Knowing the Truth, Part 1

(Text from Class given in 2005)
I have been thinking about what to talk about and I have been meeting some strange characters lately, particularly on the Internet. Bryan you met the Holy Ghost guy didn’t you?

Bryan: Yes I sure did! Chuckling!

JJ: It is funny that most of them that we meet that are very odd are ex-Mormons, chuckling. They must have excommunicated him for a reason. I will tell you about two that I met on the Internet. Now in our discussion group, the Keys of Knowledge, we usually filter them out. Sometimes really strange people join and give me a bad time for a month or so and then when they see we have a fairly logical group and they are not getting any following they usually just leave and that is kind of nice. The Keys are much like the group here, logical with common sense, except for Wayne of course. Laughter.

We filter them out on the Keys list. At first we did not do this but as we grew we found that moderating worked well for weeding out the weird. We went I think three or four years with no moderation at all and we kept it this way as long as we could until a couple of strange characters came on and even a couple that threatened us physically. Then we decided it was time to moderate. Moderating our discussion group on the Internet helped a lot because people that came on board just to create a problem found they had to stay on subject just to get their post on.

You have to use judgment in whatever you do and that is the second key of the Buddha – to use common sense in judgment. There is a time and place and a purpose for everything under heaven as Solomon said. The older I get the more I see that is true. You never say never because eventually you reach a circumstance where there is an exception to every rule that you can imagine. There is time to get together, to separate, a time to love… and it is probably good that this true because this sends us through the range of emotions in our lifetimes. Imagine what your life would be like if you never had a negative emotion in your life. What do you think Mark – don’t you think life would be kind of sterile if you never had a negative emotion in your life?

Mark: For sure but it would be nice to try for a change!

Audience: Laughter!

JJ: It would be nice to go a day without one wouldn’t it Mark? It might be a good for us all, to go one day with no negative emotion. I don’t have much negative emotions do I dear?

Artie: No dear.

JJ: Except for when I stub my toe late at night. Whenever I stub my toe and complain Artie always says, man you go to the dentist and don’t use Novocain but when you stub your toe you are like a little kid.

Audience: Laughing!

JJ: Anyway, I will tell you about two strange characters I met on the web, the first one thinks he is every important character in the Bible is pretty much him and he thinks he is the Holy Spirit and He thinks the Holy Spirit is a bigger deal than being God or Jesus. He claims to be time traveler and at the very end of time he perfects himself as the Holy Spirit and he travels back and forth through time as the Holy Spirit. Then he becomes other entities too, like the angel Gabriel and he appeared to Mary and had sex with Mary and produced the body of Jesus so he claims to be the father of Jesus and he claims to be Michael the archangel and a whole bunch of people in our history especially Biblical ones.

Bryan: Boy you would laugh if you read some of the stuff this guy writes and these people actually believe they are who they say they are.

JJ: I said to Bryan that you need to come to this list and since you are an ex-Mormon you would find this guy kind of interesting so Bryan hopped right on. So anyway I was pretty gentle with the guy and I asked him a several questions and it was about the second or third question I asked him that he condemned me not to hell, but in Mormonism the worst state you can go into is to become a son of perdition and that is where you reign with the devil and his angels where the torment is so great that even the prophets can’t even write about it. So anyway he condemned me to be a son of perdition within about two or three days of me asking him a couple questions, challenging the fact that he may be who he says he is.

So we continued back and forth and then a few days later I felt this really negative energy from him like he had this séance of some type and condemned me to eternal darkness or something. The farther I went with him the more angry he got and he said I was the first one that he had ever condemned to be a son of perdition. I guess I am to be congratulated!

