The Lord did not come with the armies of heaven, in power and great glory, nor send His messengers panoplied with aught else than the truth of heaven, to communicate to the meek, the lowly, the youth of humble origin, the sincere enquirer after the knowledge of God. But He did send His angel to this same obscure person, Joseph Smith Junior who afterwards became a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator, and informed him that he should not join any of the religious sects of the day, for they were all wrong; that they were following the precepts of men instead of the Lord Jesus; that He had a work for him to perform, inasmuch as he should prove faithful before Him. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 2:171
The resourceful reasonable researcher may ridicule the Mormon zealot for a readiness to receive the revelations of the reprobate Joseph Smith, but the resilience of the mind to evidence, and the addictiveness of the religious promise of eternal life, and the real fear of Hell for rejecting the true gospel, fuse to form a formidable defence to cocoon the credulous.
To be a Mormon is to believe some really crazy stuff ... You kind of have to up the ante ... The idea that Christianity is American I think is an amazing entitlement. Bill Maher, Religulous
Our response recognises the contrast of rapt victim and rapacious perpetrator: no-one is immune to the fatal attraction of magical thinking, cosmic promises and a Meaning of Life.
The rapscallion receivers of private visions may not foresee the devastation heaped on millions of lives, and what started as the plagiarised mischief of a gold-digger from a fogbound era of fairy tales, magic thinking, visions and religious revivals has resulted in the worldwide catastrophe of a viral evil.
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