The fact that Justice Neely said Joseph Smith was a "Glass looker" fits very well with the published version of the legal proceedings. Hugh Nibley and other Mormon apologists became strangely silent after these documents were discovered.
Posted on 06/30/2007 11:32:18 AM PDT by Calpernia
GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, courting Iowa conservatives, found himself answering questions Saturday about the role his Mormon faith would play should he win the race.
Romney told one questioner "we have exactly the same values" and said there is no religious litmus test for candidates. The former Massachusetts governor dismissed suggestions of a conflict between his religion and his ability to govern. He also hastened to offer assurances of his faith.
"The Bible for me is the word of God," Romney said. "I also believe that Jesus Christ is my savior."
The questions arose as Romney prepared to join five other Republican candidates at a forum sponsored by two of the most important forces in Iowa Republican politics _ the Iowa Christian Alliance and Iowans for Tax Relief.
Many conservative Christians are quietly nervous about Romney's religion and the issue surfaced as Romney opened his campaigning at a forum in Pella, about 40 miles south of Des Moines.
Mary Van Steenis asked Romney how he would ponder important decisions as president and which source of inspiration he would seek.
"Where would the Bible be in that process?" she asked. "Would it be above the Book of Mormon or would it be beneath it?"
"I don't know that there's any conflict at all between the values of great faiths like mine, like yours, like other faiths, like Jews who don't believe in the New Testament," Romney said.
"People of faith have different doctrines and different beliefs on various topics of a theological nature. But in terms of what it is we are going to believe and also based on our values for our country, I think we come from the same place," Romney said.
The answer did not satisfy Van Steenis.
"I asked if you had to look to one source what would it be? He didn't really respond to that," she told reporters after the event. "This is serious to me."
Romney said he thinks that as people "look at me and my values and look at my family and myself they'll recognize that we have exactly the same values. This is a nation where people come from different faiths, different doctrines and different churches."
Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom quickly issued a statement to reporters that said Romney took the oath of office as governor on his family Bible.
"He swore to follow the constitution and uphold the laws of the land," said Fehrnstrom. "That would continue to be his highest duty as president."
Some of Romney's critics says he has shifted his views on positions such as abortion and gay rights as he moves from governor to presidential contender.
Romney sought to assure activists of his hard-line views. He said the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in 1973 should be overturned and states should be allowed to decide the issue.
He also said he fought an overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature in Boston by pushing for the death sentence during his time in office.
Romney and his rivals _ minus top tier candidates Rudy Giuliani and John McCain _ were scheduled to appear at the forum. Joining Romney were Tommy Thompson, Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo and Jim Gilmore.
LOL, led by a McCain supporter and someone who once worked for George Pataki. Hey Ed, how'd that 'forum' turn out?!? According to eyewitness reports around 600 attended the meeting.
However, the Republican Presidential candidate Ed banned, and I mean banned, from attending held a forum in the same venue immediately following. Over a 1000 people showed up at that meeting to listen to one candidate who gave an excellent speech if the live bloggers reported the numbers and comments correctly. That's more than 600, Ed. And he only had a week to set up his meeting, where as you had been planning your little shindig for awhile, flipping around which 'accepted' candidates were going to appear. That must suck Ed....
Don't worry Ed, it's just 'spammers'....
So, instead of attacking the LDS church, and being blind in your assessment; why not do an elementary analysis on it?
The bible commands each of us to stock away sufficient food to last a year. To the best of my knowledge, the LDS church is the only one that does this; and encourages each of their members to have a food storage plan.
The LDS church has steadfastly come out and supported the Boy Scouts. The LDS church currently supports upwards of 30,000 troops within the USA; without regard to a child’s religion. Where are the rest of the Christians hiding? How many troops does your church support?
The LDS church stated quite openly to the Boy Scouts that if they relented on allowing Gay members into the Boy Scout program; the LDS church would no longer support or contribute to the Boy Scouts, and would use these funds to create it’s own scouting program. Where are the other Christian churches?
