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“As you know from past conversations, FastCoyote has been corrected on these point on many occasions. He knows what he said is not true. At this juncture, it’s a 9th commandment issue.”

You’ve been corrected multiple times yourself to no avail, apparently you belleve Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness (Lie) only applies to others. So, it is clear one of us is a nutcase and/or a dissembler. Therefore I ask our dear readers to judge who is likely to have a belief structure built of cards that leads inherently to False Witness.

My opponents believe the following: Joseph Smith somewhere before 1820 had God appear to him in the flesh and tell him that all other Christian churches were an abomination. Later the angel Moroni appears to him and shows him where to dig up Golden tablets beneath a rock which he then translates into a history of a tribe of Jews coming by ship to America in 600 BC following a magic brass orb. These Jews become the Nephites and Lamanites, build cities, have wars and eventually become the American Indians.

Now the way Joseph Smith translates these Golden tablets (while they are still buried on the hill no less), is to sit in a room and look into his hat through a seer stone that a friend plucked out of the mud while digging a well (the seer stone he claims is the magical Urim and Thurim of the Bible). As if this isn’t unbelievable enough, Smith later “translates” the wrapping from a traveling Egyptian mummy show and claims these are the Book of Abraham, though at that point hieroglyphics had not been deciphered and as we now know the wrappings were a mundane list of gods. Moreover, there are thousands of Egyptian mummies now known so Smith supposedly was the lucky one who got the only wrappings with the Book of Abraham!

Joseph gathers adherents, who he helps get driven out of Ohio and later Illinois by overruning communities and threatening them with his pocket army. He also finds time to run a bank scam with unbacked tender at Kirtland Ohio (also collapsing the Monroe bank), and it is for this reason that he has to excommunicate a number of prominent founding members who also realize he is a crook. Smith almost gets a 1000 of his men butchered at Far West, gets sent to prison, and after escape then hightails it to Nauvoo Illinois where he becomes Mayor, Lt. General of the Nauvoo Legion and part owner of most of the real estate. He also has himself ordained king and sets up a shadow government called the Council of 50, just in case the US falls into turmoil so he can save the day.

Apparently, to relieve the stress of being a fallible but infallible Prophet, he tells young and older ladies that “God will strike me dead” if they don’t marry him, and he collects 33 notches. A local group of dissident Mormons tries to start the Nauvoo Expositor to expose these deeds (and the fact he is wife stealing), but Joseph and his brother Hyrum have the press destroyed (censorship and/or excommunication seems to be a repeated way for Mormons to stifle dissent).

The end result of this brouhaha is that Joseph, and Hyrum, and a couple others are taken to jail and a mob comes and shoots Joseph and Hyrum dead. When one reads the account of the Illinois governor’s actions, it becomes plain that he was stuck in a hard place trying to stave off a Civil War, so the early history of Mormonism is as much one of settlers trying to control a slick grifter’s fraud as having anything to do with religious bigotry against the sheep who followed Smith.

So dear readers, while there is much more to this history than this thumbnail (and I certainly can be wrong in minor detail), you have enough to make a likely decision about who is thinking clearly, the anti-Romney faction, or those who for religious reasons are lockstep for Mitt.

The Mitt group must believe in seer stones, magical Golden tablets, translations of hieroglyphic prior to their decipherment and polygamy being a revelation before it wasn’t a revelation. Add to this a large panoply of doctrines like the ability of men through their good works to become Gods of their own planets, God living on a planet near the star Kolob near the center of the universe, creating spirit children with celestial wives, the ability of underwear to be blessed against devils, etc. etc.

Now, knowing that I believe in none of this hooey, while Mitt Romney and his followers believe in all of it lock stock and barrel (and much much more, blood atonement anyone?), I think some of you may suspect which side has their facts together, and which side has had their eggs scrambled. You need to ask, Who MUST engage in False Witness to keep their house of cards standing?

I think the reader may also want to ask whether they want a president who will have to defend this convoluted mishmash of doctrine and dubious history through the next long eight years.