Saviors, Weakness of Soul

                                           

                                               The Messiah Complex

                           Tell the truth, and people will bash in your head
                                                                      —Hungarian Proverb


    It is one of the fundamental and oldest of ploys by government officials to stir up dissention and riot among the populace, and blame a scapegoat who they have created by propaganda as the villain of social unrest. The story is repeated in the Book of Mormon throughout the Gadianton period. It is present in the pogroms of the National Socialist and Bolshevik revolutions. It is so common in America’s foreign policy for the last century hardly anyone blinks an eye to it. It doesn’t take much investigation into the recent subversion of Libya, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so forth to see it glaring from the newsprint. Such was the case among the Jewish Sanhedrin when Jesus was made the scapegoat of insurrection. As yet I have to learn when in history such a tactic was first used. But it is clearly evident in the Gospels that the Jews (the Zionist leadership of that day) made good use of it, as they have been doing since, right up to this very day. It is a tactic used in our time to stir people up to war against our neighbors under a false flag of patriotism. Its been documented by journalists and politicians, priests and even a number of Jews, such as Benjamin Freedman.

What he was
When Jesus was arraigned before Pilate, he was accused of provoking political discord by claiming he had right to be King of the Jews. The passage is in John 18 and likely the most important part of the Gospels above any other passage. Here we learn what Jesus was really doing, and the Christians of the world have paid no attention to it.

Pilate enters the judgement hall and gets right to the point, suspecting that the Sanhedrin is trying to set him up, he asks Jesus straightway: Are you the King of the Jews? Jesus wants to know what Pilate’s position is and answers with his own question: Are you asking to know for your own information, or did somebody put you up to it? Pilate lets the cat out of the bag: What do I know of your kind? Your own people and the chief priests have put this debacle (insurrection and aspiring to the throne) in my lap. YOU tell ME, what have you been doing? Whether Pilate is aware of Jesus’ activities or not we cannot say (not without resorting to “spurious” texts). But he wants to be impartial and hear the matter from the accused.

Jesus spells it out so Pilate can make no error: My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my subjects would be fighting for my freedom from the Sanhedrin. My kingdom is not of the kind you and the Sanhedrin need worry about. Pilate rejoins to make sure there is no inferential subterfuge: Are you a king then? Here Jesus is quite clear about what his mission on earth is: I was born and came into the world for this purpose only; to bear witness of the truth. Every one that reveres and adheres to the truth cleaves to my elucidation of it.

It is also a ploy by those who desire distinction among men, to subvert a movement or popular trend from within, if it cannot be accomplished by direct confrontation, whether covertly or overtly. Thus did Saul of Tarsas to the followers of Jesus; as was done to the Bolsheviks as they had done to the populace; as Hitler to the National Socialist party; as the Communist party USA; as the Illuminati to the Freemasons; as the Zionist Jews to the world’s banking and business trusts, and non-democratic governments around the world.

Context
There is a Gospel story of Jesus entering into the house of a chief Pharisee on the Jewish Sabbath. Everyone’s eyes were upon him. A man suffering from edema was present and Jesus decides to put his detractors on the defensive by asking, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Getting no response he heals the man and sends him off, adding with the question put to them: Which of you fail to go attend one of your cattle that is in a bind on the Sabbath? Now having gotten everyone’s attention he proceeds to speak in parables to them. He attracts a crowd, at length the Publicans and street rabble come along to hear. The Jews love to hear their priests tell allegories. By this time the Pharisees are a bit miffed and murmur he’s not behaving like they do: Get lost, you sinners. We won’t be seen associating with you.  So Jesus changes the tack of his allegories to expose the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. This got them perturbed and they ridiculed him. Seeing he had them in their own noose, got more explicit and expounded on their fate. Seeking to justify themselves feeling convicted of their wickedness, they lean on Abraham. But Jesus declares that neither Abraham nor Moses, nor anyone coming back from death could persuade them to repent.

Then he turned to his disciples, who seem to be at his heals everywhere he goes, and admonishes them not to take offense like the Pharisees if they happen to be rebuked at some time for their faults. Interestingly, his apostles request him to increase their faith, and Jesus being a bit perturbed at this tells them if their faith was as little as a mustard seed they could get the flora to observe their command. And if they merely did what was commanded of them they would yet be unprofitable servants.

At this juncture he’s had enough of the folks who just can’t seem to get the object of the parables and makes his way downtown by way of Samaria and Galilee. One must presume if the story is contiguous, that the chief Pharisee he had dinner with lived in a swank subdivision at the outskirts of Jerusalem. Along the way he encounters some lepers who beg him to have mercy and heal them. Having compassion on those afflicted, he does so according to their own faith. But this really gets to the Pharisees who are a mite defensive, following him to find a way to use the law to shut him up. They demand he tell them when the kingdom of God should come, and he tells them explicitly: You ain’t going to see no kingdom come by looking for it. You ain’t going to see it come by people preaching in the streets, declaring its arrival (apparently a reference to John the Baptist among others). Just as plain as he can make it clear to the Pharisees and to his disciples he said: the kingdom of God is within a person’s heart. He tells his disciples the day will come when they will lament the time gone by when they had his company. He warns them by allusion that the Pharisees have crafted a plan to accuse him falsely of seeking to take over the kingdom of the Jews.

Jesus, a priest, a rabbi, a magi, a physician. A man of the craft. Throughout the Gospel stories we never read of him declaring of himself any other such agenda, nor that his intent was to build a church, for the Jews don’t attend churches to worship. (The use of the word “church” in Matthew 16 is an anachronism, and clear indication the passage is corrupt, the word first being derived from the Greek, and is interpolated hearsay by the translator.) They go to synagogues to learn. They go to the temples to buy off their offences to God. His Gospel is not new, it had been declared through the ages before him (The Essenes, among whom he first learned his craft, were the conservators of The Way of the ancients.). By lineage, he had a claim to the throne of the southern kingdom, but it was not as direct as others contemporary with him, being that such lineage goes through a bastard child of Tamar and Judah. Judah himself can only claim this royal prerogative through the fabled story of his progenitor Jacob buying off his brother’s birthright. So within the context of kingdoms and kings as had been practiced in Mesopotamia for several millennia, Jesus didn’t have a right to anything but a petty vasalship.

What he was not
So how did Jesus get mixed up in this plot? Well Andrew, Peter’s brother, was a follower of John the Baptist. After John declares Jesus to be the Lamb of God to Andrew and another, the two immediately tail Jesus and follow him home. The next day Andrew shags his brother Peter and tells him he and his bud have found the prophesied “Messias.” The thing snowballs as Jesus picks up Philip from the same suburb as Andrew and Peter. Philip goes off to find his bud Nathaniel and tells him they have found the Mosaic-law-and-prophets-prophesied coming of Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. (Nathaniel is a skeptic, but flip-flops after Jesus tells him he saw Nathaniel before Philip shagged him. Huh?) Stop right there! Isn’t this declaration a bit opportunistic? In Matthew Jesus asks Peter who he thinks Jesus is and Peter tells him he is the Christ, the Son of the living God. But the word Christ is Greek for “the anointed”, meaning the Messias. But it doesn’t have anything to do with also being the Son of God. Is Peter adept at Greek, or is this the Gospel author slipping in the Greek form? (By the way, Peter’s subsequent rebuke by Jesus as possessed of Satan is another anachronism, for Satan in Hebrew means “accuser,” while its Greek equivalent  diabolos from which diablo or devil is derived means “aggressor.” The first anachronism is "Jesus of Nazareth")

And where does it say in Deuteronomy or any of the Pentateuch books that “Jesus of Nazareth”, a son of Joseph, was the prophesied Messiah? The town of Nazareth is not even mentioned in available Jewish writings of the period, and only appears no earlier than 200 AD in the writings of Sextus Julius Africanus and Origen by the dubious variant Nazará.  The etymology of “Nazareth” is disputedly undecided by scholars as to whether it is a genuine variant of the Aramaic language of the time. To date, no one knows for sure if there truly was a town called Nazareth, although the purported location has an archeological history extending back to 2200 BCE. Nathaniel declares Jesus to be the Son of God, and the King of Israel. Here again we are confronted with anachronisms, products of a much later age by True Believers who are descendent scribes (by 200+ years) of the early sect. We know that Nathaniel would have to be ignorant of Israelite history, for the northern kingdom was known as Israel, while the southern kingdom was of Judah. If Jesus was a descendent of Judah, how then could he be the rightful king of Israel, while later at the Crucifixion he is labeled the king of the Jews? Whoever wrote the Gospels did not get their stories straight, as we see over and over throughout the narratives. Much has been investigated on this problem by able scholars such as Bart Ehrman, F. Scrivener, Vincent Taylor, etc. After these chroniclers got through with their fraudulent treatment of so-called eye-witness accounts, Constantine (who was raised in England as a Christian) directed St. Augustine and Eusebius to gather all these disagreeable contorted manuscripts and compile a single compendium and dogma according to his decrees. Whereupon Eusebius gathered them all up, saved those that conformed to the decrees, and directed the burning of those then labeled heretical at the Council of Nicea.

