"Well, what harm can Mormonism do?" Let me explain

If the last time you attended the Mormon Church was before the Three Hour Block Programme was introduced, I doubt you would recognise it as the same Mormon Church.

Regular ward or branch socials? Theatrical presentations and the like? Things of the past, mainly. Rummage or jumble sales, bring and buys? Banned by edict from Salt Lake City.

Remember Sunday School in the morning, with Sacrament meeting in the evening? All gone! All absorbed into the mad, frantic and spiritually sapping Three Hour Block Programme.

Why? Consolidation. All must be the same. You will be assimilated, Borg-style.

This happened because the Mormon Church is run by its civil service, by managers, not by the clergy. Because, of course, the Mormon Church has no clergy.

"Well, what harm can Mormonism do?" An interesting and fair question. Let me direct you to www.exmormon.org. Read the blogs there, read the posts, then read the heart-wrenching stories about how people struggled when they became aware that the Mormon Church was not what they thought it was. When they realised that it was part MLM, part Ponzi scheme and part corporate behemoth, without any real spirit, or soul or religion, when they realised that the name Jesus Christ over the door was a hollow mockery of Jesus Christ.

Read how families are split apart by the Mormon Church, how it sucks money, time, spirit, heart and even the last vestiges of hope from the membership, from the poor, from the downtrodden, from the needy. The very people that it should be helping, it is actually crushing and trampling underfoot.

Sometimes good people within the Mormon Church do good for others. But please do not be deluded! That is against the backdrop of the whole evil edifice that is Mormonism! The great building, the whited sepulchre built by Joseph Smith, a 19th century con artist that made Charles Ponzi seem like a no-account dilettante piker of a confidence man, when compared to Smith whose claim to fame is that his con is still operating over 180 years later!

The Joseph Smith Dilemma: Well, would YOU have done it?

If someone gave you an opportunity to get riches, respect, authority, leadership and just about ANY sexual partners that you wanted, and as many of them as you could physically cope with, would YOU succumb to the temptation to actually do it?

To actually get those riches? To get the respect? To take that leadership? To have just about any and every sexual partner that you could physically cope with?

Well, yes, morally we would hope to say that we would not do any of those things.

But put it another way. If you could have anything that you wanted, anything that you desired and you knew that nobody would mind, nobody important that is, that you could do whatever you wanted to do with no possibility of any comeback, are you saying that you would be able to shrug your shoulders, smile and say: "No thank you!"

To be honest, I do not know if I could. And that was the dilemma that Joseph Smith found himself in.

But ultimately Joseph Smith found that there was a price to pay.

More poetry

I fear for them,
I really do,
the Mormons,
trapped,
in the dream of Joseph Smith.

But that wicked dreamer is dead.
So how will those trapped in his dream, escape?

For it is written, 'what of the dream, when the dreamer dies?'
For how can they escape the wicked man's lies?

My book, Mormonism, Con or Cult is still available to buy

A little while ago, I decided to publish a book, "Mormonism, Con or Cult?"

It is still available via Lulu at the reduced price of £1.88, though you can, of course, use your local currency to purchase this e-book.

It's based on the material from the early days of my blog, Not a Mormon.

The link to buy the book is on the right hand side of this blog. There's also some totally unrelated Christmas stories for sale there, too!

Killer reason why Mormonism is not true

The killer reason as to why Mormonism is not true is that Joseph Smith, and several other people, made the whole thing up.

The Book of Mormon was made up from bits of the Bible, bits of other books including even a bit of Shakespeare, and he mined the philosophy of others to add verisimilitude to the whole rotten structure.

Plus, of course, there was the latter stealing of Methodist Church services and formats, the wholesale theft of Masonic Rites, etc., etc.

An oddity of Mormonism

An oddity of Mormonism is that, although the official name of the Mormon Church is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Or LDS) is that there seems very little real emphasis on Jesus Christ, himself.

In fact, there is often more emphasis on Joseph Smith the founder of the LDS Church than on Jesus Christ.

