Be weary of Sugar Free substitutes

[Stray Pooch]

Now I am surprised that you actually did cut and paste it. At least you provided documentary evidence for your claims. That is the first time I'm aware of that you did that. Congratulations.

====================
I didn't cut and paste most of this, I paraphrased some of it.

too bad you don't have a para balls

Kramer, as an old Company Commander of mine once said to me after a similarly excruciating pun:  I appreciate how smart you have to be to come up with something so stupid!

[Stray Pooch]

Out of curiosity, what foods do the Seventh Day Adventists prohibit?

Adventists are vegetarians. I believe they also refrain from tobacco and alcohol. You can Google for more.

Here is why Mormons were unwelcome in NW Missouri according to Missourians:

In 1812, there was a huge earthquake in SE Missouri, the area we Missourians call the Bootheel. The town of New Madrid was destroyed, the Mississippi was out of banks for months,and many farms were ruined. The Territorial government told those who had lost their farms that they could move to NW Missouri, where the Indians had recently evacuated. So a lot of settlers went to what are now Jackson and Clay Counties and settled. Because they were a contentious bunch, the followers of Andrew Jackson settled in Jackson County and named the county seat Independence. The settlers who were Whigs settled in Clay County and named it after Henry Clay, and their county seat Liberty. They were mostly illiterate, and staked off the land and settled in, any not feeling any need to register anything. Everyone knew everyone, and everyone was armed and dangerous, as hunting game was a major way of getting food for the table.

 A decade and change later, the Mormons came along. In 1831, Joseph Smith declared that NW Missouri was the new Promised Land, and of course, he did not mention that it was promised to the settled squatters who were already there: he meant that it had been promised to the Mormons, who were largely literate and went to the courthouse and registered their claims.

Many of their claims were to land inhabited by the squatter refugees from the New Madrid Flood. They did not accept that God wanted them to be driven off by a bunch of smartypants antislavery Mormons. When a Mormon popped in to ask some farmer for the hand of his daughter to be his second, third, fourth or fifth wife, that was was ill received. Mormons hunted and depleted the game. The lifestyle that the settlers were accustomed to was threatened.

What a settler did when a Mormon tried to drive him off his land was the very same thing that happened when some Indian staged a raid: he took out his gun and started plugging away. Eventually they decided to give the Mormons their own county, Caldwell County. But the Mormons kept getting new converts and spilled over the borders of their "reservation". Mormons were singularly unpopular and became so unwelcome that a man named Lilburn Boggs was elected in 1836 on the platform that the Mormons should be expelled from the state,and those who refused to leave could be shot on sight. It became legal to shoot Mormons, and the Mormons, not wishing to be shot, lit out for Illinois.

Joseph Smith preached that Jesus was going to return to a specific spot North of Clay County. He has yet to make an appearance. In 1983, I think oit was, my father, who was Recorder of Deeds of Clay County as well as President of the county historical society, got the state to allow the Mormons to put up a roadside marker at Adam-ondi-Ahman, in Daviss County, supposedly the site of the Garden of Eden and the spot Jesus is supposed to appear at whenever he gets around for it. We no longer shoot Mormons -- not just the Reorganized LDS buy Salt Lake Mormons -- in Missouri. In return, Mormons no longer try to register lands on which squatters have settled, being as there are no squatters left, and Mormons no longer try to marry local girls to be their second, third or umpteenth wives.

It is hard to argue that chewing tobacco is a rather nauseating habit, especially when you include the habit of spitting tobacco juice on the floor.

Thanks for the info.  As you may guess, we would dispute the accuracy of the "Missourian" version on several points, but that's life.  btw, you might be interested to know that the Reorganized church no longer exists by that name.  It has split into two factions:  The Community of Christ and the Restoration Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  The former is the larger and more liberal of the two and retains the rights to the RLDS name and properties.  The latter (NPI) is the more conservative and smaller group.  Interestingly, the CofC has finally admitted that Joseph Smith was a polygamist.  Only took 'em a century and a half!   

[Xavier_Onassis]

There used to be two churches in Independence. The Reorganized Church had the huge new Temple, and a much smaller faction owned the actual land that Smith said the Temple was to be built on, and lacking funds, had a house trailer there. So now there are THREE Independence churches, I suppose.

