Facing Facebook, part 4

Guy in England replies:

Sorry about the lateness of response. I have been super busy as of late.

On the face of it, yes Masons do in a roundabout way claim that they protect the ways of King Solomons temple. However, taking things from a New Testament point of view, this is not necessarily needed.
You write something very interesting, '...among other things'. Now I think the 'things' you have not mentioned are of HUGE importance to the practice of Mormons and how and why I do not believe it to be: a) a fuller, deeper, more complete version of the Gospel as spelled out by Christ Jesus. b) Believe it divinely inspired by God.

First off, regardless of whether you have met masons who are 'pleasant enough' does not mean your common practices sound. As you may know, some of the symbolism of the masons is to be frank quite occultic. Looking at what Joseph Smith (who was a high up freemason) incorporated into your temple buildings is nothing short of praise and declaration to his apparent Christianity sitting side by side with Egyptian and other satanic belief. For example, the temple you fellas have in Salt Lake City is full to the brim of what is widely accepted as heathen symbols. For example you the all-seeing eye (which you Americans have on your dollar notes). This is known as the Egyptian God, Eye of Horus, and his father Osiris. I.e 'the creator'. This is recognised by the satanists as the eye of Lucifer. Why on earth would a supposed Christian sect have this on a building so holy that only about 1 in 10 Mormons are eligible or choose to go?

Further to this, on that same temple you have the ursa major, the big dipper. A seven starred contellation, known by the Egyptians as the Dragon of the seven stars, further known to the 'Dragon of the Seven Stars', later known as the Seven Headed Beast. This may look familiar to you as what is said in Revelations. The Seven Headed Beast being the enemy of the church of God.

You have inverted pentagrams- this is the symbol of Satan.the upside down pentagram relates to the sinister goat, known by occultists as a manifestation of the devil.

Also, something that has similarities to satanists, Mormons and masons alike... The secret handshake. You probably won't make much of this but I do not remember reading anything about this in the Bible. But do you not think this is more than a coincidence that this is now introduced into your cult as a means of getting into heaven. Is it not the case you need a handshake to get into heaven or something. (Or have I got that completely wrong?)

Also when Smith was killed, he was found with an accultist talisman. Need I say anymore!!

If this man is meant to be the mouthpiece and prophet of God, a man meant to be trusted to deliver the world the new Gospel, then I am flabbergasted to say the least!! If it is the case that the wonderful Lord God sent a prophet to us who was a superstitious, occultist, dark arts practicing, satan-leaning, pagan worshipping then I really do despair!! That being the case, rather God is somebody that is really akin to satanic dogmatism and is in a sense polytheistic, OR Joseph smith isn't a prophet, and he is just some fella who tells tall tales about the God of the bible.

Mate, the onus is on you to really dig deep into the rudiments of what you believe. However, if you are content with what you follow, and you want to continue to feel unchallenged then stay where you are. Remember though, Jesus calls you to trust Him and come out from that boat. I really don't want you to go in a corner and harden your defences and in essence be really 'anti-Louie', just use your head, be sensible and do not rely on that 'burning in your bosom' (that I have read so much about'.

What I would say is read up on freemasonry yourself. You will see it is not as cool/Biblical as you may first think. I mean c'mon, why would a so called Christian association have so much symbolism relating to Satanism and Egyptian ancient beliefs and polytheism? I think the answer is obvious. And why on earth would your ceremonies need to be secret?

I think the most blatant thing the mormons do during their temple endowment (if that is the right word) is they play out the part of the devil and I think Adam and Eve. Then they mock putting on the apron that relates to what the Devil does!! Unbelievable.

When I said 'odd' it was fitting into the context of what I was saying. I didn't write it as a question btw.

Also, I'm better than calling what you believe odd. To emphasise this point, I am from a Charismatic church, (Pentecostal to be precise) in the north of England. Therefore, I know the meaning of being different to the what the norm may be.

TR replies:

Before we go further into this, I just want to ask that if you have any questions about specific temple practices or symbology that you send them to me in a private message. We don't like publishing them or discussing them publicly for several reasons, one of which is that it ALWAYS gets misinterpreted and causes misunderstanding. The other reason is that some of what you mentioned is not true or is only half-true, and I can't exactly set the record straight without saying even more details of the temple ceremony.

Also, before I offer another perspective on this, I want to thank you again for asking me. Since Mormons (including me) are unwilling to share many details of the temple, a curious person will always find another source, and that source is usually an anti-Mormon one. I hope you won't take offense to me saying this, but a lot of what you said sounds like the sort of thing I used to read in anti-Mormon literature that was published by many Christian churches in Scotland while I was a missionary there. I'm glad to have this opportunity to refute what people have said to misrepresent the temple ceremonies.