The LDS church has stated that homosexuality is a perversion of God’s plan. This is not condoned, or tolerated within the church. The LDS has the fortitude to stand by it’s moral convictions. I think God was pretty clear on this point. How about YOUR church? Does your church allow, tolerate or make excuses for amoral behavior?
The LDS church was first on the scene with aide for Hurricane Katrina; and every other disaster to hit the country. Why? Because the LDS church maintains a Bishops Storehouse in every major metropolitan area; to provide food for the needy, and aide in time of disaster. This is a commandment - where’s your Church’s storehouse?
Finally, aide when given, is given unconditionally. No payment is expected, nor accepted. Aide is given without regard to race, religion, sex, or nationality. Anyone can go to a food distribution center and buy processed food, wheat, canned goods for home storage. During a disaster, anyone can ask for food or aide.
I believe that Matthew 7:16 states it quite plainly, “Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?”.
I didn't say that they were, although in fact the Book of Mormon provides a very different version of history from what any Protestant or Catholic Christian would teach. What I said was that Romney ducked the question and papered over the differences.
If, for instance, if an Evangelical Protestant asked me as a Catholic whether I gave the ultimate authority to the Bible or the Magisterium of the Church, I would reply that the two are mutually supportive. Some things that the Magisterium teaches are not specifically in the Bible, such as the Assumption, but they do not directly contradict it. A Protestant might well disagree with that, but at least it would be an honest answer from the Catholic perspective. I don't think Romney's answer was really honest, because he was trying to duck the question.
Huh? What executive orders in place of the Pope? I have no idea what you are talking about.
Disregard the previous post - I missed your link.
As of March 7, 2007 (~2 months ago) Pres GW Bush gave a sovereign of a foreign nation Observer status at the UN. As the Vatican is in fact a nation unto itself - there is a rationale for this action.
However, we now have one set of rules for Catholics, but no similar statute for Buddhist, Wiccians, Baptists, Lutherans, Evangelist, Angelican, Seventh Day Adventists or any other faith.
Why is the Pope entitled to a position that no one else on the planet can aspire too? If your Pope can have this, why can’t the LDS Prophet have a similar position? And if we are passing out Observer seats to the UN to leaders of religons - where do we stop?
The LDS faith does NOT dictate politics from the pulpit - I have no idea what Romney has in mind. I do wonder what was going through President GW Bush’s mind when he signed this executive order; as all it can do is cause problems. This, along with other decisions he has made of late appear to be the tactics of a Lame Duck precidency. His actions on illegal immigration alone will likely sink the Republican Party. President Bush apparently doesn’t care that he is single handedly giving the election away to the Democrats.
Does the Vatican contribute to the UN in any way? If not, why should they have a seat?
I was responding to the article rather than your comment on it.
The Vatican is a secular state as well as the headquarters of the Catholic Church. I believe that diplomatic recognition of the Vatican is usually considered to involve a state-to-state relationship. It doesn't really involve a judgment as to the truth of Catholicism. Numerous Muslim nations have relations with the Vatican, for instance.
On a related matter, it has been a long time since the American government has stood up for Christians overseas. They pretty well ignore persecution of Christians around the world, and it doesn't seem to matter who is president. Bush is certainly better than clinton in that regard, by nature and by instinct. He is pro-life where clinton was pro-abortion and perversion. Yet it can't be said that Bush has done anything more than any of his predecessors to protect the rights of Christians in China, say, or in Sudan.
As a Catholic, I do have problems with the Mormon religion, but I don't think it would be impossible for a Mormon to make a decent president. But as I've said, I also have problems with Mitt Romney. I think he's a flip flopper, that he's evasive, and that he cannot be trusted on some of the important issues.
