Gordon Fraser, October 6, 1981, Forest Grove Chapel.
Forty-five years of working with the, uh,
alongside of the Mormons, I would say, or
with them, or for them, for their benefit,
we've had some rather interesting experiences.
And much of what we learned in the
early days about them, uh, uh, guided me
in my, uh, later studies.
In my college work and so forth, I
deliberately took, uh, subjects that would relate to
the subjects of Mormonism.
Particularly the Book of Mormon, which you may
have seen.
Don't ever buy a copy.
They'll give you one if you, uh, uh,
resist buying it.
They'll give you one.
So don't bother.
Or you might even find one in a
motel room.
If you come out west, you'll find them
in a motel room instead of the, uh,
Bible, getting Bible.
But, uh, I took a great deal of
study.
All the, all the information I could get
in my college work relates to this.
The subject of anthropology, for instance, you say,
well, what has that to do with, uh,
the Book of Mormon?
Well, a great deal.
Because they claim that it was the ancient
American people, the ancestors of the present Indians,
who wrote the Book of Mormon.
And so they say, this is the Bible
for the new world.
And I say, this is the Bible for
the old world, but this is the Bible
for the new world.
Well, there's some rather strange things written in
the Book of Mormon, and I spent a
good deal of time studying them out.
In fact, in my, uh, in my field
work, I did much of it in Yucatan
and, uh, really Honduras, that general area where
the great population was during the period that
is described through the Book of Mormon.
And later on, in, uh, in the North
Country, in British Columbia, Yukon, Southern Alaska, I
did quite a bit of studying up there
on the Native people.
Of course, this blended with my work at
the American Center, with the Southwestern School of
Visions, besides that, because these are devoted entirely
to the training of Native American people, uh,
who have had students in our school from
all parts, you might say, of the North
American continent.
This year we have them from Alaska, from
Alberta, from Central Mexico, from Florida, from the
Dakotas, and, of course, from the tribes in
the Southeast.
Now, the interesting thing is this.
The Mormon missionaries, when they go to the
Indian people, they say, Why are you interested
in American Indians?
Why are you so interested in Mormons?
Well, the Mormons have taken possession of a
number of the Indian reservations, seriously speaking.
They have one reservation in Oregon, a one
-street reservation which holds members of several tribes
that were brought together there in one reservation.
A very rich reservation in timber and tourism,
winter sports, summer sports, everything.
They're very rich in this, so much so
that the tribe gives a dividend to every
individual in the tribe each year.
Besides having all the debts paid.
When we knew of the work there first,
there was a Presbyterian Church, a Roman Catholic,
a Native Patriot Church, and a Pentecostal Church,
all four of them active.
Now, the only church that has a resident
leader is the Mormon Church.
They have taken it over, and the others
have just dropped out.
Well, we see this sort of thing happening.
One of our tribes up in the village
northwest, the Philly tribe up on the coast
of Washington, some years ago, when I was
up there, we had a work going up
there, we had a bookmobile touring around the
Indian reservations on that peninsula.
Eleven different tribes.
We found in one of them that two
of the missionaries came in one summer and
took over an old abandoned house and set
up housekeeping there and went out, and all
they were interested in was youngsters.
They put them on parties, they put them
fishing, they put them on hikes, and got
well acquainted with them.
At the end of the summer, they took
seven of them, ten-year-olds, over to
Utah and adopted them into Mormon homes.
There they would get an education under Mormon
schoolteachers.
With the prospect that ten years later they
would come back to their own tribe, the
Philly tribe, as full-fledged Mormon elders or
missionaries.
They called themselves elders.
I always smiled at that.
A few nights ago I was talking to
one of them, and I said, what's your
first name?
He didn't want to tell me his first
name.
I'm Elder Jones, whatever it was.
And I said, why don't you call yourself
an elder?
I said, are you maybe 19 or 20?
He said, yes.
I said, are you married?
No.
They don't permit you to get married on
our mission.
Have you any children?
Of course, this was a silly question.
He said, no.
I said, well, then how do you qualify
as an elder?
Because an elder would be the husband of
one wife with children in succession to her.
Oh, well, he said, we don't consider that
in our church.
I said, forget about that.
Just call yourself elder.
