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Mormonism

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Contrary to popular belief, the Mormon faith is not all that much weirder than any of its mainstream counterparts.

  • Many religions have cornball rituals, for instance Catholicism, although none of theirs was ripped off from the Freemasons.

  • Their founder, Joseph Smith, got lynched by an Illinois mob while he was in jail. But Jesus was murdered too. Then there's Michael Valentine Smith from Stranger in a Strange Land.

  • Plenty of other faiths have secret teachings and ceremonies, such as the Unification Church, Aum Shinrikyo (a Japanese doomsday cult), and the World Church of the Creator.

  • Practically every church has sent troops to shed innocent blood. So the Mountain Meadows Massacre was nothing compared to the Crusades. What's 128 dead settlers slain on orders of Brigham Young compared to hundreds of thousands because of the Pope?

  • Mormonism is an edifice built atop another religion, Christianity. But Christianity builds on Judaism and Paganism, and Islam builds on both Christianity and Judaism.

  • Islam practices polygamy.

Okay, none of the other Christian religions made multi-chick marriages an essential feature, but the LDS church gave that up in 1890. Publicly at least, and only after the federal government stepped in. The feds revoked the citizenship of every polygamous Mormon, disincorporated their church, and began seizing its assets. Shortly thereafter the residing Prophet responded with a fresh revelation from Heaven, immediately reversing their five decades old implementation of the holy sacrament.

Incidentally, good chunks of the Book of Mormon (purported to have been written circa 400 AD) were lifted from the King James translation of the Bible (completed in 1611). Included in these plagiarisms are the errors made by KJV's translators. Explanations of this time warp are curious and unsatisfying. Furthermore, whichever Supreme Being wrote the Book of Mormon's pseudo-KJV verses possessed an inadequate understanding of how to use Jacobean noun cases.

The Mormons are the only mainstream church to engage in retroactive, posthumous baptisms, in order that ancestors may ascend to heaven. Among those so baptised were Adolf Hitler in 1993, Josef Stalin, and Vlad the Impaler. By 1997 a coverup of the most controversial baptisms occurred, accomplished imperfectly.

The Mormons were vilified by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Study in Scarlet." It was also Mormon settlers who precipitated the war between Earth and Klendathu in the movie Starship Troopers.

Timeline

21 Sep 1823 Angel Moroni appears to Joseph Smith thrice, giving him the burial location to the box containing gold plates which are to become the Book of Mormon.
1830 Book of Mormon published with funding by Martin Harris.
1843 Kinderhook Plates found by Robert Wiley.
6 Apr 1841 Foundation for the Temple at Nauvoo laid.
1846 Mormons driven from Nauvoo.
Mar 1849 State of Deseret founded in Salt Lake City.
1850 Utah Territory organized.
29 Aug 1877 Brigham Young dies.
19 Nov 1918 Joseph Fielding Smith, eldest son of Joseph Smith, dies


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