Another word about the Masons. That they are "pleasant enough" is an understatement. The Masonic Lodge of Salt Lake City runs and operates the Salt Lake Shriner's Hospital, which is a hospital that treats burns and bone diseases for children free of charge. Thousands of children have been helped there for free, and they are a non-profit organization, not a business. To say they are Satanic is misguided at best. "By their fruits ye shall know them". Looking at the fruits of the Masons here, I see them as an exclusive and eccentric but extremely charitable group that God smiles upon. I don't buy this Satanic cult propaganda. The first requirement of becoming a mason is belief in God or Deity. And to say they are unaware that they are Satanists unfair and ignorant, in my opinion.

There is a lot of content in your post. I can't tell which things you want responses to, but I will do my best.

"Among other things"

What I meant by this was beyond being keepers of Solomon's temple rites, they are a fraternal organization that get together to eat dinner, talk, have barbecues, and do other things that friends or clubs do together. And as I mentioned, they are also a non-profit charitable organization who have blessed the lives of millions of children throughout the country and provided an example of what it means to be compassionate Christians. As to whether protecting Solomon's Temple's rites is needed, I will not argue this point. I believe it was needed. You don't. Fair enough?

"Playing the devil"

What is wrong with depicting the devil? One of the most beloved paintings in Christian art is of Christ overcoming Satan:

http://www.valtorta.org/images/denyingsatan.jpe
which depicts the devil! Was Bloch a Satan worshipper because he depicted the devil? Of course not.

A word that I heard a lot in your response was "Satanic" or similar words. I will try to address what you have said about many of the symbols being Satanic.

The whole point of a symbol is that it carries meaning to those who use the symbol. A swastika to a Buddhist means peace, whereas a swastika to a westerner means Nazism. When a Buddhist uses a swastika, does that mean he is secretly a Nazi? No. For one thing, the symbol belonged to Buddhism before it was borrowed by Hitler as a symbol for the Nazi party.

Likewise, many of the symbols we use have more than one meaning depending on whether it is being used by a Mormon, a Mason, or an Occultist. The number seven for example, is used many times in the New Testament. To the Hebrews, the number seven signified completeness or eternity. It is also the number of heads on a dragon, which represents Satan. At this point, I want to ask a rhetorical question: If God uses a symbol one way and Satan uses it another way, who do you think had it first? Clearly God did, because Satan always copies and perverts what God does, and God doesn't "borrow" anything from Satan.

The same thing goes for the all-seeing eye, the pentagram, Ursa Major, and the other symbols you mentioned. I won't go into all of them, but I just want to point out the significance of Ursa Major. Ursa Major is a constellation used by ancient and modern navigators in the Northern hemisphere to locate the North Star. If you line up the two stars farthest from the "handle" or "tail" of the constellation, they point right at the North Star, which is the only star in the sky that doesn't move throughout the night or throughout the year. It is the constant. It is the star by which navigators chart their course. Do you see where I am going with this? God and Jesus Christ are represented by the North Star because they are unchanging, and we chart our course through life by them. Ursa Major represents the temple because the temple points us to God. That's what we see when we look at Ursa Major, and the symbol holds no Satanic connotation for us whatsoever. If God sees it as a representation of the devil only, why did He put it in the sky?

All of the other things that you mentioned testify of Christ to me in one way or another, not the devil.

Egyptians:

Mormons don't believe that Egyptians are Satanists. We believe that they, like many other civilizations, had the complete Gospel at one time and lost it bit by bit until they were worshiping all sorts of gods. Side by side with their somewhat intact symbols (the all-seeing eye, etc.) was other things they had added on. I don't think its fair for you to say that Egyptian religious practice was satanic. The all-seeing eye was called "the eye of Horus" by the Egyptians. Just because they called their god something different than what you call yours does not make them Satanists.

You asked whether Mormons need handshakes to get into heaven. My answer is that this is another thing that is symbolic only and not to be taken literally.

I hope you don't mind if I quote you for the next part of my response. You said

"If it is the case that the wonderful Lord God sent a prophet to us who was a superstitious, occultist, dark arts practicing, satan-leaning, pagan worshipping then I really do despair!! That being the case, rather God is somebody that is really akin to satanic dogmatism and is in a sense polytheistic, OR Joseph smith isn't a prophet, and he is just some fella who tells tall tales about the God of the bible."

Which sounds like you are wanting me to try and convince you that Mormonism is true, which is not why I am participating in this conversation. If you want convincing, find those missionaries. I do want to answer your description of Joseph Smith though.

"Superstitious"

This is a word that people often use to make a person's personal beliefs seem less valid than their own. I would put the question back to you, Louie. How many people have called the your personal practice of prayer a "superstition"?

