10% of your income and taking care of 5 wives can get pricy.
Lot's of religions ask for 10% (JWs probably do more), and last I heard multiple wives were not required.
10% of your income and taking care of 5 wives can get pricy.
We won't be alive.
Besides, I don't think Scientology will grow that fast. Now enough people have the cash. Nor will the JWs, the no-blood and no-college thing is just too harsh. By comparison, no hot drinks is pretty mild.
Also factor in traveling to Utah from all over the world with just handcarts and Mormons still beat Scientology. Its not even close fella.
Haha, try and convince a person not to drink coffee in the mornings, or a Bolivian not to chew coca leaves....or an Italian to stop drinking wine...
After you try telling them that if they need a blood transfusion to live, the better choice is to die.
I'm more interested in it because it's not a late-remembered revelation designed to make him look bad. It's proffered to make him look good. To the extent it was a fabrication, it's a fabrication designed to bolster his reputation. In my mind that means it either happened or we have evidence that the church embellishes leader histories to make them look good.
Speaking of which, have you ever taken a stroll through the history of official church portraits of Smith? Dude goes from looking like wormtail in Harry Potter to looking like Paul Newman.
Most of the evidence regarding Smith's other wives is anecdotal, based on guesswork, or statements made by women who claimed to marry him but don't appear to have spent any meaningful amount of time with him (and at least one of whom married Brigham Young later). Several purported offspring have had their claims of descending from Smith blown apart by modern matrilineal DNA testing.
I've seen a wide variety of portraits, but I don't think I've ever look at them in chronological order. I guess that doesn't surprise me too much, though.
I'd appreciate some more info on this. I researched this quite a bit some years ago (10?) but at that time I could only find one purported offspring and no DNA or RNA testing had been done on her (I think it was a female) descendants.
Here's an example article on the subject. To date every person genetically tested as a descendant not from Emma has come up negative. The last time I saw an article about it they had ruled out 7-8 possible wives that had claimed to mother Smith's children.
https://www.deseretnews.com/article/695226318/DNA-tests-rule-out-2-as-Smith-descendants.html
from the article said:Plural wife Sylvia Sessions Lyon left a deathbed affidavit for her daughter, Josephine, telling her that her father was Joseph Smith. In terms of circumstantial evidence, "that is probably the strongest case out there, but it involves a daughter. I've collected maybe 120 samples from descendants of Josephine, but as of today, there is not an accurate method" to prove parentage.
Thread nominated for worst thread on the planet.