Salvation Obsession
The problem originates with the term Messias. The earliest form of this word in Hebrew is MSSH, a derivative of Messeh/Mûshûs referring in ancient Mesopotamia to the sacred crocodile. Those who by lineage had the right to rule in Egypt were anointed with the crocodile’s fat, by their consort, the Queen. This ritual was a part of the ring-lord culture which predates the Sumerian civilization, originating in the Balkans. The selling of the birthright by Esau to Jacob is likely a story fabricated by his descendents, for the birthright is a blood and firstborn prerogative. It cannot be sold or given away, only conferred upon next of kin with the death of the rightful heir if he has no posterity. This is the Sumerian legacy of kingly birthright, observed by the Pharaohs for centuries. Esau, who we learn very little of in the Old Testament, fathered the kings of Assyria and Babylonia, as well as the Hyksos kings of Egypt. The tiny wannabe kingdom of Israel is surrounded by their cousin rulers who have the most direct claim to kingship. So we can discern here that in the book of Isaiah, even if the author knew anything about the royal dynasty, was in error about a prophesied Messiah liberating the Jews at some distant time. But since the specific reference is another anachronistic bending of Isaiah (a self-fulfilling prophecy, found everywhere in the New Testament), we can set that also to rest. Jesus by lineage could never be a King of kings, because he was not a direct descendent of Esau! As for his anointing as the Messias, this is presumed to have happened when Mary Magdalene washed his feet with her tears and anointed his head with spikenard. (And now you know the rest of the story behind the Second Anointing ritual in the Morgdum temple. While the form is only partially there, the right of possession is a fraud and impossible for Caucasian Mormons. Without a direct pedigree to the Starfire council of nine—the Elohim, they have no claim to a kingdom of any kind under any aegis. The bestowal of full priesthood authority on the earth is a hoax, for kingship was never inclusive of priesthoods, even though the high priesthood was administered with spiked olive oil in ancient Israel.) In some scholarly circles it is asserted that Jesus did not receive of any priesthood until after anointing, at the end of his ministry. This priesthood was of Melchizedek descent, although its authenticity is quite dubious because of the intervening years and lack of records between the time of Melchizedek and the Nazarene community in Galilee.

Readers of the corrupted scriptures (and they are all corrupt, including those of the Essenes and the Ebionites, etc) assume that because those men Jesus chose to become his apostles were looking for a Messias (or “foundation stones” as the Essenes describe them), that he acknowledged being the Messias. If this be true, then he was lying to Pilate when he was asked if he was a king of the Jews, and he denied it. This is one of the most fundamental falsehoods perpetrated in the ancient texts, that Jesus declared himself to be the long awaited Messias to deliver Israel from bondage. Attend this passage from the Gospel of the Twelve:

“And it came to pass, as he was alone praying, his disciples were with him: and he asked them, saying, Whom say the people that I am?
They answering said, John the Baptist; but some [say], Elias; and others [say], that one of the old prophets is risen again. He said unto them, But whom say ye that I am? Peter answering said, The Christ of God. And he straitly charged them, and commanded [them] to tell no man that thing;...”

Peter believes that Jesus is the Messias (Christ, in Greek, and another hearsay anachronism), but Jesus immediately demands that they say nothing to anyone about this. Why? Because it is too early in his ministry for the people to know? Does he want them to discover it on their own? Or is he trying to quell this assumption by his disciples without actually coming out and telling them he is not who they think he is? If he told them he was not the Messias, would they continue to learn his teachings? It is my view that Jesus did not disabuse anyone of their beliefs, but allowed them to discover for themselves the truth of his doctrines and his mission. It was not a question of deception. It was a condition of having eyes that saw, ears that heard, and a heart that garnered the truth when it was manifest. How often did Jesus remind his chosen disciples about seeing and hearing? This was ever the way of the Masters, for they never went about proselytizing to obtain acolytes. People who adore and cherish the truth are not interested in becoming an acolyte, and certainly not in participating in a cult (worship; reverence, devotion, admiration of the charismatic proselytizer). They see, hear, and understand truth when it is before them, and treasure it in their hearts. They’re not looking for someone to lead them, guide them, walk beside them, helping them find “The Way.”

It has ever been the method of personalities seeking acclaim, status, and influence to impose upon the credulity of others. Joseph Smith was exceptionally adept at this and Isaac Hale among many other contemporaries, saw right through it. Joseph was able to ferret out what people believed and reflect an image of it back to them, so they were gulled by their own credulity. By definition, a politician must do this. When he fails, he loses credibility and is replaced. Hitler did it, Stalin did it, George Washington did it, all religious founders did it. Saul of Tarsas did it. The vanguard of the Messias was John the B, but the vanguard of Christianity was Paul the Persecutor. How did they do this? By fomenting the beliefs of the people. Neither Jesus nor Paul, nor Peter created Christianity. The people who craved it did. The people who craved Germany’s national salvation are the ones who created National Socialism. Hitler just rode the wave. Everywhere one looks into the causes of WWI, you find historians describing a world that was economically and socially ripe for it. Tyrants don’t grasp the reigns of power, people give it to them. Cults are not created by the charismatic leader. People exalt him. Monk monasteries are not created by the teacher. The people create it. It is people looking for the means and personage to facilitate escape from accountability. The eminent psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz, wrote:

“People dream of making the virtuous powerful, so they can depend on them.  Since they cannot do that people choose to make the powerful virtuous, glorying in being victimized by them.  After their secular savior—their Robespierre or Stalin—is safely in his grave, then the people glory once more in denouncing him as a betrayer of their trust.  Then they repeat the cycle.... The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy—and, in our age, monomedicine.  The belief that there is only one right way to live—only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs—is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity.”

This appellation of Messias in the Bible is nowhere to be found declared by Jesus of himself. It is contrary to his stated mission, and anywhere in a text that such appears to be the case there will be found a conflation of Christian salvation doctrines with it. The reader assumes it means what they are preconditioned in their minds to think it reads.  When John the B. inquired of Jesus if he was that awaited Messias, how did Jesus respond? He sent John’s messengers back with the declaration that the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, etc., and let John decide for himself. Kind of a rude response if John the B. thought he was preparing the way for Israel’s political deliverer. John the B. was a Nazarene, as was Jesus, and his father Joseph. None of these Nazarenes, who were trained by the Essenes in The Way, knew what to think of Jesus as he went about fulfilling his mission.


Historical Background
Investigating the origin of the Nazarenes we find ourselves back at the time of the Babylonian captivity. The Israelite priests were introduced to Pythagoras. The irony is that much of the Greek religious pantheon derived from the Mosaic influence in Egypt. With the intervening years the Greeks morphed the Mosaic deities (not just one, in the beginning) into their own, adding embellishments and their own characteristics. The Levitical priests of the exile then inserted this Greek perspective into their rewrite of the Torah, which is the Deuteronomist version of the royal cult which Margaret Barker was trying to retrieve in her investigative works, The Older Testament and The Great Angel. This royal cult was none other than the Sumerian pantheon of gods. YHWH, the Judaen god, merged with the Israelite god Elohim, are respectively in Sumerian culture, Enki-Ea, and Enlil/NinLil. Without the Sumer tablets professor Barker was at a standstill in disassembling the confusion. (Joseph Smith didn’t stand a chance getting the distinction corrected. His “inspired” version of the Bible is worse than a joke.) The kings and queens of all the empires dating back to Sumer are all blood related originating in Ansar the heavenly father, and Kisar the earthly mother. Both these deities are heavily referenced by Jesus in his teaching recounted in the Essene Gospel of Peace. There Jesus does not refer to them as literal parents of the human race, but as archetypes of Nature which are bestowed human qualities. It was common to deify the kings and queens in ancient religious practice, who personify the Creators of heaven and earth.) The etymology of Nazari/Nazarene stems from Ansar. The Hebrew, a Phoenician script, with their blessed abandonment of vowels (!!!) wrote it as NSR (which allowed as many variants of pronunciation as one can conjure), becoming Nas Sar, Nasi Sar, both meaning “prince.” Thus Nasi Sar is the equivalent of “Prince of princes.” It is easy to see how a pissant wannabe nation would convert the concept of “Prince of princes” into “King of kings” as part of the national identity elevation over their rightful cousins and the self-fulfillment of their prophecies.

At the time of Jesus, anyone could consecrate themself to some particular objective for any amount of time, revocable by the father or mother over minors, and be referred to a Nazorean. The firstborn son was often consecrated to god (e.g. Sampson), which explains why Mary and Joseph, Nazari themselves, introduced Jesus to the order. This consecration was begun with the initiation into the Essene sect, for rights of purification and instruction. So now you know how Jesus as a youth could sit in the temple and confound the elders. He was trained in the ancient texts preserved by the Essene community. What does Jesus do at the conclusion of his personal preparations and sanctifying? Luke tells us he went into the temple and declared the prophecy of Isaiah 61 was fulfilled in their ears! Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. He was raised by devout True Believers. The “salvation” promised by the Lord in Isaiah is the recapture of their Golden Age of political supremacy, economical prowess over other nations, and the healing of the maimed both physically and spiritually. It is a restoration of all they had lost, ascribed to their wickedness and disobedience in serving other gods. As a Master Jesus did not see himself as a political deliverer of the captive, but a deliverer of those who were held captive by their suffering, their ignorance, their infirmities. He sought to teach them personal responsibility and accountability for their physical and spiritual health.

