If you take a close look at the
Samaritans, the polyglot race of people who arose as an identifiable group in
what had been the Kingdom of Israel – but only after that kingdom was
decapitated by the Assyrians – you might find some surprising parallels with
the people who profess to be Latter Day Saints of Jesus, but who most of us
know as Mormons.
Both groups blended established
God-centered faiths with often-bizarre man-made accretions. Together, and in
each case, those two ill-fitting components resulted in bastardized faith that
was neither sanctified by God nor was exactly – or at least entirely –
pagan.
Though Wikipedia says there are still
around 300 Samaritans known to exist, most of them in Israel, I don’t know any
Samaritans personally. However, I do
know some Mormons, including some people I like very much. The ones I know best are faithful and sincere
in their beliefs. Like most people of faith, they believe in the faith of their
fathers – the faith they were raised up in. They do so without taking too much
time to try and sort out the logic – if any – in their faith, instead focusing
on attending services, praying, and on serving their church and their fellow
man.
Those folks I know are decent people, and
I mean them no offense, just as I have no burning grudge against the
Samaritans. Yet I believe their “faith”
is false and man-made, and I fear for their immortal souls. While they claim to worship Jesus, the Jesus
they worship preached to non-existent people in towns no archeologist has been
able to find. That mythic figure is not
the Jesus whom John the Apostle boldly proclaimed was the only path to God,
quoting Jesus as saying:
“I am the way, the truth and the life. No one
can come to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6 – NLT)
However, to understand them, I think a
comparison of modern-day Mormons with ancient Samaritans will prove insightful,
if not particularly flattering to the Mormons.
There are also some striking similarities
between the Latter Day Saints and Islam, in that both “faiths” were created by
a single man, who had a “sacred source” that nobody else could see or
hear. In addition, each founder was a
polygamist who has been accused of marrying child-brides, girls far below the
age of puberty, let alone the age of consent.
But that’s a topic for another time.
To understand today’s Mormons, let’s first
look at antiquity’s Samaritans.
Who were
the Samaritans? The Samaritan people
began as an agrarian, Semitic people who were left behind when the Assyrians
conquered the Ten Tribes who made up the Kingdom of Israel. The Assyrian
conquerors did not deport every Israelite.
Instead, they basically decapitated the Kingdom, taking into exile all
of the leaders, as well as the priests and the merchants who were the educated “middle
class” of the kingdom.
However, the left-behind Samaritans
quickly evolved from an agrarian Semitic people to a more cosmopolitan polyglot
race. This occurred when the Assyrians
took people from as many as a dozen conquered lands from all over the Near East
and forcibly relocated them to what had once been Israel. Suddenly, the
left-behind Israelites were part of a new society, centered around
Samaria. Of course, when these imported
strangers arrived, they brought with them their own pagan gods, and their idols,
and their priests.
The surviving Israelite peasant farmers
and shepherds remembered a time of temple worship and official – if sporadic –
opposition to pagan worship. But these
left-behinds had been “the least of these” in their society. They had no training in anything but
agriculture and animal husbandry. They
had no literacy, no temple priests or synagogue rabbis of their own – and,
therefore, no way of restarting their “Faith of Abraham and of Moses.”
However, the imported peoples from a
dozen cultures, when confronted with the wild, depopulated wilderness that had
become known as Samaria – which, our bible tells us was now the home of fierce
wild beasts – petitioned the Assyrians for help. Soon, some priests of Yahweh were sent to
what had once been the state of Israel.
Their mission, appointed by their
Assyrian overlords, was to help the new, imported Samaritan upper-class to cope
with the chaos which this land had become. They were to do this by propitiating
with their tribal god, who was thought to be the head celestial honcho in
Samaria. Among pagans – with their
pantheons – a more-or-less universal belief was that each of the “gods” had a
specific territory. This could be an area of land, or members of a trade, or
even of an attribute.