Several years ago BYU had a sort of weird Joseph Smith Nativity Scene instead of a traditional Jesus Christ Nativity Scene. And yet Mormons still cannot understand why other Christians can look at them and wonder exactly how Christian the Mormons are.

The writings of Joseph Smith seem to indicate that he thought he was not equal to Jesus but even better than him. Blasphemous? Joseph Smith? Well, you read what's on this link and then see how people might think it so...

http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_josephsmithworship.html

Combine THAT with the "Amway, Noni Juice, Nu Skin, Mary Kay, Nature’s Sunshine Products, Herbalife, Nutra-Smart, XanGo, Living Scriptures, 4Life Research, NSA, Pharmanex, Quixtar, Shaklee, Kirby, etc., etc., etc" Multi Level Marketing aspects of Mormonism and see why many people in the world shake their heads and wonder if, perhaps, Mormonism is more a money making pseudo cult rather than being a 'straight' religious cult?

By the way, some of those MLM firms have roots in Utah and were, in at least one or two cases, founded by faithful Mormons...

Here is a video of someone channelling for Joseph Smith!

Was the founding of Mormonism a 'political' decision?

The Church of England (aka Episcopalian Church) was founded in England. As were the Baptists and the Methodist Churches. Lutherans came from Germany and the Roman Catholic Church was, basically, an Italian church.

There wasn't much going for a home-grown church. So, could it be that the decision to found what became the Mormon faith was based on a desire to start a local church which would be aimed towards the American way of life?

Of course, for it to be truly local it would need some authority. So what better than a sacred text found and translated in America by a local boy?

Unfortunately they chose to use Joseph Smith who allowed his imagination to run away with him and the rest is, as they say, history.

The Harpies of Haycock County

I don’t know why I continue living in Haycock County. No, that’s a lie. Of course I know why I continue living in Haycock County. Like I ever had a choice, after the first day I arrived there...

How to describe Haycock County? Imagine the typical small towns in old episodes of The Twilight Zone. Then add something from one of the more bizarre episodes from the X Files and perhaps even something from The Land That Time Forgot. Excepting that the Dinosaurs in Haycock County were the fossilised attitudes of the majority of the inhabitants. And you might have some idea about what kind of a place Haycock County is.

I avoid going into what passes for the town of Haycock, the pretty much futile seat of government for the county for as long as I can. I only visit the town when I need to call at the bank to collect money from my Veteran’s pension –You know it, Vietnam, the war nobody cares to remember but that some of us can’t choose to forget? (damn! That sound like a Country Western song title, doesn’t it?) and to collect my supplies from what masquerades as the Haycock Mart. The bank only had one elderly PC and the Haycock Mart was… well, it just was. There was also a school of sorts, where the children of Haycock County were taught whatever crap the feckless teaching staff could be bothered to teach them.

My route into town passes by the Bligh farm. When I was driving back home, I saw the crows wheeling high over the top meadow, the one close to the farmhouse. I noticed the hulking form of Billy-Boy Bligh, outside the farmhouse. I sighed. Whenever I saw Billy-Boy Bligh I knew there would be trouble.

I was driving along the semi-dirt track that passes for the main road into Haycock Town itself, and I swung my truck off the road onto the farm track up to the Bligh place. Bligh Farm –secretly referred to as Blight Farm by most of the inhabitants of Haycock County, and not without good reason- squatted sullenly on a ridge of land above the town.

It was several years since I had last felt it necessary to visit the Bligh place, I had been able to successfully avoid it, but the crows gave me an uneasy, bad feeling. Crows are good people. I guess that’s why they were warning me about Billy-Boy.

Some background information on the Bligh family. They had been part of Haycock County since the very early days. Originally the Blighs had been part of what had been the intelligentsia of Haycock County. From what I could make out that meant a group of self-selected local worthies who had gotten together in various locations in the town, talked and spat on the floor. The “intelligentsia” part had come because they had managed to hit the spittoons and missed the floor, themselves and each other more often than the average Haycockian. Perhaps I am being harsh. Though I doubt it.