I went back to Liberty for my 50th Class reunion and did notice that the main RLDS Church had the word Restoration on it. I was wondering about that. So now no one is reorganized? I imagine that lawsuits were involved in the separation.I think they took the name "reorganized" and denied polygamy as a part of their being allowed to stay in Missouri. 

Mormon theology is at least as complicated as anything the Vatican has ever come up with. Mormon heresy has to be even more complicated.

Community of Christ does not even SOUND Mormon. There is already a Church of Christ (Disciples of Christ) that everyone in Liberty calls the Christian Church. We used their meeting room for our first Class of '60 get together. I think Sara Jane Ponder arranged that.



The main complaints that the old settlers had against the Mormons were:

(1) They were against slavery.Most people were too poor to own slaves, but one could dream. It was rather like Joe the Plumber complaining about taxes he will never be rich enough to pay, or paupers b!tching about the "Death Tax" they will never have enough money to pay, since they plan on winning the lottery someday. "I mean SOMEONE has to win! Who deserves it more than I do?"

(2) They were polygamists, and did not want their daughters to be anyone's plural wife. Frontier childcare was not that great,and it was rather normal for young women to flee a wrathful drunken father with a man who would be her husband. Mormons tended not to be alcoholics, and they didn't chew, which gave them an advantage among the women. Better to be an ignored third wife than a beaten first wife.

(3) The Mormons were literate, or knew someone that was, and knew how to file land claims, and the settlers were mostly illiterate and had never bothered. It was, nonetheless, quite annoying to be forced off one's homestead after ten or twelve years by a guy with a piece of paper.

(4) There is a natural dislike of believers who claim to have all the answers among those who have concluded that no one has all the answers

I never thought there was any debate about Smith being a polygamist. That's like not admitting WC Fields was fond of strong drink.

What does NPI mean?

[Kramer]

Now I am surprised that you actually did cut and paste it. At least you provided documentary evidence for your claims. That is the first time I'm aware of that you did that. Congratulations.

====================
I didn't cut and paste most of this, I paraphrased some of it.

too bad you don't have a para balls

Kramer, as an old Company Commander of mine once said to me after a similarly excruciating pun:  I appreciate how smart you have to be to come up with something so stupid!

if I were a para legal I'd sue you.

[Amianthus]

Adventists are vegetarians. I believe they also refrain from tobacco and alcohol. You can Google for more.

Like caffeine and Mormons, Adventists are *encouraged* to be vegetarians, but it is not a requirement. According to a friend that is Adventist, the prophetess foresaw that eventually meat would become too tainted to be safe to eat, so she encouraged her followers to become vegetarians to prepare for that time.

[Xavier_Onassis]

My guess is that she (Ellen White) read Upton Sinclair's book on the stockyards, The Jungle.
It was published in 1906, and made a lot of people consider becoming vegetarians. Adventists do actually live longer than the average Americans. Of course, so do Mormons.

[Stray Pooch]

There used to be two churches in Independence. The Reorganized Church had the huge new Temple, and a much smaller faction owned the actual land that Smith said the Temple was to be built on, and lacking funds, had a house trailer there. So now there are THREE Independence churches, I suppose.

Actually, there were several early offshoots of the LDS movement.  The smaller church you refer to would be "The Church of Christ (Temple Lot)."  The actual name of the church that Joseph Smith founded in Fayetteville, NY on April 6, 1830 was "The Church of Christ."  It was changed a few years later to "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints."  Why the Church of Christ (TL) decided to revert is anyone's guess.

I went back to Liberty for my 50th Class reunion and did notice that the main RLDS Church had the word Restoration on it. I was wondering about that. So now no one is reorganized? I imagine that lawsuits were involved in the separation.I think they took the name "reorganized" and denied polygamy as a part of their being allowed to stay in Missouri. 

The polygamy issue, which you list as one of the complaints against the church by Missourians, doesn't compute.  While it is true that Joseph practiced polygamy and expected a few of his higher ranking leaders to follow suit, this was not generally understood until the Saints became open about it in Salt Lake City.   I expect a large part of this was the potential for public reaction against it.  The Reorganized Church did not renounce polygamy.  They denied that Joseph ever taught or practiced it at all.   As strongly as the issue stands out, the fact is only a very small percentage of Mormons ever practiced it.  Most Mormon families were monogamous.