As far as I'm concerned, I'll call you
Jim, or whatever your first name is.
Well, he didn't like my condescending manner, I
guess.
But I couldn't penetrate his thick hide with
the gospel.
He just was impervious to it.
But this is the people who are so
active in the field.
There are 30,000 of them throughout the
world today, of the Chiboku missionaries.
10,000 of them in the seven southwest,
southeastern states.
10,000 missionaries right now.
This is where they're making a big deal.
They're wanting this to be a target area.
And they will open their temple in Atlanta,
I think, later this year, scheduled.
And they wanted to have 100,000 new
members by that time.
Well, they've gotten well over 100,000 already,
and they had several months to grow.
And they're all coming out of established churches.
They don't go out in the world and
get non-church people.
They aren't interested in that.
They want to get people from the established
churches.
Of course, all they get is the fringe
people who are not solid in their denominational
affiliation, and not sound, certainly, in the gospel.
I wouldn't fall for it.
All of which is leading up to the
tactics.
That they're using.
On one occasion, I was in a home,
sort of a two-family affair.
There was a Navajo Indian couple living in
one end.
And I guess it was the ones I
was visiting in the other end.
But you could hear them telling the story.
Two more missionaries telling the story to these
Navajo people.
And they just stated, it was your ancestors
that wrote the Book of Mormon.
So I listened very carefully and heard all
that they had to say, and I encountered
them on their way out.
I said, don't you realize that the Navajo
Indians couldn't have written the Book of Mormon
because they didn't come to America that early.
And they didn't come into Arizona until about
the time of Columbus.
They couldn't have been the ones who wrote
the Book of Mormon.
And I gave them a few facts, and
they said, well, you seem to know a
great deal about this, but we'd rather believe
our prophets.
In other words, don't confuse me with the
facts.
Mine's already made up.
Well, I was in Alaska this last summer,
and in Ketchikan I had a meeting.
And a very fine, tainted Indian woman came
up to me after the meeting, a rather
large, boisterous person, and a very delightful person.
She said, they came and they told me
it was my ancestors that wrote the Book
of Mormon.
I laughed in her face.
Well, to be sure, the Tlingit Indians were
never south of latitude 55, which is about
the southern tip of Alaska.
So they couldn't have been the ones to
write the Book of Mormon, which was written
in Central America, according to Mormons.
I went further north, and in the meeting
there was a delightful little native person at
the piano, and she sounded like she had
studied at Juilliard.
She had usually just zipped from her fingers,
and I thought, here's another Tlingit that has
to study this.
So I asked her, I'm an Eskimo.
I asked her about the Mormons.
Oh yes, they told me it was my
ancestors that wrote the Book of Mormon.
So the Eskimos were never south of the
Arctic Circle in the old days, except over
in Labrador, they got a little further south.
But certainly, they weren't illiterate people, and they
didn't write any books, especially about their ancestors,
the ancestors of the southern Tlingits.
Well, all of this, by the way, these
are the situations we run into.
We run into some very interesting ones.
Now, tonight, I want to continue a little
to finish up what we were talking about
last night.
We were talking about the doctrine of God,
and we talked about the Holy Spirit, who
then, an influence, not a person, sort of
an abstract influence, which they, in their baptismal
ceremonies, the elder who is baptizing the candidates,
baptizes them and lays his hand on them
to administer the Holy Ghost to them.
Which is blasphemy of the worst kind.
But this is their practice, and they do
this to every convert who comes into the
Mormon Church.
Well, we studied this last night about the
Holy Spirit.
We studied about the person of God, how
that they insist that God the Heavenly Father
is an exalted man, a second born, who
has an exalted wife, a Mrs. God, shall
we say, and they are occupied with the
procreation of spirit children.
This is their destiny, their life.
To produce spirit children, and these spirit children,
in turn, are given to human birth.
Whenever a human birth occurs, one of these
spirits is drawn from this heavenly stockpile and
put into the current birth here upon the
earth.
Which, of course, is an ancient heresy, that
we all existed before a spirit being.
Therefore, we are all sons of God, because
it is our Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother
who produced us in the celestial region.
Then we grew up in the celestial region,
finally we were given a physical body when
we were born, and we continue on in
this period of probation through life, then at
the end of death, if we have achieved
enough, if we have done enough good work
and fulfilled the commandments and so forth, we
ascend to one of several different areas.