Jackson Bligh had been a newly-qualified lawyer back in the first decade of the 18th Century, when he settled down on farmland just outside the recently established town of Haycock. From what I could make out, nothing noteworthy had happened to the Bligh family until Zebulon Bligh came back from a stint in the US Calvary, having fought the Indians. He had been known as a bright young man, full of high ideals. Nobody had been able to figure out why he had joined the US Cavalry. Except that he liked riding and had a youthful enthusiasm for adventure. He had become ill with a fever that lasted many weeks, after he was wounded fighting a tribe somewhere out in the West. The US Cavalry invalided him out as unfit for duty.

When he came back, the people noticed that although he seemed to be the same Zebulon Bligh they had sent off to join the US Cavalry, an important part of him had been left behind.

He developed the notion that he was much better than everyone else and he began to become more and more isolated from the other inhabitants of Haycock County.

Zebulon decided to create “a unique and important experiment in social living.” In short he decided that he and his family would experiment with intermarriage and polygamy. Rumour has it that Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon faith had heard about the Bligh experiment and had enthusiastically taken it up for his newly established church.

Several others had copied Zebulon’s group marriage experiment and had introduced it to their own flocks. All with varying degrees of disappointment, heartache and humiliation. Preachers were tarred and feathered. And the leader of the Mormon cult, Joe Smith, had reportedly died in a fire fight for asking the wrong married woman to join his flock of wives, so Zebulon’s experiment even caused trouble for people hundreds of miles away from Haycock County.

The Bligh family experiment had been used for a study by a university back in the sixties. It had been called: “Bligh or Blight? A report into the genetically degenerative effects of the Zebulon Bligh ‘unique and important experiment in social living’ and the effects on subsequent generations of the family.”

Apparently the author of the study came back to Haycock County once too often. The people of the town believed that The Harpies of Haycock County dived down from the sky and had eaten him alive. But I didn’t believe that. Not for one moment. I suspected that if anyone had devoured him, it had been the Bligh family, and that his remains (such as they would have been!) could have been buried somewhere up on the ridge of Bligh Farm. Or even in the private cemetary Old Zebulon Bligh had established in a remote piece of the Bligh farm lands, unregistered, of course...

Oh. You want to know about the Harpies of Haycock County? That's a story that had been used since the early days of the settling of the area. Used to explain all sorts of mysterious events. And to frighten children into being good. And there's something else about the Harpies of Haycock County that I'll tell you about, soon...

When my truck rattled and bumped up the track to the farm, I saw Billy-Boy standing over something on the ground. He was waving a rifle around. He looked like he was drunk. Or maybe it was the inbreeding? Hard to tell.

I felt a twinge of pity for him. He was the product of 200 years of close inbreeding. Fact was it was a miracle that any of the last batches of Bligh kids had survived at all. According to rumour, many of them hadn’t. But -hey? Would you check up on them? I don’t blame Sheriff Harter and his predecessors for steering well clear of the Blighs.

Billy-Boy was a shambling wreck of a man. Every time I thought of his name I felt like laughing. I mean, who in the hell would want to call their child Billy-Boy Bligh? The same idiots who had decided to call his twin sister Billy-Girl Bligh, that’s who… Thank God, the family was dying out. Not as fast as many would have liked, but still, it was something, I suppose. Billy-Boy and Billy-Girl were the last rotten fruits of a poisonous family tree.

“Hey. That you, Dixon?”

I got out of my truck slowly and acknowledged that I was, indeed, myself.

“How are you Billy-Boy?”

“Not too bad. Doing better than sis, mind.”

“Oh, really? What’s wrong with sis?” I hoped I sounded sincere enough. I guess I had done, as he had not shot me with the old rifle he was holding. Billy-Boy was very, very protective when it came to the subject of his sister, Billy-Girl.

“She’s ill. Got the Little Family Problem, you know?”

The Little Family Problem? I thought. That would be the weird genetic disorder that basically shut down all of the body organs of the Bligh women, organ-by-organ, until they died. I merely nodded in response to Billy-Boy.

