Posted on 02/21/2003 1:42:37 PM PST by vannrox
In explaining this connection Beverly Baker Northup is quoted as saying:
"The story has been kept alive among our Cherokee people that the Sicarii who escaped from Masada, are some of our ancestors who managed to cross the water to this land, and later became known as Cherokees. (Please note the phonetic resemblance of Si'cari'i and, Cherokee or Tsa'ra-gi'.)"
Northup claims that the famous scholar Josephus wrote that there were escapees from Masada in which the spokesperson for the Northern Cherokee states that this is evidence that gives credence to this connection between the Cherokee Indians and the Jews.
In addition to other startling claims, there is also the belief by the Northern Cherokee that a rock that was uncovered in Tennessee in 1889 that is named the Bat Creek Stone, proves a transatlantic connection to Jews.
Northup believes that the scratched writings on the rock indicate that the stone is evidence of a first century Atlantic Crossing to America by these escaped Jews that later became known as the Northern Cherokee Indians.
The Northern Cherokee attempted to gain full legislative recognition in the State of Missouri in 1985 that was eventually vetoed by Governor John Ashcroft. Governor Ashcroft made the following statement concerning his decision to veto the recognition of the Northern Cherokee:
"The Federal Government has traditionally exercised authority with respect to Indian Affairs. I am not persuaded that the state has such a substantial interest in this area that it should become involved in the recognition of Indian tribes."
Sources among some federally recognized Indian Tribes have stated that Mr. Ashcroft's comments were 100% correct and should be referred to from time to time.
If now here, where?
If not now, when?
So far,
Indians have been insulted, and THIS thread is still here........
Jews have been insulted, and the thread is still here as well.
Just wait 'til some crybaby thinks that one of the founders of the LDS organization gets unfairly varnished with the truth, and THIS one will vanish in thin air!!
Oh?
Will telling YOUR side publicly cause it to vanish? or the RESPONSE your 'side' engenders be the thing to do it?
Wow, I hadn't heard that one before. Where did you get that information? I did a search on Google, Yahoo and Alta Vista; and couldn't find anything about either of your assertions. Is this a fact? Or are you just making up slander?
Keeping it hid so people can't learn about it?
This URL has a great summary of a bunch of stuff vis a vis Mormonism's claims etc. of which the excerpt below is one.
HERE: http://www.greatcom.org/resources/handbook_of_todays_religions/01chap06/default.htm
Mormon scholars can be frustrated and embarrassed understandably when they realize that after all the years of work by Mormon and other archaeologists:
No Book of Mormon cities have been located.
No Book of Mormon names have been found in New World inscriptions.
No genuine inscriptions have been found in Hebrew in America.
No genuine inscriptions have been found in America in Egyptian or anything similar to Egyptian, which could correspond to Joseph Smith's "reformed Egyptian."
No ancient copies of Book of Mormon scriptures have been found.
No ancient inscriptions of any kind in America, which indicate that the ancient inhabitants had Hebrew or Christian beliefs, have been found.
No mention of Book of Mormon persons, nations, or places have been found.
No artifact of any kind, which demonstrates the Book of Mormon is true, has been found.
Rather than finding supportive evidence, Mormon scholars have been forced to retreat from traditional interpretations of Book of Mormon statements (Hal Hougey, Archaeology and the Book of Mormon, p. 12).
Dr. Gleason Archer has done an excellent job in listing a few of the anachronisms and historical inaccuracies in the Mormon scriptures (A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, pp. 501-504):
In 1 Nephi 2:5-8, it is stated that the river Laman emptied into the Red Sea. Yet neither in historic nor prehistoric times has there been any river in Arabia at all that emptied into the Red Sea. Apart from an ancient canal which once connected the Nile with the coast of the Gulf of Suez, and certain wadis which showed occasional rainfall in ancient times, there were no streams of any kind emptying into the Red Sea on the western shore above the southern border of Egypt.
Second Nephi states that only the family of Lehi, Ishmael, and Zoram were left in Jerusalem in 600 B.C. to migrate to the New World. These totaled fifteen persons, plus three or four girls, or no more than twenty in all. Yet in less than thirty years, according to 2 Nephi 5:28, they had multiplied so startlingly that they divided up into two nations (2 Nephi 5:5-6, 21). Indeed, after arriving in America in 589 B.C., they are stated to have built a temple like Solomon's.