Does the LDS do great things, yes! Does the LDS have some of the best family oriented commercials on TV, yes. Does the LDS come from God, NO! Look at the record, and go find out how JS was an absolute charlatan! It is so obvious you really have to want to be spiritually blind to not see the farce. I hope you can at the very least come to realize what I'm telling you is not because I want to prove a point or be "right," it's all about just moving you toward facts to be able to try to get you to examine what you believe.
I hope you can at least verify this: Here
http://www.xmission.com/~country/reason/ny_js.htm
The Mormon writer Francis W. Kirkham just could not allow himself to believe that the 1826 court record was authentic. He, in fact, felt that if the transcript were authentic it would disprove Mormonism:
“A careful study of all facts regarding this alleged confession of Joseph Smith in a court of law that he had used a seer stone to find hidden treasure for purposes of fraud, must come to the conclusion that no such record was ever made, and therefore, is not in existence.... had he [Joseph Smith] made this confession in a court of law as early as 1826, or four years before the Book of Mormon was printed, and this confession was in a court record, it would have been impossible for him to have organize the restored Church. (A New Witness For Christ In America, vol. 1, pages 385-387)
“If a court record could be identified, and if it contained a confession by Joseph Smith which revealed him to be a poor, ignorant, deluded, and superstitious person unable himself to write a book of any consequence, and whose church could not endure because it attracted only similar persons of low mentality—if such a court record confession could be identified and proved, then it follows that his believers must deny his claimed divine guidance which led them to follow him.... How could he be a prophet of God, the leader of the Restored Church to these tens of thousands, if he had been the superstitious fraud which ‘the pages from a book’ declared he confessed to be?” (Ibid., pp.486-487)
The noted Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley published a book in which this statement appeared: “...if this court record is authentic it is the most damning evidence in existence against Joseph Smith.” (The Myth Makers, 1961, page 142) On the same page we read that such a court record would be “the most devastating blow to Smith ever delivered.” Because he could see the serious implications of the matter, Dr. Nibley tried in every way possible to destroy the idea that the court record was an authentic document.
As we indicated earlier, in 1971 Wesley P. Walters made an astounding discovery which destroyed many of the arguments Mormon writers had used to discredit the 1826 Court record. While searching through some old records stored in the basement of the county jail in Norwich, New York, Wesley Walters and Fred Poffarl discovered two documents from Bainbridge which confirmed the authenticity of the printed court record. The most important was Justice Albert Neely’s bill to the county for his fees in several legal matters he was involved with in 1826. The fifth item from the top mentioned the case of “Joseph Smith The Glass looker.”
The fact that Justice Neely said Joseph Smith was a "Glass looker" fits very well with the published version of the legal proceedings. Hugh Nibley and other Mormon apologists became strangely silent after these documents were discovered.
While most Mormon scholars accepted the evidence which Wesley Walters discovered, an overzealous supporter of Joseph Smith decided to resort to forgery in an attempt to discredit the documents. In 1986 Ronald Vern Jackson, a Mormon researcher who wrote the book The Seer, Joseph Smith, appeared on the Mormon Church’s television Station, KSL-TV with the startling claim that Justice Neely’s bill had been altered. He claimed that the name “Josiah Stowell” originally appeared on the document, but that these words had been changed to “Joseph Smith.” Although Mr. Jackson did not directly state it, the implications were clear-Walters had found a genuine bill referring to Josiah Stowell and that he had deliberately altered it to discredit the prophet Joseph Smith! Jackson professes to believe that Mark Hofmann was not alone in creating forgeries. In an introduction to his publication of the Mark Hofmann Interviews, Jackson wrote that he had “very incriminating evidence that others were involved!” He also declared that “It was a conspiracy to rewrite L.D.S church history and Mark Hofmann was but a pawn that was sacrificed to save the King. There are those who would love to disgrace the L.D.S. church by proving it’s history to be a sham. And Mark Hofmann was the tool through which they were going to do it.” He also stated that “Mark Hofmann was just the tip of the iceberg,...” In an advertisement for his publications, we find the following:
“So incriminating is his [Jackson’s] evidence, information and documentation in this case, not only of Hofmann, and his Associates, but of the ‘Wider’ Co-conspiratorial Ring, that several attempts have been made on his life!” We understand that Mr. Jackson has hinted that the King of Mormon document forgery is a minister who lives in the Midwest. Since Wesley P. Walters pastors a church in Illinois and is deeply involved in research on Mormon history, it seems reasonable to believe that Jackson is hinting that he is the “King.”
