I studied, prayed, analyzed, and agonized trying to find just one thing that wasn't suspect in Smith's life and in his writings. At last I was impelled to admit that Joseph Smith had been a fraud and a tyrant no matter how charismatic, personally charming, and occasionally sympathetic he could be.
The bulk of the proof is J. Smith's fraudulent actions came not from anti-Mormon sources but from Smith's own words, his accounts of his own actions and his historically substantiated personal behavior.
Brigham Young had this to say about Joseph Smith: "Joseph was mean from birth, wild, intemperate, dishonest, tricky, but for all that he was a prophet of the Lord. These trifling faults were as nothing against the religion he founded. I care not if Joseph gamble, lie, swear, run horses and marry women every day: for I embrace no man in my faith" Perhaps that also reveals something of the character of Brigham Young. No matter how clean, industrious and family oriented Mormons now are it doesn't erase the smut of their beginning, nor does it add one whit of credibility to the Joseph Smith story.
Be honest with myself. What was I getting out of church affiliation? Sociability. That was all I found. Sociability is fine but not when you have to pretend to believe the nonsense that you now know is nonsense in order to belong. I got to feeling like a hypocrite. In October of 1960 I wrote in my diary that there were too many things against the Mormon church, the lies, the fraud, the lechery, the tyranny, the exploitation of women, their brain-washing of children. I wanted no more to do with it.
When a person perpetuates lies and fraud believing it is the truth is he blameless? He is not. He becomes a liar himself. What responsibility does a person have to substantiate the truth of the doctrine he's spouting before he passes it on to unsuspecting people as fact? If there were a severe penalty connected to such an activity it would silence a hell of a lot of preachers. Evidently when God, or whomever, made the commandments, teaching untruths wasn't considered worthy of any concern.
Is emotion evidence? Just because a person wants something to be true does that add one whit to its validity? I ran upon a quotation from Socrates: "Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt--particularly to doubt one's own beliefs, one's dogmas, one's axioms. Who knows how these cherished beliefs became certainties, with ease, as if some secret wish did them, clothing desire in the dress of thought? There is no real philosophy until the mind turns around and examines itself." It seemed to me as if the long dead brain of Socrates was speaking to my own brain.
At that time I intellectually withdrew from the church of my childhood and early adulthood. It wasn't easy. For the better part of ten years it was a source of anxiety. But no longer. I have continued to read and study all religions, all philosophies, hundreds of books and all I find is more evidence to substantiate my withdrawal from the Mormon church. You can only see what it is like when you get out of it, view it from a distance.
I copied this from a book I read but I've forgotten the title: "She felt the way she did when Jehovah's Witnesses stood on her doorstep and talked about God or when fresh young Mormons tried to convert her, young men with shaved faces and shaved minds, who grinned at you politely, despite your sins and talked of life and eternity as if they'd been equipped with looped tapes in some Salt Lake City basement." It is only when you regard it from a distance, from a new perspective, that you see its real face.
But in October of 1960 I hadn't even scratched the surface of a tantalizing new world I was seeing for the first time. There was more to come. It was like stepping back in time. With each step I took backward new terrain opened up to my view. When I became familiar with that new set of facts my mind would ask, "What's behind that?" As I searched I grew. When I stretched my mind over new ideas I knew it could never, worlds without end, return to its once puny size.
Once burned, twice shy. When I admitted my disenchantment with what I had once believed, I didn't turn to other churches for new comfort. After forty three years I had my eyes open. I couldn't force them shut again. I didn't try to find an opiate which would shield me against the cruelties of this world. By that time I had met many of history's theologians, scientists, philosophers, and thinkers. I gobbled up books on all those subjects as if I were starving for knowledge, and I was.
Darwin had a large influence on me as did Walter Kaufman, Will Durrant (my mother was a Durrant perhaps Will and I were related). I drank in Voltaire as if I had just come from a long hot walk in the dessert. I loved Eric Hoffer, Nietzsche, Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russel, to name only a few. I read their works not once but many times, learning something from all of them but developing a sense of discrimination as I compared one authority's philosophy with that of another and subjecting them all to Tdjeski's scale.
I read books on early Christianity, besides the Bible, I studied Augustine, Martin Luther, Wycliffe, St. Francis, many on the Catholic Popes, the Spanish Inquistion, the Crusades, the religious wars in Europe and England. I should have kept track of the books I read. I had no idea I was going to attempt to document what I believe or I would have done so.
Let's pretend I made a documentary account of those times. Come with me over the past thirty years and I'll show how the documentary was made. Let's press the fast-backward switch on our VCR and as the film rolls backward we will catch glimpses of the men and events which played parts in the scenario The Making Of Deana Jensen who has the audacity to write GODWHO.
I rode with Darwin on the Beagle and was with him when he wrote, "Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of interposition of a deity. It is more humble and I believe true to consider him created from the animals." and wondered at the courage it would take for Darwin to defend that statement in that period of time.
I knew John Calvin and John Knox and bled with them as they saw mans' depravity and mourned for his sins. I helped Martin Luther nail his grievances against the Catholic Church on the Wittenburg chapel door and stood with the crowd which watched him consummate his marriage to a nun.
There I was watching with the rest of the curious as religious zealots dug up the bones of Wycliffe and hanged those bones for heresy because Wycliffe had translated the Bible from the Latin into the "language of the Angels" so that common people could read it.
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