"Occultist"

The word "occult" means "hidden". Christ spoke often of mysteries and hidden things to be revealed. Besides that, "occult" also refers to Satanism, which is something I hopefully answered well enough earlier. Likewise with "Dark arts practicing, Satan leaning, pagan worshipping". This sounds like name-calling, which is something that really won't lead us to any further understanding of each others views.

Joseph's charm or talisman


Most LDS and non-LDS scholars now doubt the claim that Joseph carried a "Jupiter Talisman" and had it with him at the time of his death. However, if he did have one, it wouldn't surprise me for this reason: Joseph was 14 when he first told people that he had seen God. From then on he claimed visits by angels, access to ancient records and artifacts, revelations, visions, and all sorts of other similar things. He had no prejudices against folk religions and obscure religious practices, so God spoke to him from many directions. In his zeal to receive more truth from whatever source, Joseph looked for it from any source he could think of, including (as Joseph would be the first to admit) from things like charms, etc. In his writings, Joseph emphasizes prayer, meditation (or "pondering"), and righteous living as methods of receiving revelation, and in some cases, he writes about he was commanded not to continue using certain other methods of receiving revelation. Later in his life Joseph also studied ancient languages and writings. He was an explorer. He was not a perfect person, and not even a perfect theologian, but he did his best, and that is all that God requires, even from prophets. Mormons follow Joseph's example and look for truth on many fronts. We are encouraged to educate ourselves about other religions and cultures, and also about science and philosophy so that we can receive truth from whatever source God has seen fit to reveal it from. We do not practice folk religions or any of the other world religions, but we are not afraid of them either.

You said that you would despair if God sent a prophet such as Joseph Smith. My answer is, How do you feel about God sending no prophet at all? But again this is getting into the realm of me trying to convince you, which is not my job.

The Pentagram:

This is a quote from the wikipedia article "pentagram", which contains this section on the pentagram's recorded association with Christianity

quote:

"Christianity

The pentagram was used as a Christian symbol for the five senses,[10] and if the letters S, A, L, V, and S are inscribed in the points, it can be taken as a symbol of health (from Latin salus).[citation needed]

Medieval Christians believed it to symbolise the five wounds of Christ. The pentagram was believed to protect against witches and demons.[11]

The pentagram figured in a heavily symbolic Arthurian romance:[11] it appears on the shield of Sir Gawain in the 14th century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. As the poet explains, the five points of the star each have five meanings: they represent the five senses, the five fingers, the five wounds of Christ,[12] the five joys that Mary had of Jesus (the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Assumption), and the five virtues of knighthood which Gawain hopes to embody: noble generosity, fellowship, purity, courtesy, and compassion.

Probably due to misinterpretation of symbols used by ceremonial magicians, it later became associated with Satanism and subsequently rejected by most of Christianity sometime in the twentieth century.[11]

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has traditionally used pentagrams and five-pointed stars in Temple architecture, particularly the Nauvoo Illinois Temple[13] and the Salt Lake Temple. These symbols derived from traditional morning star pentagrams that are no longer commonly used in mainstream Christianity.[14]"

end quote.

Thanks for your questions, and let me know if I missed any.

TR

Facing Facebook part 2

Guy in England replies:

Thing is, I just cannot reconcile what Mormons teach. Even if we go into the book of mormon itself, we come across text that has a certain air of superiority of whites. Okay, fair enough, if you (plural) don't teach that anymore, that's fine and dandy. However, just because half way through the 20th century onwards, your organisation has wanted to align itself more with mainstream protestantism doesn't make it right. I am not saying what I am saying to be an arse, because trust me, we have loads of American mormons trying to convert here in the UK, and through that I have went to several meetings with them when they were trying to convert me. I have read all the stuff, and in a way it scared me.It scared me because first off I am a Bible believing Christian; I'm apparently not in true relationship with Christ because I don't believe the claim of Joseph. I mean if we look at that 2 Nephi 5:21, the verse that makes mormons and Christians alike squirm, then we see that fundementally, what the 'golden plates' said were bloody awful. It reads, 'And the Lord had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them.'Man this is bad. Maybe this is an example of the zeitgeist of the early 1800s, but Brooks, this is not 'cool'. This is with no shadow of a doubt elitist and down right racist. Not to mention the symbols you people use. I have seen it for myself. The dependence you guys have on Masonic practise and teachings is quite chilling. Look, I am not trying to be nasty or anything, it is just that I worry about this, frankly odd religion, which is nothing more than a corruption of Christianity.You also say that it is not your responsibility to apologise for Young. Mate, I think it is. If he is a supposed apostle/living saint of God, if he was at one point the prime human on the face of the earth, being in the capacity the mouth piece for God- you cannot, as a mormon be so willy-nilly about what he says. For what he says and does and has written by him is of great importance to the people who believe in this farce.