The final one, of course, is the celestial
region where they say we return to our
Father and our God.
This we brought up last night.
This is their concept of God.
And, of course, our Heavenly Father and Heavenly
Mother had a Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother
before them.
They, in turn, had a Heavenly Father and
Heavenly Mother before them, and so on ad
infinitum, until the writer of that particular statement
said, we wonder who begat the first Father
and created the first world.
Which is sort of a question to solve.
To push it back far enough into infinity,
of course, it gets away from us.
But that's their theory of advancement.
It's nothing more or less than a form
of reincarnation and animism, for that matter.
We find that practically all of the Pharisees
saw in monotheism.
Going back to this one of the spirits,
the pre-existent spirits, the only Churchman of
history was Orison, who believed this.
He is not considered as being very orthodox
in some of his parts, but this was
his spirit.
I don't know of any group of Christians
that have ever held this doctrine.
They did, and they borrowed it from somebody
else.
But no, we didn't get a chance to
talk about their concept of Jesus Christ, who
is he, and what is his work.
Now, in the first place, let me say
this.
They believed that he was the spirit brother
of Satan, one of these pre-existent spirits,
who was given a body that Mother Mary,
who was his mother, they acknowledge this.
They say she was the virgin, the term
they allow, but they say he was begotten
by a resurrected Heavenly Father who took a
body and with Mary produced a child Jesus.
If this Heavenly Father was the father of
her spirit, this would obviously be an incestuous
relationship that produced Jesus Christ as a man.
Now, in the teaching of the Mormon Church,
you have a section in this book, The
Doctrine and Covenants, which was written in 1844
and partially led to the assassination of Joseph
Smith.
The Church didn't want the Doctrine and Covenants.
Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Peter Kimball, three of
the leaders of the Church and a few
others, were so heavily involved with too many
women at the time it was leaking out,
Joseph Smith decided to get a revelation from
God that it was all right to have
more than one wife and to have wives
healed to you for eternity.
If you couldn't have them in this life,
you could at least have them healed in
eternity.
Actually, it was one of the most corrupt
periods of the Mormon Church, morally corrupt.
Joseph Smith got a revelation which is one
of the longest revelations in the book.
Section 132 goes page after page, and it
establishes the idea that if we are going
to become God, we have to achieve in
this life to the point where we have
a wife or wives healed to us in
the temple, and our children healed to us
in the temple.
Then when we die, we become God, and
we are assigned to a new planet and
we recreate it and populate it.
And the more wives we have down here,
the sooner we get started on our heavenly
attainment.
He established all of this in that Doctrine,
using the name of the Lord.
For instance, he says, I am the Lord
thy God, and I give unto you this
commandment, and so forth.
Thus saith the Lord your God.
And all the way through, this is put
in the first person, God speaking, I the
Lord say unto you, Joseph Smith, do this.
Well, it is so blasphemous to anyone who
knows the Lord and knows the truth of
Scripture, it is absolutely blasphemous that this man
would do such a thing as this.
Incidentally, not long after he proposed that commandment,
he was shot to death, he and his
brother Hyrum.
Incidentally, that was only one of the factors
that led to their death.
A newspaper had been published in Nauvoo, Illinois,
by a group of dissident Mormons who didn't
like this new revelation at all, and they
published a newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor.
It came out and said some very unflattering
things about this new doctrine that wasn't supposed
to have been exposed at that time.
They wanted to keep it for a little
while, but these editors just blurted it out
and published it in their paper.
Joseph Smith called the city council together, and
they declared the newspaper a nuisance and proceeded
to wreck the press and fire the press
and burn up all the copies of the
magazine or the paper.
Two or three of them escaped.
I have one of them, and there's nothing
in it but what, if Joseph Smith wanted
to, he could have sued for libel if
there was anything liable at the time.
In other facts, it was all perfectly true.
This was the trouble.
This is why you wrecked the press.
Well, this led, partially, this was the one
thing on which they based their arrest.
He was, this is something you don't do
in America, is destroy a press, a newspaper.
And so he was arrested, and a few
days later he was shot to death by
a mob, as they say.
They martyred him.
