On Sept 21, 1823, Moroni appears and points Joseph Smith to the tablets Whoever chose the angel Moroni for the Mormons had a good sense of humor. The Mormons (Latter Day Saints) started around 1850 in New York. The scientific field of astronomy had advanced sufficiently that it became part the Mormons theological beliefs. The early Mormons actually believed that people lived on the moon and on the Sun. Under Mormonism, you might become the God of another world. The galaxy has many billions of possibly habitable worlds and there are billions of galaxies. Is one God more equal to other Gods? Who gets to be on the Celestial Galactical Council? Who sits in the Universal Celestial Council to advise the lesser Gods. The Mormons believe that Lucifer and Jesus are brothers The Mormons believe that American Indians might be one of the lost tribes of Israel and Jesus visited North America. One of the things Mormons don't want you to know about is the Mountain Meadow massacre. Somewhere around 1973, the Mormon church received a divine revelation that allowed black people in their church. Strangely enough, the federal government was about to drag their ass into court for racial discrimination. I'm sure that it was a cruel joke by whomever gave the Mormons their name and assigned the angel Moroni to them.

Remove the second m in Mormons and you get Morons.

Remove the i in Moroni and you get Moron. The founder of the Mor(m)ons was Joseph Smith was illiterate like Moses, Jesus and Mohammed despite being given revelations by an all powerful diety. God Is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens In March 1826 a court in Bainbridge, New York, convicted a twenty-one-year-old man of being "a disorderly person and an impostor." That ought to have been all we ever heard of Joseph Smith, who at trial admitted to defrauding citizens by organizing mad gold digging expeditions and also claiming to possess dark or "necromantic" powers. However, within four years he was back in the local newspapers (all of which one may still read) as the discoverer of the "Book of Mormon". He had two huge local advantages which most mountebanks and charlatans do not possess. First, he was operating in he same hectically pious district that gave us the Shakers, the previously mentioned George Miller who repeatedly predicted the end of the world, and several other self-proclaimed American prophets. So notorious did this local tendency become that the region became known as the "Burned Over District" in honor of the way in which it had surrendered to one religious craze after another. Second, he was operating in an area which, unlike large tracts of newly opening North America, did possess signs of ancient history. A vanished and vanguished Indian civilization had bequeathed a considerable number of burial mounds, which when randomly and amateurishly desecrated were found to contain not merely bones but also quite advanced artifacts of stone, copper, and beaten silver. There were eight of these sites within twelve miles of the underperforming farm which the Smith family called home. There were two equally stupid schools or factions who took a fascinated interest in such matters; the first were the gold-diggers and treasure-diviners who brought their magic sticks and crystals and stuffed toads to bear in on the search for lucre, and the second were those who hoped to find the resting place of a lost tribe of Israel. Smith's cleverness was to be a member of both groups, and to unite cupidity with half-baked anthropology. The actual story of the imposture is almost embarrassing to read and almost embarrassingly easy to uncover. (It had been best told by Dr. Fawn Brodie, whose 1945 book "No Man Knows My History" was a good faith attempt by a professional historian to put the kindest possible interpretation on the relevant "events.") In brief, Joseph Smith announced that he had been visited (three times, as is customary) by an angel named Moroni. The said angel informed him of a book, "written upon gold plates" which explained the origins of those living on the North American continent as well as the truths of the gospel. There were, further, two magic stones, set in the twin breast-plates Urim and Thummim of the Old Testament that would enable Smith himself to translate the aforesaid book. After many wrestlings, he brought the buried apparatus home with him in September 21, 1827, about eighteen months after his conviction for fraud. He then set about producing a translation. The resulting "books" turned out to be a record set down by ancient prophets, beginning with Nephi, son of Lephi, who had fled Jerusalem in approximately 600 BC and come to America. Many battles, curses, and afflictions accompanied their subsequent wanderings and those of their numerous progeny. How did the books turn out to be this way? Smith refused to show the golden plates to anybody, claiming that for other eyes to view them would mean death. But he encountered a problem that will be familiar to students of Islam. He was extremely glib and fluent as a debater and story-weaver as many accounts attest. But he was illiterate, at least in the sense that while he could read a little, he could not write. A scribe was therefore necessary to take the inspired dictation. The scribe was at first his wife Emma and then when more hands were necessary, a luckless neighbor named Martin Harris. Hearing Smith cite the words of Isaiah 29, verses 11-12, concerning the repeated injunction to "Read", Harris mortgaged his farm to help in the task and moved in with the Smiths. He sat on one side of a blanket hung across the kitchen, and Smith sat on the other with his translation stones, intoning through the blanket. As if to make this an even happier scene, Harris was warned that if he tried to glimpse the plates, or look at the prophet, he would be struck dead. Mrs. Harris was having none of this, and was already furious with the feckleness of her husband. She stole the first hundred and sixteen pages and challenged Smith to reproduce them, as presumably - given his power of revelation - he could. (Determined women like this appear far too seldom in the history of religion). After a very few weeks, the ingenious Smith countered with another revelation. He could not replicate the original, which might be in the devil's hands by now and open to a "satanic verses" interpretation. But the all-forseeing Lord had meanwhile furnished some smaller plates, indeed the very plates of Nephi, which told of a similar tale. With infinite labor, the translation was resumed, with new scriveners behind the blanket as occasion demanded, and when it was completed all the Christian preachers of all kinds had justified slavery until the American Civil War and even afterwards, on the supposed biblical warrant that of the three sons of Noah (Shem, Ham, and Japhet), Ham had been cursed and cast into servitude. But Joseph Smith took this nasty fable even further, fulminating in his "Book of Abraham" that the swarthy races of Egypt had inherited this very curse. Also, at the made-up battle of "Cumora", a site located near his own birthplace, the "Nephites", described as fair-skinned and "handsome", contended against the "Lamanites", whose descendants were punished with dark pigment for turning away from God. As the crisis over American slavery mounted, Smith and his even more dubious disciples preached against the abolitionists in antebellum Missouri. They solemnly said that there had been a third group in heaven during the ultimate battle between God and Lucifer. This group, as it was explained, had tried to remain neutral. But after Lucifer's defeat they had been forced into the world, compelled to take bodies in the accursed lineage of Canaan; and hence the Negro or African race. Thus, when Dr. Brodie first wrote her book, no black American was allowed to hold even the lowly position of deacon, let alone a priesthood, in the Mormon church. Nor were descendants of Ham admitted to the sacred rites of the temple. If anything proves the human manufacture of religion, it is the way that the Mormon elders resolved this difficulty. Confronted by the plain words of one of their holy books, and the increasing contempt and isolation that it imposed upon them, they did as they had done when their fondness for polygamy would have brought federal retribution upon God's own Utah. They had still another "revelation" and, more or less in time for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, had it divinely disclosed to them that black people were human after all. It must be said for the "Latter Day Saints" (these conceited words were added to Smith's original "Church of Jesus Christ" in 1833) that they have squarely faced one of the great difficulties of revealed religion. This is the problem of what to do about those who were born before the exclusive "revelation", or who died without ever having the opportunity to share in its wonders.