Mitt Romney & Jon Huntsman
In light of so many happenings around the nation pertaining to, or being associated with Mormons and the Mormon Church, I want to try to clear up some of these misconceptions about these things. Such examples including, but are not restricted to: potentially two Mormon Presidential candidates for the 2012 election and The Book of Mormon musical on Broadway.
What creates the fears that people have about Mormons? Misunderstanding.
Baptism is a sacred ordinance instituted since the pre-existence, as an outward sign & ordinance of a person’s newly found convictions & devotion towards God & His Son via a sacred covenant with God. This covenant, being a binding two-way promise with God, is the one and only gate entering the path to Eternal Life.
An man’s view who believed there was no God, until he allowed Christ into his life and his reversal of beliefs!
Well, to those that wonder about this, I’ll ask you this question:
Could you yourself have written it?
Here are your conditions if you think you could.
Occasionally you hear someone say, “I could believe your Mormon Doctrine if I just didn’t have to swallow the story about Joseph Smith being a man of God and that he translated the Book of Mormon from some golden plates which he claimed he had found on a hill side.”
It is even possible that you, yourself, have doubted his story. Well, let us consider some facts or conditions that must be complied with in order for you or someone else to produce a similar record under comparable conditions.
1. You must be 22-24 years of age.
2. You cannot be a college graduate, in fact, you can have only three years of schooling.{i.e. 3rd Grade education only}
3. You must write a book with 239 Chapters; 54 of them about wars, 21 about history, 55 about prophecy, 71 about doctrine, 17 about missionaries, and 21 about the mission & ministry of Jesus Christ.
4. Whatever you write must be on the basis of what you now know; no research can be done.
5. You must write a history of an ancient country, such as Tibet, covering a period from 2200[sic] BC to 421 AD. Why? Because you know nothing about Tibet.
6. You must insert the history & story of two distinct and separate nations, along with histories of different contemporary nations or groups of people, of which no one ever knew existed.
7. Your writings must describe the religious, economic, social, and political cultures and institutions of these two nations.
8. You must weave into your history the religion of Jesus Christ and the pattern of Christian living.
9. You must start now & finish in 65 days [80, including time to run away from mobs & individuals trying to steal these plates of gold you now have, having to hide them seemingly every other day someplace new]. This writing spanning 2600 yrs of history in 300,000 words.
10. When you have finished you must not make any changes in the text. The first edition must stand forever.
11. After pauses for sleep and food, if you are dictating to a stenographer you must never ask to have the last paragraph or last sentence read back to you.
12. Your record must be about 530 pages with over 510 word per page. You must add 180 proper nouns to the English language. (Compared to William Shakespeare, who only added 30.)
13. You must announce that your “smooth narrative” is not fiction, but truth, yes, even that it is a sacred record of history.
14. In fact, your book must fulfill Bible prophecies; even in the exact manner in which it shall come forth, to whom given, its purpose and accomplishments (Respectively-Psalms 85:10-11, Isaiah 29:11-14, Ezekiel 37:18-21, etc.)
15. You must publish it to every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, declaring it to be the Word of God.
16. You must include with the record itself, the marvelous promise; “And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, He will manifest the truth of it unto you by the power of the Holy Ghost” -Moroni 10:3-5
17. You must make your book so convincing that after it’s in publication, men would leave their families knowing fully that the Lord would care for them, to share the truthfulness of your record (shortly after publication for a few years). Then, once you had a large enough following, have 50,000+ missionaries worldwide give up 2yrs of their lives , by their own expense no less or the expense of their family, to go unto the ends of the earth to bear testimony of the truthfulness of your book.
18. You must gain the approval of a great number of great men, intellectual giants, and scholars who must subscribe discipleship to the record and its movement, having been won over by the book, even to the point of laying down their own lives for it.
19. Your descriptions of the culture and people in these civilizations of which you will write include, the manner of their written and spoken languages, type of buildings, geographic locations, governmental types, monetary system, types of tools and materials used, and many other facts be completely unknown to the rest of the world.
20. There can be no flaw whatsoever in the entire record.
21. Yet, you must not make an absurd, impossible, or contradictory statement.
22. Even so, many of the facts, ideas, and statements given us as truth in your record must be entirely inconsistent, even the direct opposite of the prevailing beliefs of the world where very little is claimed to be known about these civilizations and their 2600 years of history.
23. You must invite the ablest scholars and experts to examine the text with care. You must strive diligently to see that your ancient texts do not fall into the hands of those most impatient to prove it a forgery and who are most competent to expose and flaw in it.