As a matter of fact, there were two
or three elements to this.
This was his Mormon group, and the three
Natives were another group, because Joseph and Hyrum
Smith had been 32nd-degree Natives, and they
incorporated a lot of their rituals into the
Mormon ritual.
And the Natives didn't take a very good
view of that, and so the agitation kept
swirling around.
They finally got Joseph Smith and his brother
off the town, out of the town of
Dalvoo, into the neighboring town, and there they
mobbed, urged on by the existing Mormons and
others to prevention, which they did.
So that's the story of the martyrdom of
the Prophet, because of the things that he
wrote.
In this section, 132, it was established that
a man cannot become a god unless he
is married, has children, and has them sealed
to him in the Mormon rite.
So they say that Jesus couldn't become a
god unless he was married and had children
before he died.
So they made up some more scriptures, some
more doctrines, and one of their men, Orson
Hyde, in the Journal of Discourses, chapter 81
and 82 of Pages, gifts at the marriage
at Cana of Galilee, Jesus was the bridegroom,
and took unto him Martha, Mary, and the
other Mary.
This talks about our marriage.
He says, If there was not attachment and
familiarity between our Savior and these women, highly
proper only in the relation of husband and
wife, then we have no sense of propriety.
He went on.
If he never married, his intimacy with Mary
and Martha and the other Mary also, whom
Jesus loved, must have been highly unbecoming and
improper, to say the least of it.
Did he multiply?
Did he see his seed?
Did he know his father's will by complying
with it?
Others may do as they like, but I
will not charge our Savior with neglect or
transgression in this or any other duty.
We say it was Jesus Christ who was
married, for by whom he could see his
seed before he was crucified.
I shall here say that before the Savior
died, he looked upon his own natural children
as he looked upon ours."
In other words, making Jesus a common palate,
who was a spirit being and a brother
of Satan.
Now, this is the interesting thing.
Satan and Jesus were the two firstborn spirits
of the Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother, and
those that are bigger than none have themselves
Adam and Eve.
The proposition was put to the two spirits
to formulate a plan of salvation.
Satan brought forth one that would have included
the whosoever will method, and Ephesians 2, 8
and 9.
Jesus proposed one that you had to work
for your salvation.
Jesus had a body.
Satan didn't, he said.
So Jesus would become a god eventually, and
he got to be a god by this
process of getting married to these women in
the gospels.
Now, this is Mormon doctrine.
They won't tell you this.
They won't come out and say this the
first time they meet with you.
In fact, they will refer to Jesus as
the Savior, our Savior, and the one who
died on the cross, the one who was
born of the Virgin Mary.
They'll say all of these things.
But when you dig in and say, well,
just what do you mean by this?
Then they're struck, and they'll have to admit
to all of this material.
I brought this up in my lectures at
the Church in Tennessee last week, and one
of these men came to me afterwards, and
he said, Did you say that Jesus and
Satan were spirit brothers?
I said, Yes.
That's what your writings tell us.
He said, I don't think we believe that.
So I showed him chapter and verse in
what they had, their Pearl of Great Price
and the Book of Moses, how these two
bide with each other to perform the labor
way of salvation.
I said, There you are.
Well, he said, I didn't know that he
thought that.
He was one of the two that he
listened to.
In fact, there are many things that these
young fellows don't know.
I've yet to find one of them that
can recite the first verse of the Book
of Mormon.
I can recite the first verse of the
Bible, and I guess you can.
Now, that's really a sort of a tricky
proposition.
You're going to read the first verse of
the Book of Mormon.
Are there any English teachers present?
Any teachers present?
Well, you'll remember, if you can make sense
out of this verse and its construction, standpoint
of grammar, I'll give you a level netting.
So that's how it goes.
I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents,
therefore I was taught somewhat in all the
learning of my father, and having seen many
afflictions in the course of my days, nevertheless
having been highly favored of the Lord in
all my days, yea, having had a great
knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of
God, therefore I make a record of my
proceedings in my days.
Verse 1.
He probably could have said it in ten
words or less, besides.
Now, here's another little paragraph on this, the
doctrine of Jesus Christ.
The appointment of Jesus to be the Savior
of the world was contested by one of
the other sons of God.
He was called Lucifer, son of the Mormon.
