I have no need for religion, I have a conscience.
Did a little reading on the origins of the Mormon cult and as with Scientology, I was on the floor howling with laughter. Read on and you will understand.As usual, I will start at the beginning only in this case I don’t mean Genesis but with the prophet Lehi who lived in Jerusalem around 600 BCE under the rule of King Zedekiah. Lehi was a Jew from the tribe of Manasseh which does allow some scientific testing of Mormon claims [as to their origin through Lehi] and it is not surprising that it is proven false. Anyway, I will go on with this comical tale. According to the Mormon tale, Lehi and his family [and a few others] left Jerusalem before the Babylonians sacked it. They walked [or drove] south on the Arabian peninsula till they reached a city called Nahom. Not being satisfied with Nahom [probably cause there were too many witnesses for what followed], they crossed the desert going east to the coast where they found a nice fertile place that they named Bountiful. Here I must mention Lehi’s son was named Nephi [note the similarity to Noah] and here like Noah was told to build an ark, Nephi was told by god to build a boat to take his family to the promised land which was the Americas. Guess Mormon’s ignore the fact that this was 600 BCE and assume they crossed the Indian and Pacific oceans in a boat much like they claim the Jaredites did after the tower of Babel fell, but the story must go on. Lehi had six sons when he landed in the Americas. Mormon’s can’t give a definitive answer to the geographic location he landed and some claim Chile while others claim everything from Cape Froward just north of the Straight of Magellan all the way to Southern California [which is geographically moronic….maybe that is why they named an angel Moroni]. Anyway, the story focuses on two of his sons. His eldest Laman and his fourth son Nephi [the carpenter/boatbuilder].
Laman rejected his fathers teaching which among other reasons led to him forming a tribe of Lamanites and his brother forming the Nephites. Now the story takes some major twists and a bunch of military skirmishes between the two groups and finally a young angel by the name of Moroni takes control of the Nephite military.
600 years or so after they came to the Americas, Jesus on his way to heaven stopped by and appeared to the Nephites but I guess the Lamanites either didn’t believe the Nephites story or didn’t hear Jesus’ words so they wiped out the Nephites and supposedly were given black skin as a curse for their wickedness [yep, seems the Mormon’s are a bunch of racists]. The Lamanites supposedly became the Native Americans. On a personal note, I can’t understand how any thinking human can belong to a “religion” that claims an entire ethnic group is evil. One interesting thing to note is that although the Nephites were wiped out the young military leader/ angel Moroni survived to add his own words [he was called the last prophet much like Mohammad in Islam is] to a pair of golden plates that were written in “reformed Egyptian” which is oddly enough neither known to linguists or Egyptologists. As luck would have it, the plates along with the seer stones to translate it were buried near what would later become the home of Joseph Smith who was called a later prophet than Moroni so I guess the Mormon’s forgot they already said Moroni was the last prophet.
Joseph Smith found the plates in 1823 in a hillside out in Palmyra New York. For whatever reason, most likely that he was carving them, he only made a once annual attempt to retrieve them. His attempt were unsuccessful until his fourth try in 1827. The plates were in a box covered by a cloth because Joseph Smith was told by the dead/undead angel Moroni not to show them to anyone until they were translated. According to the story, after they were translated they were returned to Moroni so nobody can examine them if they want.
Now that Smith had the plates and the seer stones translation could begin or so you would think. He decided to move from Palmyra New York to Harmony Pennsylvania where he began translation in late 1827. Translation was in two phases. In the first phase Smith transcribed some of the translation himself then dictated 116 pages to a Palmyra landowner named Martin Harris and that translation was lost. A year later phase two began when Oliver Cowdery became Smith’s full-time slave scribe. In June, Smith and Cowdery moved to Fayette New York but his wife Emma apparently was left in Harmony [it was her hometown].