It is interesting to note here that in the Essene book of Moses, the higher law which Moses downgraded for the dim-witted was:

Thou shalt have no other Laws before me.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any image of the Law in heaven above or in the earth beneath. I am the invisible Law, without beginning and without end.
Thou shalt not make unto thee false laws, for I am the Law, and the whole Law of all laws. If thou forsake me, thou shalt be visited by disasters for generation upon generation.
If thou keepest my commandments, thou shalt enter the Infinite Garden where stands the Tree of Life in the midst of the Eternal Sea.
Thou shalt not violate the Law. The Law is thy God, who shall not hold thee guiltless.
Honor thy Earthly Mother, that thy days may be long upon the land, and honor thy Heavenly Father, that eternal life be thine in the heavens, for the earth and the heavens are given unto thee by the Law, which is thy God.
Thou shalt greet thy Earthly Mother on the morning of the Sabbath.
Thou shalt greet the Angel of Earth on the second morning.
Thou shalt greet the Angel of Life on the third morning.
Thou shalt greet the Angel of Joy on the fourth morning.
Thou shalt greet the Angel of Sun on the fifth morning.
Thou shalt greet the Angel of Water on the sixth morning,
Thou shalt greet the Angel of Air on the seventh morning-
All these Angels of the Earthly Mother shalt thou greet, and consecrate thyself to them, that thou
mayest enter the Infinite Garden where stands the Tree of Life.
Thou shalt worship thy Heavenly Father on the evening of the Sabbath.
Thou shalt commune with the Angel of Eternal Life on the second evening.
Thou shalt commune with the Angel of Work on the third evening.
Thou shalt commune with the Angel of Peace on the fourth evening.
Thou shalt commune with the Angel of Power on the fifth evening,
Thou shalt commune with the Angel of Love on the sixth evening.
Thou shalt commune with the Angel of Wisdom on the seventh evening.
All these Angels of the Heavenly Father shalt thou commune with, that thy soul may bathe in the Fountain of Light, and enter into the Sea of Eternity.
The seventh day is the Sabbath: thou shalt remember it, keep it holy. The Sabbath is the day of the Light of the Law, thy God. In it thou shalt not do any work, but search the Light, the Kingdom of thy God, and all things shall be given unto thee. For know ye that during six days thou shalt work with the Angels, but the seventh day shalt thou dwell in the Light of thy Lord, who is the holy Law.
Thou shalt not take the life from any living thing. Life comes only from God, who giveth it and taketh it away.
Thou shalt not debase Love. It is the sacred gift of thy Heavenly Father.
Thou Shalt not trade thy Soul, the priceless gift of the loving God, for the riches of the world, which are as seeds sown on stony ground, having no root in themselves, and so enduring but for a little while.
Thou shalt not be a false witness of the Law, to use it against thy brother: Only God knoweth the beginning and the ending of all things, for his eye is single, and he is the holy Law.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's possessions. The Law giveth unto thee much greater gifts, even the earth and the heavens, if thou keep the Commandments of the Lord thy God.

The loss of Israel ‘s political preeminence was through the curse they brought upon themselves by departure from the lesser Laws of Peace and Prosperity. The original code of Law was had among the people of this planet going back all the way to Horus, when the “Gods” came down among men and taught them how to live. It was the teachings of the Akhu that the Essenes were attempting to preserve. The problem was the Deuteronomists, the exiled Levtical priests in Babylon, who not only re-wrote the lesser Law in contemporary terms, but destroyed the references to the older Law which they were charged to preserve, by not perpetuating them as the Shemsu-Hor had been doing for thousands of years. In this they violated the first commandment of the Law: thou shalt not subvert it nor make any facsimile of it. (Technically, Moses did just that when he dumbed it down, rather than leave the people to their lusts.) The restoration they were looking for began at the time of Isaiah’s prophecies when he warned the king of Judah against foreign alliances (ca 739 BC). Disregarding these warnings Judah fell into Babylonian subjection. This is the origin of the “restoration” and “salvation” in Jewish beliefs, transmogrified into the Christian (Pauline) prophecy of the return of Jesus as King of kings, Lord of lords, and the Mormon doctrine of Apostasy and Restoration preparatory to his Millennial reign. Of course the entire house of embellished and corrupt prophetic cards collapse because Jesus’ mission was the restoration of the Jews to the original Law they had abandoned, who all were astonished at his understanding and wisdom. He just didn’t tell Pilate the whole story, because he knew if the people began keeping the Law as had been given them anciently the Roman subordination would collapse of its own weight, while the people would have internal peace by living justly with all men. Such a course would be construed as subversion by Roman authority. What is most important to observe in these historical accounts is that Jesus does NOT portray himself as a political liberator in the Gospel of Peace, whereas in the later Christian Gospels (including the Essene Gospel of the Twelve) it is a remnant of the Tolkien (Sumerian) Return of the King, the Solar Myth. This subversion of Pauline Christianity was implemented by the conspiracy of Constantine, Augustine, and Eusebius at Nicea. They incorporated the solar myth of pagan origin, as well as the fabrication of the miracle fables we read today, and the present abomination of blood Atonement by crucifixion. The Jews never considered Jesus a Messias because the orthodox among them were looking for a king with the power to break their occupation and economic servitude. It is for this reason he was mocked as the King of the Jews at the crucifixion, all the while the Sanhedrin leaders were scapegoating him with this propaganda in order to subvert his rising popularity among the people. He was seen as the political third party between the Pharisees and Sadducees.

Morgdumb is correct about the early Church apostasy. What they don’t realize, though Joseph Smith did have a small clue, was that the entire New (and Old) Testament was corrupt, not just translated incorrectly. The apostasy began with the Pauline churches that split off from the Essene driven Jerusalem “church.” This “church” fled Jerusalem with the advent of the Roman destruction in 64AD. The apostasy began with Paul arrogating to himself the status of Apostle of Jesus, with Peter tailing along for a short period. Peter was not the conservator of the church, for in the Essene Gospel of the Twelve Jesus explicitly tells Peter, he, Jesus, is the rock, the cornerstone, and the twelve form the foundation of the allegorical building of his “kingdom.” Peter never did find his conviction, for it was Jesus’ brother, James the Just who watched over the Jerusalem church until martyrdom. Peter fades into the background until he too is martyred. Saul of Tarsus, seeing that he could not obtain the Jewish daughter he wanted to wed, persecuted the Essenes until his so-called conversion, where upon he changed his tactic of persecution by Jewish law to subversion by phoney conversion and false self-effacement. Paul’s “conversion” stories are just as inconsistent as Joseph Smith’s, and he used the same con game that Joseph did to jump start his own religion.

Conclusion
When one reads the Gospel of the Essenes, the character of Jesus and his purported mission is consistent with his actions as a teacher and healer in the four Gospels. What is not consistent is all the Messianic and Divine hyperbole found in the New Testament and the self-fulfilling retroactive prophecies—the wresting of the Old Testament passages that ordinary Jews knew did not have anything to do with the Rabbi Jesus.

Jesus was who he said he was, and not what later acolytes of Paul’s preaching made him into. He was an ordinary man of extraordinary education and virtue—a man of the craft, born of a physical father Joseph, also a man of the craft, and a young virgin maiden, Mary. Taught by the Essenes in his youth and learned in the various skills of the craft in other countries, his stated mission was to bear witness of the truth, to heal the infirm. When he told the Nazari of his youth the truth of their own hypocrisy, they sought to “bash in his head” as the Hungarian proverb warns. And so it was with all those he confronted with their works of mischief, wickedness, and abandonment of accountability.

One cannot make the blind to see that does not know he is blind; nor the deaf to hear, that does not know he is deaf; nor heal those who do not feel ill; nor the arrogant to understand who do not know their ignorance.

Seth Smee

Addendum 9-28-14
U.G. Krishnamurti, pointing "to his heel and said that it was the only `sole', and that the other soul, if there was one, was fed to the point of indigestion by all those holy men and so-called messiahs.”

Bruce: “What if I need you?  What if I have questions?”
God:    “Ha ha ha.  That’s your problem Bruce—that’s everybody’s problem.  You keep looking up” [for your solutions]. Bruce Almighty




When a toddler is ready to walk on his/her own, (S)he lets go of the parent's fingers and begins the exploration of the world, solo. It is a rite of passage missing in transition to adulthood, in the individual, the family and Nations.



REFERENCES
John 18:33-37
Luke 14
Luke 4:16-30
Luke 9:18-21
Gospel of the 12, Lection IX
Gospel of the 12, Lection XIII
Gospel of the 12, Lection XVII
Laurence Gardner, Genesis of the Grail Kings, xiii, p155, Realm of the Ring Lords
The Nazarene Way of Essenic Studies, Caesar's Messiah; http://www.thenazareneway.com/Caesar%27s%20Messiah%20Commentary.htm
The Golden Age Project, http://www.goldenageproject.org.uk/genesis.php
Bart Ehrman, Jesus Interrupted
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason pp19-20
Thomas Szasz, The Untamed Tongue p155,160
Hannah Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism p458
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind
“Religion is not a matter of God, church, holy cause, etc. These are but accessories. The source of religious preoccupation is in the self, or rather the rejection of the self.” p25

“It is the weak who strain their ears for a new word, clutch at every promise and rally around a savior and a redeemer.” p28

The True Believer
“When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need of something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives. Hence the embracing of a substitute will necessarily be passionate and extreme. We can have qualified confidence in ourselves, but the faith we have in our nation, religion, race or holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising. A substitute embraced in moderation cannot supplant and efface the self we want to forget. We cannot be sure that we have something worth living for unless we are ready to die for it. This readiness to die is evidence to ourselves and others that what we had to take as a substitute for an irrevocably missed or spoiled first choice is indeed the best there ever was.” p16


Charles Moore, History of Western Civilization I, April 2003 Lara Lee Show
“...the head of the Jesuits, gathered together a bunch of Jesuits not long ago in Rome and explained to them the truth about Islam. And the truth about Islam is that it was created deliberately by the Catholic Church, on the advice of St Augustine, at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire. And the reason behind this is rather startling. It turns out that Christianity was found not by Jesus, but by Constantine at the council of Nicea. That there was a Jesus, the last thing in the mind of that person was to have a Church, or any organization to follow him. He was too busy trying to share his life and insights with the people around him. His life is like that of Buddha, who also forbade any religion in his name. Now, all Masters do that; the true Masters don’t want religion following them, they simply want people to find out what they found out. Constantine founded Christianity, and the guy he got to the editing on the scriptures was named Eusebius. Eusebius was delivered by the bishops of the then up and running gatherings of so-called Christians.”

Personal Epiphany

Just prior to turning 41 I filed for divorce. This was an agonizing decision I had wrestled with for several years. Losing my bid as plaintiff in court I spent the ensuing months possessed of considerable anxiety over the propriety and consequences of the decision and its subsequent loss. I was fearful of having taken a course in life for which there was no remedy for my children, and had consigned myself and them to an endless misery. The struggle to find useful purpose in 19 years of non-functioning marriage consumed my daily thoughts. I had failed miserably to be a decent father on more than one occasion. Against this backdrop I found myself suddenly extricated from the trivialities of bachelor living to another existence. On the night of November 8th, 1991 I retired to bed much earlier than usual. The date is peculiar as it was the 56th wedding anniversary of my deceased parents, the same day of the week, the same time of evening of their ceremony, and at the time of this experience I had not any knowledge of these details. The last thing I remember seeing before falling asleep was looking at my alarm clock which read 8:30PM.