In any case, Wesley P. Walters made these observations about Ronald Jackson’s charges:
“Recently, Ron Jackson, a pro-Mormon historian from Bountiful, Utah, appeared on KSL-TV in Salt Lake City and claimed that the 1826 justice of the peace bill had been altered. He claimed that when this writer was lecturing in Salt Lake City in 1976, a friend had inadvertently picked up some of this writer’s notes and kept them. Accompanying the notes, he claimed, was a reproduction of the trial bill as it originally read. Jackson said that instead of reading the people ‘vs. Joseph Smith the glass looker,’ it originally read, ‘vs. Josiah Stowell the glass looker.’
“The reproduction bearing the name Josiah Stowell and purportedly obtained from this writer’s notes shows signs of forgery. Someone has obliterated parts of ‘Joseph’ and in a sloppy hand tried to change this to read ‘Josiah.’ He has left the ‘S’ of ‘Smith’ but obliterated the remainder and placed the name ‘Stowell’ into that space. The final ‘ell’ in Stowell appears to have been taken from the name Darnell, which appears further down in the same manuscript, and inserted as the final letters of Stowell. Moreover, the letter ‘a’ in Josiah and the ‘o’ in Stowell do not match the way these letters are formed in the rest of the document, and the crossing of the ‘t’ is quite different.” (Personal Freedom Outreach Newsletter, April-June 1986, p. 2)
Amazing court docs. Thanks for the link.
That is just the tip of the iceberg! JS was such a deceitful charlatan it's a wounder how anyone could "buy" into his plan.
It's so obvious JS "money digging", "peep stone," schemes went directly after the farmers. If you look at the historical record most if not all the people he originally duped either had no compunction to verify his claims on even the surface, or the people who were witness to his shenanigan's wanted in on them because there might be profit to be made!
I read, I believe in Kingdom Of The Cults, someone had holes dug all over their property believing in his trickery.
And absolute charlatan who watched 3 of his 5 children freeze to death (ie. die from exposure - their homes were burnt to the ground in the middle of winter - not once, but time and again). This 'Charlatan' scarified a child, then two, and finally 3 for this 'cult'. He surrendered to the law, on a bogus charge (he was arrested several times, spent many months in prison, but was mysteriously never charged). He knew he would be assinated in prison; and a mob did exactly that in Carthage, Illinois.
A charlatan who was tarred and feathered, beaten and penniless. A charlatan who has made prophecies that were ridiculed as being 'made up' in the 1800's and 1900's; but are being VERIFIED today. This 'charlatan' who 'mislead' people from New York, had the only 'Extermination Order' in the history of the USA given to his followers in the great state of Missouri. A 'Charlatan' who never was rich, who never asked for money, who never became affluent and was hated, beaten and chased from state to state.
A charlatan who teaches that the practice of "Priestcraft" is an affront to God. A "Priestcraft" is the practice of charging money to perform sacraments, or to provide services in the name of God. I can tell you to the penny what the Quorum of the 70 are paid, what the LDS Apostles are paid, what every local Bishop is paid, what every single member of the church is paid . Zero. This includes our leader of our faith; he is paid nothing for his time and services. No retirement, no pension, nothing. No one is paid for their calling in the LDS church. Everyone holds down full time jobs, then does church work on their own time; to be temple worthy they must abide by several covenants and tithe 10% of their income to the church. I would imagine that 'Christian' churches would find the fact that everything they are paid to do, the LDS church does for free to be a great threat to them. Your priest makes a living, draws a paycheck and has a pension paid for, by doing what God has commanded us to do.