Smith translated the plates, which were not used during the translation, by a pair of seer stones that he supposedly placed inside his hat [strangely a white one] and read the English translation off the stones. Witnesses during the latter part of his translation saw that he used one stone, not two as he claimed, and it was the same brown stone Smith had used during his treasure hunting in Palmyra [before he found the plates and stones]. Although Smith himself claimed to have been using “Urim and Thummim” to translate and that they were a large pair of eyeglasses with the stones in place of the lenses. He doesn’t claim to have worn them and nobody to the best of my knowledge ever said he did. Smith did say that his ability to translate with the stones naturally followed from his treasure hunting ability. Strangely, or not depending on your viewpoint, Smith’s translating technique was a very close duplicate of his treasure seeking use of seer stones.
Didn’t intend for this to be as long as it is but this story is really comical. Sad when you realize some people actually believe it. One thing I didn’t mention but I will now [promise it is short] is that one of the others that left Jerusalem with Lehi and his family was a man named Ishmael. Supposedly Ishmael died somewhere near Nahor. The only reason I mention Ishmael is I see in the story of Laman and Nephi a striking similarity to Issac and Ismael. Even a close similarity between the exodus myth and their leaving Jerusalem to “wander” till they set sail for the promised land. They even found a way to but Jesus in the story. Guess I can say there is one true verse in the bible and this story about the cult of Moron’s Moroni points it out clearly. Thought it would be interesting to note that Joseph Smith was tarred and feathered in 1832 and he was shot to death while in jail in 1844. And they say atheists are immoral. As it says in Ecclesiastes 1:9 there is nothing new under the sun.
[tweetmeme source=”noreligionblog” only_single=false https://noreligionblog.wordpress.com/2010/03/07/cult-watch-mormons%5D
Filed under: Atheism, Religious Absurdity | Tagged: Joseph Smith, Lamanite, Lehi, Moroni, Nephite |
noreligionblog.wordpress.com 
Thank you for the story. I had heard for some time that the story was a hoot, and you are correct. It is ridiculous when one looks at it; not just from a logical or scientific standpoint, but also from a historical standpoint. But then again, when you are cult leader, why worry about facts?
I was in a cult. The origins have some similarities. The main similarity is that the founder always has some sort of information that can only be understood by them and them alone. That makes them the one and only holder of the truth. My founder, Lloyd Arthur Meeker, claims he is incarnate of John the Beloved, the man who wrote Revelation. Supposedly, John wrote it in a cryptic manner so that only he would understand its meaning when he came back to Earth.
Please post this blog, Missing Deerfield, here for your viewers to see. Cults are a dangerous thing out to destroy peoples lives and their faith in God and Man. The more we can get the word out about cults, the better we can be about silencing them. Thank you. http://whathappenedtodeerfield.wordpress.com/
In Christopher Hitchens book, God is Not Great, he devotes a few pages to Joseph Smith’s personal history, and apparently when he was 21 (in 1826) a Bainbridge New York court convicted him of being a “disorderly person and an imposter.” Hitchens says at trial he admitted to defrauding persons who signed up for various gold-digging expeditions and by claiming “Necromantic powers.” One might guess such a man would go on to found a religion…… Less than four years later local newspapers reported he “discovered” the book of Mormon. When he got around to translating, the wife of the scribe who wrote it down (Smith was illiterate) STOLE the first 140 PAGES OF THE MANUSCRIPT and dared him to recreate it from the plates… Read Hitchen’s book. It’s a hoot!
That’s God is Not Great on AMAZON at http://www.amazon.com/God-Not-Great-Religion-Everything/dp/0446579807
DNA research hasn’t really established anything with respect to the Book of Mormon.
The guy who published the DNA attack on the Book of Mormon was assuming a popular folk belief of the Book of Mormon that presents the people chronicled therein composing a vast intercontinental empire covering large portions of North and South America with Lehi and company as the sole ancestors.
This view has been refuted and discredited within Mormon scholarly circles for over 50 years now and is currently only held by Mormons who don’t know any better.
About mid-point through the Book of Mormon in the book of Alma, there is a detailed account of various military campaigns, complete with city names, directions, major landmarks, and infantry march times between major cities.
By analyzing these accounts, Mormon scholars have concluded decisively that the Book of Mormon is describing a much smaller geographic area than the intercontinental folk beliefs asserted. Probably an area no larger than Guatemala, actually.
