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Unfortunately, you answers don't cite any references.
Bachman, Danel W. "New Light on an Old Hypothesis: The Ohio Origins of the Revelation on Eternal Marriage. (http://tinyurl.com/5lz9c2 - broken link)" Journal of Mormon History, Volume 5, 1978. pp. 19-32.
Compton, Todd. "Fanny Alger Smith Custer: Mormonism's First Plural Wife? (http://tinyurl.com/67cmmu - broken link)" Journal of Mormon History, Volume 22 Issue 1, Spring, 1996. pp. 174-206.
In regard to Fannie Alger Smith, these references render pretty much everything else in your post moot in addition to answering the questions raised in your post. BTW, I know Danel and took classes from him back in the 1970 at college. I met him again at the FAIR Conference two years ago.
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Polyandry and sharing spouses are certainly not the same thing. What Smith et al were doing with each other in Nauvoo by "sharing" spouses wasn't polygyny or polyandry.
Except that they got married with a ceremony and officials and witnesses. Try again.
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I'm looking at mostly hand-waving on your part in your responses. I don't care what your role is in FAIR or any such thing. If your job is to shill for the church, good luck to you. We haven't even talked about Views of the Hebrews, Smith's prospector's stones, the almighty plates that appeared then disappeared, the silly pseudo-King James language found in the Book of Mormon, the Danites, the Mormon War in Missouri, the "hit" on the ex-Governor of Missouri, the Nauvoo Expositor episode in Nauvoo, Illinois, Smith's failure to correctly translate true Egyptian (Book of the Dead), etc, etc.
So your idea of a good post is just to throw out a bunch of words again. This is the typical shotgun approached used by anti-Mormons---raise as many topics as possible in the shortest amount of space and hope that at least one item isn't addressed satisfactorily.
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Hey, folks, we're talking here about home-grown American religion at its best! Inventing a story that would give North Americans a sense of God's purpose directly for THEM, and assigning historical priority to their doctrines based on a new set of scriptures that claims priority over everything found in all the previous Christian scriptures, were clever moves because we're talking about a semi-literate society (1830s) already inclined to bend the knee to a holy book. All these are great moves to make if one's goal were to establish a new alternative society with access to vast tracts of raw materials and capitalistic economics. The trick was to create enough of a semi-plausible beginning myth (with retroactive substantiaton of the key facts) to get the organization started, then the enterprise aspects and the plural marriage stuff would make it highly probable that the movement could attract converts going forward. There was sure to be no shortage of male converts to such a religion and would of course result in rapid population increases among the faithful! The sheep are always out there to be found!
This is a nice story, except that it springs entirely from the mind of a person drenched in conspiracy theory view of the world. It makes absolutely no sense from an historical view and can't be supported from the record.
It just goes to show that when you run out of good ideas, inventing and telling the BIG LIE has been shown to be a good approach to swaying people.
Sufice it to say you obviously are not speaking for mormons or for the mormon church.
Of course not. Were you expecting some kind of official spokesman to come on this board to respond to your complaint?
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As for the answers to your questions, well, no thanks.
So you're mad but you don't want to explain or justify yourself, just vent. Well, sometimes venting is all that is needed.
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And as for my property, well, we'll see if they find you after you show up. Hope you leave a list of places you'll visit with someone who cares about you. Have a nice day.
What makes all this so funny is that you are complaining about the immorality and inconsideration of someone knocking on your door, while at the same time threatening people with death. It is incredibly amusing to watch people try to take the moral high ground while wallowing in the mud.
On top of all that, I've never said here that I thought the people visiting you were being considerate or behaving decently. In fact, I've suggested just the opposite might be the case. Your apparent hatred seems to have blinded you to the point where you can't even see when people are disagreeing with you. Are you so bigoted and intolerant that you think that simply being religious makes a person deserving of mocking and ridicule, and makes him into someone to whom common courtesy and decency no longer applies?
Wait up, Chielgirl, I'm activating the ignore beam too. Before I go though, fair warning: it probably is a good idea to have a close relationship with god before you come lurking on my property.
A marvelous post.
We have a person threatening to kill people because they are discourteous and thus immoral!
