Thursday, January 24, 2008

False Christians

What are false Christians?
Glad you asked, false Christians are those who use Christianity for their own aims and not for the true reason it exists.
Like those American TV evangelists who ask for your money (For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. 1Timothy 6:10) and just happen to live in huge houses and own vast tracts of Texas.
False Christians are little more than criminals hiding behind misinterpreted and purposefully twisted biblical text to con and persuade people to trusting them.
False Christians are always looking for some scapegoat for them to vent their spleens on, such as Gays or single mothers.
False Christians insist on the assertion that the Bible is the literal word of God, they use bullying and scare tactics to force others to accept this to be true.
False Christians deliberately use lies and dishonesty to refute logic and reason. They are quite happy to use falsely ludicrous and absurd totally made up claims when speaking against evolution or abortions.
False Christians claim to hold the absolute truth and understanding of Gods word, which means that if only one of them is correct (they can’t all be) then by logic the other 99.99% have to be wrong.
False Christians claim that all other religions or sects are wrong, yet deliberately shield themselves from exposure to anything else other than their own narrow little world view.
False Christians deny absolute truths about there own religion and religious history. The Vatican during WW II lifted not a finger to help the Jews. They could have threatened to excommunicate Catholics who engaged in those murders. After the war, they helped Nazi war criminals to escape. Then they got into the business of laundering money for the Mafia. The Vatican cons poor peasants in the third world to pay for the extravagance and opulence of St. Peter’s Basilica, but try asking a False Christian about this.
False Christians seem to relish and even encourage gullibility. There are no first hand accounts of Jesus or of his words, at best, the nearest we can ascertain is that the earliest Gospel was some 100 years after the death of Christ, so their accuracy is some what dubious, yet False Christians accept them as indisputable facts, rather than a rough account of what may have happened. It is a bit like believing some guy how told you he heard from an unsupported and unnamed source that aliens had landed 150 years ago and made some crop circles. Would one second hand account make you believe in the Loch Ness monster?
False Christians can not understand why their views are not accepted world wide. They can not understand how anyone could deny or reject the existence of their God, whilst simultaneously denying and rejecting the existence of every other God with ease.
False Christians encourages a careless disregard for the environment as they believe that God will not let anything bad to happen to them or their kind. They see no need to restrict or limit the growth of the population as God will take care of all his children.
False Christians teach hypocrisy, they preach poverty yet most of them live in opulence and abundance.
False Christianity encourages passivity. Instead of doing something about the evils of the world, False Christians sit at home and twiddle their thumbs, all the while imagining they are doing something highly virtuous and useful. They call this passivity Praying. Instead of doing something, they sit back and wait for God. If a False Christian was flying an airplane and the controls failed, they would just sit back and start to pray rather than actually try and solve the problem.
False Christianity erodes the minds ability to understand Logic and reason. False Christians are incapable of noticing when they are being illogical. They are so sure in their guts they are right that they will resort to any dishonest tactic to promote their views regardless of how crazy, absurd, meaningless, hollow, insincere and incongruous those views are.
False Christian believe in the whole idea of Christian Triumphalism is that everyone has to believe and follow the same rules for it to “work”. Christianity was thoroughly tried. Life under Christian tyranny in the middle ages proved utterly unbearable. We refer to those times of deep superstition as the “dark ages”. In modern times we have Islamic states like Saudi Arabia and Iran. These countries have to pay huge premiums to get skilled workers to go there. Very few people can stomach such repressive regimes. Theocracies are anti-democratic. Yet still we have right wing fundamentalists trying to subvert our modern democracies back in to Christian dominated theocracies.
False Christians draw others into their delusions, not with logical arguments or evidence based statements, but with emotional blackmail and wishful thinking. Truth is they don’t care if what they say is true, they are just totally besotted with how fantastic things would be if what they said were true.
False Christianity was the root of the Nazi atrocities. That is not to say all Christians are Nazis, just that the False Christian believe of superiority over other races and religions found a foot hold and flourished in Nazi Germany. The KKK was founded on False Christian beliefs and superiority.

False Christians are everything real Christians aren’t. The False Christians message seems to be as far away as possibly for the words Jesus supposedly spoke during the Sermon on the Mount.

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.
And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.
Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?
And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

Now I am no biblical Scholar, but does any of that sound like the messages given out by the False Christians?