TR replies:

First of all, I don't take any offense to what you wrote. You raise some good points.

I'll respond to the things about Masonry, etc. later, but for now I'll just address what we were already talking about.

I'll admit that the passage in Nephi makes me cringe every time I read it, and I am not even black, so I imagine the it sounds even worse to you. The only way that makes sense in my own mind is that it was a totally isolated incident which in no way relates to race today. For one thing, this is the only way to make sense of later passages in the Book of Helaman wherein the Lamanites were righteous while the Nephites were wicked, but there was no change in skin color when that happened. The righteous ones were darker and the wicked ones were whiter.You said that the Mormon church changed its practices to be more aligned with mainstream protestantism. Maybe so, but that's not really the way I look at it. I think they stopped teaching it because they realized it was wrong, both doctrinally and morally.

The Church itself never made this whole thing established doctrine. Having a publishing company compile something Brigham Young probably said about interracial marriage into a book and publish it after he was dead is not the same as the Mormon Church, as an organization, officially declaring it as doctrine. I think of it as a personal belief of Brigham Young, and as such I do not feel responsible, or even entitled, to apologize for it.

Furthermore, I do not even understand what he was saying. Brigham Young was from the Eastern US where he no doubt met many blacks and whites who had had children with blacks. He must have known that they do not drop dead as soon as they "mix their seed". Although the language is unambiguous, it still doesn't make sense at all to me, and I still am not quite sure what Young was getting at. It is a very weird quote.I believe Brigham Young was a prophet, but also a human who learned throughout his life and taught many true things but probably let his own opinion slip out once in a while. Paul the Apostle did not instantly know every single thing about Christ as soon as he saw him. It took him time to learn, just like it takes all of us time to learn. And I think there is a reason why that particular discourse by Brigham Young has never been published by the Church, but by others.

I agree that I should not be "willy-nilly" about what he and other prophets have said. Everything I read by him I ponder to discover what it is I should learn from it. What I learned from that quote and others like it is that he is human, and while he is appointed as leader of the church by God, he still has the capacity for errors. That' why the LDS church emphasizes individual prayer and individual revelation.

All that said, I have met racist members of my church and they embarrass quite a bit. I think a lot of it is geographic as well. We are still kind of isolated here in Utah, and while Utah is becoming more diverse, it is still one of the whitest states in the USA.

I want to address your other points later on. If I read right, they were:

-Having a relationship with Jesus Christ without the teachings of Joseph Smith
-Mormons and Masons
-Mormonism as an "odd" religion.

Facing Facebook, part 1

An "apologist", of course, is someone who defends or reconciles, not someone who apologizes. Gordon B. Hinckley was one, and so am I in some of my finer moments. Here is a transcript of an online dialogue I had with some guy in England via Facebook.

Guy in England says:
I got this from researching into mormonism, I obtained a copy of the Journal of Discourses, written by the 2nd "prophet" of your "church"It basically talks of those of African descent, (btw, do you still teach the mark of Cain in relation to blacks?)Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses 10 v 110:'Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain [the seed of Cain being blacks], the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so. The nations of the earth have transgressed every law that God has given, they have changed the ordinances and broken every covenant made with the fathers, and they are like a hungry man that dreameth that he eateth, and he awaketh and behold he is empty.'How do you justify this? This is not a cool teaching is it?It really scuppers what you replied to me, i.e., '[it] is wrong and in no way do i believe that God would do that.' So rather you are Mormon, and believe mormon teachings, or you dismiss the racist teachings of the 2nd president,"prophet" of Mormonism, and therefore nullify the teachings all together...

TR replies:
Thanks for bringing this topic up. It causes no end of misunderstanding.First of all I want to say thanks for going into actual Mormon literature to discover what Mormons believe rather than believing every rumour that gets passed around without checking into it. That said, I would advise giving much more weight to what the current church president is teaching now than what was written 150 years ago. It is probably true that Brigham Young taught that, however, Mormons give more credence to some texts than to others.The Bible, The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price are the only thing accepted as scripture. The Church does publish official statements as well, but those are usually things to do with policy and practice and not with doctrine. Brigham Young's Journal of Discourses is not a church publication. It is a collection by others of his sermons and writings.Brigham Young may well have believed and even taught some strange things about blacks, but the thing about Cain is definitely not an official church doctrine, even if there are some backwoods type Mormons who still believe it.Anyway, I don't think it is my responsibility to defend or apologize for what Brigham Young said 150 years ago. Isn't it enough that nobody teaches it now?In my own mind, I can do this without having to "nullify the teachings all together". I don't believe in a perfect, infallible, or always correct prophet, but rather one who is led by inspiration from God despite making mistakes.So to answer your question, no. This is not a cool teaching.

--end--

Part 2 to be posted on Wednesday, Sept. 24 2008