Now Solomon's temple required 153,000 workers and 30,000 overseers (1 Ki. 5:13, 15; 6:1, 38; 9:20,21; 2 Ch 2:2, 17,18) in seven and a half years. It is difficult to see how a few dozen unskilled workers (most of whom must have been children) could have duplicated this feat even in the nineteen years they allegedly did the work. Nor is it clear how all kinds of iron, copper, brass, silver, and gold could have been found in great abundance (2 Nephi 5:15) for the erection of this structure back in the sixth-century B.C. America.
According to Alma 7:10, Jesus was to be born at Jerusalem (rather than in Bethlehem, as recorded in Lk. 2:4 and predicted in Mic. 5:2).
Helamen 14:20, 27 states that darkness covered the whole earth for three days at the time of Christ's death (rather than three hours, as recorded in Mt. 27:45 and Mk. 15:33), or beyond Easter morning, which would have made it impossible for the woman at the tomb to tell whether the stone had been rolled away from its mouth.
Alma 46:15 indicates that believers were called "Christians" back in 73 B.C. rather than at Antioch, as Acts 11:26 informs us. It is difficult to imagine how anyone could have been labeled Christian so many decades before Christ was even born.
Helaman 12:25,26, allegedly written in 6 B.C., quotes John 5:29 as a prior written source, introducing it by the words, "We read!'It is difficult to see how a quotation could be cited from a written source not composed until eight or nine decades after 6 B.C.
Quite numerous are the instances in which the Mormon scriptures, said to have been in the possession of the Nephites back in 600 B.C., quote from or allude to passages or episodes found only in exilic or postexilic books of the Old Testament. Several examples follow.
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FURTHER AT THE SAME URL:
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Most interesting is the recently exposed fraud of the so-called Book of Abraham, part of the Mormon scripture known as The Pearl of Great Price. This was assertedly translated from an ancient Egyptian papyrus found in the mummy wrappings of certain mummies which had been acquired by a certain Michael H. Chandler.
In 1835 Joseph Smith became very much interested in these papyrus leaves, which he first saw in Kirtland, Ohio, on July 3, and arranged for the purchase of both mummies and manuscripts. Believing he had divinely received the gift of interpreting ancient Egyptian, he was delighted to find that one of the rolls contained the writings of Abraham himself, whose signature he had personally inscribed in the Egyptian language.
In 1842, Smith published his translation under the title, "The Book of Abraham" in Times and Seasons. He even included three drawings of the pictures or vignettes appearing in the manuscript, and interpreted the meaning of these illustrations: Abraham sitting upon the throne of Pharaoh, the serpent with walking legs who tempted Eve in Eden.
For many years this collection of papyri was lost, but somehow they (or else a duplicate set of them from ancient timesl were presented to the Mormon Church by the Metropolitan Art Museum of New York City on November 27, 1967. This made the translation skill of Joseph Smith susceptible of objective verification.
The unhappy result was that earlier negative verdicts of scholars like Theodule Devaria of the Louvre, and Samuel A. B. Mercer of Western Theological Seminary, and James H. Breasted of the University of Chicago, and W. F. Flinders Petrie of London University (who had all been shown Smiths facsimiles) were clearly upheld by a multitude of present-day Egyptologists.
Their finding was that not a single word of Joseph Smith's alleged translation bore any resemblance to the contents of this document. It turned out to be a late, even Ptolemaic, copy in hieratic script of the Sensen Papyrus, which belongs to the same genre as the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
As John A. Wilson, professor of Egyptology at the University of Chicago, described it in a published letter written on March 16, 1966, it contains vignettes familiar from the Book of the Dead. The first illustration shows the god of embalming named Anubis preparing the body of the deceased for burial, with the soul hovering over his head in the form of a bird, and the canopic jars containing the dead man's inwards set beneath his bier. The third picture shows the deceased led into the presence of Osiris, the infernal deity who judged the souls of the dead. (This is what Smith had identified as Abraham sitting on Pharaoh's throne! 1. Figure 2 was a round disc made of cloth and jesso and customarily placed as a pillow under the head of a corpse in the Late Egyptian period.