“But I reckon that I have the problem just about beat.” I did not like the way he said that. This was probably what the crows were telling me about.

“How’s that, Billy-Boy?” Speak softly, don’t antagonise him. I remember hearing about what he had done to Delany LeBouf in the Haycock Pub. They never did find poor Delany’s right hand. And Delany has resided in the Sumner County Mental Hospital these past ten years. Nobody had ever figured out what Delany had said or done to upset Billy-Boy like that. My theory is that Delany had, in a fit of drunken stupidity, told Billy-Boy exactly how ugly and misshapen his sister was.

Usually you can see an ugly person and say something like: “Yes, but they have nice eyes.” Or “they have such a nice personality.” There was nothing nice or even faintly redeeming about Billy-Girl. She not only looked ugly, when you looked at her you knew that her ugliness went way beyond soul deep. People in Haycock County think that Billy-Boy is dangerous. Perhaps he is. But I don’t believe he is nearly half as dangerous as his sister, Billy-Girl.

Billy-Boy licked his lips, eyeing me up and down. “You are a man of honour, aren’t you, Dixon? I mean, you served your country and all, over in Vietnam, right?

That wasn’t strictly true –the part about serving my country, but I let it pass. “Yes Billy, I fought in Vietnam. A lot of us did. Many people still seem unwilling to think about it and what it did to us. But you, you are different, somehow. You seem to understand what we went through. And I am grateful for that.” And strangely enough, I was.

“Oh, that’s ‘cos I read Zebulon Bligh’s diaries about been in the US Cavalry. He was in the US Cavalry, you know?”

“Yeah, I know that Billy-Boy. Fact is, I served with some members of the US Cavalry in Vietnam.”

“They don’t have horses now, though.” That was a statement, rather than a question from Billy. I nodded in reply.

“Billy-Boy, you said that you could beat Billy-Girl’s problem? How is that?”

He licked his thickened lower lip before speaking, dropping his voice into a conspiratorial whisper. “I am going to make a human sacrifice.”

Oh, shit, no. There’d been reports and whispered rumours that the Bligh family had long, long ago left the Baptist church... but -human sacrifice? That surprised even me. A think trickle of sweat ran the length of my back. No wonder the Crows had been anxious for me to stop by. People misjudge Crows. And they’d know that I’d have to try to put a stop to this.

“Who you going to use, Billy-Boy?”

“Come and see. I got the little feller out back.”

I followed Billy-Boy round the side of the large, tumbledown house. In the back yard I saw a small, begrimed figure. It was staked out on a long rope. “Hey. Dixon, meet the boy. He is going to help me save my sister.”

At that moment I heard the mooing, bawling noise that passed for the voice of Billy-Girl emanating from somewhere within the house. Billy-Boy turned to me and said: “Don’t you even think about taking the boy with you, Dixon, if you got ideas of saving him. Because I know where you live. And I could sacrifice you, just as well as the boy.”

He shambled off, quickly, towards the house.

I looked down at the boy. His eyes were dulled with fear. He said in a resigned tone of voice: “You aren’t going to be able to help me, are you?”

I carefully replied: “Don’t be too certain, son. How in the hell did you come to be here?”

“My folks were driving along the State Highway just North of Haycock County when a rotten tree fell on the automobile. Mom, Dad and my little Sister were all killed outright, I escaped with a few bruises. Trouble is I have no other family and the old Judge living in the town signed adoption papers giving me to Billy-Boy and his sister.” He began to cry.

Shit. Now I knew what had happened. Judge Bannerman, that would have been. Some people believe he had been born senile. There was certainly no way that he should have signed those papers. And Billy-Boy had almost certainly known that. Though there was no reason for the boy to have known.

“What’s you name, son?”

“Peter Hewlett. You?”

“David Dixon. I am going to get you out of here, somehow.”

“You’d better hurry! Billy-Boy is the Harpy Master! He told me that! He’s going to stake me out and leave me out for the Harpies of Haycock County to come and kill me!” He was becoming hysterical.