Haughty, ambitious, and covetous of power and glory,
this dear brother of Jesus desperately tried to
become the Savior of mankind.
He failed.
I think that's all we need to say
about that.
That's the concept of the son.
The father, a person who is a second
-born, who has a wife or wives, and
they are producing spirit children.
The Holy Spirit, an influence which is administered
by the hands of a priest to the
new candidate at his baptism, which supposedly lasts
him through life.
This priest of the Mormon Church may be
a used car dealer during the day, but
he's a priest in the church at night.
And then, Jesus Christ, the product of a
polygamous society.
I have one question that I think I'm
going to say.
There's a question to ask the Mormon folks
here tonight, and I was going to give
them a special story.
But I'll say that.
I'll give it to you before we get
through.
Some of them want to come, so I'll
say this for him.
He's saying you're a trickery, old man.
Well, maybe so.
You have to be.
Here's some more material on the person of
Christ, on the Incarnation, the Mormon view.
Jesus is man's spiritual brother.
We dwell with him in the spirit world
as members of that large society of eternal
intelligences, which included our Heavenly Parents and all
the prophesies who have become mortal beings upon
the earth or wherever come to dwell.
In the spirit creation, when we became children
of God, Jesus was the firstborn, and he
was our eldest brother.
He was the most intelligent, the most faithful,
and the most God-like of all the
sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father in
the spirit world.
Not the eternal ones who made flesh, but
rather man.
Jesus became a God and reached his great
state of understanding through consistent effort and continuous
obedience to all the gospel truth and universal
law.
Jesus is not the father of the spirits
who have taken or will take bodies, for
he is one of them.
He is the son, and they are the
daughters of all of him.
As for the devil and his fellow spirit,
they are brothers to man and also to
Jesus, and sons and daughters of God in
the same sense that we are.
When the Virgin Mary conceived the child Jesus,
he was not forgotten by the Holy Ghost,
and he is his father.
He is the first of the human family.
Jesus, our elder brother, was begotten in the
flesh by the same parrot who lives in
the Garden of Eden."
So there you have the story of the
person of Jesus' flesh during the estimation of
the Mormon Church.
He was a polygamist who had to become
a polygamist before he could become a God.
Now, while we have our Book of Mormon
here, I'm going to spend some time on
this book so that you can evaluate it
if you ever get your hands on a
copy.
Though it hasn't paid to do so, they've
never sold any of these.
They've never seen it offered in a bookstore,
and yet they have published millions of them.
At one period, it was the second-bestseller
for a whole year.
That is, it wasn't a seller, but it
was published in such numbers that it was
viable in distribution.
Now, in the first place, the book is,
as I suppose to have been, the product
of the inhabitants of America in a period
of two histories.
I'll give you a little outline of what
the book consists of.
The first place, the second place in Jerusalem
at the time of the Babylonian siege of
Jerusalem of the United States of America.
One family of Manassites escaped from Jerusalem, from
the siege of Jerusalem, and traveled across the
desert to the Persian Gulf and there built
a ship to sail to the New World.
This was in 590 B.C. They arrived
on the shores of America and set up
a civilization composed of two nations.
They split off very soon after they arrived
and became two rival nations, and these rival
nations are the ancestors of the American Indians.
They settled up the North American continent.
They ignore the South American continent, which does
give them some problems, and they start to
really just ignore this.
And then they established a great civilization in
Latin America, and the old ruins that we
have there are supposed to have been the
buildings, the temples, that they built.
Then, at the time of Christ, Jesus came
to America and appeared to them in 53
A.D., after his resurrection, and established a
church in ancient America, appointed prophet and repeatedly
affirmed the mount, and the Lord's Prayer, and
a few other things, quoting John the King
James Version of the English Bible, and established
a church which is supposed to have lasted
for 200 years.
Then, finally, the apostasy set in, and the
ancient Americans became the presidents that they are,
and the whole story ends at 421 A
.D. The interesting thing that starts in all
of the activity, all of the action in
the Book of Mormon, takes place either on
the way to America or after they were
in America, in Latin America, what we call
Latin America, or naval America, as we call
it sometimes.
Then, in the last few chapters, for some
magical reason, we find them all up in
New York City.
The Nephites were up there surrounding the hill
of Palmyra in New York.
