Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Lamanites and Scrapbooking

My mom, bless her heart, was raised in a time when Mormonism was easy to believe in. Oh sure it still had its detractors, but by god, at least intelligent minds could still point to all those ancient civilizations in Central America and at least debate the question. Facts still mattered. The Mormon Church was so sure of this reality, that it spent millions of dollars on archeological digs and studies to find evidence to support the claims of the Book of Mormon as an ancient historical document. They never doubted for an instant that their investment would not return spectacular evidence to support their claims.

My mom never even had to doubt, with all that proof supporting the claims of the Book of Mormon, who in their right mind would doubt. Mormonism was a fact, a reality, it was testable and supportable...hallelujah the church is true!

Yesterday I visited my parents. In retirement my mom has occupied her time with what she calls doing genealogy. In reality she isn’t searching for family lines to extend our family tree, what in fact she is doing is compiling bits and bobs of pictures and cards, a trip down memory lane, and putting them in a scrapbook...but we all refer to her activity, in her words, as her genealogy.

So yesterday as I made a visit, my mom pulls out her latest compilation of memories (genealogy) and places it front of me. It was a large thick book consisting of about 50 thickly filled pages of family recollections.

As I leafed through the pictures and post cards I came to one page in particular. Mom had cut out a few pictures of American Indians dress in full-feathered headdresses and war regalia and pasted them on a page. I turned to my mother and asked... Ah what are these pictures in here for? “Oh those“, said mom, “those are to remind me of our Jewish ancestry? Your great great great grand mother was Jewish.” “But mom these are American Indians...not Jews.” Her reply was one for the Mormon Hall of Fame. “But Craig, Your great great great grand mother was Lamanite and Lamanites are Jewish.

Yeah got to love that hemispheric Book of Mormon setting taught for over 175 years... Oh how I long for the good old days...

3 comments:

Sideon said...

*singing*

"Book of Mormon stories that my teacher taught to me...!"

Cr@ig said...

Mujun...

You're free to debate my mom any time you'd like... but let me give you fair warning... she does not live in a world based on any measurable reality... in her world Indigenous American Indians ARE Jews... Period! Don't try getting into the semantics of Jew vs Israelite vs descendants of Joseph. to her they're all the same...

She has the faith of a child... and god bless her for it...

Anonymous said...

Craig,

Your right on this one. Your mom is just plain stupid. Why in the hell would Christ visit the Native Americans? Its just silly to think that Christ would care about people in ancient America or anywhere else in the world but Israel. The Native Americans have absolutely no right to know about Christ!! They are not really worthy of salvation. Like Christ always said, he is not the God of the whole world but only a small limited part of it as explained in the Bible. He clearly would never allow His name to be uttered anywhere in ancient America. The audacity of the mormon church to think that Christ would actually call prophets among the millions of ancient Americans to preach the gospel. It is absurd to think that He would do such a thing!

I'm glad that other people agree that Native Americans had no right to believe in Christ. Christ obviously didn't love them since he never visited them, sent them prophets or gave them any scriptures like he did in Israel. There is a nice place reserved in hell for all of them. Too bad, they never really had a chance. Oh well, not my problem.

Craig, I sincerely pray that your mother will know the truth one day just like us.