Mormons in Secret Merger Talks with Catholics

An internal coup has happened in Temple Sqaure since its temporary approval of gays rights within Salt Lake City limits? Remorse. Regress. Stop the madness!

I guess the magic, Black magic? of re-baptizing all my dead Catholic relatives has brought the Vatican round to recognize the one true magical kingdom in Utah.

For a second there, I thought I saw the word merger between these great noble institutions in America. Their “shared moral principals” are no doubt the basis of secret ongoing merger talks. I doubt that it will ever be an outright merger. But I can see Joseph Smith, Prophet and occasional horse thief, being raised to RC sainthood or even Church Father status based on his forged and plagiarized writings.

Thank the white Caucasian God that Solomon Spaulding is long dead. Though I am still in hopes of another Mark David Chapman document to surface saying that Joe Smith on his death bed converted to the one true church via the Jesuits. That would reassure me.

I did not see this in any American MSM, talks being secret you know. I first saw it in the Guardian UK, which because of Britain’s diversity these days and quasi-official Church of England thing, that paper has an excellent daily religion section. I am not certain how the secular atheist New York Times handles religion. It may be in the Arts section with the recipes.

Well anyway, if this is a PR handout, then the American papers did not want to touch a tired old religion story of two dying, declining Old Testament like entities, the Church of LDS and the RC Church America INC.

Searching around I found this breaking story on the Catholic Blogosphere and Utah Newspapers dreaming of glory days past and ahead in current joint efforts with the RC hierarchy.

Merger talks are good. A shrinking believer base makes it necessary. Shared corporate expenses. Shared Hate Non-Profit organizations to push gay-bashing and more restrictions on women’s right to choose.

Mormons, Catholics must defend religious freedom, Cardinal says

PROVO, Utah -- The fight to defend moral principles is linking Mormons and Catholics like never before.

"In recent years, Catholics and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have stood more frequently side by side in the public square to defend human life and dignity," Francis Cardinal George told nearly 12,000 students, faculty and community members gathered Tuesday at BYU.

"I'm personally grateful that after 180 years of living mostly apart from one another, Catholics and Latter-day Saints have begun to see each other as trustworthy partners in defense of shared moral principles."

Mormons and Catholics join forces

Last Tuesday, in a speech called Catholics and Latter-day Saints: partners in the defence of religious freedom, he told an audience that Catholics and Mormons must stand together as a "vital bulwark" against those who wanted to "reduce religion to a purely private reality".

“Trustworthy partners in defense of moral principles” – I heard (a rumor) all the U.S. Bishops have been down to Mississippi and had sex therapy along side Tiger. I am reassured. We would not want to have to share females in all those group marriages in Utah with the paps, would we? Though if you think about it, with polygamy, there are plenty numbers potential in the possible altar boy/future priest category.

“Reduce religion to a purely private reality” – well hell yeah, who wants the Mormons or the RC Catholic bullshit on the public platter. I thought religion was supposed to be private.

If “defense of religious freedom” are the new code words for “forced religion” in the public square – fuck it!.

I am glad that Studebaker and Packard are in secret merger talks. The Mormons and Catholics together really represent the future. Yeah right.

Solomon Spaulding Revealed

One of the big con games of the early nineteenth century by the equivalent of used car salesmen was that of land speculation.

The idea of manifest destiny was not so much a noble ideal as the need to keep leveraging unseen lands and selling them to a public desperate to move on to greener pastures.

The Financier of the American Revolution, Robert Morris, his financial empire was brought down in the end after the revolution by land speculation. Demand went down and overseas finances dried up because of Britain’s stake in the Napoleonic wars.

The Bankruptcy Laws passed by Congress as authorized by the new constitution were in fact tailored to release Morris from Debtor’s Prison.

Even the legendary Jim Bowie of Alamo fame was a land speculator who more times than not got into life and death fights over what he said in contracts for land he sold that did not exist or having already been claimed or sold by some other speculators.

The history of early nineteenth century America was not one of pilgrims and immigrants pushing further out west but one of chasing after the crook who sold you non-existent or substandard land and who kept setting up a new shop five valleys over and on a regular basis.

It comes as no surprise to me that a man with a big chuck of Ohio to sell, Solomon Spaulding, would do anything for a sale including write a short story (sales brochure) about treasures or lost Roman manuscripts to be found in hidden places on his land.

I ran into Solomon Spaulding in my youth in a Nelson’s Encyclopedia dated round 1942 and out of the University of Chicago Press. Why I was reading the brief entry I cannot say. I have always been excited since my youth by the esoteric and the exotic. I remember not knowing what Mormon meant and asked my father who said a line or two which I did not understand but his spin had a negative tone so I did not pursue the subject further.

I see on the Internet that comparing Solomon Spaulding’s “manuscript” to the Book of Mormon is a cottage industry on blogs and a deemed singular important BYU college term paper in many cases.

Solomon had attended Dartmouth, practiced as a minister and then more or less gave that up and failed in most every other business or enterprise he set up shop in.

Close to twenty years after he dies, some disgruntled LDS types go about trashing the new church and assemble a whole bunch of documents and affidavits and publish “Mormonism Unvailed”. The original he said-she said gossip book was born. At the end of the book was a claim that the sales brochure for Spaulding’s land was in fact the backbone of a plagiarized Book of Mormon. The irony in all this is that the little, mostly negative, documentation about the early Mormon church, that has not been suppressed, lost or intentionally destroyed, comes from this one gossipy back stabbing book.

Spaulding’s sales brochure disappears for decades and is supposedly found in Hawaii around 1884. Seeing that it is little more than a sales brochure fantasy deal, one of the LDS major branches publishes it to bolster the fact that it, cheese, and the Book of Mormon had little or nothing to do with one another.

Along comes a disgruntled Mormon pup in the late nineteen seventies and early eighties who uses the Mormonism Unvailed book to forge a bunch of documents that fit the he said-she said scenario of the book. In a religious community starved for original documentation, these forgeries became not unlike the RC church and its selling of relics. Every one wants a piece of the beginning, of the original saint etc. The moral to be learned is that selling relics is like selling land. If you try to move onto the relic maker’s or the land salesman’s profitable turf, they may kill you.

Whether the Spaulding land sales brochure was genuine in 1834 or the one re-found and published in 1885 is of little consequence. The original manuscript in Oberlin College in Ohio is valuable as a historic artifact, whether genuine or not.

The thing with relics is that you can sometimes have enough pieces of the true cross to build a house. And wasting tens of thousands of man hours debating on the Spaulding-Smith comparison is perhaps not a waste of time but a question not unlike how many angels dance on the head of a pin.

Trying to deify your beginnings or your past - in terms of faith - takes a great deal away from the present and the future.