Among other things...
Posted on 09/22/2019 4:04:02 PM PDT by robowombat
Affixing blame for the Mountain Meadows Massacre SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 BY DAN PETERSON
This is not a photo of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. We have none. So I went for a cheerier note. This is a photo (by James Jordan) of director Mark Goodman working just a few days ago with extras in Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts, for the “Witnesses” film project.
I note that I’m being accused by a small handful of people of blaming the Mountain Meadows Massacre on “anti-Mormons.”
First, two preliminary observations:
1) When I write anything for the public, at least some people will misread it in the most negative way that they possibly can.
2) The Mountain Meadows Massacre is, for quite manifest reasons, a controversial topic. And, accordingly, it’s one that some people are strongly inclined to exploit for ideological ends.
Of course, I don’t blame the Massacre on “anti-Mormons.” I blame it on the people who did it.
But the perpetrators interest me very particularly because, overwhelmingly, they do not seem to have been conventionally bad people – thugs, murderers, and the like – either before September 1857 or, for the most part, thereafter.
So the question that puzzles me (in this case as in more than a few others) is, What makes ordinary, decent people commit so extraordinarily horrific a crime?
Reading the Oxford book Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Ron Walker and Rick Turley and Glen Leonard, when it first came out many years ago, I felt as if I were seeing a Greek tragedy unfold. There was a certain inexorable logic to what ultimately happened – a horrible logic, obviously, but one in which it made a certain degree of sense, after one bad step had been taken, to take the next one. I found myself wanting to scream “No! Stop!” while knowing what the outcome was inevitably going to be.
To me, if we see the people who committed the Mountain Meadows Massacre as utterly unlike ourselves, we’re not only falsifying history (and not merely in the sense that they, like me and many of my readers, claimed membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) but refusing to see a lesson (or, more aptly, lessons) in what happened. If they were something of a different species, their cautionary tale can have little if anything to teach us.
In order to understand what they did, we need to understand what factors acted upon them. And, beyond any reasonable dispute, one of the most important of those factors was a prior history of persecution and forced migration.
That doesn’t mean that the Missouri mobs bear legal and moral responsibility for the Mountain Meadows Massacre any more than an abusive father is responsible for the violent acts committed much later by a criminal son. But neither are the two unrelated. Human evils ramify. They do damage, among other things to human psyches.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre certainly isn’t the Restoration’s finest hour. It’s anything but faith-promoting. But it shouldn’t be exploited as a weapon against the Church or against religious belief, either. It’s too complex to be reducible to a self-serving slogan on a partisan bumper sticker.
John 17:3 “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”
Sorry .... but Christ didn’t pray to a third personna of himself .... he prayed to the Almighty God, our Father in Heaven.
I don’t know .... there is no scriptural information on a heavenly mother. It is purely conjecture.
And God keeps expanding and blessing the Church that he restored through Joseph Smith.
I can see why
Them spirit kids gotta come from somewhere
Why?
Why does something ‘restored’ need any expanding?
There is no scriptural information on a LOT of stuff that the Church tells it's members they HAVE to do.
They are purely conjecture; too; but I'm sure you have a list of them handy.
What's with this Atonement..stuff anyway?
Megwetch, Nican....
Yep
Isn't that special!!
We are STILL awaiting an answer...
Among other things...
Brigham Young, October 9, 1859
Intelligence, Etc.
Remarks by President BRIGHAM YOUNG, delivered in the Tabernacle, Great Salt Lake City, October 9, 1859.