Community of Christ does not even SOUND Mormon. There is already a Church of Christ (Disciples of Christ) that everyone in Liberty calls the Christian Church.

Actually, given the original name of the church that title ironically DOES sound Mormon.  But the CofC actually took pains to distance itself from the LDS movement.  Originally, it simply claimed that Joseph had some "religious experiences" that lead him to found a church without discussing the visions, revelations and new scripture he brought forth.  It tries to pass itself off as a mainstream Christian belief church.  It is quite liberal and very unlike the traditional LDS movement.  Many of the general authorities of the church, for example, are women.  More importantly, though, are doctrines like belief in the trinity, which differs from the LDS belief that God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are three separate personages.   (When Joseph had his first vision, he saw two personages - the Father and the Son.)  Other subtle but important doctrinal differences exist between the CofC and earlier RLDS beliefs.  The Restoration Church is far more "Mormon" in belief.  That was the reason for the split.  Basically the Restoration church believes that the CofC has apostasized.   Lately, the CofC seems to have re-embraced some early LDS ideals, allowing that Joseph had visions and re-emphasizing the Book of Mormon.  As an odd coincidence, my Key Club advisor in High School, who first explained Mormonism to me, was in fact a Disciple of Christ. 

I never thought there was any debate about Smith being a polygamist. That's like not admitting WC Fields was fond of strong drink.

Emma Smith, his wife, and Joseph Smith III, his son, were prominent members of the RLDS church after his death.  (That is one of the reasons a court awarded some of the LDS properties - like the Kirtland Temple - to the RLDS church.)  Apparently, they denied the ideas of Joseph having more than one wife (which might be understandable, given the situation).  At any rate, the RLDS church never accepted polygamy and considered it a perversion of the apostate "Brighamites."  The CofC website now states that historical evidence seems to support the idea that Joseph practiced polygamy but everybody makes mistakes, yada yada, and it was never sanctioned by God.
[/quote]

What does NPI mean?

No pun intended.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I have no statistics about what percentage of Mormons living in Clay and Jackson Counties were polygamous, but it was widely believed that it was a common thing.

I had no idea that the Disciples of Christ (IE the Christian Church) was anything other than a mainstream Protestant Church, like the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopals. They do not use the Book of Mormon.

[Stray Pooch]

I have no statistics about what percentage of Mormons living in Clay and Jackson Counties were polygamous, but it was widely believed that it was a common thing.

I had no idea that the Disciples of Christ (IE the Christian Church) was anything other than a mainstream Protestant Church, like the Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopals. They do not use the Book of Mormon.

No, no.  I did not mean to imply that the Church of Christ (DoC) was affiliated with the LDS movement.  It is not.  That DoC Key Club advisor answered my questions about Mormonism (raised because I met my wife in Key Club and I respected his opinion) as objectively as possible, but he made it clear that he did not think much of the doctrines.  He was a very good, intelligent man and a good Christian. 

The designation "Church of Christ" is pretty generic.  Part of the reason the name of our church was changed was probably to avoid confusion (and potential legal issues) with other non-related organizations who used that name.  The Disciples of Christ use that name, but it is not due to any historical affiliation with the LDS movement.   The reason for our rather lengthy designation is to clarify who we are.  We believe we are the church of Jesus Christ.  We believe we are the very same church that Christ started during his mortal ministry.  We believe that, over time, that church became corrupted and a restoration (as opposed to a reformation) was required.  That happened through the Prophet Joseph Smith.  The "Latter Day Saints" part came as a clarification.  It differentiates the church in this dispensation (time period) from the church in Christ's mortal dispensation.  "Saints" in this context only means followers of Christ, as the term is often used in New Testament epistles.  "Latter Days" means now - what we believe to be close to the end of times - as opposed to (perhaps) "Ancient Days."   As an example then, if you ask if Peter was a Mormon, the answer is "yes" and "no.'  He WAS a member of the Church of Jesus Christ, so yes, but not the restored church, which has gained the designation "Mormon" from the world (it is not part of our church name) so "no."   That is analogous to the question "Was Moses a Christian?"   The answer to that, for similar reasons, is "yes" and "no" in that, he was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ (who is the God of the Old Testament) but he did not live in the times when the church gained the designation "Christian" after the actual atonement took place.  It's all semantics.

