Falling Into Life: A Gay Exmormon’s Journey

Chapter Ten – The Disintegrating Gospel: Gold, and Mummies, and Lies…Oh My! Part 2

Satchel Paige once wrote, “It’s not what you know that will hurt you. It’s what you think you know that just ain’t so.”

After doing enough research on the Book of Mormon to have it explode in my face, I had to continue on with the remaining scriptural additions in Mormonism to see if they followed suit. Sadly, they did. So without further ado, let’s go back to the crazy, shall we?

The Doctrine and Covenants (D&C) is a long collection of journal writings and direct discussions with God through prayer received by Joseph Smith. Much like the BoM, it’s been edited, and re-edited, and re-edited so many times over the years that they read well, almost scripture-like. The originals were fraught with misspellings and phrases that have been removed entirely. They had to PC it up over the years, changing obvious racist sentiments and other things. Joseph Smith actually had a black man cited as his “servant in the Celestial Kingdom”. He had a thing for black men and slaves.

The D&C is where you find such gems as the fact that Satan controls the water due to a scary canoe incident, and other intriguing blatherings that place fear and loathing into your heart. Chapter 130 is the best chapter to dispel Mormonism. That’s the chapter where Joseph Smith, via God through “revelation” because he spoke directly *for* God, threatens the life of his first wife Emma in an attempt to scare her into accepting his polygamous wives. He kept screwing around with underage and married women, and it turns out that Emma was always the last to know, poor thing. And when she pitched a fit, he sicked God on her. Sick ‘em! It’s good to be king…er…prophet. Until you get shot out of a jail window for fucking around and getting caught.

Now on to the third: I’ve saved the best for last. Once upon a time there was a wandering Mummy Show that happened to roll into a lucrative valley one day. The owner of this amazing mummy spectacle made a pretty good living off of his Egyptian stash. His wagon had lift-up sides and so all he had to do was roll in his horse-drawn wagon to a location that looked like it was full of suckers, raise the sides to expose his four mummies, papyrus papers and start charging admission. But this lucky Irishman named Michael Chandler had *no idea* how well he’d be received when he got to crazy town!

Turns out this particular town called Kirtland, Ohio was filled with Mormons who had a prophet who could translate ancient writing! Hell, he had already written an entire new book of scripture from “Reformed Egyptian” from these gold plates. He still had his magic seer stone and his hat! Their prophet was ready to go. And when these Mormons saw these mummies and all this real Egyptian paper and scrolls on the bottom of the wagon, they were ready for their next adventure! They ran and got Joseph Smith, hauled his butt down there and whaddya know? He was trapped like a rat! Or was he saved again?

We’ll never know if Joseph Smith felt sheer panic or complete elation as they scraped together about $2,400 and bought that whole Mummy Show, wagon and all. Perhaps he was increasing his delusion of grandeur seeing yet another opportunity to solidify his prophetic standing as prophet, seer, revelator, and womanizer extraordinaire? I believe this was the case because nothing else could explain what he did next.

First, he received revelation that two of the four mummies were of biblical derivation and were specifically delivered to him, they were Abraham and Joseph (of Arimathea, I believe) from the Bible. The *very same men* from the Bible. Somehow God had set up this miraculous occurrence, both Abraham *and* Joseph from ancient days were now propped up against his house on his covered porch.

Imagine for a moment this grisly scene.

Secondly, all the Egyptian paper strewn about on the bottom of that wagon would be translated! He set about creating an “Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar” book, with one Egyptian figure on one side and its corresponding English letter on the other. Mind you, the world was still wild, and the Rosetta Stone had yet to be discovered so he had no idea that this wasn’t how the Egyptian language worked. Also in those papers from the wagon were some torn images, and so Joseph went about recreating the images that were on them, with the seer stone. He could whip *anything* out of his ass and be perceived as a *real* prophet!

After some seven years elapsed, everyone was so excited to see what he was working on, surely God was again working through his prophet Joseph to translate more pertinent scripture. The day came and Joseph revealed that the paper he was translating was none other than the actual writings of Abraham! Glory be! Wave those holy hankies, ladies! The Book of Abraham was born, which was a full “scroll” now, and would eventually become The Pearl of Great Price. He would soon translate the next “scroll” and call it The Book of Joseph, so that each chosen porch-propped mummy would have its own book!

But before that second book could be translated, some bad stuff happened…

Joseph’s secret garment-wearing polygamy club was being exposed via local newspaper and so he sent out a group of men called the “Danites” to destroy a printing press on the eve of its release. The Danites, also known as Joseph Smith’s “Army of Israel” were used to kill off unwanted things, and people, too, if need be. A “revelation” stated that they were justified in their killing, too bad they got their justification from a conman. I mean, he had already deemed Independence County, Missouri as “Adam-ondi-Ahman”, which is the place where Adam and Eve fled to after that Garden of Eden mess. This could mean a matter of miles or a matter of light years for the Mormons.

Turns out the Danites burned down the whole place, completely destroying the printing press machine and its location. This didn’t sit so well with the locals, who finally reached a boiling point with this pedophile womanizing “prophet”, who had stolen Freemason property and now destroyed private property. Joseph knew the shit was about to hit the fan, so he begged sanctuary protection in a jail. Smith figured that those jailers had the responsibility to protect him, he thought wrong. A mob formed as expected, and they shot him out of that jail window after he shrieked, “Is there no help for a widow’s son?” intoning the allegorical freemason Hiram Abiff for his final plea. Sad for the Mormons, to be sure, but certainly no martyr. This guy had it coming.

And now…for the *rest* of the story… Fast forward from the mid eighteen hundreds to the nineteen sixties. Brigham Young had moved all the remaining Mormons to Salt Lake City, Utah, and the church had been growing exponentially ever since. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City stumbled across something amazing. A quick call to Salt Lake alerted the faithful that Joseph Smith’s paperwork for the Book of Abraham had been found! Finally, the leaders of the church saw this as an opportunity to prove, once and for all, the veracity of Joseph’s translations. This would certainly be a huge conversion tool, no doubt. They decided on a perfect way to ensure this goal, they would create a blind test with current Egyptologists.

They put Hugh Nibley, a high ranking church member, in charge of this wonderful project. They had received Joseph’s original Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar book, as well as the torn and recreated facsimiles *and* the original papers from the bottom of that mummy wagon. They were set! They identified four or more trained Egyptologists from around the country, packed up their precious contents and sent them off, each to a different professor in a different location. None knew of the others involved. And they waited…

You know how this is going to turn out, don’t you? It was an utter disaster. Every single professor returned the exact same findings: the original papers were nothing but common funerary documents explaining how to mummify a body. The torn drawings were recreated entirely wrong, they were simply the typical gods of the Egyptian underworld, known by all now due to the Rosetta Stone and further studies. Joseph Smith had errantly turned the Jackle-headed Anubus into a black slave.

The fall out was horrendous. Hugh Nibley was paid to rectify the huge mess they were in. The church had openly published in the Ensign, a church magazine, what they were doing. Just about everyone was in the know, and was looking forward to the biggest breakthrough in the twentieth century of Mormondom. Nibley’s final statement on this debacle was that Joseph had channeled the *real* Book of Abraham as he gazed at those funerary documents. Channeled the real  thing.

There is no other explanation for a rational thinker. At some point you simply have to say, “Wow! This whole thing is a steaming pile of dog poo!” Instead of proving the “Prophet of God”, they had proven that Joseph Smith Jr. was a conman and that the entire church was founded on lies.

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