This is about as big as the Nephite and Lamanite civilizations ever got.
Based on this research, most informed Mormons have concluded that Lehi and company landed on a land already occupied by other indigenous peoples. They spread out, mixed in with the locals, and their genetic signature was quickly swallowed up in the dominant surrounding genetic population without a trace.
Everything could have happened exactly as the Book of Mormon says it did without leaving a single Hebrew DNA trace today.
It’s been slightly amusing watching the secular critics of Mormonism play around with this whole DNA line of attack. When it first came out in the 90s, they were ecstatic – thinking they had finally found the magic bullet to kill Mormonism once and for all.
Then when LDS scholars proceeded to utterly demolish the DNA attack without even breaking a sweat, there was a chorus of outraged howls and something of a fun little panic among atheist ex-Mormons.
Nowadays, they spend their time whining about how the continental model is the only truly authentic model of Mormon belief.
Sucks when you lose your straw-man, doesn’t it?
The Mormons changed their story from the so called continental model to what you are claiming in the late 90s after genetic marking disproved their story. Truth is even if it was a small population as you claim the marker would still be present, it isn’t going to disappear. According to DNA testing Native Americans do not have the haplotype found in Jews and lots of middle eastern people [and their descendants]. The Native Americans do have genetic markers that are pretty much the same as the people from the Altay mountrain region of central Asia. As toward your strawman crack, where did I say anything about a continental model prior to this reply? If I didn’t, that means your argument saying I used it is a strawman if you even know what a strawman is.
I believe what you are talking about here is the Cohen modal haplotype. But you are pretty-much butchering the explanation. This marker is carried by about half of those who claim descent from Aaron, Moses’ brother (the Hebrew priestly line), and only 2-3% of other Jews. Basically, it only applies to the tribe of Levi.
But the Book of Mormon never suggests that anyone from the tribe of Levi was in Lehi’s party. Lehi was from the tribe of Manasseh and Ishmael (whose family they brought along) was from the tribe of Ephraim. Both of these tribes were carried away from Israel captive by the Assyrians and did not contribute greatly to the current genetic mix of the Middle East in any traceable way. They do not factor into modern tracking of Israelite DNA at all.
So the Cohen modal haplotype, sometimes used to identify those of Jewish genetic lines, is worthless to the Book of Mormon question. And anyway, the Cohen modal haplotype is only held by half of even Jews who can demonstrate a direct descent from Aaron. Half!
Among other known Jews, it drops to 2-3%.
You can’t even prove that most modern Jews are Jews with this test of yours.
I am not referring to the Cohen modal haplotype. I am not too surprised that you brought it up though. I was referring specifically to markers on the Y-chromosome haplotype. In any event, this is not the topic of my article and has drifted quite far from it. If you comment further please try to discuss the article and not continue this topic.
The DNA argument was a key part of your critique of Mormonism in your original article. And now you’re asking me to drop the subject? You’re the one who wrote:
“Lehi was a Jew from the tribe of Manasseh which does allow some scientific testing of Mormon claims [as to their origin through Lehi] and it is not surprising that it is proven false.”
Why shut the conversation down now? Are you not confident in your arguments here? Because I’m quite ready to address the Y-chromosome issue with you too.
No it wasn’t a key part of my article. I do not intend this to become a discussion of genetics. Do not persist or you will find yourself banned from commenting. Consider this a warning. You can feel free to comment on the article.
The main body of the article simply restates the Mormon story and then says “this is so stupid.”
What’s to respond to? I mean, I disagree. But it’s not like there’s really anything to discuss beyond that.
Then what are you trying to say? That the story is scientifically and historically accurate or that a boat crossing of the Indian and Pacific oceans [Atlantic in the case of the Jaredites which was well earlier than 600 BCE] was feasible.
I believe a guy actually did an Atlantic crossing in a boat made out of reeds once – late 20th century.
Pacific Islanders navigated vast distances in their carved out boats.
