"Under the Banner of Heaven" - cont'd

I'm almost halfway through John Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith.

The narrative's not nearly as riveting as Into Thin Air nor as spellbinding as Into the Wild, but Under the Banner of Heaven does include concise, and revealing, summaries of both Joseph Smith's biography and the early history of the Mormon Church.

For example, Smith first began translating the cryptic "reformed Egyptian" symbols recorded on the six inch stack of thin gold plates (hidden away for thousands of years, until their location was revealed by "the angel Moroni") that would eventually be printed as "The Book of Mormon" using magic glasses called "interpretors" ... divinely endowed spectacles generously provided by Moroni.  

After Smith's scribe, Martin Harris, misplaced the first 116 pages of the translation, Moroni took back and re-hid the gold plates (and Smith's translating spectacles) in a pique of angelic anger.

Moroni finally cooled off and returned the plates to Smith in 1828, but the angel apparently chose to punish Smith by withholding the magic glasses ... leaving Smith to translate the remainder of the heiroglyphs using his favorite "peep stone," a rock Smith had found while digging a well in 1822.

(Smith's translation technique involved placing the peep stone at the bottom of an upturned hat, pressing his face over the hat, and then dictating "the lines of scripture that appeared to him out of the blackness.")

Concerning polygamy, it seems that the doctrine of "celestial wifery," unacknowledged until 1852 (eight years after Smith's death), wasn't a "divine revelation" at all, but most likely the result of Smith's intractable compulsion to have sex with an un-ending supply of teenage girls.

At least Smith's wife, Emma, thought so too.

--   ---  --

Since its inception on April 6, 1830, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints can lay claim to two troubling accomplishments:

First, Mormonism is well on its way to becoming a major world religion ... the first to do so since Islam.

Second: with more than 12 million members, Mormonism is the fastest growing religion in the Western Hemisphere.  From 1984 to 2000, membership grew at an average 52% per year; some estimates claim that by the year 2080, membership could be as high as 280 million.

"The Mormon Church is the fastest growing religion in the world! Doesn't this indicate that it is God's work?"

No, it does not.

For comparison, from 1994-1996, Islam grew at an average 4% per year, adding more members annually than the total number of Mormons ... while Falun Gong, a Chinese religious movement that went public in 1985, increased to over 10 million members by 2000.

That's going from zero to 10 million+  in just 15 years.

--   ---  --

BTW, Southern Baptists acknowledge that baptisms are at a 20-year low: 70% of its churches are plateaued or declining, and one former SBC president warned that within 20 years half of all Southern Baptist churches could die off.