The thought back in Assyria was that
Yahweh was just one tribal god among many, but one who had a special affinity
for Samaria. Leaders sent the Israeli temple priests because it was believed
that – with the proper priestly intervention – Yahweh could be persuaded to
re-tame the wilderness.
All of which meant that Yahweh’s priests
had status in the community, but they were not the “only game in town.” Worse, they were still slaves and expected to
get along with the imported pagans, their priests and their gods. However, since Israel was decapitated because
God got fed up with the Israelites repeated flirtation with Baal and his
priests, it was not hard for Yahweh’s temple priests to – as we say today – “go
along to get along.”
So was born the polyglot Samaritan race,
comprised of former Israelite farmers and shepherds, along with “imports” from
a dozen conquered cultures and civilizations, each with their own god or
gods. Those priests together forged the
“new” Samaritan religion – part adapted Mosaic Hebrew and part imported
pagan. They claimed to be the true
descendents of Abraham and Moses – their “bible” stopped with the first five
books – but their neighbors in Judea to the south took a somewhat different
view of the Samaritans, and their odd mixture of beliefs.
The new Samaritan race made their
provincial capital the city now known as Samaria – it had a different name
then. All the people of this land,
regardless of origin, became known as Samaritans.
As an aside, among the followers of Yahweh – dating all the way back to the days of Joseph and of Moses, keeping genealogies had been an important means of keeping track of which tribe a person belonged to. That tribal affiliation could even determine an individual’s career path. Especially for those at the top of the cultural pyramid – such as priests or kings – pure bloodlines were important.
Today, when we think of “pure blood
lines,” we think of Jim Crow laws or Adolph Hitler’s holocaust. But in those
days, heritage was important, and pure blood lines often had a life-changing
impact, but they weren’t necessarily the cause or trigger for oppression or
genocide. Still, in the ancient Near
East, a person’s bloodline mattered – a lot. Yet for the Samaritans, there were
no pure bloodlines – none at all – and in that culture, this meant that no
natural-born leaders arose to lead them out of bondage to foreign satraps.
To put this into perspective, two of the
Gospels – Matthew and Luke – begin with their own genealogies of Jesus. Each recognized the importance of tracing the
ancestry that led to the Messiah – the natural-born leader of the Jews – for
indeed, that ancestry was the subject of many ancient messianic prophecies. This tracking of blood lines was that
important to the people of Judea in the time of Christ, in the society and
their faith.
Samaritans had nothing to compare with
those unbroken bloodlines. With the
Israeli leadership gone forever, and with new settlers arriving from a dozen
Near Eastern cultures and races, the polyglot Samaritans quickly became a
polyglot race of abandoned Hebrews and imported Pagans. As subject of the Assyrians, these
left-behinds and imports lived together – and interbred together – for more
than two centuries before Judea fell. Intermarriage
among these peoples, along with the intermingling of their various pagan
religions with the worship of the one true God, served to create in Samaria its
own kind of chaos.
Add to this a salient fact: at no time
were these cobbled-together Samaritans ever an independent people. Their race was
created by an Assyrian king, and for centuries they were ruled by that king, or
by his successors – including Babylonian and Persian successors. Sometimes the
Samaritans were ruled harshly, sometimes with a feather-soft touch – but always
without any racial or cultural free will.
History records that the Samaritans did what they were told to do,
knowing that to disobey meant that they’d face consequences they knew only too
well.
Like the Hebrews who God sent Moses to
save from Pharaoh after 400 years of slavery, the Samaritans had always a slave
race. Yet unlike the Hebrews, God did
not send a savior to free them from bondage.
The Samaritans were, therefore, a people who’d never known freedom. In a
world that prized pure bloodlines, they were a polyglot race, which meant they
were looked down upon by all “pure” races.