Look, if you want to claim that the idea of God directing a guy how to build a boat and then directing it by supernatural means is ridiculous, well, that’s understandable considering you don’t believe in the concept of God.
But if you do believe in God, then what’s so tough about him instructing a person on how to build a boat capable of crossing the Indian and Pacific oceans? Get a good enough boat and a competent navigator and you CAN do it.
So, if your premise is that the idea of God intervening with people is stupid, well I guess that’s your prerogative, and we don’t have anything else to discuss.
Late 20th century? Mormons teach the Lehi crossing was 600 BCE. That is 2600 years before your example. Historically there were no boats even close to crossing an ocean until the vikings appeared in the 10th century. Are you claiming they were really Jews from the tribe of Manasseh?
If you read carefully, you would have noted that the guy did it in a boat made out of REEDS. Small boat. He tried to simulate primitive conditions.
I think he was testing the hypothesis that Egyptian mariners may have made contact with the New World earlier than we thought. Don’t have further details on the incident handy though.
Yes….2600 years after the Lehi myth. Or do you intend to show evidence that the vikings were not the first to have boats worthy of an ocean crossing?
BTW, http://www.wingsworldquest.org/?q=node/208
Note that they did NOT make it across the ocean.
Note that the article also stated it was possible to cross the ocean that way.
My aim here was not to provide proof of pre-Viking trans-oceanic travel. Merely to suggest it was not impossible. If you add in divine guidance, which the Book of Mormon does, a journey across an ocean is quite possible.
Of course, you don’t believe in that divine intervention stuff. But IF it was truly a factor, the story works fine.
As well as it is possible to fall off the empire state building and live. Just as that hasn’t happened, neither has the Atlantic been crossed in a boat made of reeds. If you want to deny it, that is your problem.
Well, that’s basically true.
Religions are called faiths for a reason. It is because they deal with stuff that is not subject to being verified by empirical means.
I’m cool with you not being on board with that. I really am.
I just wish people would stop calling us names for following a story that internally makes sense just fine on its own terms.
If you believe in God, the Book of Mormon story works just fine. If you don’t believe in God, it’s all going to be far-fetched.
I get that.
Yes, faith not reason, logic nor science. As far as names go, if you don’t like being called names because your cult beliefs are so outlandish, leave the cult. Simple choice really.
Seth, Mormonism is a cult and a very dangerous one.. And I speak from experience. My very intelligent daughter married a mormon man who is also very intelligent (enough so that her is a ER Surgical Doc). She converted and took her children from a previous marriage with her. Both girls are a mess, but that is another story. My point here is that when they saw the actual facsimile from the book of abraham as translated by Joseph Smith, they swore that some one had corrupted the real one. I tried to explain that it was JS who corrupted the original but to no avail. Mormons are blind, deaf and immuned to the truth.
Yeah?
I know some messed up atheists too.
What’s your point?
What is this non-sequitur in reference to? Never mind I see it was a reply to Interested. Guess you didn’t see how she said the guy was a Mormon.
You’re not being very clear. My stuff about Moroni was in response to your remarks noreligion. All Interested did was remark that she knows messed up Mormons (like this proves anything important here) and that a couple Mormons she knows had a confused argument about the Abraham facsimiles (as if I’m supposed to care that a couple Mormons were confused on the subject).
So I’m not sure what you are talking about here.
Speaking of Moroni, you state:
“he was called the last prophet much like Mohammad in Islam is”
Actually, no. He is not at all consider the “last prophet” in the same way Muslims claim.
There is no such LDS teaching. A key selling point of Mormonism is actually that prophets should be available to us today. Never was it ever asserted that Moroni would be the last of them.
i’d like to know what your source is for this statement, or if you just made it up.
Considering you are a member of the LDS I would like to know if you have read anything about Moroni? Here you can read Nephi was the last Nephite prophet in NA and in many other places you can read he was called the last prophet.
noreligion,
Yes, Moroni is commonly considered the last Nephite prophet (not Nephi – I assume that was a typo on your part).
But that’s not what you said.
What you said was that he was the last prophet PERIOD. That he was considered the same way Muslims view Muhammad.