The next thing I was conscious of was walking north on the sidewalk outside the house where I grew up. This house was demolished as were most of them on the street by the 1970s. Presently my parents walked up from behind and “spoke” to me about going into the house to discuss important matters. After some unknown length of time discussing my marital situation with my mother we exited the house back in the direction they had arrived and we made ascension into another place via a swirling dark vortex. There were a number of people who were also entering and departing. It all seemed so natural and ordinary. The moment we entered the blackness, we moved at such speed I don’t remember anything of the journey, only the arrival at a quarried stone building used for consultation--the kind people engage in to obtain a clearer sense of purpose.

We arrived at a room on an upper floor and my mother instructed me to enter through a door to our left where I would be visited shortly by way of their prior arrangement. I would guess the room was on the order of twenty to thirty feet on each side. I was alone and the room was empty and windowless, but well lit without evidence of artificial lighting.  Presently the door opened and a man came in, dressed in simple white robes.  He was taller than I, about six feet.  He had a strong build without looking excessively muscular, and walked with perfect confidence.  His hair was white with some moderate curling, and it appeared to flow down around his head like a waterfall.  Within a moment I recognized him, not from his facial features, but from the aura of his countenance.  I suddenly remembered we were friends and that we had spent time with each other often before I had entered mortality. It was a flood of warm memories instantly unlocked.  As He approached me I knew him to be Jesus and the same overwhelming, enveloping love I had experienced with my mother years earlier flowed from His being.  Only His was much stronger and radiated farther out.  I was also aware of His immense age.  He had been alive for a very long time in terms of planetary years.  My impression was at least a quarter million, but there is no way to quantify it in mortal terms. I was not nearly as old as He.

I was filled with deep feelings of respect and esteem for Him, and He for me. I felt a measure of awe, and filled with a wonderful sense of value in being privileged to have had His friendship all of my existence. The conversation though mental and extremely fast went something like this:

Jesus: (With considerable affection and slight humor) “You know we could have had this visit a lot sooner, but your attention was so riveted on your mistakes and guilt none of us could reach you. We’ve been waiting.”

Smee: (Feeling a lot of remorse and humiliation) “I did not know who to trust, not for lack of trying to find intelligent help. I tried really hard in spite of all the adverse situations to do the right thing, and made a serious mess of my paternal stewardship. I fear my children may never recover from my mistreatment of them, and then the divorce turned out far worse than I had anticipated. What hope have they now of growing to adulthood without serious relationship issues? I feel really hopeless about their prospects for a functional life. I can’t help wondering if I could have found some way to hang on in spite of their mother’s indifference to our emotional needs.”

Jesus: (brilliant with love, acceptance, confidence) “I know about all you have gone through, all you have done for good and ill, about your children, their struggles, and their fate. They will be fine, you have not damaged their lives “beyond repair”, and they will be attended to while in the flesh, just as you have been. None can judge or condemn you for your mistakes and their evil consequence but you alone. It is not mine to do either, but only mine to extend the helping hand to those who are willing and in need, to lead them through the door of transcendence. The measure of mortality is not in the mistakes men make, any lack of conviction, will, or power to control. It is not through merit nor my “grace” as the world perceives it that Man obtains transcendence and redemption. The purpose of mortality is not after the manner of Man’s conception, and therefore the value of the soul is not predicated upon the concepts of fallibility nor merit. Rather mortality’s purpose is to experience powerlessness and by it magnify the virtue of compassion and love, for love is the very essence of power in all of Creation. The measure of your life will not be in the misdeeds nor the good deeds you have achieved, to be weighed in a balance scale. It is solely by the amount of love you have administered to those who need it, that their own flame dies not. Your fallibility and its consequences are redeemed through my love as it is in all love, as you permit it to have influence in your life. The purpose of life is in how much you grow in love, for these mortal experiences are but a process in this journey of Being. The only harm you can commit is refraining from loving others when they require it, and erecting prison walls of guilt, remorse, and unforgiveness about yourself. To do so delays growth and produces exquisite, unnecessary torment from which not even Man’s God can deliver.

So that you may find rest to your soul, let us review your life from the beginning. Let us examine your choices and the growth you have obtained from them. You shall see the whole of your life, all that it was before mortality, all that is has been to now and may be until you die the mortal death, and where these choices are leading you to.”

Smee: (gaining courage and hope) “Lead on Lord. Restore my soul. Show me who I am.”

Presently the walls seemed to fade away and in their place scenes from my life appeared.  It was panoramic, only all around me.  It was like stereoscopic vision, with multiple scenes happening, past, present and future, each with their own issue and events pertinent to a particular cusp.  I had never imagined it would be possible to learn on such a scale.  Here we think, read, and speak in serial form.  There, it was in parallel, the mind multitasking each subject with complete ease.  As I learned from observation and a kind of interactive process with what I saw (the scenes changed according to what I wanted to understand), I marveled at how there seemed to be no limitation to the amount of information the human mind could process at once.  It has taken a number of years since this review to unzip all those packets of entwined learning and put them into a serialized form I could articulate.  Even then it has been very difficult to put into words for there is often no analog of experience in mortality with which to describe those things.

The whole of my life was there before me, behind me, all around. I could analyze and evaluate all I wished to while at the same time absorbing the meaning of each experience and knowing its value. I saw my earliest experiences up to entering the physical body, all that had transpired in it, numerous possibilities yet to be chosen, the transition of dying, and returning home. It was like conversing with a congregation of souls and not losing focus with a single individual, all the while correlating the meaning and significance of each person’s communication into an integral whole. It was real-time; being in tune with Creation, being in touch with life. This panoramic review continued for quite some time. It seemed but only an instant, yet in retrospect encompassed subjectively most of the “day.”

At length when I was satisfied, understanding that which I had seen, I had another question, like a yearning.

Smee: (great curiosity and thirst for understanding) “Lord, I want to know why we are, what we are to become. Where can I go from here, after mortality is finished? Is it possible for such a seemingly insignificant person as I among innumerable souls, many of whom possess great capacity, to amount to something of value to the whole of Man’s existence? What IS Man’s Destiny?”

Jesus: (laughing with delight) “Those are big questions that are not easily answered. To gain those answers, one must learn many new ideas, and that requires experiences of growth. But come along, let us visit some of the different levels of progression that Man has achieved. Let us behold the marvels of that which they have attained. It will be a fun experience!”

Smee: (terribly agitated with excitement) “Yes! Let’s go see what others have become! I want to see what if any, limits there are to what I may achieve, and how much happiness can be created.”

So with Jesus close by my side we traveled great distances over the next “day”, stopping to observe  many places throughout this region of space, how other souls had chosen to realize their potential. Most of those localized civilizations we observed from a distance. There was little interaction with them because of my lack of sufficient growth to comprehend the nuances of their objectives. Our perceptions and understanding of Creation comes in stages of development. This is hard to explain. The Universe is endless. It is not possible to take it all in. If I were to guess, we went to the local group of galaxies. I’m pretty sure it was not limited to just our own, which is relatively young. But the scenes were magnificent. Beautiful creations everywhere, both in Nature, and that which Man had invented. There was a level of happiness and love in each one unique to their enterprise unparalleled in anything I had contemplated or beheld before. Satisfied that there was plenty to keep me occupied for a very long time, and prospects for happiness and beauty unlimited, we returned to the same room we had departed from.

Feeling immensely edified and enlarged, saturated with awe and wonder at those scenes I had observed, I wanted to keep them forever in my heart and mind. I had to ask:

Smee: “Going back to my mortal life, can I retain what I have learned from our adventure?”

Jesus: (very amused but steadfast) “Knowing now what you do about yourself, do you believe you can refrain from trying to manipulate life and avoid the painful experiences to come? Do you believe you can still realize the full growth you want by circumventing the hardest parts and still arrive at the person you want to be?”

Smee: (dismayed and acquiescing) “You are right. I could not resist trying to avoid the painful parts. I would only succeed in making my life and the lives of others more complicated. But I don’t want to go back to that feeling of hopelessness and despair for the future. I need to know I will get through all those things and mortality will turn out well. How can I know I am making the right choices?”

Jesus: (brilliant again with His love and compassion) “Most of these things will be suppressed in your memory, particularly what you have observed in our journey together. This is necessary so that you will not be overwhelmed by them when you experience the challenging events to come. The torment of the contrast will make them all the more difficult and cause you to shirk them. However, you can be permitted to remember particular portions of what you have seen and learned after the critical moments have passed, so that you can know you are still heading in the direction you want to go.”

Jesus extended His hand and touched me with His index finger on the forehead between the eyebrows, and then again midway on the breastbone while speaking thus:

Jesus: “I seal these memories in your mind and heart, to be held in reserve until the end of mortality. You will know and remember only that which is needful to sustain you in tribulation, to give you hope and peace to your soul. You will not be alone, but can receive of my presence as you desire to be comforted.”

His touch changed me in ways I cannot describe. I felt transformed, as if a part of me was supplanted with something greater. It was a sense of surety, of confidence and self-assurance. In a way it felt like being reunited with my pre-mortal self. The emotional impact was almost overwhelming. I felt myself return to my physical body briefly, restless with a remorseful agitation for the person I had been, and then leaving that distraught person behind. Instantly I was back in His presence, feeling whole.

Jesus: (exuding joy and gaiety, pointing to the room’s corner behind Him a long table appeared, laden with comestibles) “Let’s celebrate this time together. Here is a banquet of fruits and vegetables to refresh ourselves.”