Worse – for their status among their fellow captive and free neighbors –
they had a mix-and-match man-made religion. Despite the presence of Israeli
temple priests, this Samaritan national faith had only the most tangential
relationship to the worship of Yahweh as it was practiced at the time of Moses,
or as it was practiced in Judea, Samaria’s neighbor to the South.
The emerging Samaritan people, while
claiming to be true literal and spiritual descendents of Abraham and Moses, had
their own version of the Five Books that were, at best, only remotely similar
to the Hebrew bible’s first five books. The best you could say was that the
Samaritan Mosaic scripture was made up of a very different translation.
The Samaritans, of course, claimed their
five sacred books to be the only true translation, despite the fact that their
neighboring Judean Hebrews had direct generation-to-generation hand-offs of the
original texts. In the Samaritans’
revised Yahweh worshiping religion, they also cast aside all other canonical
holy books except their version of the Pentateuch. In this, the Samaritans turned their backs on
Joshua and the Judges, David and Solomon, and on the Israeli kingdom from which
they’d sprung.
At this point, you may be wondering, “what does this have to do with the Mormons?” If you’ve read this far, I ask you to keep reading just a bit farther, as this will all soon become clear.
These Samaritans who evolved out of
Israel’s remnants also declared their own Holy Mountain – Mount Gerizim – and
the surviving 300 or so Samaritans still hold Mount Gerizim holy to this day.
Naturally, the Samaritans promptly
claimed that Mount Gerizim was the “original” Holy Mountain, the one identified
by Joshua in the days immediately after the Exodus, and not the “Temple Mount”
of David and Solomon. Accordingly, they
built their own Temple on that Holy Mountain, dedicating it to a god they
called Yahweh, but not the Yahweh who still guided Judea – when the Hebrews
would listen to Him.
Though he shared the name with the God of
David and Solomon, the Samaritan’s god could not have truly been Yahweh. He, as
we know, is a jealous God who will allow no other Gods before him. Yet by all accounts, the Samaritans shared Yahweh’s
Temple and their Holy Mount Gerizim with the grab-bag collection of pagan beliefs
and pantheistic gods that had migrated to the land once known as Israel.
The Samaritans’ bastardized form of
Yahweh worship violated both the sacred guidelines laid out for temple worship
in the real Pentateuch, then went a step further by mixing Yahweh worship with
the worship of pagan gods and false beliefs in their “something for everyone”
man-made religion.
By the time that the Babylonians decapitated Judea the way the Assyrians had decapitated the leadership of Israel, these Samaritans had existed apart from Judea for the several centuries. They had existed as a polyglot slave race for the entire time between the permanent exile of the Ten Lost Tribes and the temporary exile of Judea.
However, one long generation later, when
the Persians took over the Fertile Crescent, they allowed – under government
control – the first of the Jews to return to Judea. The reason for their return
was imperial policy, which called for identified captive races to reinstate
their own faiths, in their own historic tribal regions. This policy led to a
vanguard of Jews being sent to the rubble of Jerusalem, there to restore the
Temple and to reinstate Temple Worship. The Persians recognized that it was
this Temple Worship which had defined the true followers of Yahweh from the
time of the Exodus to the time of the Babylonian Exile.
However, when the true followers of
Yahweh returned, that’s when their now-meddlesome neighbors, the Samaritans,
stepped in.
First, they offered to help the Judeans
to rebuild their temple. They offered funds, and labor and materials. They did this
even though the Samaritans had their own – and, they claimed, only – real
temple, on God’s only real Holy Mountain, Gerizim. The bible tells us that the Judeans wisely
smelled a rat – they swiftly declined the Samaritans’ offer.
That’s when the true nature of the
Samaritans’ offer became crystal clear.
Having been rebuffed locally, the Samaritans took a legal case before
the Persian court. They claimed the Judeans were a rebellious lot who had no
loyalty to the Persia emperor. The
Emperor sided with the Samaritans, and work on the Jerusalem temple stopped
after only the foundation had been laid and the altar erected.
