... none doeth good no not one they have turned asside [sic] from the gospel and keep not [my] commandments they draw near to me with their lips while their hearts are far from me and mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth to visit them
Jumping Jack-Flash Jesus lets rip eighteen hundred years of explosive frustration. On a cold November day of 1835 Joseph spins a fireside version of the First Vision to a house visitor Robert Matthias, a religious conman masquerading as alias Joshua the Jewish minister. And later that day Joseph lays the hotly hatched version of the Vision to a scribe: two unknown personages in a Pillar of light, Joseph’s sins are immediately forgiven, but no mention of religious revivals or corrupt Christian sects ... ‘And I saw many angels in this vision’.
From 1835 to the first published account of the First Vision of 1842 the two unknown personages mutate monstrously into the Godfather and the Boy Wonder Lard Jesus with their own lighting system and plans for a new fascist structure, and how best to extract a fast buck of 10% protection money on penalty of a fear of Hell.
The gullibility of early Mormons about the genesis of their new-world religion illuminates what was understood by the First Vision. The second polygamous prophet Brigham Young — him of the handcart scandal — testified as late as February 1855:
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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