At this juncture my parents entered the room and we all feasted to our satisfaction upon the most exquisite tasting food I’d ever had. Jesus then departed to attend other matters. The next thing I remember was arising from sleeping in a second floor bedroom of the old house mentioned earlier. I trotted down the stairs which were adjacent to the kitchen. Somehow I knew mother was there, and seeing her she greeted me. I asked her where dad was and she said he had matters to attend to. I was disappointed. I had not heard him utter a single word the entire time. I had hoped we could discuss those issues that had bothered me when living in that house, and now he was gone.

I asked mother if any of what I had experienced actually happened, or if it was all just a fabrication of my own dreaming. She said it indeed did happen, just as I had experienced it in every detail, and that I should not deny it, for it would be cause for regret. She had been preparing something to eat for us and I sat with her enjoying a breakfast I could not remember having done since a young boy.

I awoke in a manner similar to the previous time she had visited with me. It was an event of strange disorientation, a kind of vertigo, but not of physical balance. It was somewhat like stepping between two moving trains, one traveling at a different height and speed, combined with a sense of awareness of location changing over a great distance. I was there, then rapidly and with the sensation of extreme movement, like stepping onto a people mover at an airport, I was here. I felt the sense of elapsed time change, and was instantly awake and alert. Opening my eyes I saw the clock which glowed with the time of 12:30 AM.

There have been moments over the intervening years I've cursed having experienced this epiphany. Before it happened, it was never something on my mind, the transcendence of a spiritual quest. All I wanted was answers to some basic issues that had plagued me since my earliest childhood memories. Like many people who have passed through their Near Death Episode and struggled with adjusting to living in this world of flesh, I've had my moments too. I don't like in the aggregate being here. I love the living beings on this planet more than I did before. The beauty of this planet is extraordinary in its depth and variety. I went through a period of increased sensitivity to light, irritation with hard raucous music, and an increased revulsion of news broadcasts or TV/movie programming that focuses on denigration of the human soul. I no longer have any interest in religion. It is a creation of Man, and its method of operation is domination and control of the human soul. Contrary to popular belief of the religious, it is the most stifling activity man can engage in to prevent spiritual growth.

There have been sudden moments of illumination of people's lives I hardly knew and knowing from it the troubles they would have if they didn't relinquish their lust for control of life. I wrestled, and at times continue to wrestle with depression during personal setbacks or that of other people who lose their health, spouse, or friends. I'm not one of those people who can say I am better for having been through this. There have been times when it has been a light to my footsteps, imparting courage and confidence to those who falter from their own burdens. At times the love of Jesus has sustained me in full confidence, rarely for myself, but to lift up the dispirited. There are still certain things that scare the bejesus out of me, but none of them to do with death. The thing I fear most is a protracted illness, fraught with pain and disability, that would encumber those closest to me with an impossible burden. I have been a helping hand over the years to such people and their family. It is not an easy task to lift up the hands of those who've lost their courage and spirit from travail.

Perhaps someone may find the answers here that I was searching for. The one thing that has stuck with me all this time is the extraordinary certitude I have about it. Religion was never my source of faith or conviction. For me, the answers I received imparted a clarity of understanding that surpasses all other forms of learning. May this story help restore a sense of personal value to an ailing soul.

SethSmee

Conspiracies and Common Sense

                                       

                                                        In the Mirror
 “For the Lord worketh not in secret combinations, neither doth he will that man should shed blood, but in all things hath forbidden it, from the beginning of man. And now I, Moroni, do not write the manner of their oaths and combinations, for it hath been made known unto me that they are had among all people, and they are had among the Lamanites. And they have caused the destruction of this people of whom I am now speaking, and also the destruction of the people of Nephi. And whatsoever nation shall uphold such secret combinations, to get power and gain, until they shall spread over the nation, behold, they shall be destroyed; for the Lord will not suffer that the blood of his saints, which shall be shed by them, shall always cry unto him from the ground for vengeance upon them and yet he avenge them not.” (Ether 19-22 Book of Mormon)


Secrets. Oaths. Conspiracy. Murder. Wealth. Power. Dominion.

Of all the indictments laid against Mormonism as a fraud, their own scripture—the “Gold Bible”—is the most damning. Yet the credulity of its adherents, with their concomitant cognitive dissonance, prohibits the realization of this simple conclusion from their reading in the Book of Mormon. As a missionary, I was commissioned to present the Book of Mormon as a new witness for the divinity of Christ, and by logical extension, such testimony made it one of the Movement’s pillars of proof of the Restoration. Neither I, nor any of my peers, had any conception of the American social and religious environment from which it emanated.

Long before I had abused my senses with more than forty readings of this plagiarized, late eighteenth century tale, I came to the conclusion that the bulk of the story had far less to do with Christ and His appearance among these purported aborigines, than it had to do with the human impulse to form “combinations.” The wail of its baneful civil effects is the summation of Mormon’s story. From beginning to end, along with the interrogatory comments of the “chroniclers”, the lament has to do with the destruction of their civilization due directly to the lust for gain, power, and domination. The theme plays out like the worst of contemporary “B” movies, also produced by aspiring but untalented writers and playwrights. This IS the message of the book; the activities of the Gadianton robbers with their plundering, murdering, oaths, conspiracies, subversion of law and justice, according to the prophet-priests who allegedly witnessed and chronicled their civilization’s destruction.

Early in my reading of this fabulous production I came to the conclusion opposite of what Joseph Smith told his twelve apostles convened at Brigham Young’s house:

“I told the brethren that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book.”  (4:461 History of the Church)

I did not get any closer to God reading this book than any other, ever, save The New Testament (and that poorly). It did however, raise a lot of questions and inconsistencies that I spent years trying to resolve. Among them were the unpaid priests who labored with their hands for their support, the secret oaths and signs of the Gadianton robbers, the discontinuity between the form of worship described by Mormon versus in the CJCLDS, and numerous other inconsistencies already dealt with by other church history investigators. When “Endowed” as a missionary, a person has little chance of reflecting on the presentation. Everyone is too busy with getting up and down periodically to fuss with “priesthood attire.” Upon returning from the mission for the Church I renewed temple attendance to gain an understanding of what was being taught there. I was further burdened by inconsistencies and obvious references to itself during that portion consisting of Lucifer, his preacher, and that all religion was a production of deceit and confusion. Especially noteworthy was the purpose of the oaths, signs, and death penalties. These I did not understand until years later gaining access to the history of Joseph’s involvement with Free Masonry, and Joseph and Sidney’s alienation after Sidney’s 1838 “Salt Sermon.”

What the unwary and fully credulous Mormon members do not realize, is that this story appears during a period in world history when secret societies were sweeping Europe and appearing in Colonial America. Free Masonry, the Illuminati, Jacobinism, and several others had found their way into the political world, as well as the more fundamentalist religious movements such as the Jesuits. Not long into the investigation of this period of world history the presence of societies of every imaginable kind appear on the world stage. Of all the anachronisms found in the Book of Mormon, this is the most glaring and obvious to the student of history. But Mormons are characteristically ignorant of early American history, while the ideologues of BYU in defense of the Faith interpret the period in support of the Joseph Smith Mystique. They would rather see a sinister motive against their faith in the determination of View to the Hebrews and Manuscript Found as the substance of the Book of Mormon plot, than to see in all three the elements of secret society angst extant in late Eighteenth century American culture. Such anxiety is nowhere to be identified in the histories of native American inhabitants, such that we so far have. The theme of secret societies was wholly and totally consistent with late Eighteenth century civilization, and not within that of the Maya, Aztec, Toltec, or any of the various aboriginal cultures.

Some people have equated the phrase “secret combination” to mean conspiracy. But Webster’s defines a conspiracy to be either open or secret. In my view, “society” is a much closer contextual synonym to “combination.”  Its usage also parallels the social fixation of the period in which the story was manufactured. Nevertheless, the important point of this topic is that secrecy, conspiracy, and the objectives of “secret combinations” as described in the Book of Mormon have been a fundamental part of Mormon history since before Joseph Smith courted Emma Hale.

One of the earliest persons to recognize the conspiracy surrounding the production of the Book of Mormon was Emma’s father, Isaac. Mormon ideologues have from the earliest days attempted to impugn Isaac’s eye-witness account of the book’s production as a hoax:

“…the whole "Book of Mormon" (so called) is a silly fabrication of falsehood and wickedness, got up for speculation, and with a design to dupe the credulous and unwary-and in order that its fabricators may live upon the spoils of those who swallow the deception.” Hale Affidavit

Since Isaac provided Joseph and Emma the very house in which this production began, who would know better what was going on therein and why? The problem I see with these refutations is they consistently extricate the eye-witness accounts from the historical context, and their polemics always have the unstated agenda of putting Joseph’s character in a positive light. What Rodger Anderson attempted to do was present a reasoned examination of why they should be accepted at face value, irregardless of imputed perjury. Why is it so difficult to let the testimonies of these contemporaries of Joseph Smith speak for themselves? Who knows better what was happening during the initial stages of the book’s “translation”, Isaac, or people who never knew Isaac, the conspirators in its production, or those who lived or now live removed in time and distance from the original events?

According to Cowdrey, Davis, and Vanick, the conspirators in the book’s production included at various stages, Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdrey, Martin Harris, Orson Hyde, Sidney Rigdon, and Emma Hale. Today we have the confessed account of the stated objective of the book’s production by Joseph and his relatives. Yet at every turn the Mormon ideologues attempt to discredit those who recorded what they heard and saw from the lips of these conspirators. All this is sufficiently documented by various investigators of Mormon history and I shall not attempt to review their research. Getting the story from their hand I relegate to the reader.

