Having in my last blog compared life in Manhattan 60-some years ago, when I was just starting out on my lifelong search for Truth, to life in my old hometown of Long Beach today, in my retirement years (from the world’s affairs; not my personal vocation), I got to musing about it all.
I remember:
Young Irish cops walking the beat in my neighborhood, on the West side of mid-town Manhattan, and being given an apple by a grateful grocer; and speaking of apples, and, like, ‘road apples on the trail’: there is -
living here in a fairly respectable section of town with dog poo a constant and sign-posted worry, and now added to it the feces of the homeless. Knock on wood, this isn’t San Francisco. Yet. But even I have had my bout with the menace, when I went out one day to put my recyclables in the green bin and discovered a load having been dumped right outside our apartment’s - locked - back door.) And speaking of cops on the beat: Now, here, they are called out to have to deal with such activity as stolen bikes, broken car windows, Peeping Toms casing the joint, broken-into garages and cars’ glove compartments rifled through, and now the latest in fashions: the theft of car batteries. (Possibly somehow connected with devices to charge the batteries of all these electric scooters left all over the place???
Something about this current scene has caused me pause, in relation to my life’s vocation. I have talked before in these pages about my background, which has included membership, from family orientation, in the ‘Mormon’ religion. At one point I got to reading the Book of Mormon, to find out what it was actually all about (hopefully about more than as Mark Twain has been reported as describing it, as “chloroform in print”), and, though I have subsequently ’read’ my way out of that religion - as with Christianity itself - I remember well reading in it about a time, supposedly, in the Central American setting of most of that book, when the people had fallen into a terrible state of ‘apostasy,’ and crime was rampant. In large things and small.
Well, would you ever. Now, that rings true. True to form, of a people who have lost their way, and believe only in the ‘reality’ around them, as having any bearing on life.
If The Book of Mormon is a fake, a fraud, a forgery, how come it rings so true, in such a curiously fundamental aspect of life, as we are witnessing in our own time and place???
Let me set the stage for the remainder of this blog. The ‘alternative’ story to the “Mormon’ story goes like this:
A man by the name of Sidney Rigdon, in the early 1800s a preacher looking for a congregation, had a job in a book publishing company when a man named Solomon Spaulding came in with a manuscript that he had concocted, called a Romance, about life in Central America way back when, and, though it went nowhere with the company that Rigdon worked for (so far as I know), he saw some possibilities in it, and began tinkering with it, along the lines of a tale that would ‘prove’ the story in the Bible, both Old Testament and New, in the way of the ‘stick’ of Judah now joining with the ‘stick’ of Joseph, in the culmination of God’s Plan for mankind. That’s it in a nutshell. Only, how to sell it??
‘I know!’ he cried out, silently to himself, and went to a young man in the area, name of Joe Smith, who had developed a bit of a reputation for being a ’seer,’ in the way of looking into his hat, wherein he had, or at least said he had, a ‘peep stone,’ and telling people what he saw through it. One thing led to another, and Rigdon and Smith, now in business with one another, came up with a story about how young Joe - now more ‘professionally’ Joseph - Smith, had had a vision (which changed somewhat in the telling in those days; there is more than one version of it in the record. Contrary to the knowledge of most Mormons today), and as a consequence of it was led to uncover some gold plates in a nearby hill that had been buried there by a sort of prophet of olden days on the continent (whether in Central America or North America has been a bit of a quandary ever since; but to move on with the story. As they did in those days as well); plates which told the story of a people who had been led over to, er, 'this' continent from the Middle East in Old Testament days, ‘for a marvelous work and a wonder’ - to be joined with their biblical forebears in the Last Days. (Hence the true name of the newly-born church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; or LDS, as it is more commonly known, and referred to. Besides by the name of one of the prophets in the to-be translated 'book’.) All of this came out via sessions where young Smith - with a couple of observers present - translated, or pretended to translate, the plates - purportedly with the help of a gadget, described in the Bible, called the Urim and Thummin - behind a curtain. (The observers didn’t actually ever see the ‘plates’ themselves; a weakness in the official version of this story. One would think a fatal weakness; but never mind. A good story is a good story.) And when finished, the plates were somehow magically returned to their place of burial, and Smith took his translation to a printer, and lo, The Book of Mormon was born, and lo, young Smith became the prophet of a new church, which Rigdon - who had kept his distance up until then - then ‘heard of,’ and, checking out this prophet of ‘our’ time and place, felt that this was the work of, er, God, and joined in the efforts to get it off the ground; and thus becoming the preacher that he had always wanted to be. And when Smith was killed some years later (by a mob of ‘good’ Christians), missed his chance to take over the fledgling church, with the rise in it of one Brigham Young, who as a consequence of such persecution took the majority of the flock out West - way, way out West - where they could practice their religion in peace. And Rigdon retired into obscurity thereafter.
