On a supposedly conservative site, there was a chap who calls himself a right wing reverend. Sounds more like a liberal to me. He spends a lot of time bashing members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (nicknamed 'Mormons' since at least the days of the Missouri Extermination Order) and fills his rant with false information and conjectures. So I posted the following to his video, which is months old and I should have come across it earlier.
Here's my rant to his rant, though I tried to contain myself. Gettin' too old for restraint, I guess. Meantime, hope everyone in America had a great Thanksgiving, and hope our neighbors to the north had a happy Thanksgiving last month. And everyone everywhere else - consider what you have, and what the alternatives could be. We still have the opportunity to make the world better, one person at a time.
(ahem) Yeah, that rant:
My word! The factual errors and/or falsehoods within this presentation are amazing. With intent to prejudice his audience from the start, he slanders Lucy Mack Smith by proclaiming her "a superstitious woman." (She was neither more nor less superstitious than any other American of the early 19th century.) He claims that "the" split in the Church (there were several small groups who found the Gospel of Jesus Christ too hard to live) was between Brigham Young and Joseph Smith's surviving family. It was not. There was a debate in which Sidney Rigdon (not a member of Joseph's family, but a counselor which Joseph had asked the Church to release at least once) wanted to take over leadership from Brigham. Sidney had been a counselor to a president of the church who had been murdered. Brigham was (and had been) the president of the 12 Apostles. The sustaining vote was almost completely unanimous to follow the apostles. Joseph's widow and children stayed in Illinois, and she remarried - never denying her testimony, never denying Joseph's calling, and frequently testifying that the Book of Mormon was true - that Joseph was far too unlearned to, by anything short of the power of God, translate as she had witnessed him doing. She testified to handling the plates, but never looking at them - though tempted.
Like the stereotypical anti-Mormon, he claims many errors and sins of Joseph -- yet never mentions the real errors and sins which Joseph spoke of himself - most of which he ensured were included in the revelations which were compiled into the book of Doctrine and Covenants. He claims that only the Latter-day Saints who moved to Utah were called Mormons, though it's well established that the nickname began in the East, and was even referred to in the infamous Extermination Order of the governor of Missouri, calling for the killing of every Mormon in the state.
Sidney never became the head of either group. It was many years later, when Joseph III (Joseph Jr's son) had grown up that a small group of the dissenters of the Church convinced Joseph III to become the president of a group which would be formed from several of the dissenting groups, among them being Lyman Wight's group which were now in Texas.
The speaker claims, as did the murderers (the Carthage Grays they called themselves, of which one seems to have been an ancestor of mine) that the Church was guilty of destroying the press of the Nauvoo Expositor, a newspaper which the speaker (A conservative? Really?) claims was guilty only of criticizing the Church. A glance at surviving copies of the paper shows that it was not merely criticizing the Church and Joseph (both had lived with much more severe criticism) but was, by the standards of the day, obscene. It was not the only printing press in the United States which was destroyed for violating obscenity laws. Indeed, the Church's printing press had been destroyed in Missouri for daring to print that slavery was evil and that the black men and women were our brothers and sisters!
This charges - and many others - are old hat. They've been answered again and again. But anti-Mormons always behave as if they've discovered new evidences against the Mormons. Please, folks -- if you MUST slander us, come up with something new. This repetitiveness is very, very boring.
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