“Religions that are cults and lead people to eternal damnation are the people’s business.”
Not to equate anyone’s religion (other than radical islam) to satanism, but help me remember exactly why it was that our Nation was founded in the first place. I think it might have been to escape religious persecution?
BTW, I am not Morman. I am a Christian baptized in the Methodist Church. I do not “belong” to a Church (although I worship in several), but I do belong to Jesus Christ.
LLS
April 10, 2007, was the 400th anniversary day of the First Charter authorizing the founding of the colony of Virginia, the first colony established in the New World, and whose legal territorial boundaries extended northward to what is today the State of Maine, soutward to what is now South Carolina, and westward to the Pacific Ocean. Virginia was founded with a single purpose: winning the native peoples to Jesus Christ.
The 1606 Charter was secured from King James I of England by the founders of the London and Plimouth companies “to make Habitation, Plantation, and to deduce a colony of our people into that part of America commonly called Virginia, and other parts and Territories in America, either appertaining to us, or which are not now actually possessed by any Christian Prince or People....”
After describing a geographical area stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts, and on a line south to the Carolinas and north as far as Maine, the Charter turned to the founders’ purpose and the King’s acceptance of it:
We, greatly commending, and graciously accepting of, their Desires for the Furtherance of so noble a Work, which may, by the Providence of Almighty God, hereafter tend to the Glory of his Divine Majesty, in propagating of Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God, and may in time bring the Infidels and Savages, living in those parts, to human Civility, and to a settled and quiet Government.
So the expressed purpose, and the only one written in the Charter, was to establish colonies in the new World as a Christian evangelical witness to the native peoples.