While reading some of the writings of Hannah Arendt, particularly her treatise of Totalitarianism, I could not help but notice strong resemblance in the history of the leadership of Mormonism to the characteristics Hannah identifies in movements that culminate in Totalitarianism.  Hannah elucidates this fourth form of government that rose a century ago in the form of Bolshevism and Nazism. The parallels to the behavior of Mormon leaders and its organization are too numerous to be coincidental. Hannah explores further where Eric Hoffer leaves off in The True Believer, characterizing mass movements and their social development. Of particular interest germane to my thesis are the chapters  The Totalitarian Movement, Totalitarian Power, and her later essay On the Nature of Totalitarianism. All this material I found available in the local library network. With some diligence, the reader can likely find all these on the Web. They are not particularly demanding of intellect, although Hannah’s ability to write lucidly in English is hampered by her German origin. One can read through all this material in a matter of a few hours.

Hannah identifies four basic forms of government:

Republican Rule
Monarchial Rule
Authoritarian Rule
Totalitarian Rule

The principle of action by which each of these forms respectively operate are Virtue, Honor, Fear, and Ideology. The first three were identified by Montesquieu, the last by Arendt’s study of Nazism and Communism. The important point to keep in mind with this study is that none of these forms manifest in human society in complete purity. There is always some overlap of form and character among them. Hannah’s tremendous point in her research is that had Nazism achieved complete totalitarian rule, the world would have been in far worse condition than where it was on V-day, perhaps never achieving liberation from their human and property destruction at all. The terror that unfolded from these movements is largely absent in the experience of society today, for only the oldest segment of the world’s population can remember the conditions that produced the holocaust. Hannah is certain that Totalitarianism in its elemental form has never left the world scene since the destruction of Germany, and this is born out with the history of the USSR as well as our own US of A. An important point to contemporary citizens is that the elements of Totalitarianism have been fully functioning in our society since that time. Technically, we entered the beginning of Totalitarian rule in this country during the administration of George W. Bush and the passage of the Patriot Act which “legalized” the use of terror through the suspension of Habeas Corpus. It is a matter of no small significance that Mormons contributed to the loss of several civil rights under the Act, just as the conservative Religious Right in Nazi Germany did beginning in the 1920s.

In comparing the history of the CJCLDS from beginning to present to these forms, I have observed numerous similarities to Authoritarian and Totalitarian political domination. The virtue of Eric Hoffer’s analysis is the reduction of political, religious, and social institutions to human mass movements. He devotes an entire section in his book, The True Believer to the interchangeability of mass movements. Eric, like Hannah, identifies the basic human quality that is the root of the motive force generating the production of movements, and the manifestation within them of Leaders who personify the same characteristics. Political terrorists such as Stalin and Hitler (or Bush and Obama), and religious terrorists such as Sidney and Brigham (or Benson and Packer) don’t suddenly appear in a vacuum. These personalities ride the wave of people coagulating around a central paradigm intended to be a substitute for their common deficiencies. Like attracts like, and it is just as true of mass movements as it is of married couples. (Incidentally, this also accounts for the lament of single women uttering the cliché that “All the good men are taken” being none other than a myth.)

Hannah identifies the common human need of Distinction as the root of motive energy. Its antithesis is Superfluity. If a person cannot achieve distinction among his peers, then he tends to feel superfluous. Eric describes the individuals who start or gravitate to mass movements as those who feel frustrated, are malcontents, misfits, or disaffected in their social relations. It is the suppression or prevention of individuality that causes these persons to seek substitutes for that innate need of human expression and validation. Obviously it is this basic need that Christ’s Beatitudes address, but which are perverted in the same manner as the hypocritical priests did in His day when members today are purged for failing to adhere to the Church’s priesthood party ideology.

The perspicacious Dr. Szasz wrote “In a modern totalitarian society, such as the Soviet Union, only the right man, who is the spokesman for the Party, can speak, and what the Party says is right.”  This is a credible description of Mormonism, and the man who bemoaned of Communism coming to the center of Mormonism is precisely the man who entrenched and enlarged Totalitarianism in Mormonism.  He was the man who was widely celebrated as the advocate of Liberty as a Church authority—just like Hitler was exalted as the savior of Germany. This man was Ezra Taft Benson, who institutionalized the Church’s equivalent of the secret police in creating the Strengthening the Membership Committee. While Church leaders had employed spies all the way back to Joseph’s day, it was never incorporated into the hierarchical structure of the Church until Ezra institutionalized his own spying upon “subversive” members of the Church. The objective of this Committee is not the actual strengthening of members in their Faith, but of purging the dissidents who the Leaders fear will expose the man behind the curtain. It is the Church’s Correlation Committee who have charge of publishing the dogma.

The Church’s Correlation program was Totalitarianized with the restructuring of the Church hierarchy under Harold B. Lee. This formalization of a process begun decades earlier was a consolidation of power within the elite—the fifteen Apostates. Part of its intent was to remove various doctrines that had crept in during its creative phase, to be replaced by a consistent indoctrination methodology across all departments. It is no coincidence that since that time purges of dissident factions and the creation of such categories (Intellectuals, Feminists, Homosexuals) has increased. Such an organizational change was required to make spying an institutional facet of the Church’s organization. There was no divine inspiration in such changes. They were a normal and necessary part of the consolidation of hierarchical power at the top over the individual member’s life, far greater than it had been since the administration of John Taylor.

A totalitarian organization develops through a single party system, and this is precisely what the Correlation Program accomplished—the unification of the Priesthood “party” of the Church, thereby compressing the beliefs of the various organizations into a singular ideology run by a single party—the Priesthood. If women are ever allowed to hold priesthood positions, it will indubitably require the dissolution of the Relief Society as a woman’s function. When Joseph threw this bone to Emma (to silence her complaints on his philandering), it also included the creation of an inner Priesthood organization composed of those who were given a “fullness” of the Priesthood. Brigham sought to suppress women’s influence in Church priesthood. (The reader can find Brigham’s attitude about women in the Journal of Discourses, especially where he threatened to dissolve all Church marriages.) A hierarchical form of it exists today among those who receive their “Second Anointing.” But they are all essentially neutered in terms of real Church power which was Brigham’s implementation of Joseph’s objective.

In a Totalitarian movement, such doctrinal denials that Gordon Hinckley made on Larry King to the world are ignored by True Believing Mormons, for they see themselves faithful to the Ideology and Leader, keeping their “eye on the Prophet.”  Describing this same characteristic of Nazism Hannah explains:

“While the membership does not believe statements made for public consumption, it believes all the more fervently the standard clichés of ideological explanation, the keys to past and future history which totalitarian movements took from nineteenth-century ideologies, and transformed, through organization, into a working reality.” (p371-2 Burden of Our Time)

The entire point of secrecy in conspiracy is to conceal fraud. Fraud can only be imposed upon the ignorant and gullible. It is an instinctive reaction in human nature to disbelieve anyone who imposes upon one’s credulity. This instinct can be over-ridden by the emotional craving for distinction, and leads numerous people, lacking in self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-validation to attach themselves to movements where others of like deficiency can assuage the emotional emptiness. We hear this repeatedly in the news and television programs: I want to make a difference. Seldom do such people ever stop to consider that simply by being born into this world they are making a difference. Hannah is explicit about this.

The relation between secret societies and hierarchies in mass movements are described by Hannah in explicit detail throughout her writings. Reading the following passage I was startled in recognizing all the elements found in the Church’s “Endowment”:

“Secret societies also form hierarchies according to degrees of ‘initiation,’ regulate the life of their members according to a secret and fictitious assumption which makes everything look as though it were something else, adopt a strategy of consistent lying to deceive the noninitiated external masses, demand unquestioning obedience from their members who are held together by allegiance to a frequently unknown and always mysterious leader, who himself is surrounded, or supposed to be surrounded, by a small group of initiated who in turn are surrounded by the half-initiated who form a ‘buffer area’ against the hostile profane world. With secret societies, the totalitarian movements also share the dichotomic division of the world between "sworn blood brothers" and an indistinct inarticulate mass of sworn enemies.” (p364 Burden of Our Time)

A look at the Endowment dialogue a century ago reveals the blood oath of vengeance, removed in 1927, after it became known during Reed Smoot’s senatorial appointment.

The Church’s story of the Smith family is a whitewash of propaganda, intended to conceal the fact that this family was not humble, honest, pious frontier folk, but ignorant, indolent thieves, suffering therefrom in wretched poverty. After seeing the result of hard labor upon the life of his older brother Alvin, it would be no leap of the imagination to conclude that Joseph Jr. sought to employ the only skill he had—charlatanism (which he emulated observing the religious revivalism of the period). As a young man he could well have concluded that physical labor was likely to lead to a short life, especially if one suffered destitution from the indolence of a raging, often drunken father. Isaac Hale had the family pegged for what they did; “dupe the credulous and unwary-and in order that its fabricators may live upon the spoils.” Dupery depends on secrecy and gullibilty. The irony is Joseph was never fully accomplished at secrecy, though he strove for it his entire life. To the astute investigator of early Mormon history this is abundantly evident.

Because the fundamental nature of Man (and of Beast or Fowl etc.) is to obtain distinction, all associations congeal into hierarchies. Thus all mass movements inevitably develop hierarchies, whether they be political, religious, or social. Hierarchies therefore intensify the strife for distinction where self-confidence seeks substitution, becoming the motive force behind parties, groups, unions, and conspiracies. The history of the CJCLDS is no exception. Those who were at the fore of its formation and subsequent evolvement have been those bereft in varying degrees of self-confidence, esteem, and validation. One cannot scrutinize the lives of Sidney Rigdon, Martin Harris, Joseph Smith, Orson Hyde, Emma Hale, Brigham Young, Joseph F. Smith, Heber C. Kimball, Heber J. Grant, Harold B. Lee, Ezra T. Benson, Gordon B. Hinckley, Thomas S. Monson, and not observe this deficiency of character. In fact, it is an essential element of active hierarchies that the higher one ascends within them, the greater is the insecurity of confidence, and thus the more fervent the assertions of divine influence. A century ago theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed:

“Extreme orthodoxy betrays by its very frenzy that the poison of skepticism has entered the soul of the church; for men insist most vehemently upon their certainties when their hold upon them has been shaken.  Frantic orthodoxy is a method for obscuring doubt.” (pp2-3 Does the World Need Religion?)