Jesus’ three main points were:
1, Don’t chase wealth.
2, Look after the poor.
3, Don’t judge or seek revenge.

How many so called Christian world leaders in America and Europe follow these words of Jesus?

False Christians give real Christians a bad name. Although it is fair to say this is not just a Christian trait, the same applies to False Muslims and False Jews that twist and ignore the truths and messages of their faiths and bibles to their own perverted ends.

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Mormonism

I must admit that I had never heard of the Mormons, or members of the Church of the Latter day Saints until about ten years ago, and I must admit, ever since then, the more I have found out about them, the more and more I wonder why they have any members at all.

The whole religion is based on the words of one man named Joseph Smith, a convicted conman at that, who claimed that God had spoken to him personally in 1820 when he was only 14.
Allegedly God told Smith not to join any church as all the existing churches were false and that he himself (Smith) would bring forth a new and true religion blessed and dictated directly by God.
Three years later in 1823 a seventeen year old Smith was visited an angel named Moroni who told him of a sacred history written by ancient Hebrews that had previously inhabited America. The history, apparently, was engraved on Gold tablets, in ancient Egyptian, and were buried in a near by hill. With the help of the angel Smith obtained the tablets from the hill in 1827, along with a mystical translation devices called the “Urim and Thummim” which were described as a pair of sacred spectacles of sorts.
No one was allowed to see the gold tablets or the translation devices, and Smith kept them locked away in a safe to which only he had access. He translated them to his secretary Martin Harris from another room, not even allowing him to see the tablets.

And thus the Book of Mormon came into being.
Or did it?

Martin Harris’ wife, Lucy, feared her husband was being hoodwinked by Joseph Smith over the “new Religion” that he was working on that she decided to call Smiths bluff.
She stole the 116 pages of the book already translated by her husband and told Smith that “If this be a divine communication, the same being who revealed it to you can easily replace it”.
Now Smith knew he could never translate the 116 pages again exactly, he could probably keep the same essence of the translation, but any deviation from the original translation held by Lucy Harris would expose him as a fraud.
Any lesser man would have ran away and hid his head in shame, but not Smith, a hardened conman who from his teen years charged farmers, property developers, oil and gold prospectors for his “magical powers” to be able to use his “seer stone” to see into hills and mountain and underground.
Smith had a plan. He added a preface to the first edition of the book. The preface claimed that the 116 pages had been translated from supposed Plates of Lehi and that the devil had caused the translation to be stolen and altered from what Smith had "translated." So that even if Smith was to produce a new translation word-for-word identical with the first, it nevertheless would appear to differ from the stolen pages because of the changes which had been made in the latter by the cunning of the devil.
Neat eh?

"I will not suffer that Satan shall accomplish his evil design in this thing. Therefore thou shalt translate from the plates of Nephi." God told Smith, according to the Books preface. Lucy Harris’ plan had backfired but rather than Smith being angry with her, he thanked her for helping him realise how they must all be on their guard against the influences of Satan, and how Gods power will always over come.

Now to any one sane the warning bells of the Bull shit detectors would be deafening, but for some strange reason Smiths followers found this completely plausible and acceptable. God had beaten that scamp Satan, and that was good enough for them.

Strangely enough in 1928, some eight years after God himself had spoken to Smith and told him all churches were false and that he should start the one true religion endorsed by God, Smith applied for membership in a local Methodist church. Other members of his family had joined the local Presbyterians!

As I said at the beginning of this piece the more I learn about how the Mormon religion began, the less and less I understand how people (supposedly sane and rational people) convert to it.
The Book of Mormon spend a lot of effort describing vast civilisations that existed in both North and South America for thousand of years that were all descendants of Jews Moses lead from slavery.
They had knowledge of horses (introduced to America by the Spanish Conquistadors in the early 1500’s), elephants, cattle, sheep, wheat, barley, steel, wheeled vehicles, shipbuilding and other old world elements. They were spread across the continent but shared a common language.
The fact that none of the remains of any of these vast civilisations have never been discovered, not a single relic or item, seems to deter them. The Book of Mormon also neglects to mention any of the civilisations that did really exist in the Americas at the same time as these devout Jewish tribes.
Book of Mormon offers the depiction of a somewhat uniform people, with a solitary language and the ability of communication between remote parts of the Americas, the true history of the Americas shows the opposite: extensively dissimilar racial types (just about completely east Asian of derivation - positively not Semitic, as proven by recent DNA studies), and numerous unconnected native languages, none of which are even tenuously associated to Hebrew or Egyptian.
A lot of the fundamental historical philosophy established in the Book of Mormon had appeared in print previously in 1825, just two years before Smith began dictating the Book of Mormon, in a tome called View of the Hebrews, by one Ethan Smith (surprisingly no relation) and published just a couple of miles from where Joseph Smith resided.
The historian B. H. Roberts, a Mormon himself and a official of the LDS church had to confess later when viewing the evidence that it “tended to show that the Book of Mormon was not an ancient record, but concocted by Joseph Smith himself, based on ideas he had read in the earlier book”

