Mormon Essay
A.) The basis of the religion comes from the story of a young 14 year old boy named Joseph Smith who had a vision of an Angel of God called Moroni who instructed him to dig on a hillside near his home.
When he was digging Joseph found some gold plates which were engraved in a foreign language (Egyptian). He read he also found some special stone-like spectacles the ancients called ‘Urim and Thummim’ which he used to read the plates which he alone was allowed to read.
The gold plates recorded the accounts of the tribes of Israel. It was said the tribes emigrated to America where they fought each other; the fighting subsided when they met Jesus who planted his Gospel in America. Then the tribes began to fight again until it came to the final battle of ‘Cumorah’. Mormon and his son Moroni were two of the few survivors who ordered whoever found the plates to restore the true ‘Church Of Jesus’.
Joseph Smith published the work under the title of ‘The Book of Mormon’; the book is similar in context to that of the Old Testament of the Bible. Within a year his church had over 1000 followers.
The Mormons believed they were God’s chosen people on Earth and that eventually one day inherit the Earth and all its wealth. This partly explains why they became very unpopular amongst gentiles (non- Mormons).In 1844 Joseph Smith claimed to have received a revelation from God which he said allowed certain Mormons to practise polygamy; by this time he already had more than one wife and his bodyguard John Scott had five. Some Mormons thought this was wrong and denounced Smith as a false prophet this led to a series of hate attacks and eventually him get arrested then shot in jail by an angry mob of gentiles.
