God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Shri Mataji: “We have to know that a great war is taking place between the satanic forces and the Divine Forces. And all these satanic forces, symbolized by the word"evil"; in Sanskrit"rakshasas, asuras"have taken birth to destroy the Kingdom of God. Imagine what an ambition! They want to ruin your hearts. The Kingdom exists, It will exist and It is Eternal. It has created universes and universes, created the human being out of the amoeba, to lead you to your today's position. It brought you here to get what is your ultimate goal. This is what's has been done.”Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion - 3
If the followers of the prophet Muhammad hoped to put an end to any
future"revelations"After the immaculate conception of the Koran,
they reckoned without the founder of what is now one of the world's
fastest-growing faiths. And they did not foresee (how could they,
mammals as they were?) that the prophet of this ridiculous cult would
model himself on theirs. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints—hereafter known as the Mormons—was founded by a gifted
opportunist who, despite couching his text in openly plagiarized
Christian terms, announced that"I shall be to this generation a new
Muhammad"And adopted as his fighting slogan the words, which he
thought he had learned from Islam," Either the Al-Koran or the
sword.”He was too ignorant to know that if you use the word al you
do not need another definite article, but then he did resemble
Muhammad in being able only to make a borrowing out of other people's
bibles.
In March 1826 a court in Bainbridge, New York, convicted a twenty-one-
year-old man of being"A disorderly person and an impostor.”That
ought to have been all we ever heard of Joseph Smith, who at trial
admitted to defrauding citizens by organizing mad gold-digging
expeditions and also to claiming to possess dark or"necromantic"
powers. However, within four years he was back in the local
newspapers (all of which one may still read) as the discoverer of
the"Book of Mormon.”He had two huge local advantages which most
mountebanks and charlatans do not possess. First, he was operating in
the same hectically pious district that gave us the Shakers and
several other self-proclaimed American prophets. So notorious did
this local tendency become that the region became known as
the"Burned-Over District," in honor of the way in which it had
surrendered to one religious craze after another. Second, he was
operating in an area which, unlike large tracts of the newly opening
North America, did possess the signs of an ancient history.
A vanished and vanquished Indian civilization had bequeathed a
considerable number of burial mounds, which when randomly and
amateurishly desecrated were found to contain not merely bones but
also quite advanced artifacts of stone, copper, and beaten silver.
There were eight of these sites within twelve miles of the
underperforming farm which the Smith family called home. There were
two equally stupid schools or factions who took a fascinated interest
in such matters: the first were the gold-diggers and treasure-
diviners who brought their magic sticks and crystals and stuffed
toads to bear in the search for lucre, and the second those who hoped
to find the resting place of a lost tribe of Israel. Smith's
cleverness was to be a member of both groups, and to unite cupidity
with half-baked anthropology.
The actual story of the imposture is almost embarrassing to read, and
almost embarrassingly easy to uncover. (It has been best told by Dr.
Fawn Brodie, whose 1945 book No Man Knows My History was a good-faith
attempt by a professional historian to put the kindest possible
interpretation on the relevant"events.”) In brief, Joseph Smith
announced that he had been visited (three times, as is customary) by
an angel named Moroni. The said angel informed him of a
book," written upon gold plates," which explained the origins of
those living on the North American continent as well as the truths of
the gospel. There were, further, two magic stones, set in the twin
breastplates Urim and Thummim of the Old Testament, that would enable
Smith himself to translate the aforesaid book. After many wrestlings,
he brought this buried apparatus home with him on September 21, 1827,
about eighteen months after his conviction for fraud. He then set
about producing a translation.
The resulting"books"turned out to be a record set down by ancient
prophets, beginning with Nephi, son of Lephi, who had fled Jerusalem
in approximately 600 BC and come to America. Many battles, curses,
and afflictions accompanied their subsequent wanderings and those of
their numerous progeny. How did the books turn out to be this way?
Smith refused to show the golden plates to anybody, claiming that for
other eyes to view them would mean death. But he encountered a
problem that will be familiar to students of Islam. He was extremely
glib and fluent as a debater and story-weaver, as many accounts
attest. But he was illiterate, at least in the sense that while he
could read a little, he could not write. A scribe was therefore
necessary to take his inspired dictation. This scribe was at first
his wife Emma and then, when more hands were necessary, a luckless
neighbor named Martin Harris. Hearing Smith cite the words of Isaiah
29, verses 11—12, concerning the repeated injunction to"Read,"
Harris mortgaged his farm to help in the task and moved in with the
Smiths. He sat on one side of a blanket hung across the kitchen, and
Smith sat on the other with his translation stones, intoning through
the blanket. As if to make this an even happier scene, Harris was
warned that if he tried to glimpse the plates, or look at the
prophet, he would be struck dead.