The accompanying text, as can be ascertained from other copies of this not uncommon document, deals with magical spells intended to open the mouth of the deceased and to prepare him for his audience before Osiris in the judgment hall of the dead (as set forth in detail in chap. 125 of the Book of the Dead, the Egyptian title of which is P-r m h-r-w, or, "The Going Forth by Day"). Needless to say, the completely mistaken concept of Joseph Smith as to his competence in ancient Egyptian is now clearly demonstrated to be beyond debate.
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When all the evidence is considered, the Mormon claim to be the restoration of Jesus Christ's church falls to the ground. We have taken up the challenge of Brigham Young who said, "Take up the Bible, compare the religion of the Latter-day Saints with it, and see if it will stand the test" (Journal of Discourses, Volume 16, p. 46, 1873). Orson Pratt echoed the same sentiment, "Convince us of our errors of Doctrine, if we have any, by reason, by logical arguments, or by the Word of God and we will ever be grateful for the information and you will ever have the pleasing reflections that you have been instruments in the hands of God of redeeming your fellow beings" (The Seer, p. 15). Our conclusion is that when Mormonism is weighed in the balances it is found wanting.
Qx: Exceedingly wanting, I'd add.
FROM THE FOLLOWING URL, EXCERPTS BELOW IT:
HERE: http://www.creator.org/holybooks/rvtr/rvtr-11.html
A/K/A Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
Mark Twain has observed that "truth is stranger than fiction - it is just less popular." The Mormon religion is a case in point, and owes its existence to the coming together of a number of bizarre coincidences that were not likely to happen. Most strange of all, however, is the fact that the basic book of Mormonism was written by a man who had no intention of starting a religion, never heard of Mormonism and died fourteen years before the Mormon Church was founded in 1830.
THE THREE KEY ACTORS IN THE DRAMA
Solomon Spalding (1761-1816)
The story rightfully begins with a sometime Congregational preacher and part-time novelist named Solomon Spalding, who was born in Ashford, Connecticut on February 20, 1761. Although he was never too successful as a preacher, nor as a writer, nor as a businessman, yet, what he started more or less by accident would have ramifications that would reverberate into the 20th Century and far beyond.
Solomon Spalding was the third of ten children. His father, Josiah, joined the Revolutionary Army, and Solomon followed him on January 8, 1778 as a private. After the War, Spalding studied law in Windham, Connecticut, and later entered the prestigious Dartmouth College in preparation for the ministry, where he graduated with a Master's degree in 1785.
He became associated with the Windham Congregational Association in 1787, which at that time was one of the largest Congregational denominations in the eastern United States. He was ordained and remained an evangelist for about a decade, but finally quit the ministry because of ill health.
In 1795, he married Matilda Sabine and shortly thereafter moved to Cherry Valley, New York, to join a brother in the mercantile business. After several other not too successful ventures, Solomon and Matilda moved to Salem, Ohio, in 1809 in order to superintend a small property they owned, while also working at an iron forge. As his health further deteriorated he began writing novels in an effort to earn a living.
When the War of 1812 began his business failed and the family moved to Pittsburgh in the hopes of printing and selling his second novel Manuscript Found, in order to help pay off their debts. Spalding and his wife then moved to Amity, near Pittsburgh, where living was less expensive and the climate hopefully more conducive to his now rapidly failing health. However, change of climate not withstanding, six weeks later on October 20, 1816 Solomon Spalding died.
Although desperately in need of money, Spalding never was able to sell Manuscript Found. He left it with a printer in Pittsburgh, who did not see fit to spend his own money printing it, but would print it if Spalding would pay the costs. There it remained at the time of Spalding's death, and for many years thereafter it lay there in Patterson's Print Shop, unwanted and unpublished.
Sidney Rigdon (1793-7)
The scenario now shifts to another set of characters. Working at this same Patterson's Print Shop in Pittsburgh was a man by the name of Sidney Rigdon, who was also a sometime preacher, and an unstable religious renegade of shifting ideologies. Somehow Spalding's unpublished manuscript fell into his hands (it is claimed he stole it from the print shop and copied it at home.)