As Ezra later reported, sixteen years
later, the prophets Haggai and Zechariah got the returnees moving again. There
was a new Emperor, who overturned the Samaritan decision. With his blessing,
and with imperial funding, construction was re-started. Some scholars believe that Haggai’s last
prophetic statements, in Haggai Chapter 2, reflect a renewed offer by the
Samaritans to help fund the rebuilding of the temple.
On the
twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, in the second year of Darius, the word of
the Lord came to
the prophet Haggai: “This
is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Ask the priests what the law says: If someone carries consecrated meat in the fold of
their garment, and that fold touches some bread or stew, some wine, olive oil
or other food, does it become consecrated?’”
The
priests answered, “No.”
Then
Haggai said, “If a person defiled by contact with a dead body touches one of
these things, does it become defiled?”
“Yes,” the
priests replied, “it becomes defiled.”
Then Haggai said, “‘So it is with
this people and this nation in my sight,’ declares the Lord. ‘Whatever they do and whatever they offer there is defiled.
But even if that interpretation of Haggai
2 is not what happened – if instead, Haggai was prophesying against those
well-off Jews who were unwilling to give their whole heart over to the Temple’s
restoration – the Samaritans were still not to be trusted, for their god was
false.
Experience quickly taught those Judeans
who came back to Jerusalem that their neighboring polyglot race of mixed-faith
semi-pagans were no friend of the true followers of Yahweh. And so it remained until the time of Jesus.
The Judeans later conquered Samaria –
only to be conquered in turn by Alexander and his Greeks. Then the Maccabees retook the land, only to
have it later fall to the unstoppable Rome.
Yet no matter who was in charge, the Samaritans were a second-class
people, still little better than a slave race, a people who were bystanders in
the march of civilization and faith.
By the time of Jesus, Samaritans were
despised by the Temple hierarchy. They were looked on with suspicion and –
presumably, prejudice – by the true followers of Yahweh. Despite their
oppressed status, the Samaritans maintained that they were authentic Yahweh
worshipers. However, nobody else seemed to believe them, or to even care what
they believed.
Samaritans
and LDS: So what does that
historical look at the origins and fading existence of the Samaritans have to
do with the members of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints? Well, a number of things.
However, before we get into that, like
the ancient Hebrews, the LDS has a “thing” about genealogy. However, this is
not intended to demonstrate pure bloodlines. Instead, their use of genealogy is
just one part of the mixed bag of beliefs they hold to.
At the core of those beliefs, by the way,
is this: through the revelation of
Joseph Smith, the LDS and its followers have restored the original church
founded by Jesus Christ. If you
understand nothing else about the Mormon faith, understand that they believe
that they have the only true faith, and that all of Christendom is an
apostasy.
Beginning the LDS saga, a New Yorker in
1830 named Joseph Smith dug up from a hillside in upper New York State, as he
later claimed, a set of golden plates. These plates were inscribed with an
unknown language, using an unknown alphabet, and clearly of ancient
lineage. Smith also uncovered a kind of Rosetta Stone that allowed him to
translate the words inscribed on those golden plates.
These translated gold plates became The Book of Mormon – Another Testament of
Jesus Christ, the first sacred book in what became the Mormon faith. The church now has two other sacred texts, The Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price, though over
time, some sections of those books have been added to, deleted from or
eliminated.
Smith claimed that the bible remained a
holy book – that his Book of Mormon merely expanded on it. Yet to make
this work, Smith also undertook – under the direction of an angelic editor – to
rewrite significant sections of the Christian Holy Bible, to make that ancient
and sacred book more in-line with his new revelation. In this, Smith broke
faith with the last commandment in the Holy Bible, found in Revelation 22:18-19
(NIV):
I warn everyone who
hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them,
God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll. And if anyone
takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that
person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described
in this scroll.
However, God’s commands as presented in holy
scripture never seemed to deter Joseph Smith.