Consider what would have happened if Moses told the Israelites that "I'll get you free from the Egyptians, but you have to pay me a Sheep apiece". Can you imagine what God's reaction would be? The word "smite" comes to mind, doesn't it? Can you provide a single reference, anywhere in the scriptures that indicates that Priests were not expected to work as well. From the beginning, up through and including the 12 Disciples, these people held jobs.
Here's a question for you. Why doesn't your priest get a 'real job'? Why would someone 'sell' an ordinance? If Jesus was enraged at the thought of 'coin-changers' operating on the temple grounds - don't you think he'd be a little miffed at the thought of 'selling' sacraments?
Instead of seeking information from anti-Mormon sites; why not be mature and ask a real Mormon about his beliefs? If I got my information from anti-Catholic sites (and yes, they do exist); how much credence would you have. Oh, and by the way; most of the information you quoted as 'fact' is made up. It's simply not true; or worse, it's full of 'half-truths'. Then ask yourself this simple question. Have you ever heard of a Mormon attacking your church, the way you attack his? I've been to temple open-houses; where the general public is invited to go inside a new temple prior to it's dedication. People are welcomed, cookies and soft drinks are provided free of charge to any and all. All that is asked is that people be respectful of our faith, as we are of yours. I saw 'Christians' with bull-horns, signs and people attempting to block the streets to prevent other people from going to the temple. I witnessed people trying to disrupt dedication programs. Why? Is this the spirit and anywhere close to the teachings of Christ, or is it in fact the exact opposite?
So, again ask yourself; why attack Mormons? Is it in the spirit of Christ that you attack people who do nothing but promote good, morals, give aide to the sick? I submit that these attacks are cowardly, and that these are motivated by the spirit that is the anti-thesis to what is taught by Christ.
You will never, ever find a Mormon that attacks another 'Christian' church. Why? Because counter to what you may have been told; we believe that we are all following the same teachings. You have a Bible, we have the same Bible, plus the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. These books all re-inforce each other - but you wouldn't know that because you have had your mind made up for you, by someone who hasn't looked at these books either.
1: Do you deny the validity of the information presented in the site I made available?
2: What prophecy which JS made is being verified today?
Here is the problem with the Romney campaign. The face of the campaign has become a quasi LDS operation. This is what is OFF PUTTING to the majority of Christians, who regard the precepts of Mormonism as biblically unsound.
Why is Romney’s faith an issue, but Harry Reid’s faith isn’t? How about judging a man on his values, his voting record, or his past behavior as a Congressman?
Instead of being a bigot, get over the fact that you don’t worship the same as he does. Most people do not have the balls to whine about Congressmen who are athiest, Budhist, Muslim, Jewish, Luthern, Baptist or Wiccian. But because LDS members chose not to make a big scene; people like you pile on. Please read the 1st amendment, get over the fact that you are a bigot; and make your vote based upon the candidates political views.
Whom you vote for is your business; how Romney choses to worship is his.
2: What prophecy which JS made is being verified today?
Let's start with the prediction of when and where the Civil war would start - 30 years prior. We have the topic that Caliphia brought up about the place of Christ's birth - confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls. We have horses mentioned in the Book of Mormon; conventional wisdom stated that they were introduced to the South American continent by the Spanish Conquistadors - however 5 years ago mummified horse remains were discovered in Peru that predate the Spanish presence by several thousand years. If you spent 5% of your effort trying to tear down the LDS church; actually looking at FACTS, I think you'd come away with a different view.
Again, consider the advice of Matthew; does the tree bear good fruit?
Mormons do not tolerate homosexuality or abortion. These offenses will result in excommunication - period. Mormons provided financial aide to the Boy Scouts with regard to allowing Gay Scoutmasters - the message was clear, stand strong and the Church will stand with you; falter and you stand alone source . As a side note, the LDS Church sponsors over 31,000 troops (about 12% of the total number of all Troops)
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