Now Sidney Rigdon was a man of vivid imaginations and unstable character. As a boy, he had been thrown from a horse, his foot entangled in a stirrup and he was dragged some distance before he was freed. In the ensuing accident he received severe contusions of the brain that effected his mental stability and character ever after. Although his mental powers were not diminished, it did greatly affect his equilibrium and he was subject to running into wild visionary views on almost every question, and strangely enough, this focused in particular on religious hallucinations and visions.
Born on February 19, 1793, Rigdon joined the First Baptist Church in 1817 near his hometown of Liberty. He was ordained a year or two later and in 1822 he became minister of the First Baptist Church in Pittsburg. His ministry, however, was short lived and he was excommunicated on October 11, 1823 for teaching irregular doctrine.
This experience greatly embittered him. It was between 1823 and 1827 that his vivid and unstable imagination conceived the idea of converting Spalding's fictional novel into the "Holy Book" of a new religion and laying the basis of Mormonism.
Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805-1844)
The drama now shifts front stage and center to the "hero" of our story, the alleged founder and prophet of the Mormon religion.
Joseph Smith Jr. was born on December 23, 1805, in Vermont, the third son of Joseph and Lucy Smith. When he was eleven his family moved to Palmyra, New York, where most of his family joined the Presbyterian Church.
The Smith family was a bizarre collection of individuals and was not well received by their neighbors when they moved to Palmyra. Both Joseph, Sr. and Joseph, Jr. had this droll obsession of digging for money and hidden treasure in the nearby hills and Indian mounds in the area. Both were in particular considered entirely destitute of moral character and addicted to vicious habits, according to an 1834 report.
Joseph, Jr. was an uneducated, (he only went to the fourth grade) uncouth character, slovenly in his manner of dress and had all the morals of an alley tomcat, as his later polygamous life-style was to prove. Before his untimely death at 39 he fornicated with at least 50 women that are on record and probably twice that many that are unrecorded.
He had one redeeming quality, however, that fitted him to become a spook peddler extraordinaire. Even in his younger years Joseph Smith, Jr. could lie fluently, skillfully and convincingly, and his imagination seemed to know no bounds. He was also subject to hallucinations and "visions" which he later managed to turn into a very useful tool in launching his new religion.
As a youth he, along with his father, were involved in such occultic pursuits as "glass-looking" and "crystal-gazing" and similar fortune-telling confidence games. In 1826, Joseph, Jr. was arrested, tried and convicted for the crime of defrauding a local victim by means of a "glass-looking" con-game.
From the combination of these three rather odd and bizarre characters was launched the mighty, affluent and powerful Mormon Empire that exists today. With truth still as unpopular as it was in Mark Twain's day, and with superstition and gullibility still as rife and rampant as it was five thousand years ago in the day of the Ancient Egyptians, Mormonism flourishes today as never before.
Here is a concise summary of the material wealth that Empire has accumulated today.
THE MORMON EMPIRE TODAY
========================
SHORT HISTORY.
We have already sketched the origins of the Mormon creed and find it is based on Solomon Spalding's fictional novel Manuscript Found. This was then picked up by Sidney Rigdon in Patterson's Print Shop in Pittsburgh several years after Spalding's death. Evidence points strongly that Rigdon deserves the credit for conceiving the idea of Mormonism and converting Spalding's Manuscript Found into a new religion. He then sold the idea to Joseph Smith, Jr., whose more vocal and flamboyant talents were utilized to< spearhead and promote the new religion.
It was during the years 1827-30 that this ambitious pair got their act together and began to put their conspiracy into operation. Rigdon and Smith did their best to keep their contacts a secret in order to not arouse any suspicions about Spalding's manuscript. (The Mormon Church too, has tried to camouflage this relationship, pretending that Rigdon joined the church in 1830 only after it was organized, and that the pair did not know each other before. Despite all these precautions, and denials, however, the evidence is overwhelming regarding their previous relationship and the fact that Spalding's manuscript was utilized as the basis for the Book: of Mormon.)
Joseph Smith's story claimed he had had several "visions" and was told by the Angel Moroni to dig up a set of "golden plates" buried in a hill nearby. These "plates" were to "reveal" the true story of the peoples on the North American Continent and set the record straight. What Smith actually did was sit behind a curtain and dictate from Spalding's fictional novel to his "scribes," making suitable innovations and changes here and there to give it the flavor of a "new" religion. In tailoring the manuscript to fit the new religion much of the editing and detail work was actually done by Rigdon beforehand, with Smith picking it up from there. But basically the story was, and remained, Spalding's Manuscript Found. The "golden plates" then mysteriously and conveniently disappeared. No one else saw them except three, then eight, of his followers, and then only in "a vision."