To understand to what the Latter Day
Saints anchor their faith – and to better see how closely this parallels the Samaritan’s
evolved faith – let’s look at the provenance of the three books sacred to the
Mormons.
The Book
of Mormon: This sacred-to-Mormons text describes the
resurrected Jesus’ visit to Native Americans in North America some time after
he ascended into Heaven. It includes the
writing of various prophets who lived and worked and prophesied during the
period from 2,200 BC to 421 A.D.
These long-hidden prophesies, as well as
other “sacred” material, were created for a group of people who God took from
Jerusalem to North America 600 years before Christ came to earth. These people are supposedly linked to the “ten
lost tribes” who were taken to Assyria, there to disappear from history.
The golden plates were covered with text
that was written in an unknown language by an Egyptian scribe. He wrote biblically-sounding history and
prophecy on plates of gold – a millennium or more later, these plates were
given to Smith by the Angel Moroni. At
different times, Smith credited “special spectacles” – magic reading glasses that
allowed him to translate and understand the ancient texts. At other times, he
credited a pair of seer stones that he put in a top hat for allowing him to
read this ancient writing.
He dictated the text he translated to any one of a group scribes who were generally not allowed to see the golden plates. However, eleven of Smith’s early followers did testify to having seen, and in some cases, handled, the golden plates. Once the translation was complete, the golden plates were returned to the Angel Moroni – except for some plates which were stolen and then disappeared from human ken.
As an aside, tens of thousands of Hebrews saw God’s holy tablets as given to Moses – but only a dozen Mormons, including Smith, claim to have seen the golden plates.
The first were the “Three Witnesses,” who
claimed to have been shown the plates by an angel, and to have heard God’s
voice vouching for them. These three
later broke with Smith – all were excommunicated, and all later recanted their
testimony. Then, even later – towards the
end of their lives – they once again embraced some version of their original
testimony. However, a number of them
claimed that their witnessing of the golden plates was in a vision, rather than
in a conscious and eyes-wide-open state.
The others were the “Eight Witnesses,”
who were either relatives of Smith’s
or
members of one other family – and all of the members of that other family were
soon either dead or excommunicated. None
of The Eight made any claim about angels or the voice of God, merely noting
that Smith showed them some gold plates.
All of these witnesses were Smith’s
family, close friends related by marriage, or financial backers.
Not wanting to break up a good thing,
when Smith died, one contender to his earthly throne produced his own buried
gold plates and the testimony of eleven witnesses – however, translations of those
plates, apparently, were not created, nor is there any evidence of their
continued existence.
Unlike the Mormons, Hebrew scripture
attests to the ongoing physical presence of the stone tablets. For centuries after entering the Promised
Land, the Hebrews carried that second set of stone engraved by God with them;
keeping them safely within His Ark of the Covenant.
However, except for those gold plates claimed
to have been stolen and lost, the other Mormon gold plates were returned to the
Angel Moroni. This ensured that no man would be able to ever again gaze on
them, let alone try to translate them.
Though this Book of Mormon is purported
to be an accurate description of the lives of the exiles from Jerusalem and
their descendents, their language was not Semitic, nor was their writing. In addition, no archeological evidence of
this has been found. Finally, there is
no DNA evidence to suggest that any Semitic refugees ever lived in North
America thousands of years ago. If these
lost Israelites were here for hundreds of years, they nevertheless managed to
leave no evidence – archeological or genetic. After the time of Jesus’ visits
and Moroni’s writing, they died out as a people with no surviving offspring.
While reported to have been written in
North American for migrants from Israel, the Book of Mormon also included
mention of objects and animals not native to North America, including:
Living: Cattle, horses,
asses, oxen, sheep, swine, goats, elephants and wheat
Non-Living: Steel, brass,
chains, iron scimitars and chariots
Nonetheless, the LDS considers The Book
of Mormon to be canonical and divinely accurate.