Islam takes the theological position that Muhammad was the last prophet and there will be no more prophets needed. Mormonism does not take this position. Nowhere in our scriptures does it say that Moroni was supposed to be the last prophet of them all. The Wikipedia article you linked to doesn’t say this. So I’m wondering where you came up with it.
I think your key part was to show how ridiculous the cult is…Bravo! you did it in style.
Thanks 🙂
Very well then.
What was that bit about Oliver Cowderey being Joseph Smith’s slave?
Do you think Joseph and Emma had him locked in the basement or something?
The comments seem to be out of order.
Now your just being ridiculous. I suppose you were using seer stones to see through the lines and read slave but they filtered out the word scribe afterwards. Why is it that members of the Moron cult have no humor?
You meant it as a joke?
Sorry, I couldn’t tell.
Why is that not surprising?
And, Nephi’s boat was not made of reeds incidentally. It was a much larger vessel capable of carrying many people and provisions, and built according to a design he admitted to having never seen before. He said god showed him how to build it.
If you accept these facts, a journey across both Indian and Pacific oceans is not far-fetched.
I know you do not accept these foundational facts. You’re an atheist.
But IF you accept those facts, the actual voyage is not a problem.
So they are facts? You have a really warped definition of what a fact is. That sure does explain some of the more idiotic Morons, I mean Mormons.
By the way, what do you mean when you use the word “cult?”
you ever look it up in a dictionary? You know what they are? Big books with lots of words in them.
I didn’t ask what the dictionary meant.
I asked what you meant.
Sorry, the comments appear to be out of order again.
And I said look it up in the dictionary. Do you have a problem with that answer?
According to Merriam-Webster, the word “cult” has FIVE different meanings:
1 : formal religious veneration : worship
2 : a system of religious beliefs and ritual; also : its body of adherents
3 : a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also : its body of adherents
4 : a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator
5 a : great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (as a film or book); especially : such devotion regarded as a literary or intellectual fad b : the object of such devotion c : a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion
So…
Which one are YOU talking about?
Firstly, Merriam-Webster is not the only dictionary available. But if I was forced to answer based only on the definitions they give it would be a mix of 3 and 5a. Does that meet with your approval?
Sort of.
Let’s take #3:
3 : a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also : its body of adherents
I imagine you would use the word “spurious” since “unorthodox” only really applies to religious people. For instance, the Catholic Church might consider us a cult because our beliefs are unorthodox vis a vis the established religious orthodoxy they have set up for Christian belief. Jesus himself would have been the leader of a cult by the standards of the Jewish establishment under this definition.
But use of the word unorthodox doesn’t really work for an atheist. So I guess we’ll stick with “spurious.”
As for #5a – this is true.
But also quite unobjectionable. It’s not really a negative definition at all. So we’re highly devoted to a person or object.
And this is bad, why?
So we’ve gone through Merriam-Webster and the definitions seem to be pretty mild and unobjectionable. But you seem to have a highly negative meaning behind the word “cult.”
Perhaps you are misusing the word and it doesn’t really say what you want it to say?
Well, let’s try another dictionary first. Like Dictionary.com:
1. a particular system of religious worship, esp. with reference to its rites and ceremonies.
2. an instance of great veneration of a person, ideal, or thing, esp. as manifested by a body of admirers: the physical fitness cult.
3. the object of such devotion.
4. a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc.
5. Sociology. a group having a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols.
6. a religion or sect considered to be false, unorthodox, or extremist, with members often living outside of conventional society under the direction of a charismatic leader.
7. the members of such a religion or sect.
8. any system for treating human sickness that originated by a person usually claiming to have sole insight into the nature of disease, and that employs methods regarded as unorthodox or unscientific.
Well, #1 and #2 seem to apply, but we already dealt with this with Webster. Likewise with #4. #5 doesn’t really add anything to the discussion nor does #7, and #8 doesn’t apply.
Which leaves us with #6, which seems to be giving the negative sort of vibe you were looking for.
But it doesn’t really fit Mormons in some important ways.