(However, no problem. In 1979, I visited the Mormon Museum at Nauvoo, Illinois, where in a beautiful glass case they displayed a "replica" of the visionary golden plates.)
Be that as it may, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was organized on April 6, 1830 and was incorporated later that same year. Spalding, who was too poor to have his Manuscript Found printed during his lifetime, would have been astonished to see the final outcome. In slightly modified form it was now printed up as the Book of Mormon, and the printing was paid for by Martin Harris, one of the original six founding members.
Mormonism now was off and running. It had a creed, a bible, and an extremely loquacious con-artist as its "prophet." By the end of the first month it had 40 members and soon grew by leaps and bounds.
One of the major incentives that initially helped to spread and popularize the movement in the 1830's was the fact that the Mormons advocated and condoned polygamy. It was this practice, however, that also aroused the bitter hatred and violent opposition from other religions who were in fierce competition with Mormonism.
There is one other peculiarity that Mormonism had to offer in the way of promises "in the hereafter" that topped those of its rivals. All spookcraft religions are based on lavish promises of rewards, and dire threats of punishments, in the hereafter (a shoddy practice which needs no collateral to back it up). However, whereas the regular Christian sects promise their subservient followers that they will become "angels," fluttering about in a nebulous heaven after death, the Mormons went them one gambit better. The Mormon Church promises their faithful that they will become not subservient angels, but gods in their own right. Each will rule as a god over the untold trillions of worlds out there in the endless universe. Now there, as the head of the Maflosa said, is an offer you can't refuse. At least, it is extremely difficult to top. Promises, promises, promises.
In the meantime, the Mormon Church continues to increasingly extract millions and billions, most efficiently and ruthlessly, from its deluded victims. By 1976 it was on record as taking in one million dollars a day. By now that figure has easily doubled and is rapidly ballooning. In return it offers only promises — pie-in-the-sky, and like a true con-man implores its victims: TRUST ME! Without having to deliver two cents worth of any real product in return, it continues to fill and over-fill its bulging coffers with worldly wealth. Not only pecuniary wealth, but also, control, power and domination over the human mind and body.
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Am getting tired. I faintly recall that the court records were not discovered in New York for a long time and finally were found.
I have ran onto a long discourse by evidently a Mormon apologist in a long convoluted piece trying to show that the allegations of a court trial and conviction were mostly groundless. I still don't buy it. I believe I've read an authentic copy of at least 2 of the 3 or 4 convictions for defrauding farmers. I now THINK the copies were in the Tanner's big book the title of which I've forgotten and the book I've lost. I don't know if I'll track any web evidence of such down or not. I may take my ailing body to bed first.
Wellllllllllll, that's all I have gas for and plenty other priorities tomorrow.
Sorry, that's the best I can do for now. Consider it what you will.
Bernie....... meet Grig
Are you an allusion to the Chocolate colored stone that the LDS organization has locked away?
--generic LDS dude
If you do not, you are merely a heretical unbeliever.
| This thread has been pulled. |
| Pulled on 02/22/2003 4:02 PM EST by Jim Robinson, reason: pulled |
A settler becomes separated from his wagon train, and, hopelessly lost, blunders into a band of Indians- all wearing war paint. They quickly surround him -and the leader of the war band confronts him.
" Ya ta hey, bubbeleh !" the leader says. " I've got good news, and I've got bad news."
" The bad news is we're Cherokees, and we're on the warpath."
" Oh-oh ! :, the settler responds. " So, what's the good news ?"
The leader beams. " The good news is: We're also Jewish, . "
" Landtsmann ! ", the settler exclaims. " So am I !"
It's the settler's turn to smile. " So: what else is good news ?"
The Cherokee glances around, counting heads. " Eight, nine, ten. Hey ! We got a minyan here ! "
" Ah ! ", cries the settler, piously. " That's wonderful news ! When are you holding service ? "
The Cherokee leader frowns. " Well, that's the bad news. We're saying Kaddish , as soon as we finish killing you. "
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