“Stop that! Stop that right this minute! No Harpy is going to come anywhere near you.” I was going to say more, but held back, as Billy-Boy was returning.

“Peter here tells me you are going to leave him out for the Harpies. Sounds like a good plan, to me. How you going to get them to come down, Billy-Boy?”

He glared at Peter before turning his gaze on me. “I am going to keep his staked out and then, I am gonna cut his throat! The smell of blood will attract the Harpies and they’ll come and eat him.”

I sucked my teeth, feigning doubt. “You sure about that, Billy-Boy? I’d heard how the Harpies don’t like carrion. Now Crows, on the other hand, they do like carrion. But Harpies? They are different. They have to have their meat so fresh it, that it's still alive. You never heard that?” I made the last part of that statement puzzled, as if I was shocked that nobody had thought to tell him.

He shook his head. “No. I never hear that. What should I do, then?” Good. He thinks I am conspiring with him. Think, Dixon! You used to be good at that! Think!

“You need to leave him out in the open. The field halfway up your farm track should be OK, I’d guess. Just stake down him with that long piece of rope you got him on, but give him plenty of room to move. The Harpies like a bit of sport from what I have heard. They prefer a living, moving target.”

Billy-Boy was interested in this idea. “Sure. But how do the Harpies know where to go, if they don’t smell blood?”

“Don’t worry, Billy-Boy. The Harpies will know where to go. They always know where to go.” He was clearly howling mad. For some reason I thought about poor Sheriff Harter, probably sat in his office in town or more likely in the coffee shop across the street, blissfully unaware of what was happening.

“Well, Billy-Boy I guess I’d better be going. Got to put the groceries away.”

He nodded, lost in his thoughts, wandering back to the house.

I whispered: “Peter, listen to me. I’ll bring help for you. Just stay as calm as you can. And try not to be frightened, no matter what you hear tonight, OK? And say nothing to Billy-Boy.”

He whispered in reply: “You are coming back for me?” I nodded and returned to my truck.

Later that evening soon after dark I returned to the Bligh place. Thank God! I found Peter, safe, where I had told Bligh to put him. He was trembling like a leaf as I untied him.

“There were screams from the farm. I heard terrible, horrible screams from Billy Boy and that… that thing of a sister of his. It was her idea to sacrifice me! What has happened?!” He was a little out of it. But there was no wonder to that.

I looked at him. How to tell him? The truth. Same way as I had heard it, all those years ago. “Peter I knew the Harpies would not come to kill you. I also knew that Billy-Boy was not the Harpy Master. Not, as you’d think, because Harpies are mythical creatures, that don't exist. Rather, it was because I am the Harpy Master. When I told the Harpies what Billy-Boy had planned for you, they were very, very angry. We knew that Billy-Boy would be a continuing danger to you, so we knew that they, the Harpies, had to kill him and his sister.”

I called one of the Harpies over. She flew to us. It was Leliali. Peter looked at her and gasped: “But... she is so beautiful! Billy-Boy told me they were ugly, but he was lying! They are so beautiful!” I knew from the way she held her head that Leliali was also rather taken with Peter, so that was part of the battle over.

In the truck driving back to my place I told Peter my story. In a way, it was not totally dissimilar to his. “I am not even an American, Peter. I am English, though I have lived most of my life in America. My father was working for a large British firm; he was the director of their US operation, based in LA. I was of the age that, if I stayed any longer, I knew I would be eligible for the draft into the US Army and sent off to fight in Vietnam.

“It wasn’t my country and it certainly wasn’t my war, so I wanted to fly back to England to stay with friends. But my father would not let me. My mother was weak and my father kept prevaricating and delaying, until one day in the morning post, I got my draft papers. I was scared shitless, let me tell you. But I worked out a plan of escape. I managed to get together enough cash to buy a ticket to Canada. But my father found out about my plans and he told the Military Police about it.”

“What happened?”

