The Origins Of Mormonism

Three years after Joseph Smith's First Vision, God sent the angel Moroni to instruct Joseph about restoring the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In 1820 or so. Joseph Smith claimed that the angel Moroni had appeared to him and revealed that a Bible of the New World lay hidden. In time he would be permitted to unearth it, but the time was not yet. Seven years later The angel Moroni, on September 22, 1827, granted him permission to unearth this Bible of the New World from a spot on a hill near Palmyra, New York. Digging at that spot, he said he found golden plates in a stone box. On these plates was an unusual script which the barely educated Smith realized were in the hieroglyphics of the Reformed Egyptian language.

MORMONISM'S EGYPTIAN LINK

Fortunately the plates came with two crystals named "Urim" and "Thummen" were set in silver to form a bowl-like set of spectacles. These magic spectacles, not unlike the "magic" or "peek" stones with which the family was enthralled, enabled him to read the Reformed Egyptian text and turn it into unreformed English—"unreformed English" since the early translation of this "text" was not in the most literate of English.

Smith claimed that he spent two years behind a curtain dictating the translation to assistants who took down his words as he deciphered the "reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics." This was truly a remarkable event since the scholarly French Jean Francois Champollion was at work deciphering the Rosetta Stone with its hieroglyphics, at about this time, but without the benefit of "magic crystals," the first time that the Egyptian written language could be read. When Smith had completed his translation, the angel Moroni re-appeared and removed the golden plates and the magical crystal glasses forever. No evidence remains that the plates ever existed. Moreover, Smith gave conflicting accounts of the find. He was to describe the plates in various ways, ranging from simply metallic plates, then to golden plates, and finally to engraved golden plates.

YOU GOTTA HAVE FAITH.......OR JUST BE A MORON

Come on now folks, that's a little hard to swallow. Have you ever even seen an angel? At least you know that aardvarks actually exist! I can just see old Joe Smith and his friends drinking one night and thinking 'Hey, we should start a religion " Well their theology seemed pretty lame and one of them said "Why you would have to be a moron to believe any of that crap" which caused another one to exclaim "Exactly! That's it, we'll call it Moron-ism and we can name our angel Moron. Being the most insightful of the group old Joe though for a moment and said "I think your on to something here, but to have actual members we can't be calling them morons, no one would want to be referred to as a moron! And thus Mormonism was born and the angel was named Moroni. Today there are around 15 million morons, um Mormons who believe old Joseph Smith's story.

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