological sense; includes both male and female) was freed from the centuries-old dogma of the Triune God.  When we pray, we are not addressing a formless blob or a concentration of energy; we are speaking to the father of our spirits, our Heavenly Father.

For the first time, we no longer had to ask Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? No longer did we fear that if we made the slightest misstep, forgot the smallest observance, we would burn in the fires of hell forever. No longer need we fear a frowning, vengeful God. Instead we kneel to a loving, gracious Father who loves us and asks only that we love him.

Abraham Lincoln: the Emancipation Proclamation

Another "unlettered farm boy" who saved the Union and made it clear once and for all that man must never be physically enslaved by another man. The soul of this great man is further revealed in his Gettysburg Address. His work laid the groundwork for freedom everywhere; a battle that is still being fought as I write this.

Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species

Though I doubt that he would have thought of himself in this way, Darwin was the product and refiner of the Protestant Reformation. For centuries, illiteracy, the lack of Bibles translated into the vernacular languages, no printing press and no cheap paper conspired to keep men from reading Holy Writ for themselves. All they knew was what the local priest told them, and sometimes he was as ignorant as his flock. So everyone "knew" the Bible said the world and every creature in it was created in six days, fixed in their species forever.

Darwin was the quintessential naturalist; his brilliant seeking mind soaked up information and put it together like a huge jigsaw puzzle. He had the idea of evolution, but knew it could not fit into the 6,000 years alloted for creation. When he boarded the Beagle, his father gave him a going-away present. It was Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, and the five-year voyage of the Beagle became an unequalled adventure of the human mind.

The closing paragraph of The Origin of Species reads:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

These men perceived the Laws of Nature to be the Laws of God, their Creator and ours. In the early days of the 21st Century, let us look back with gratitude to the early days of the 19th, and to our several gifts of freedom. From Joseph Smith, freedom from the wrath of a whimsical and vengeful God; from Abraham Lincoln, freedom from the Simon LeGrees of the world; and from Charles Darwin, freedom from the tyrany of a young earth