I've been there several times and explored it
and tried to find some significance to it.
But the king of the Nephites wrote to
the king of the Lamanites, who is still
down in Latin America, and invited them to
come up there to join battle, all the
way from Guatemala to New York City.
In the past, there were a hundred places
which were far better battlegrounds, as far as
that goes, but they had to have the
thing up in New York City so that
the golden place could be hid there on
the Smith's Pond, which is where George Smith
was founded.
At any rate, the last battle has all
of the Lamanites on the top of this
hill of Palmyra, about 230,000 in arms.
On the fifth morning, they swoop down the
hillside and destroy the 230,000 Nephites, leaving
only a handful of them, including Mormon and
Moroni.
Well, at Hilltop, you couldn't get more than
75 people on a ridge out to the
side.
They had a monument of Moroni up there,
and they dozed off part of the cliff,
though they didn't pass about 10 or 12
cows there, on the road they're going up
there.
If anything, this is more than five-tenths
of a mile long, and it's about 200
feet high, and if you could keep these
230,000 soldiers on that, if the clouds
rose right at their foot, it is really
that fantastic that we haven't been able to
find pictures.
There are 90 of 230,000 to be
as large an army as ever has been
deployed in any battlefield in the world's history.
At one place, one time.
Well, at that time, Moroni, the final writer
in the Book of Mormon, inscribed all of
the history of these thousand years or more
on golden plates.
In a book of golden plates about seven
inches wide, eight inches high, six inches thick,
of solid gold plates in the form of
a ring binder.
Well, they were buried in a chest on
the Hill of Pomona.
She used to go to my family tradition,
she was a lady who lived up there.
She said it's one of the traditions of
our family, that the tribesmen's boys, or the
shift, used to come across our town there.
You'd see them, you'd be wandering around hunting
treasures and so forth.
So, that's probably localized, which is in my
mind, to know somebody that saw him.
But anyway, he inscribes this whole thing in
the Egyptian language.
I guess that's his deal, and he wrote
them, inscribing a book this size on golden
plates in the Egyptian language.
It could only be translated by Joseph Smith
by means of a pair of testicles and
found that this was a golden plate.
So, he took them on, and put them
in his office.
There were some of the judges that married
him.
They had a normal person that had put
them on his face, which means that he
was making grand out of this person.
Hopefully, he was alive on the first day.
But when he put them on his face,
and he was putting them over the door,
he said, let me come and get a
golden plate.
And he could use it in any way.
When he did say he did, he inscribed
himself on the other side of the prison,
and wrote all down for himself.
Well, this scribe, when he left the place
eventually, and by request from Joseph Smith, he
had some of the boys that had come
to drive him out, he wrote his defense
for having left the man in prison.
And he said, as he transcribed his defense,
he said, unless the two of you are
here and out of our country, and if
the two of us run around, and they
get up today, they will come and take
him from this golden plate to the place
where no one will ever have it, to
the place of their heaven in Jerusalem.
Well, now this is a godly mission.
And this man, incidentally, I told you that
I wrote a letter to him about this
coming of Jesus Christ as a human.
Well, this was a probable cause of it.
He made the statement that, that he must
give me the wisdom, that I could be
a theologian for this commission.
He said to me that he did not,
and he was told that he had to
visit in his heart, which is so much
like John the Baptist.
Well, obviously, I said, I have to give
you the wisdom, and he afflicted, he says,
telling me to learn to be careful.
I said, what do you like to do?
Well, I said, I like to give you
the wisdom, and he said, I like to
learn to be careful.
I said, what do you like to do?
Well, I said, I like to give you
the wisdom, and he said, I like to
learn to be careful.
I said, what do you like to do?
Well, I said, I like to give you
the wisdom, and he said, I like to
learn to be careful.
I said, what do you like to do?
Well, I said, I like to give you
the wisdom, and he said, I like to
learn to be careful.
I said, what do you like to do?
Well, I said, I like to give you
the wisdom, and he said, I like to
learn to be careful.
I said, what do
you
like to do?
Well, I said, what do you like to
do?
Well, I said, I like to learn to
be
careful.
I said, what do you like to do?
Well, I said, I like to learn to
be careful.
I said, what do you like to do?