A classic depiction of this state of mind is Jeffrey Holland’s Book of Mormon speech in General Conference, October 2009.

Nowhere is secret conspiracy more prevalent, than where orthodoxy and passion join to fuel the Holy Cause. To the Orthodox, departure from the Right Way is heresy.  It doesn’t have anything to do with Truth—that is the nature of their scam.  Heresy is contravening their ideology, asserted by their power.  The seeming irony is, all Reformers (read prophets) throughout time were heretics who sought return to strict Orthodoxy. Purge of the heretic within hierarchies and conspiracies is an essential function to consolidate and maintain Power. Wars are not fought over scarce resources.  They're fought to consolidate power, and so it is with the conflict in hierarchies. The ultimate end of consolidation of power is total domination. As Hannah Arendt’s investigations have shown, the final end of domination is complete destruction for no other reason than they must be infallible:

“Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true. The Nazis did not hesitate to use, at the end of the war, the concentrated force of their still intact organization to bring about as complete a destruction of Germany as possible, in order to make true their prediction that the German people would be ruined in case of defeat.” (p339 Burden of Our Time)

All prophecy is self-fulfilling. It is the manifestation of the votary’s ideology.  “Prophecy is a poor guide to the future. You only understand it when the events are already upon you.”(Ambassador Delen Babylon 5)

“…it is with prophecy as it is with miracle; it could not answer the purpose even if it were real. Those to whom a prophecy should be told, could not tell whether the man prophesied or lied, or whether it had been revealed to him, or whether he conceited it; and if the thing that he prophesied, or intended to prophesy, should happen, or something like it, among the multitude of things that are daily happening, nobody could again know whether he foreknew it, or guessed at it, or whether it was accidental. A prophet, therefore, is a character useless and unnecessary…” (p51 Age of Reason)


Michael Quinn who wrote Early Mormonism and the Magic World View chronicled the influence of astrology and necromancy in Smith's family and its influence in the Church.  For that he was censured and ultimately booted out for embarrassing the Church.  Brigham distanced himself from astrology and divination, but retained incantations and the secret oaths and combinations by formalizing the "Endowment" (while privately endorsing the Danite clan activity), which is nothing more than a loyalty test and covenant. The test used to be executed in the Temple upon threat of excruciating pain of death.  The second token of the Aaronic priesthood administered to the Endowment initiate requires them to covenant to avoid “every unholy and impure practice.” Mormon wrote that the Lord forbade all manner of secret combinations and murder. Yet here we have in the very ceremony meant to prevent such an occurrence, administration of the covenant by oath, signs, and until 1990, the death penalty imposed upon all who failed to abide the covenant. Such irony. Such hypocrisy. Such craftiness.

Apprehensive about the growing unrest of the residents outside of Nauvoo, and perceiving the real possibility of extradition for treason and bank fraud, Joseph began measures to surround himself with loyal followers who ultimately would commit themselves by death oath to protect him and the Church leadership. A partial history of such measures is:

Joseph’s April 1938 Conference injunction “that "any person who spoke or acted against the presidency or the church should leave the country to die; that he would suffer no such to remain there; that they should lose their heads.";

Sidney Rigdon’s June 1838 “Salt Sermon” injunction; "It is the duty of this people to trample them into the earth, and if the country cannot be freed from them any other way I will assist to trample them down, or to erect a gallows on the Square of Far West and hang them up.";

The 1838 formation of the secret Danite society with its oath to "Sustain, protect, defend, and obey the leaders of the Church, under any and all circumstances unto death; and to disobey the orders of the leaders of the Church, or divulge the name of a Danite to an outsider, or to make public any of the secrets of the order of the Danites, was to be punished by death." Several Danite members became Nauvoo policemen;

Joseph’s March 1842 adoption of Free Masonry in the Church leadership, organizes the first Nauvoo lodge then considered to a be a secret society, at the behest of John C. Bennett;

Joseph gives the first Masonic laden endowments to leaders May 1842;

Joseph’s April 1843 Nauvoo City council statement that instead of hanging "I will shoot him, or cut off his head, spill his blood on the ground, and let the smoke thereof ascend up to God; and if ever I have the privilege of making a law on that subject, I will have it so.";

The March 1844 creation of the secret theocratic council under charge, constitution, name, keyword, and penalty of death for divulgence;

The April 1844 Temple dedication where Joseph claims the temple is “the most substantial and best finished Masonic temple in the Western states.”;

Further secret killings post assassination period into the Great Basin Kingdom infamy.

Just these highlights of Church history bring to mind the passage in Helaman 6:

22 And it came to pass that they did have their signs, yea, their secret signs, and their secret words; and this that they might distinguish a brother who had entered into the covenant, that whatsoever wickedness his brother should do he should not be injured by his brother, nor by those who did belong to his band, who had taken this covenant.
23 And thus they might murder, and plunder, and steal, and commit whoredoms and all manner of wickedness, contrary to the laws of their country and also the laws of their God.
24 And whosoever of those who belonged to their band should reveal unto the world of their wickedness and their abominations, should be tried, not according to the laws of their country, but according to the laws of their wickedness, which had been given by Gadianton and Kishkumen.

The terror employed in the Church was a physical threat with the claim of saving a man’s soul by spilling his blood, as well as excommunication for offenses of disloyalty to Joseph Smith. All these threats when carried out were done in secret, with the sanction of a secret conspiracy.

Today the terror employed by Mormonism is the threat of, or actual consignment of, the offender to oblivion through excommunication. The person is not only out of the fold, but out of communication with anyone who is still a member. This often includes the destruction of family solidarity, marriages, and sometimes defamation with job loss. It is the equivalent of social and spiritual solitary confinement. Once this punishment was called an act of love. Now it is termed an act of discipline. It is neither. It is terror enacted to enforce conformity in the name of spiritual salvation.

Repeatedly in Church conferences members are admonished that spiritual safety can only be had through conformity, to obey without question, never be found disloyal to the Church’s head leadership, subjected to secret inquisition and reproach by the Bishop for voting opposed to Priesthood decree, investigated and subjected to threat of disfellowship or excommunication for publishing or preaching material embarrassing to the Church or its leaders. By these methods the Leadership compresses the boundaries between members wherein they define their own lives, their relations with their relatives, neighbors, and the world. This compression is possible when members feel lonely, fear, rootlessness, homelessness, and isolation. The compression drives out the individuality, the juridical and moral senses with the objective of amalgamating members into an unthinking mass, with only the Leader doing the thinking. It is no coincidence that Brigham chose the beehive as the State’s symbol. It represents the industry of drones who don’t think, only obey and do.

One consequence of terror is the destruction of moral judgment. In a web interview with Charles Moore, Catholic priest and district attorney he stated:

“If you base a religion on faith, and believing what somebody says, then you are vulnerable to believing a lie. And if you believe a lie, you are constantly in conflict with yourself, because your heart knows better. Your heart and your mind are divided. Consequently your whole life is in hostility, anger, and striking out. Faith based religions are the basic cause of war.” (Laura Lee Show History of Western Civilization 4-2003)

Along similar thought is this observation by Tom Paine:

 “When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive any thing more destructive to morality than this? ” (p3 Age of Reason)

Conspiracies are not characteristic of the absence of proclaimed moral values. The ideology often requires the highest standards, while the Leader and his inner associates often act arbitrarily indifferent to them. Members of the Nazi SS were required to posses the highest moral standards, and simultaneously follow orders to exterminate innocent people without question, for the good of the Party, or Germany, or whatever reason Hitler decided. How do they get away with this contradiction?

“The chief value, however, of the secret or conspiratory societies' organizational structure and moral standards for purposes of mass organization does not even lie in the inherent guarantees of unconditional belonging and loyalty, and organizational manifestation of unquestioned hostility to the outside world, but in their unsurpassed capacity to establish and safeguard the fictitious world through consistent lying. The whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naive fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member, depending upon his rank and standing in the movement, is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders and the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement.” (p369 Burden of Our Time)

“A mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements, and the higher the rank the more cynicism weighs down gullibility. The essential conviction shared by all ranks, from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the ‘first commandment’ of the movement: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war.” (p370 Totalitarianism)

Hannah’s analysis of Totaltarianism is that the leadership operates in a similar manner to the gangsterism of America’s 1920s, from which the Nazis learned it. The movement has its stated purpose for the gullible altruist which is the lie, but the real purpose is otherwise. Isaac Hale saw through the ruse to the true purpose. For some, it is often difficult to recognize the inconsistency of purpose, especially for lack of familiarity with the movers and shakers of the movement:

“The lies of the movements, on the other hand, are much subtler. They attach themselves to every aspect of social and political life that is hidden from the public eye. They succeed best where the official authorities have surrounded themselves with an atmosphere of secrecy. In the eyes of the masses, they then acquire the reputation of superior ‘realism’ because they touch upon real conditions whose existence is being hidden.” (p344 Burden of Our Time)

Members like ex-area authority Hans Mattsson cling to the idea there is some element of divine inspiration in the Church’s leadership. Yet they do not answer his questions, remaining mute on the most critical of historical issues. They can’t answer them, because to do so reveals the secret of their existence and ultimate agenda. The real purpose of Mormonism is not to extend true salvation to the world. Its purpose is exactly what the Council of Fifty, a secret conspiratorial society, was invented to do—fill the earth in fulfillment of Daniel’s dream of the stone cut out of the mountain (p129 Origins of Power):

“The true goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion but organization-the ‘accumulation of power without the possession of the means of violence.’ For this purpose, originality in ideological content can only be considered an unnecessary obstacle. It is no accident that the two totalitarian movements of our time, so frightfully ‘new’ in methods of rule and ingenious in forms of organization, have never preached a new doctrine, have never invented an ideology which was not already popular. Not the passing successes of demagogy win the masses, but the visible reality and power of a ‘living organization.’” p351 Burden of Our Time)

This, the “True and living Church” of Christ.... As Hannah characterized the ideological processes of Hitler it became evident that there were no new ideas ever incorporated into National Socialism. And so it is with Mormonism. Take for example the concept of salvation wrought by the atonement of Christ. Morgdoc proclaims it covers all the creations of Jesus Christ. It is the basis of the Creation story in the temple ceremony. This was not a revelation to Joseph Smith (never mind the personal differences of belief among the Church’s Apostles in recent times). This was a tenet had among American religious theologians more than fifty years earlier:

 “From whence, then, could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world, because, they say, one man and one woman had eaten an apple? And, on the other hand, are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a redeemer? In this case, the person who is irreverently called the Son of God, and sometimes God himself, would have nothing else to do than to travel from world to world, in an endless succession of deaths, with scarcely a momentary interval of life.” (p44 Age of Reason)

So where did Joseph’s or Sidney’s or Brigham’s ideas originate, really? Virtually every doctrine of Mormonism can be found in some American religious sect. This subject has been well covered by presenters at the Ex-Mormon Conferences, downloadable at their website.

