More on mormons and race

I just found these quotes on wikipedia and they mesh rather nicely with what I remember reading in the church library way back when i was a confused little mormon kid ……

check it:
Bruce R. McConkie (a high-ranking church authority) stated in his 1966 edition of Mormon Doctrine, a handbook for people teaching official church doctrine, that:

“Of the two-thirds who followed Christ, however, some were more valiant than others….Those who were less valiant in pre-existence and who thereby had certain spiritual restrictions imposed upon them during mortality are known to us as the negroes. Such spirits are sent to earth through the lineage of Cain, the mark put upon him for his rebellion against God and his murder of Abel being a black skin. (Moses 5:16-41; 12:22) Noah’s son Ham married Egyptus, a descendant of Cain, thus preserving the negro lineage through the flood. (Abraham 1:20-27) Negroes in this life are denied the priesthood; under no circumstances can they hold this delegation of authority from the Almighty. …The present status of the negro rests purely and simply on the foundation of pre-existence….The negroes are not equal with other races where the receipt of certain spiritual blessings are concerned, particularly the priesthood and the temple blessings that flow there from.” 3

McConkie stated after the 1978 revelation that LDS should “forget anything I or anyone else have said on this subject prior to 1978,” because more knowledge on the subject had now been revealed. He also removed his prior statement and quoted the 1978 revelation in his later edition of Mormon Doctrine.

So we should just “forget” that the mormon church advocated an explicitly white supremacist policy? how about an actual apology? oh, but that would that be asking too much….

Mormon elder Mark E. Peterson addressed the issue of race priesthood in his address to a 1954 Convention of Teachers of Religion at the College Level at Brigham Young University. He said:

The reason that one would lose his blessings by marrying a Negro is due to the restriction placed upon them. ‘No person having the least particle of Negro blood can hold the Priesthood’ (Brigham Young). It does not matter if they are one-sixth Negro or one-hundred and sixth, the curse of no Priesthood is the same. If an individual who is entitled to the Priesthood marries a Negro, the Lord has decreed that only spirits who are not eligible for the Priesthood will come to that marriage as children. To intermarry with a Negro is to forfeit a ‘Nation of Priesthood holders’….[1]

Note how these men invoke God and God’s mind – as if they know perfectly what God the almighty thinks – and then when their church finds it politically expedient to update its doctrines they expect us to just pretend that they never spewed this filth in the first place. Shouldn’t this make us a bit suspicious of Mormon claims to know gods mind on a host of other issues? Like how about their raging homophobia?

Typical holier-then-thou bullshit.

the full wikipedia article is available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacks_and_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints, the main article cites sources and dates but some mormon apologist has inserted a lead paragraph claiming – in defiance of all evidence – that the church does not and never has condoned racism. the real article starts a ways down the page.

Take wikipedia with a grain of salt though, virtually all the articles on mormonism there are either written by mormons or have been censored so throughly by mormons that anything even remotely critical of the church has been removed or “explained” ad infinitum. As an example, all their quotes from black people on the mormon church and race come from black mormons who are overjoyed at how they finally get to be treated like real people – not a single quote from anyone outside the church or from the thousands of people who’ve left over the issue. and anyone who tries to add in information on the church’s current white supremacist doctrines gets shut down right quick.

Posted: May 24th, 2007 under gods & religion, race & racism.
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