That’s the essence of ‘the story’. Now. Is there any evidence for the veracity, not of this story - which has its own historical references - but of the story in the Book of Mormon?? Of such a people, having come out - brought out, somewhat magically - from the Old World into the New World in Old Testament times???
Not a lot. But there is one thing in particular, that has caused searchers for truth, like me, some pause. And that is what is known as The Lehi Stone.
That story:
Around 1941 some anthropologists/archeologists from National Geographic (as I recall the story), in engaging in some professional work in Central America, came across a large stone in the jungle that had a curious carving on it, and, not sure what to make of it, brought it back to the States with them, where, after puzzling over it for some time, they gave it to the Smithsonian Institution. Where it stayed in their ‘archives,’ until someone who was either a Mormon or knew something of the Mormon’s religious book, many years later, recognized the carving as having significance to the Mormons. The upshot: the carving was of an old bearded man (a bearded man? In Aztecan country??) sitting against a tree, with rivulets like the depiction of a river nearby, and some other details, that all added up to a depiction of a story in the Book of Mormon about a prophet, by the name of Lehi, who had a dream whilst…sitting against a tree.1 Now, ‘you’ can say that some Mormon missionaries somehow managed to carve such a stone and deposit it in the Central American site where it was subsequently discovered by the team from the NG, and/or that that team itself was infiltrated by Mormons, not above some skullduggery in support of their religious beliefs. But what are the odds? and that they would leave it with the SI, and forget about it??
Forgeddaboudit. There is something going on here. But in the light of such excellent research into the New Testament as that of another Joseph, last name of Atwill - in his seminal work entitled ‘Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus’ - the whole Christian ‘story’ falls. And therefore, so does any story connected to it.
Ir would appear.
Now where was I?
Oh well. It made for an interesting story anyway. I trust.
P.S. Now if the Christian story were true (or something close to it); and therefore, if the ‘Mormon’ story had any possible standing to be true…I would have done more to chastise the current Church authorities concerning the failure of theirs to honor a major prophecy of their Church’s Founding Father; when Joseph Smith reportedly gave a prophecy that has come to be known as the White Horse Prophecy. It says, in effect, that there would come a time when the U.S. Constitution would be “hanging by a thread,” and the (Mormon) Church priesthood would be instrumental in its salvation. Well, said Constitution has been ‘hanging by a thread’ ever since the Usurper, Barack H. Obama, assumed the presidency;2 thus making of that document simply a wet noodle, capable of being twisted any way one wishes to.
Regardless of the actual veracity of the Church or not:
Still waiting, gang. But the waiting will not go on much longer.
One way or the other.
—
footnotes:
1 A rendition of this stone is in the Anthropology Department of BYU in Provo, Utah. Or at least it was when I inspected it in the latter part of 1968, as part of my ongoing search for Truth. And where I did some research in the stacks of the University’s library into original-source materials and doctorate theses regarding the founding of the Church. Which is where I came across a lot of the story as I have laid it out above. As supplemented with some similar researching subsequently in the Utah State Historical Society in Salt Lake City, and at its Main Public Library. And in some materials developed by some critics of the Church, available in an out-of-the-way place in downtown SLC, that I was able to find out about through some sourcing that I have forgotten. Who came across the fact that some of the materials that the Church looks upon as ‘gospel’ had been edited - altered - over the years. Very similar to the materials in the New Testament itself.
But to continue.
2 Illegally, for not being a ‘natural born’ citizen, one of the eligibility requirements for that particular office. All of which I have dealt with in these pages often enough for the subject to be coming out of my regular readership’s ears.
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