Reported by G. D. Watt
Journal of Discourses, Vol. 7, p.282-91
They succeeded in killing Joseph, but he had finished his work.He was a servant of God, and gave us the Book of Mormon.He said the Bible was right in the main, but, through the translators and others, many precious portions were suppressed, and several other portions were wrongly translated; and now his testimony is in force, for he has sealed it with his blood.As I have frequently told them, no man in this dispensation will enter the courts of heaven, without the approbation of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Jun.Who has made this so?Have I?Have this people?Have the world?No; but the Lord Jehovah has decreed it.If I ever pass into the heavenly courts, it will be by the consent of the Prophet Joseph.If you ever pass through the gates into the Holy City, you will do so upon his certificate that you are worthy to pass.Can you pass without his inspection?No; neither can any person in this dispensation, which is the dispensation of the fulness of times.In this generation, and in all the generations that are to come, everyone will have to undergo the scrutiny of this Prophet.They say that they killed Joseph, and they will yet come with their hats under their arms and bend to him; but what good will it do them, unless they repent?They can come in a certain way and find favor, but will they?
God is my “right hand man.”[8]
(Joseph Smith, in a letter to James Arlington Bennett on November 13, 1843, History of the Church, (Deseret Book, 1975), vol. 6, p. 78.)
"God made Aaron to be the mouth piece for the children of Israel, and He will make me be god to you in His stead, and the Elders to be mouth for me; and if you don’t like it, you must lump it."
Joseph Smith at the LDS Conference on April 8, 1844, History of the Church, vol. 6, pp. 319-320.
"God is in the still small voice. In all these affidavits, indictments, it is all of the devil—all corruption. Come on! ye prosecutors! ye false swearers! All hell, boil over! Ye burning mountains, roll down your lava! for I will come out on the top at last. I have more to boast of than ever any man had. I am the only man that has ever been able to keep a whole church together since the days of Adam. A large majority of the whole have stood by me. Neither Paul, John, Peter, nor Jesus ever did it. I boast that no man ever did such a work as I. The followers of Jesus ran away from Him; but the Latter- day Saints never ran away from me yet."
Joseph Smith, Sunday, May 26, 1844 History of the Church, vol. 6, pp. 408-9.
"We will become gods and have jurisdiction over worlds, and these worlds will be peopled by our own offspring. We will have an endless eternity for this.”
— Joseph Fielding Smith Jr., Doctrines of Salvation, Vol.2, p.48
“As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.”
Lorenzo Snow, Mormon Prophet and president
"The day will come—and it is not far distant, either—when the name of the Prophet Joseph Smith will be coupled with the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the Son of God, as his representative, as his agent whom he chose, ordained and set apart to lay anew the foundations of the Church of God in the world, which is indeed the Church of Jesus Christ, possessing all the powers of the gospel, all the rites and privileges, the authority of the Holy Priesthood, and every principle necessary to fit and qualify both the living and the dead to inherit eternal life, and to attain to exaltation in the kingdom of God."[5]
Joseph F. Smith, sixth president of the LDS Church, Gospel Doctrine, 5th ed. [1939], p. 134; as quoted in “Joseph Smith: Restorer of Truth,” Ensign, (Dec. 2003): p. 17.
“Thus those who gain eternal life receive exaltation. . . They are gods.”
(LDS Apostle Bruce McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, pg. 237).
(Gordon B. Hinckley, the fifteenth president of the LDS Church, Ensign article entitled “Joseph Smith: Restorer of Truth,” December 2003)
My brothers and sisters, in this bicentennial year of his birth, I should like to speak of our beloved Prophet Joseph Smith. . . . In the 135th section of the Doctrine and Covenants we read the words of John Taylor concerning the Prophet Joseph: “Joseph Smith, the Prophet and Seer of the Lord, has done more, save Jesus only, for the salvation of men in this world, than any other man that ever lived in it.” [D&C 135: 3]
(Thomas S. Monson, counselor to President Gordon B. Hinckley, the semi-annual LDS Conference in Salt Lake City, 2005)
Mormons are heretics and a cult.
Elsie ... are you quoting the ‘Mormon Church’ ...........
.....or the ‘Church of Jesus Christ?’
Yea .... are Nicene/Apostolic/Athenasian creeds conjecture or biblical?
If they are biblical ..... Prove it! If not .... Matt 7:5
“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye”
Lazy butt!
If you would have clicked the link you’d KNOW!
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