As to the perceptions of polygamy, how many people think Muslims are terrorists today?  Though the polygamy issue was not fully openly embraced by the church until Salt Lake, it is quite likely rumor had gotten about.  There were many early defections even among top leaders of the church in the Ohio/Missouri period.  Many of those who left the church turned against it, and reporting such a practice as polygamy would likely have been part of the efforts to warn potential converts.  So I wouldn't be surprised if people knew about it in Missouri.  The fact that it was practiced by only a small percentage of the church (especially at that time) would have been irrelevent.  The perception would have been much like the perception of Islam today - if the church leaders are teaching it the followers will comply.  Of course, what is not commonly known is that one could not just go out and pick a few girls and tie the knot.  You had to be "called" by church leaders to marry another woman.  (This process is how we select people for any church duty.  I was, for example, "called" to be a Gospel Doctrine teacher.  That is my current "calling.")  So the idea that Mormons were going to steal the daughters was not really accurate.  (In fairness, if a young lady was converted, the chance of her becoming a "sister-wife" in some family was certainly there. So the idea was not totally irrational.)  But rational, accurate analysis is not the hallmark of mob reactions.  It is so in this day of mass communication, and it was much more likely in a time without such media resources. 

Where the Islamic analogy breaks down, of course, is that our church leaders were, in fact, actually endorsing the practice, though not yet openly.  Only a fringe element of religious teachers in Islam are actually endorsing a direct violent interpretation of Islam.    But there are still people who believe Mormons practice polygamy to this day.  In fact, there are still people who believe Mormons just hang around in cults in Utah and dress like it's the nineteenth century.  A Fedex guy that I see every day was shocked to find out that a very popular local newspaper reporter is a Mormon (and that I was LDS too).  He was really shocked when I told him that there are three congregations of Mormons in our town.  This is a place where old order Mennonites are a very large part of the community, and a Horse and Buggy is a common sight.  So I guess he expected me to be dressed like Brigham Young instead of wearing business casual and fixing broken printers.  Whaddayagonnado?

[Xavier_Onassis]

I imagine that when people see the Fundamentalist Mormons like the ones in Texas with bunches of wives and wearing weird XIX century dresses they assume that all Mormons do this, since there is no way to distinguish Mormons otherwise (unless there are two guys wearing white short sleeved shirts and neckties on bicycles cruising about).

Announcing the End of the World was always a problem for Christians, because of all that silly stuff in the Book of Revelation. There was a a guy named Miller, who got a whole bunch of people to give everything they owned away and to gather on a mountaintop on Oct 22, 1844. The world, as you might have suspected, did not end.Instead it began to rain. This was called "The Great Disappointment". Luckily, they were peaceful Christians, and so it was not known as "The Day We Pummeled and Thrashed that Lying Preacher".

I heard that Joseph Smith predicted the coming of Jesus on Smith's 85th birthday, but Smith was deceased by 1890 and apparently celebrating a specific birthday after one is dead does not count for predictions. It might be safe to assume that Jesus decided not to come to Smith's 85th birthday party at the specified place near Gallitin, MO. But I don't think that he named the place in that prediction.

I think that it is likely that to predict the end of the world or the Second Coming of Jesus in specific terms has NOT proven to be a good career move for preachers in general.

Here is a bunch of stuff about Smith and prophesies, and how they were all fulfilled, maybe were not really prophesies after all, and might have not been fulfilled, after all. It seems to have been hard for preachers in the 1900's to read all those Old Testament Prophets and not want to join them in predicting the future. Perhaps if they had proven more adept at curing the lame and the lepers or even at turning water into wine, this would not have been such an obsession for them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prophecies_of_Joseph_Smith,_Jr.

Sort of like all the Young Pioneers in Cuba wanting to be like El Che, I guess. That was not a clever idea, because Cuba needs people who can do things that El Che was not good at, like growing rice, beans and coffee. Once a Revolution is won, there is no real need for revolutionaries.

 There is a salt shortage in Cuba these days, so we could add making salt from sea water. I do not think that a tropical island surrounded by a salty ocean should suffer from a salt shortage.


I can see why "Church of Christ", "Christian Church" and other various similar names might be popular, being as Christ (as opposed to Jesus) was the main focus of the religion from the time of Paul.