LDS and
Samaritans: Note that one commonality between the Mormons
of today with the Samaritans of the sacred text is their creation of a religion
that begins with portions of God’s covenant with the Hebrews (and, in the case
of the Mormons, with His later covenant with the followers of Christ). However,
in both cases, this sacred text is first suitably changed to match the new
faith’s evolved and evolving religious needs. This semi-faith is then blended with
supposedly divinely-inspired – but fantastical and seemingly man-made – religious-like
materials. Those fantastical Mormon “sacred
texts” include the next two:
Doctrine
and Covenants: Originally, the Doctrine and Covenants included speeches
by Smith that spelled out doctrine. Over time, that changed, and today, the
only still-canonical part of that book is a group of revelations that were
given to Smith by God, then dictated by Smith to scribes. As an aside, that revelation-and-dictation
creation style is very similar to the way the Q’uran came into being.
Pearl of
Great Price: The Pearl of Great Price,
the other sacred Mormon text, is an assemblage of Joseph Smith’s writings. This
includes a rewrite of the creation story, this one credited to Moses, as well
as a revision of the story of Abraham. That is reportedly based on papyrus
documents Smith purchased from a traveling mummy exhibition, then “translated.” At the time, nobody could read Egyptian hieroglyphics,
allowing the faithful to believe Smith’s “revealed translation.”
These discovered documents were reported
by Smith to have been written by the Patriarch Abraham himself, during his
sojourn in Egypt, 3,500 years ago. However,
unlike the angelic golden plates, some of these papyrus documents still exist,
much to the embarrassment of the Mormons.
For more than a century they were believed to have been destroyed in a Chicago
fire, but that is not the case.
Recently, fragments of those papyrus
documents were found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and other
fragments were found in LDS church archives. Instead of 3,500 year old
documents written by the hand of Abraham, these fragments were found to be
standard Egyptian funerary texts from 2,000 years ago. What has been translated
from them bear no relation to Smith’s revealed translation.
Adding insult to injury, The Pearl also contains Joseph Smith’s re-translation of the Gospel of Matthew, containing many significant changes and additions to the original biblical text, which Mormons now refer to as the Joseph Smith Translation. Since Smith had no training in biblical languages, the translations are deemed to have been dictated to Smith by God.
Finally, as an aside, the Samaritans had
a pantheon of gods, one of whom was Yahweh.
Joseph Smith took a similar approach in identifying his take on Yahweh
and his pantheon. In the “Teachings of Joseph Smith: Section 6, Pages 371-2,
1843-1844,” Smith wrote:
“'In the beginning the
head of the Gods brought forth the Gods,' or, as others have translated it, 'The
head of the Gods called the Gods together.' The head one of the Gods said, Let
us make a man in our own image."
Instead of the triune God who called forth
the creation of man in his own image, the Mormon God brought together his
fellow Gods to preside in this creation.
If anyone still doubts that the Mormon’s “God” is not the God found in
the Christian bible, consider those teachings.
Holy
Bible: Still, the LDS also
claims to include the Holy Bible among their sacred books, but, as noted above,
their version of the bible has been rather dramatically amended, edited and
reinterpreted by Joseph Smith. He restored “lost sections” of the Bible –
presumably under God’s guidance – that makes their bible far different, in some
sections, than the Christian bible. This
is reminiscent of the Samaritans’ edited and rewritten Pentateuch.
After nearly 200 years, the sacred books
of the LDS faith continue to be periodically changed, with material either moved
from one book to another or dropped altogether. This is in line with their
belief in the continuation of God’s prophetic work, offering new teachings to
the latter day prophets who lead the church.
We do not know if the Samaritan religion continually evolved in this
way, but it’s not hard to imagine that their made-up religion required periodic
upgrading to reflect changing realities.
Doctrine: Unlike Christianity, which believes that revealed
doctrine was complete with the canonization of the New Testament, the Mormons
believe that their President is an active prophet,
seer and revelator who can, at God’s direction, change doctrine. This has
happened many times since April 6, 1830, when Joseph Smith formally created the
Church.