24. You must verify all claims made within & be sure that through investigation, scientific evidence, and archaeological discoveries for the next 150+ years, they also must verify your claims and prove even the minutest details of your history to be perfectly true, even to the types of roads they built.
25. After 150+ years of extreme analysis, that none of the ideas, pretenses, or facts stated in your book have not been refuted, but have helped establish that all the other theories or false ideas concerning its origin, of “having appeared suddenly,” have collapsed, leaving your description as the only viable & possible way.
26. You must insure that ALL internal and external prophecies must be confirmed and fulfilled in the next 150 years.
27. You must find three honest & accredit-able witnesses who must testify to the whole world that an angel from heaven appeared to them and showed them the ancient records from which you claim your record is translated. These three witnesses must never deny their testimony, not even upon their death bed. (They may lose faith in YOU but MUST NEVER deny the testimony of your book or the records from which they came)
28. You must call out of heaven the voice of the Redeemer to declare to the three witnesses that your record is true and that it is their responsibility to hear the testimony. They must handle and feel the engravings on the plates, and bear record of it. Again, they can never deny their testimony.
29. Eight other witnesses must testify to the world that they saw the ancient records in broad daylight and they that handled them and felt the engravings on the record.
30. You must make first the 3 & second the 8, witnesses without ANY benefits (not for profit or gain) and they must bear their testimony to the world, but for a great price of great personal sacrifice and severe persecution, even to their death.
31. You must find someone to finance your book with the understanding that neither he, nor you, will ever receive and monetary reimbursement from it. You must sell the book at the cost of, or less than the cost of, its production value.
32. You must tell the world that the written record you have translated from was engraven gold plates, even though up until the time you make the claim, no one has ever found anywhere in past history any civilization using gold as a method of keeping records, and not until about 100 years later were any similar engraven gold plates found.
33. Finally, after suffering persecution and revilement for 20 years after you finish the book, you must willingly give your own life for your testimony that the record is from God. All the time you never make a profit or any other type of personal gain save it be your testimony of the work you brought forth.
34. I must be that millions of people witness to the world for the next 150+ years that they know the record to be authentic because they put the “promise” to the test and found it to be true, and that they have received the manifestation of the truthfulness of your record by the power of the Holy Ghost.
Surely, no one without God’s help could produce a similar record and comply with all of the above conditions. Wouldn’t you say that Joseph Smith was indeed a man of good and that he was an instrument in God’s hands to bring forth such a record?
(My take on a list Copyrighted by Peter C. Covino, Jr. 1974)
“” I, Jeramy Hubbard, was born the eldest son into the Collins Family. Having been taught by goodly parents & raised after the manner of the early saints, I took pride in my role of help in supporting and leading the family. Ma & Pa Collins were busy in the years following my birth, bringing into this world 12 more children, bringing our total strength to 13 children. The eldest 3, myself, Keri, & David, looked after our younger siblings making sure that the morale stayed positive in our family.
Upon receiving word that the saints were moving west, we, the Collins Crew, packed up all our earthly possessions into the handcart and pressed forward into the unknown world towards the west. With Ma & Pa unable to help with the handcart, for a 14th was newly born, we had a difficult road ahead of us, for amongst us children, many appeared small in size and in strength. We managed to arrange ourselves in a manner that we could rotate to keep fresh arms and legs on the most difficult parts of the handcart, but most of all we kept a song in our hearts, and when we had an extra breath or two, we sang out into the wilderness to keep us going.
Pushing on through the day, having nothing to eat but an orange and water to drink, we overcame wily rocks & winding trails, swearing we’ve seen that same algae covered pond 2 or 3 or 4 times today, climbed the steep hills, conquered the insane climbs, braved wild Indians, and also had the men called off to join a war, leaving our poor mother’s & sisters to carry on without us. But yet, after 14 or 16 miles, we found the place called “basecamp”, which for the last 3-4 hours of our trip had eluded us, being told it was “just ahead” or “just up the road,” when in reality we were still 5 or 6 miles away. Even though we appeared small & weak, we proved to be very strong willed, and when given the chance to be the lead handcart we took off & set the pace so well that we were hard to keep up with. Finally, after setting up camp, when the dinner call rang out from the cooks, we did find that chicken broth never tasted so good! Once the chicken broth had hit the stomach, there came a dimming of the noise across the camps & soon people drifted off into slumber-land, and I did find that the empty handcart makes for an unusual bed. “”
~~~Jeramy Hubbard, 7-24-2010
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