Anyway John Crane made a post to the Keys about this guy who claimed to have translated the seal plates of the book of Mormon. When Joseph Smith brought forth the book of Mormon he said he translated one third of it and two thirds of the plates are sealed because humanity was not ready for what was written on them and the rest will come forth at a later date. Well something must be going in the ethers because in the last five or six years there have been five or six versions of the sealed plates that have come forward but there is this new guy that is particular interesting because he claims to have the gold plates in his possession and the stones of Urim and Thummim. He has a picture of a translation stone on the Internet and it looks like he bought it at local rock shop. He is also going to make a news conference on April 6th.

So anyway I thought this guy sounds kind of interesting so I joined his list and asked him a simple question and I said Joseph Smith had eleven witnesses that witnessed to the book of Mormon that they actually saw the plates and it says in the scriptures that all things shall be established by the mouth of two or three witnesses. I then asked him where are his witnesses that have seen the plates? He wrote back and said several people have seen the plates and they just have not signed anything and he wanted to protect them and keep them out of the limelight.

So I said yes but the scripture says that everything will be established by the mouth of two or three witnesses so he writes me back a scripture that says, God will establish His purposes with as many witnesses that seemeth Him good. He said that it seemeth God good that there is just one witness this time, which was him.

Audience: Chuckling!

JJ: I said yes but look at this scripture, that scripture you quoted in connection with this other one is speaking about the generation of Joseph Smith and this is a different generation. He established as many witnesses that seemed good to Him then and several times I gave him several references where it says that all things will be established in the mouths of two or three witnesses and as a matter of fact the Pharisees and Sadducees even came to Jesus and said all things will be established in the mouth of two or three witnesses and where are your witnesses. It is a principle that has been around a long time.

So then he began to ignore me so then I asked a couple of other questions and I said in your sealed plates it says the celestial kingdom is in Mercury and so I showed him some satellite photograph of Mercury where we sent the mariner over there and took pictures and it looks worse than the moon and it is hot enough there that lead will flow like water and I said this does not look like heaven to me! So around this time he makes a post and he condemns me to be a son of perdition!

Audience: Wow JJ you are very popular with these guys!

JJ: I found this to be very common though that I have been condemned so many times. In a class I was teaching that Artie attended this guy claimed to be channeling God and he condemned me to hell. You should have heard this guy, (In a deep Darth Vader voice) “You have been given one last chance Joseph and if you don’t stop you are going to be extinguished forever!” This guy just got up in one of our meetings and was all of a sudden channeling the big God himself! This seems to follow me around I get condemned everywhere I go including the Mormon Church itself. They condemned me to hell and excommunicated me and after they excommunicated me one of the brethren came to me and said “It is too bad it is not legal to put people to death because if it was I think that is what should happen to you.” Laughing!

And they started out calling themselves the court of love! It is interesting that in the Middle Ages when they were putting people to death who challenged anything, it could be something really small like a person made some comment about the king, religious leader, pope or anything – you could be burned at the stake for this. But to burn a heretic at the stake in those days they had a name for it and do you know what that name was? It was a Spanish term, “auto da fé” that meant, “act of faith.” It was an act of faith in god to burn a heretic. Do you know why they burned them at the stake?

Audience: Guessing?

JJ: They burned them at the stake because the scripture commands against the shedding of blood, so they could not shed their blood so instead they burned them at the stake. This why they burned everybody during the Middle Ages. It was also an act of faith and if you really had guts to do this it was considered that you were acting faithful. Thank God the Founding Fathers came along and established the Constitution. We have a little more freedom today and the law protects people a little more, not as much as people would like perhaps, but it is heaven compared to what it was a couple hundred years ago.

It is amazing how things have changed too; I was reading in a history book not too long ago that when one army conquered another they did terrible things to the leaders of the opposition. They would pour molten lead down their throat, cut off their ears, cut out their tongues and more. If you were the leader of army back in the old days and you lost you were in for a heap of trouble. You probably fought with everything you had to win. I mean Abu Grab was bad but back in those days if you lost the battle you could be certain of a horrible death unless the leader wanted you for some purpose. Then you live for a little while until you had served your usefulness.

Copyright by J J Dewey

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