Two of the most important of these
doctrinal changes, however, came about not from God, but from outside
pressure. In the first, the Mormons
changed their teachings on bigamy, banning the practice after having embraced
it for nearly 70 years. They did this – as “revealed by God” – in order for
Utah to be admitted into the Union as a state. The US Congress had made it
clear that a territory which legalized polygamy would never be admitted to the
union as a state, and desperate for acceptance, the Mormon prophet reinvented a
core doctrine to suit Congress.
Can you picture Paul suggesting that the Ephesians
embrace pagan idol worship to get Rome off their backs? Neither can I, but roughly 125 years ago such
a politically-motivated change dramatically altered the very nature of the
Mormon faith.
In enacting the second secularly-driven
change, they changed doctrine 40 years ago to acknowledge that members of the
black race – in defiance of previous doctrine – were suddenly no longer deemed
inherently inferior in the sight of God. Suddenly, they could become priests
within the church.
Mormons
and Christianity
Joseph Smith claimed that the revelations
given him at the creation of the Mormon church, and later, were given him so he
could restore First Century Christianity.
Yet in doing so, he and his faith have run afoul of the very teachings
they are supposed to be restoring.
These include:
·
Mormons,
as noted above, reject the Trinity in favor of a pantheon of Gods. The Father God, along with Jesus and the Holy
Spirit, exist, but not as one triune God
·
Until
it became politically inconvenient, they believed in polygamy as a matter of doctrine
·
Mormons
believe that upon their death, believers becoming Gods – in effect, joint heirs
to the kingdom with Jesus
·
Mormons
believe that Jesus’ visit with Smith at age 14 was the most holy act of God
since the resurrection, whereas Christians believe that nothing surpasses the
resurrection as a holy act of God
·
Mormons
believe that a resurrected Jesus came back down from heaven after Pentecost to
witness to a non-existent group of Semitic refugees from Israel’s ten lost
tribes, in cities that nearly two centuries of archeology have been unable to
locate
·
Mormons
believe in the retrospective salvation of the dead by living descendants,
without their having accepted Jesus as their lord while in this life
There are many more areas of belief where the
Mormons’ “restoration of First Century Christianity” runs afoul of core
Christian beliefs as presented by Jesus, Paul, the Gospel writers and the
Apostles.
Samaritans
and LDS
As a race, the Samaritans were created by
the forced, “shotgun marriage” of a dozen racial, tribal and national groups –
and because of this, their national faith was a weird blend of rewritten Mosaic
law coupled with a variety of pagan beliefs – and pagan gods.
The Mormon faith represents another kind
of “shotgun marriage,” between a bowdlerized Christianity and a variety of
man-made revelations, supposedly inspired by God and delivered by an angel, but
clearly made up of bits-and-pieces of other sacred texts, mixed with a man-made
mythology that has left no archeological or genetic clue as to its existence. And in
their faith, like the Samaritans, the Mormons believe not in one God, but in a “head
of the Gods” and “the Gods.” And in the possibility
that mortal man, after death, can become a God as well.
Conclusion: The Holy Bible has 66 God-breathed books written
by 40 Spirit-inspired authors writing from three continents over a period of more than 1,500 years. It has
stood the test of time and faith for more than 3,000 years. Christ’s miracles were witnessed by tens of thousands
over a period of years, and his resurrection was witnessed by more than 500
people, not all of whom had been Christ-followers before His resurrection.
The books deemed sacred by the Latter Day
Saints were written by one mortal man over a period of not much more than a
dozen years. The closest thing the
Mormons have to those thousands of Christian eye witnesses were a group of
family and friends who were soon either dead or excommunicated.
While many Mormons are earnestly devout
and faithful, their beliefs are – like those of the Samaritans – based on human
claims and mythical confabulations rather than God’s testimony.
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