“The MPs were very good to me, when they came. I remember that one of them, especially, was absolutely furious with my father. He said to him: “Why the hell didn’t you let your son go to Canada, you Limey jackass?” My father mumbled something about military service making a man out of me. The MP muttered something under his breath about better to be a boy in Canada, alive, than coming back as a man in an aluminium box, but I am not sure my father heard him. He made no outward sign of it.

“I was taken for my induction and basic training and then, a shockingly short time later, or so it seemed, I found myself in Vietnam. I was there for nine months until I received a wound that sent me back to the US and I recovered in a military hospital. I went to visit my parents but found out that soon after I had been drafted, they’d gone back to England, without leaving a forwarding address. I never saw them again. Never tried to contact them. Didn't care to.

“I signed up for a twenty year stint in the army, that was finished nineteen years in, when I received a medical discharge due to a helicopter crash. I was lucky. Only three of us survived out of 15.”

“How did you end up here?

“I was driving through, just going from place-to-place, drifting along on my military pension, when I found an old man, lying at the side of the road. I stopped my car and I took him to his home, which was a couple of miles outside of town. His name was Brewster Haycock, the last member of the family that had founded the county and the town two hundred years previously. I nursed him back to health. But there was always something that seemed to niggle at him, something that he wasn’t telling me.

“Eventually, he told me that he was the Harpy Master. He introduced me to Leliali, and the rest of the Harpies. He trained me to become the Harpy Master. And that’s what I am going to do for you, Peter. Train you to be the Harpy Master.”

He said nothing, his eyes still fixed on Leliali. I knew he’d do it, accept the training, I mean. Then he’d take over from me and continue the tradition of Harpy Master of Haycock County.

Later that night, while Peter slept soundly in his new bed, I set fire to Bligh Farm. I didn’t want any questions. After all, Harpies do make a hell of a mess when they feed…

Was Joseph Smith a martyr?

Was Joseph Smith a martyr? That's a very good question. If you speak to any faithful Mormon (or TBM as they are sometimes known) the answer will be: "Why, yes! Of course he was! He was martyred at Carthage Jail!"

A martyr is someone who is put to death for his faith. "Like a lamb to the slaughter" is one definition of the act of being a martyr. Or Martyrdom as it is also known.

Generally, a martyr just accepts their fate and dies for their religion. They do not fight back. Some of them even make jokes about their martyrdom, and or forgive those that are martyring them.

Did anything like that happen in the case of Joseph Smith? No. It did not. Because Joseph Smith fought back. He drew a pistol on the mob who were attacking him and his companions and either injured or killed some of them.

Now, that was his right. Every man and woman has a right to defend themselves against attack. Even if this necessitates killing the attacker in extreme cases. And, let's face it, being attacked by a mob baying for your life is an extreme case.

But for followers of the church Joseph Smith founded to claim that Joseph Smith was a martyr is just plain wrong. A victim of a murderous attack, yes, he was. But a martyr? No. To describe Joseph Smith as a martyr is stretching the definition of that word beyond breaking point.

Here is a link to some 'real' martyrs for comparison:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_martyrs

Mormons and criticism

Many Mormons do not like to hear or read criticism of their church. They believe they have a God-given right to correct what they see as misinformation about the Mormon church.

If we are to believe Mormons there was never any blood oaths in the Mormon Temple ceremony, Joseph Smith only had one wife (and if he did have more than one wife, including women already married to other men and young, nubile girls under the age of 16, it did not matter as they were only ever 'spiritual' wives) and Mountain Meadows was only an attack by Indians on a wagon train of people passing through the territory. And in any case, it did not matter, as did you know that some of those people on that wagon train were actually part of the mob that martyred Joseph Smith?

And did you know that neither Joseph Smith or Brigham Young ever ordered a group of men called the Danites (which didn't exist, anyway) to murder people? And even if Joseph Smith and Brigham Young HAD ordered the non-existent group to murder people, it would not have mattered as they would almost certainly have deserved it, and blood atonement was never preached or practised.