Also an important part of Hannah’s analysis is that during the initial stage Totalitarianism destroys moral judgment, as also the sense of justice as established by civil Constitution and law. The holocaust of the last century was attributable to this state of mind, and that is what made the Nuremburg trials so difficult. Not just the inner circle of leaders, but many of the Germans had no sense of having committed any crime, much less affixing one appropriate to the magnitude of human destruction. In Hannah’s expositions we have the essence of what Voltaire meant:

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities...."

And I may add to this: and not feel guilty for them but believe one is doing a service to Mankind. Tom Paine was incensed by this perspective of the modern priest and his ability to turn inside out the doctrines of Jesus:

“…what can be greater blasphemy than to ascribe the wickedness of man to the orders of the Almighty?” (p69 Age of Reason)

Looking at the whole of it, which is only obtained by diligent reading of the references and reflection upon the same, it is a sad, disgusting revelation to discover in Mormon history the behavior proscribed in their own Scriptures. It seems never to have occurred to any of them the words of Jesus to Peter in the Garden: “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword”  (Matt 26:52), and his defense before Pilate:

“My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.” (Jn 18:36)

During the first Endowment sessions in the Nauvoo temple Heber C. Kimball told the initiates the purpose of it was “to bring us to an organization, and just as quick as we can get into that order and government, we have the Celestial Kingdom here”. But didn’t Jesus say the Kingdom was already here, within? (Lk 17:21) The organization Heber refers to then is not an other-world kingdom, but a Totalitarian organization as Hannah described, a gang of thieves, liars, and murderers the purpose of which is to fill the earth, so that they might dictate to all men, with Joseph at the head. The destruction of Nauvoo and the depredations committed leading to it is not any different than what happened to the Jews in 70 A.D..

Here is a vignette from the Mormon temple ceremony prior to 1990. The pretension to authority is palpable, an indictment of themselves:

NARRATOR: Adam, on finding himself in the lone and dreary world, built an altar and offered prayer, and these are the words he uttered:
ADAM: Oh God, hear the words of my mouth. Oh God, hear the words of my mouth. Oh God, hear the words of my mouth.
LUCIFER: I hear you; what is it you want.'?
ADAM: Who are you?
LUCIFER: I am the God of this world.
ADAM: You, the God of this world?
LUCIFER: Yes, what do you want?
ADAM: I am looking for messengers.
LUCIFER: Oh. you want someone to preach to you. You want religion, do you? I will have preachers
here presently. There will be many willing to preach to you the philosophies of men mingled with scripture.

Minister enters—

LUCIFER: Good Morning sir!
SECTARIAN MINISTER: Good morning!
SECTARIAN MINISTER: A fine congregation!
LUClFER: Yes, they are a very good people. They are concerned about religion. Are you a preacher?
SECTARIAN MINISTER: I am.
LUCIFER Have you been to college and received training for the ministry?
SECTARIAN MINISTER: Certainly! A man cannot preach unless he has been trained for the ministry.
LUCIFER: Do you preach the orthodox religion?
SECTARIAN MINISTER: Yes, that is what I preach.
LUCIFER: If you will preach your orthodox religion to these people, and convert them I will pay you well.
SECTARIAN MINISTER: I will do my best
LUCIFER: Here is a man who desires religion. He is very much exercised, and seems to be sincere.
SECTARIAN MINISTER: I understand that you are inquiring after religion.
ADAM: I was calling upon Father.
SECTARIAN MINISTER: I am glad that you were calling upon Father. Do you believe in a God who is without body, parts, or passions, who sits on the top of a topless throne; whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere; who fills the universe, and yet is so small that he can dwell in your heart, who is surrounded by myriads of beings who have been saved by grace, not for any act of theirs, but by His good pleasure. Do you believe in such a great Being?
ADAM: I do not. I cannot comprehend such a Being.
SECTARIAN MINISTER: That is the beauty of it. Perhaps you do not believe in a devil, and in that great hell, the bottom less pit, where there is a lake of fire and brimstone into which the wicked are cast, and where they are continually burning, but are never consumed?
ADAM: I do not believe in any such place.
LUCIFER: I am sorry, very very sorry! What is it you want?
ADAM: I am looking for messengers from my Father.

The scene changes to the Godhead talking to Peter James and John who subsequently walk in—

PETER: I am Peter.
JAMES: I am James.
JOHN: I am John.
LUCIFER: Yes, I thought I knew you, what are you going to do now? (Speaking to the minister) Do you know who these men are? They claim to be apostles. Try them!
SECTARIAN MINISTER: Do you profess to be apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ?
PETER: We do.
SECTARIAN MINISTER: This man told me that we should never have any revelation or apostles, but if any should come professing to be apostles, I was to ask them to cut off an arm or some other member of the body and restore it, so that the people might know that they came with power.
PETER: We do not satisfy men's curiosity in that manner. It is a wicked and an adulterous generation that seeks for a sign. Do you know who that man is? He is Satan!
SECTARIAN MINISTER: What? The devil?
PETER: That is one of his names.
SECTARIAN MINISTER: He is quite a different person from what he told me the devil is. He said the devil has claws like a bear's on his hands, horns on his head, and a cloven foot, and that when he speaks he has the roar of a lion!
PETER: He has said this to deceive you, and I would advise you to get out of his employ.
SECTARIAN MINISTER: Your advise is good; but, if I leave his employ, what will become of me?
PETER: We will preach the Gospel unto you, with the rest of Adam's posterity.
SECTARIAN MINISTER: That is good ....

The first of several Masonic signs and tokens are then administered to the congregation.

The level of gullibility throughout is astonishing. If this is how smart Lucifer is, he could not very well deceive the elect (whoever they truly are). And Peter, why does he assume the preacher just wants his curiosity satisfied? Or Lucifer thinking that Adam is stupid enough to be looking for religion? If this is truly part of the restoration of an ancient Endowment performed in the Solomon temple, how did Peter, James, and John, and the sectarian minister get in there? Previous to this version that I was introduced to, there used to be a Protestant hymn and service along with the preacher. So that was restored too? Isn’t this what is called an anachronism—the “restoration” of a Free Masonry ritual claimed to have existed in the tenth century B.C.?  The association of Lucifer with the devil was an early Catholic creation, and the word Satan had an entirely different meaning in Hebrew. Sidney Rigdon’s search for a Restoration is riddled with anachronisms.

Hannah tries to make a case for stupidity increasing over the previous century along with loss of common sense. But even two centuries ago it was on the decline, judging by the reference material. She does have a point to its presence among non-intellectuals:

“Stupidity has become as common as common sense was before; and this does not mean that it is a symptom of mass society or that "intelligent" people are exempt from it. The only difference is that stupidity remains blissfully inarticulate among the non-intellectuals and becomes unbearably offensive among "intelligent" people. Within the intelligentsia, one may even say that the more intelligent an individual happens to be, the more irritating is the stupidity which he has in common with all.” (p314 Essays in Understanding)

And this is precisely why Apostates Packer and Oaks were so adamant about Intellectuals being an enemy to the Church. They tend to peek behind the curtain to see who is really there. Intellectuals aren’t usually satisfied with walking down the yellow brick road with fools for companions.

Quite some time ago when Freud was perpetrating his fraud, Karl Kraus made this simple observation about fools and gullibility:

“Alas, journalists have fought with more success against corruption than the gods have against stupidity: …whereas profound stupidity carries deep conviction and cannot be bought off for any price." (p135 Anti-Freud)

I’m looking in the mirror. From the time I was inducted until I resigned was nearly fifty years. At least I woke up and smelled the pigsty. And this discussion takes the reader back to the beginning. Full circle.

Seth Smee

REFERENCES
John Robison, Professor of Natural Philosophy, 1798 Proofs of a Conspiracy
Hannah Arendt, political theorist,1994 Essays in Understanding
Hannah Arendt, political theorist, 1951 The Origin of Totalitarianism. Burden of Our Time
Hannah Arendt, On the Nature of Totalitarianism; http://www.cas.umt.edu/liberal/documents/152ArendtOnTheNatureofTotalitarianismAnEssayinUnderstanding-Copy.pdf
Eric Hoffer, American philosopher, 1951 The True Believer
Michael Quinn, historical investigator, 1994 Origins of Power
Cowdrey, Davis, Vanick, historical investigators, 2005 Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon
Mark McKiernan, historical investigator, 1971 Sidney Rigdon
Rodger I. Anderson, 1990 Joseph Smith’s New York Reputation Re-examined
Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry, 1990 The Untamed Tongue
Thomas Szasz, Professor of Psychiatry, 1990 Anti-Freud
Reinhold Niebuhr, American theologian, 1927 Does Civilization Need religion?
Thomas Paine, Colonial philosopher, 1794 Age of Reason
Joseph Smith, Charlatan, 1844, History of the Church