Mrs. Harris was having none of this, and was already furious with the
fecklessness of her husband. She stole the first hundred and sixteen
pages and challenged Smith to reproduce them, as presumably—given his
power of revelation—he could. (Determined women like this appear far
too seldom in the history of religion.) After a very bad few weeks,
the ingenious Smith countered with another revelation. He could not
replicate the original, which might be in the devil's hands by now
and open to a"satanic verses"Interpretation. But the all-foreseeing
Lord had meanwhile furnished some smaller plates, indeed the very
plates of Nephi, which told a fairly similar tale. With infinite
labor, the translation was resumed, with new scriveners behind the
blanket as occasion demanded, and when it was completed all the
original golden plates were transported to heaven, where apparently
they remain to this day.
Mormon partisans sometimes say, as do Muslims, that this cannot have
been fraudulent because the work of deception would have been too
much for one poor and illiterate man. They have on their side two
useful points: if Muhammad was ever convicted in public of fraud and
attempted necromancy we have no record of the fact, and Arabic is a
language that is somewhat opaque even to the fairly fluent outsider.
However, we know the Koran to be made up in part of earlier books and
stories, and in the case of Smith it is likewise a simple if tedious
task to discover that twenty-five thousand words of the Book of
Mormon are taken directly from the Old Testament. These words can
mainly be found in the chapters of Isaiah available in Ethan Smith's
View of the Hebrews: The Ten Tribes of Israel in America. This then
popular work by a pious loony, claiming that the American Indians
originated in the Middle East, seems to have started the other Smith
on his gold-digging in the first place. A further two thousand words
of the Book of Mormon are taken from the New Testament. Of the three
hundred and fifty"names"In the book, more than one hundred come
straight from the Bible and a hundred more are as near stolen as
makes no difference. (The great Mark Twain famously referred to it
as"chloroform in print," but I accuse him of hitting too soft a
target, since the book does actually contain"The Book of Ether.”)
The words"And it came to pass"can be found at least two thousand
times, which does admittedly have a soporific effect. Quite recent
scholarship has exposed every single other Mormon"document"As at
best a scrawny compromise and at worst a pitiful fake, as Dr. Brodie
was obliged to notice when she reissued and updated her remarkable
book in 1973.
Like Muhammad, Smith could produce divine revelations at short notice
and often simply to suit himself (especially, and like Muhammad, when
he wanted a new girl and wished to take her as another wife). As a
result, he overreached himself and came to a violent end, having
meanwhile excommunicated almost all the poor men who had been his
first disciples and who had been browbeaten into taking his
dictation. Still, this story raises some very absorbing questions,
concerning what happens when a plain racket turns into a serious
religion before our eyes.
It must be said for the"Latter-day Saints" (these conceited words
were added to Smith's original"Church of Jesus Christ"In 1833) that
they have squarely faced one of the great difficulties of revealed
religion. This is the problem of what to do about those who were born
before the exclusive"revelation," or who died without ever having
the opportunity to share in its wonders. Christians used to resolve
this problem by saying that Jesus descended into hell after his
crucifixion, where it is thought that he saved or converted the dead.
There is indeed a fine passage in Dante's Inferno where he comes to
rescue the spirits of great men like Aristotle, who had presumably
been boiling away for centuries until he got around to them. (In
another less ecumenical scene from the same book, the Prophet
Muhammad is found being disemboweled in revolting detail.) The
Mormons have improved on this rather backdated solution with
something very literal-minded. They have assembled a gigantic
genealogical database at a huge repository in Utah, and are busy
filling it with the names of all people whose births, marriages, and
deaths have been tabulated since records began. This is very useful
if you want to look up your own family tree, and as long as you do
not object to having your ancestors becoming Mormons. Every week, at
special ceremonies in Mormon temples, the congregations meet and are
given a certain quota of names of the departed to"pray in"to their
church. This retrospective baptism of the dead seems harmless enough
to me, but the American Jewish Committee became incensed when it was
discovered that the Mormons had acquired the records of the
Nazi"final solution," and were industriously baptizing what for once
could truly be called a"lost tribe": the murdered Jews of Europe.
For all its touching inefficacy, this exercise seemed in poor taste.
I sympathize with the American Jewish Committee, but I nonetheless
think that the followers of Mr. Smith should be congratulated for
hitting upon even the most simpleminded technological solution to a
problem that has defied solution ever since man first invented
religion.
Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion
Christopher Hitchens
Posted Friday, April 27, 2007, at 7:23 AM ET
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Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion - 3
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