PaulMcNabb:
I quickly read the two articles you have cited. A couple of things stood out to me among the material. The first is the animosity that Joseph Smith, Jr., had toward the civil authorities, about which I had read previously in separate works. On page 31 of the Bachman article there is a quote from the Newell Knight article where Smith supposedly holds himself up as immune from any laws passed by the Congress of the United States regarding the practice of religion. The second is the statement attributed to Smith by Benjamin Winchester, also found on page 31 of the Bachman article, that Smith stated in about 1835 that "[he] could do whatever he could choose to do, therefore the Church had no right to call into question anything he did." A serious consideration of the truth of Winchester's testimony, regarding Smith's "expansive" (dare I say monomaniacal) view of his own identity and role in the church, would force us today to cast in a skeptical light the actual motivation and the veracity of the accounts of the full range of Smith's behavior during his leadership of the early LDS church. Smith's sense of his identity as being modeled on the Old Testament conception of "prophet" is key, it would seem. I would like to find further scholarly work on this topic. Smith certainly comes across to us today as a supremely confident man among his fellow men and women and having great confidence in his ability to personally persuade and lead others.
The Compton article relies heavily on the unpublished reminisence (the provenance of which is not specifically established in this cited works) of Mosiah Hancock about his father Levi Hancock's "exchange of women" (Compton's words) with Joseph Smith, Jr., (regarding Fanny Alger and Clarrissa Reed) and later the "marriages" that supposedly took place, with the Smith/Alger secret ceremony possibly taking place first. Compton does not enumerate who were the witnesses to such an event, so I received the impression that these "ceremonies" involved only the principals themselves and the officiator himself (Smith for the Hancock/Reed ceremony and Hancock for the Smith/Alger ceremony) and perhaps also the Alger parents, but the latter are not mentioned as being at the ceremony in the Compton article, if I recall correctly. Compton mentions documentation that later in time the Alger family espoused "pride" that Fanny had been given to Smith in marriage. But given that the marriage was kept secret both from Smith's first wife Emma and from the public (at first and for some time, perhaps for a long time) outside of Alger's immediate family and given that I haven't yet seen an account of who else might have witnessed this "ceremony," I conclude that the weddings of Levi Hancock/Clarissa Reed and Joseph Smith, Jr./Fanny Alger were unusually secret events, not disclosed to the public, but also for the Smith/Alger "marriage" not disclosed to the church until decades later, that is RETROACTIVELY. The Compton article, because it is addressing the issue of whether there were incidents or precursor incidents of Mormon plural marriage in Kirtland, also does not address whether the fact that Fanny Alger did not continue to be associated with Joseph Smith, Jr., after he left for the West is, or is not, evidence that any "marriage" took place between the two of them. It is also known that Smith's first wife Emma "threw out" Fanny from the Smith household (where Fanny had been a housekeeper) when she believed she discovered a relationship between Smith and Alger. Is there documentation in another article that this separation of Alger from the Smith household was the only precursor event to her continued and final separation from Smith? (She later traveled with her parents to Indiana and married another man surnamed Custer.)
Again, as I posted previously in this forum, this retroactivity pattern regarding the attestation of Joseph Smith, Jr.'s activities relating to the early LDS church is what seems to me to be the basis for throwing doubt on establishing anything certain about those activities (if they, in fact, occurred) as well as his motivations in performing those supposed activities.
Note that Compton's researching skill and scholarly criteria for inclusion of sources and their documentation are also called into question regarding his book In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith, published in 1997. For example, see the comments from readers on the Amazon.com site: http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Lonelin...pr_product_top
Last edited by ParkTwain; 11-07-2008 at 07:32 PM..
UH, I have also said "I am a Christian" "I already have a church" "I don't want to talk"
Be nice to them; they are just kids.
I have very EMPHATICALLY told them "I am Catholic and have no plans to convert to any other religion. Thank you."
Be nice to them? No. I'd describe myself as more brusque about it. They need to hear it. "Kids" also grow up to be Mitt Romney and Covey (7 Effective Habits), the latter of which is a big "duh" for educated and thoughtful people.
One time I was stopped at a light and I saw two missionaries standing, while on their bikes, and logging stuff into a booklet. Another time, I was at a public library while passing through a small town, and I saw FOUR of them working on what looked to be "convert" lists....don't salespeople LOG their prospects?
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It is incredibly amusing to watch people try to take the moral high ground while wallowing in the mud. 