When Mormons tell or pass on these lies, do they know they are lying? OR do they really believe what they are saying? I remember one former Mormon mentioning the blood oaths in the temple ceremony to someone who had gone through the temple at roughly the same time as them. They were shocked when the practising Mormon denied there had ever been blood oaths as part of the temple ceremony, and challenged the former Mormon asking them why they would make up such a story? It was, they reported, as if part of the memory of the practising Mormon had been surgically removed. Unless, of course, the Mormon was just a liar? Which tends to indicate that some Mormons do "Lie for the Lord."

FLDS in Texas

The FLDS story will, to coin an old journalistic expression, run and run. Especially when lawyers for the FLDS get involved. And just wait for self-proclaimed civil Rights lawyers to get their snouts in the trough!

Some people have questioned the propriety of the raid/s in that they offend their liberal sensibilities. These seem to run along the lines of: "People should be allowed to do what they want on their own property" and "parents should have a right to bring up their own children in any way that they see fit." Yes, but not if that bringing up of children utilises what boils down to torture techniques outlawed by International Military Conventions for use against enemy combatants, let alone against your own toddlers and children, for goodness sake!

The people responsible for all this are Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Sidney Rigdon and the other early leaders of The So-Called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

It was Brigham Young's decision to move to the then isolated territory of Utah and the ultra-draconian measures he introduced (including ruling by fear) that caused this dreadful situation to exist down to this time.

Brigham Young used Mountain Meadows, attacks on native Indians and guerilla attacks on the USA Army for two purposes. The first to stop the rule of law -of real law- being introduced in Utah and to raise up a fire-storm of fear in the hearts of his followers. Dissenters knew that they were likely to be taken out at night, their throat slit and to be denied a decent, Christian burial.

Their wife and children would be put upon Brigham Young's slavery auction block and sold off to the highest bidder. Oh, its doubtful if money changed hands. for the bill of currency was that of favours owed and favours dispensed.

"You scratch my back and I'll ensure that the next apostate dissenter who crosses my path and needs to be 'used up', well, his wife, his children and his lands will be yours in order to build up your kingdom when you get to the Celestial Kingdom."

Of course, the corollary to that was: "Change your ways, cross me, and the same thing happens to you."

The history of attacks and murders within the fundamentalist Mormon Church down through the decades shows that the Danite murder gang -almost a sect within a sect, if you will- and their descendants have operated almost without pause since Smith founded it.

People who have raised the legitimate question about Joseph Smith "was he a "pious fraud?" need to understand one thing: The answer to their question was staring them in the face throughout: Does a pious fraud set up a secret murder gang / death squad and use it to terrorise and to brutally rub out opposition by internal and external outrages? By murdering people and by stealing the land of followers and of non-member neighbours? By using fraud, trickery, deceit and outright theft? "No," I think is the answer to that.

If you want to study the operation and structure of the early Mormon Church,how it treated neighbours, members and their children, study the history, dark and bleak as it is, of the fundamentalist Mormon church in all its myriad sects and offshoots.

Murder, rapine, theft, fraud, rape, torture and abuse of men, women and children is what you will find. The Mormon Church is a whited sepulchre that is built on sand. The walls are already starting to crack, and the stench from within is sickening.

The FLDS is still very much a part of the official LDS Church.

What is the difference between them? The difference between two Mafia families, one might argue. I.E., not very much.

Four key differences between Jesus and Joseph Smith

Jesus said: "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”
Joseph Smith said: “My word, little girl. You certainly have big tits for your age.”

Jesus said: “Don’t store up treasures on the earth”
Joseph Smith said: “Give me ten percent of your income. In fact, give me all of your money and I’ll put it in my "bank." You sucker!”

Jesus said: “Love your fellow man”
Joseph Smith said: “You love your fellow man whilst I will love your fellow man’s wife, his daughter, his sister, his niece, his mother...”

Jesus said: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Joseph Smith said: “Take that, you bastards! I’m gonna take some of you with me!”

And those are four key differences between Jesus and Joseph Smith.