@Abimelech That one is a little sketchy in that the author is an ex-Mormon (or,, raised Mormon) dudeweedbro guy and every now and then he says something retarded like the myth about the Founding Fathers growing hemp. But in general it seems pretty accurate. You get a detailed treatment of entheogenic (psychedelia for religious visions) use in history, a detailed treatment of the Christianity-based magical/occult system that Europeans and Americans used (it's largely forgotten now, but belief in magic was SUPER common even among the educated classes up into the 1800s, the part that's most relevant for Mormonism is the use of dowsing rods and magical incantations to uncover buried treasure), and then finally an account of Mormonism based around those two things, which also rips Joseph Smith up one side and down the other.
Mormonism for Dummies is, no shit, where I got most of my Mormon foundations from.
Doesn't the whole concept of jesus escaping to america invalidate, you know, his sacrifice?
Like Welper Helper said (but clarifying a bit more), he doesn't ESCAPE to the Americas, he visits it
after rising from the dead for the purpose of spreading his testament to the New World.
@The Tall Man I don't think so?
Okay, keep in mind that Mormonism was founded over a hundred years before the State of Israel and its theology was not meaningfully expanded on any way (the only additions were Brigham Young's, which is like the 1840s, and then the Mormons REMOVING concepts due to Federal Govt pressure).
I think they just really don't give a shit about it. That's not to say Mormons don't tend to have good relations with Jews and Israel, but I know a ton of secular boomercons that shill hard for Israel just because the Evangelicals have a huge sway over the Republican Party and FOX News and so they get fed endless Israel propaganda. It originates from the pulpits, but it ends up infecting conservative thought everywhere in the USA (and even Latin America, one downside of Evangelicalism spreading so much down there).
The whole who-killed-Jesus thing is retarded. There's retards that used it to justify beating on the Jews (because
one group of Jews killed a
Jew who was leading
another group of Jews), and then there's other retards that try to remove that entirely because they fall into the camp of Zionist knobslobberers. I mean, the story is very clear. The Pharisees/King Herod wanted to kill a figure that was politically subversive (if only because he criticized the corruption of the religious elite) and, as a client of Rome, they appealed to the Roman occupying force to do it on their behalf. It's both. I don't remember how they taught it, but I'm pretty sure that was basically universal until the Schofield Bible and a bunch of philosemitic revisionist bullshit started to infect everything, really taking off in the late 1900s. Like, even though the revisionism began earlier, the average person was still a massive anti-Semite before the Holocaust pimping began.
@AnimeGirlConnoisseur The Mormons had two separate doctrines.
One, introduced by Joseph Smith himself in the Book of Mormon itself, dealt with the state of the American Indian.
The other, introduced by Brigham Young (Smith's successor, who lead the Mormons out of Illinois to establish a state in Utah in one of the greatest American mass migrations), dealt with the Blacks.
Smith's Book of Mormon narrative deals with the conflicts between two warring groups of Israelites who colonized the Americas. Like those Old Testament stories where one family will somehow incest their way into being a whole empire, a very holy man, his family and I think a few other families (???) travel across the sea and become the seed of a civilization called the Nephites.
Because Jews can't control themselves, inevitably a group of them (the Lamanites) break off so they can go be disgusting godless evil heathens.
If you're a non-Mormon, it's basically Bible fanfiction set in North America for an American pioneer audience. There's constant arguments (like there is with the age of the Earth/creationism) about how big this migration was, if all Indians are descended from these peoples, and so on. You get apologists in the modern day that argue that it was ackshually a very tiny group in one tiny part of the landmass, and the Indians are largely unrelated. On the other hand, early Mormons seemed to very much interpret it as being a large scale civilization that was the ethnic origins of American Indians and Polynesians in general.
Anyways, the Lamanites somehow come to wipe out the Nephites and fuck up so bad that God curses them and turns them into damned Red Savages as punishment. Lo and behold the Indian race is born.
Now, you'd think that would be a sign of some huge anti-Indian bias, but it actually wasn't. The Mormons got along great with Indians and Polynesians, converting HUGE numbers of them and generally staying out of wars because they actually considered their supposed descent from Israelites to mean that they had a very noble history and background, which was both flattering in diplomacy and lead to them being far more respectful/polite when they'd deal with them. The most Mormon country in the world is Samoa. There's some other cool ones, a lot of Navajo country is Mormon and there's a tribe in South Carolina called the Catawbas who fought for the Patriots in the Revolution and later converted to Mormonism. Nowadays a lot of Latin Americans flock to the religion (it's growing extremely rapidly down there) for the same reason.
What about the Blacks? Brigham Young didn't like them and said they had the Curse of Ham. You know the one? That stupid bullshit that Southern churches, and even a lot of Northern churches, believed in that said that Blacks were made to be a degenerate slave race because they were descended from a guy who had the gall to look at his dads pecker (gasp)? Well, that shit was really hot back then, a lot of people believed it despite how retarded it is, and even though Joseph Smith himself was actually rather progressive for his day, Brigham Young believed it and had a hate on. So God told Brigham Young that it was God's will that Blacks could not hold priest offices (which pretty much every Mormon male is expected to, so that's even worse than just being shut out of leadership, it's like being shut out of most of the actual church life).
This was later walked back because the Federal Government, on a race crusade, decided that a bunch of White people living in an almost exclusively White part of the country had to get BLACKED. This is like the 1970s or so. They threatened to yank their tax exempt status and so God very conveniently up and changed his mind, so sayeth the prophet.
The abandonment of polygamy likewise came from Federal pressure. The Republicans (like, Lincoln's Republicans) had this raging hateboner towards everyone that wasn't a Yankee or Black*, and they were the Bible-thumpers of their day, so Catholics and Mormons especially pissed them off. They were constantly harassing them. Democrats weren't exactly friends, but they tolerated them (Mormons, for some reason, never seemed to bother with or have any success in the South, so they might as well have been space aliens on another planet for as much as the core of the Democratic Party cared about them).
After being brutally occupied (think of these people as being like American Boers) for decades the Church finally struck a shady deal with the Feds: we give up polygamy, you let Utah become a state. And God also conveniently had something to say about it then, too. They kept doing it in secret for a while - it's not like you're going to set your wives aside - and the hardcore true believers flipped their shit (rightfully so!) and split off to become the FLDS, the Fundamentalists that you sometimes hear about in the news. Over the decades it was largely forgotten and became a taboo within the Church, something that they barely talk about so after generations the average Mormon knows or thinks little about it.
Personally I support monogamy on the grounds of equality - unlike things like wealth, "redistributing" women doesn't make there be an incentive to have less women, it's not destructive like socialist economic policies are - but it has always mystified me that people get so fucking pissed about it.
*Even if you were Black, the Republicans were an awkward marriage of proto-libtards that loved Blacks and honest to god ethnonationalists that hated Blacks so much they hated slavery because it meant they might have to live near a Black person. Several Northern states straight up banned them from migrating there after emancipation. I call them "Free Soilers" because my understanding is that the Free Soil Party, which later became one of the founding groups of the Republicans, had that bent to it. The Republicans were a genuinely very nasty bunch of people who I will argue were closer to Fascists in mentality than the Confederates ever were.