The Mormon religion is supposed to be the direct and irrefutable will of God, everything in it is how God wanted it to be. Its foundation is that it is the pure, uncorrupted, unchangeable, everlasting, eternal word and will of God.
The Mormon church even claims that God is guiding the church through its leader (known by the catchy title of “prophet, seer and revelatory”) so basically his word, is Gods words spoken through him. Which make you wonder how the “Prophet, seer and Revelatory”, and presumably God, got taken in by the successful hoax perpetrated on the church by manuscript dealer Mark Hofmann in the 1980s. Hoffman was a forger and forged documents pertaining to the Mormon religion and presented them to the LDS church (with a several thousand dollar price tag per item). The Church studied the documents and the “Prophet, Seer and Revelatory” declared that God had revealed the documents to be genuine.
Oh dear! In 1986 Hoffman was arrest for Murder and forgery, and confessed to the fakes.

The furtive temple ritual (known as the "endowment") was introduced by Smith in May, 1842, just two months after he had been initiated into Freemasonry. The LDS temple ceremony directly resembles the Masonic ceremony of that day. Smith explained that the Masons had contaminated the ancient (God-given) ceremony by altering it and removing sections of it, and that he was restoring it to its "untainted" and "original" (and absolute) form, as made known to him by God. In the years since, the LDS church has made many fundamental changes in the "pure and original" ritual as "restored" by Smith, mostly by removing major parts of it. So much for respecting God version..

On the whole they, to me, seem a crazy bunch with some crazy ideas. Many of their teaching are well known, such as not partaking in alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea, or giving a percent of you income to the church (known as a tithing).
But there are some stranger more guarded teaching the have that are less publicised and usually only spoken about between practising Mormons, and not outsiders.
Teachings such as:

 God was once a man like us.
 God has a tangible body of flesh and bone.
 God lives on a planet near the star Kolob.
 God ("Heavenly Father") has at least one wife, our "Mother in Heaven," but she is so holy that they are not to discuss her nor pray to her.
 Jesus was married.
 They can become like God and rule over our own universe.
 There are many gods, ruling over their own worlds.
 Jesus and Satan ("Lucifer") are brothers, and they are our brothers - They are all spirit children of Heavenly Father
 Jesus Christ was conceived by God the Father by having sex with Mary, who was temporarily his wife.
 They should not pray to Jesus, nor try to feel a personal relationship with him.
 The "Lord" ("Jehovah") in the Old Testament is the being named Jesus in the New Testament, but different from "God the Father" ("Elohim").
 In the highest degree of the celestial kingdom some men will have more than one wife.
 Before coming to this earth they lived as spirits in a "pre-existence", during which they were tested; our position in this life (whether born to Mormons or savages, or in America or Africa) is our reward or punishment for our obedience in that life.
 Dark skin is a curse from God, the result of our sin, or the sin of our ancestors. If sufficiently righteous, a dark-skinned person will become light-skinned.
 The Garden of Eden was in Missouri. All humanity before the Great Flood lived in the western hemisphere. The Ark transported Noah and the other survivors to the eastern hemisphere.
 Not only will human beings be resurrected to eternal life, but also all animals - everything that has ever lived on earth - will be resurrected and dwell in heaven.
 Christ will not return to earth in any year that has seen a rainbow.
 Mormons should avoid traveling on water, since Satan rules the waters.
 The sun receives its light from the star Kolob.
 If a Gentile becomes Mormon, the Holy Ghost actually purges his Gentile blood and replaces it with Israelite blood.
 A righteous Mormon will actually see the face of God in the Mormon temple.
 You can identify a false angel by the color of his hair, or by offering to shake his hand.
What else is there left to say other than than to what "Kolob" sounds like backwards?