First, our leaders aren’t “charismatic.” Joseph Smith was. Brigham Young arguably was. But they lived almost 200 years ago. Our current leadership isn’t charismatic at all. If you don’t believe me, just watch a bit of our semi-annual General Conference (where Mormon leaders address the Church membership).
Second, we don’t live outside conventional society, but are highly integrated into it. We hold normal jobs, community leadership positions, our kids go to public school, we watch TV and go to movies, we waste time on the Internet. All sorts of “social” kind of stuff. We just aren’t really that isolated.
Extremist?
Maybe that’s what you’re shooting for. You might argue this point. But it really is in the eye of the beholder, and happens to be one of those words easily subjected to the prejudices of the person using it.
If you’ve got a different dictionary definition, I’m willing to hear it. But the ones I’ve found so far just don’t seem to convey the meaning you’ve been putting behind the word “cult.” You seem to have something much more negative in mind than what the dictionary definitions are providing.
Ok. I bow to your obvious psychic ability and extreme arrogance in telling me what I mean. That arrogance is what got Joseph Smith shot in the ass. Try as much as you like to say that cult is neither bad nor applicable to the Morons, I mean Mormons.
Look, I’m just going off what you wrote.
Are you saying that you don’t think “cult” is a negative word, or that belonging to one is a negative thing? If that’s your position, I apologize for misreading you.
Did you forget to take your Eskalith today? Where the hell did I say I don’t think a cult is a negative thing. I said you seem to be trying pretty damn hard to show they aren’t. Now either show me where I said they are not negative or apologize for insinuating I did. If neither is forthcoming consider that last reply to be your last here.
“Where the hell did I say I don’t think a cult is a negative thing.”
You didn’t say anything to that effect that I recall. Neither did I ever suggest that you thought cults were positive. In fact, I was under the assumption that you consider cults to be negative.
What I said was that the dictionary definitions weren’t particularly negative, and that’s the source you told me to go to when I asked what you mean by the word. So I simply assumed you must have some additional meaning in mind – beyond the dictionary definition – that I wasn’t aware of.
I’m just asking for clarification here.
If you want to look at the Merriam-Webster and dictionary.com definitions as the only definition, then you can but you would be as wrong as you are as when you call Lehi’s three day tour [had to get a Gilligan’s Island plug in] a fact. Now, what was the arrogance that you know what I believe better than I do? That is 1. STUPID and 2. called building a strawman.
You’re the one who told me to go to the dictionary. So I did.
And I didn’t just go to one – I went to two of them.
Are you saying you would prefer to use a different definition than Webster’s?
If so, what is it?
yes I did tell you to go to a dictionary. you are the one that decided to pick those two. Now I really must insist you address what I am bringing up for the third time. Why were you arrogant enough to think that you know my meaning better than I do? Is that a common practice of Morons, I mean Mormons?
I don’t think I know your meaning better than you do.
I have been repeatedly asking you to explain what you mean. I wasn’t asking rhetorically. I really don’t know exactly what YOU mean by the word “cult.” Please let me know what you mean.
You didn’t say “Which leaves us with #6, which seems to be giving the negative sort of vibe you were looking for.”
or
“you are misusing the word and it doesn’t really say what you want it to say?”
Both are nothing more than arrogance on your part.
In both of those instances I asked you if that was an incorrect statement of your thoughts on the matter.
I was just throwing out possibilities because you were refusing to say what you meant by the word.
What do you mean by the word “cult?”
Do you even have an opinion about it?
You asked me if they were incorrect statements? No you told me I was using the wrong word, don’t make yourself look really dumb by hiding behind a question mark. And you claimed that based on the definitions YOU provided that none were as negative as I wanted.
For the last time Seth that is arrogance and I am not going to play merry go round with a cult member.
You don’t want to have a discussion Seth. Admit it, your a raving lunatic and now your mad because I revealed how idiotic your cult is. Your last reply is proof that you are not after discussion so it has been deleted and you have been banned.
Thanks! I like this site. The content keeped me reading for a while. This is interesting stuff. I will be checking for new posts daily.