Scott Johnson: FYI /// And more revelations about Glenn Beck's fiasco of a rally

Well. I'm listening to Scott Johnson's talk for today, skipped the first parts to hear the third because according to his list of subjects he was going to be talking about Glenn Beck. He's playing audio from the opening of the Restoring Honor rally, a part of it I had missed. There's to be a pastor who keeps saying "Gods" where he should be saying "God" -- haven't heard that part yet. And there are some native Americans out on the stage in full Indian regalia, and Glenn Beck's speech is pure Mormonism.

And Scott Johnson doesn't seem to know it. This whole business of the Native Americans having the true religion is really puzzling him. Scott, you need to know that that comes straight out of the Book of Mormon. In fact Beck's opening remarks about the true God dealing with His chosen people through Moses at the same time He was dealing with people on this continent is pure Book of Mormon. And pure idiocy.

Actually Beck didn't even get the time frame right. I read the Book of Mormon in order to talk to a Mormon girl missionary years ago and was appalled that such utter stupidity could ever be taken for reality by anyone.

[Later: Just listened again to the Beck speech from Johnson's site: "The story of America is the story of humankind" he says. Huh? Then he says "Five thousand years ago, on the other side of the planet, God's chosen people were led out of bondage by a guy with a stick who was talking to a burning bush. Man first began to recognize God and God's law." [Nonsense. Humanity had known God and God's law since Eden but it had become corrupted because of the Fall. God was now beginning to train a people to carry His word for the rest of the world, and especially for the purpose of producing the Messiah He'd promised to send back in Eden, to save us from the consequences of the Fall, our disobedience to God. But Beck goes on:] "The chosen people listened to the Lord." [Well, sort of, some of the time anyway. They also made a golden calf to worship as soon as Moses wasn't around to keep them in line. Now here comes the BIG FAT STUPID MORMON LIE:] "At the same time those things were happening, on this side, on this land, another group of people were gathered here and they too were listening to God."

Uh oh. Remember, he's identified this time as 5000 years ago, which is absurdly wrong for starters for identifying the time of the Exodus under Moses, which occurred more like 3400 years ago or about 1400 BC. Abraham's time was about 500 years before that or about 1900 BC. The Flood was about 2500 BC, so Beck's time frame would put Moses before the Flood. But Beck goes cheerfully on spelling out his Mormon fiction:

"How these two people were brought together again happened because people were listening to God." [Scott Johnson interrupts here to ask "What does that mean?" Even if you don't know anything about Mormonism or even the time frame of the Old Testament, yes, you still have to ask "What does that mean?" because Beck is not making sense. Johnson points out that when the Pilgrims got to America the Indians were immersed in paganism, showing no signs of ever having learned anything of the true God. I'm leaving out a few comments here, then we get to:]

"God's chosen people, the Native Americans, and the Pilgrims . . ." [and here some people start cheering and applauding -- what on earth for?] [Johnson, who clearly doesn't know that this all comes out of the Book of Mormon, simply comments at this point, "The Native Americans weren't saved, they needed the gospel of Jesus Christ." Quite true.] Then Beck goes on to introduce a Rabbi, a couple of Indians and a pastor who he says is a descendant of the Mayflower Pilgrims. "To restore America, to restore honor, we've got to start at the beginning and look at the patterns" Beck then says. "When people came together of different faiths in the spirit of God . . . and the first thing they did was pray together." Man, if I'd heard this part of the rally the first time around I wouldn't have had to struggle to recognize that the whole thing was a bizarre religionistic fraud. Even without knowing that Beck is preaching pure Mormon lies it should be clear to a Christian, as it is to Johnson, that he's preaching ecumenical gobbledygook that no Christian should countenance for half a second.

At this point Johnson goes on to play what he says isn't a very clear audio of the prayer in which the pastor keeps saying "Gods" instead of "God." Yes, a few sentences into this you can hear "Lord Gods," and yes he keeps repeating this odd "mistake," two times, three times, over and over. Yes, very very strange.

Hey, Christians, wake up. NO attempt to restore America is worth compromising with the devil, and this is what this is. Abandon America if we must, No matter how much it hurts, if it means abandoning the true God, as in this abomination of a religiopatriotic rally it clearly means.

Anyway here's the story as I recall it from the BoM. In 600 BC [this is about the time of Jeremiah, when the Israelites were going into captivity in Babylon, considerably later than Moses . Beck himself -- along with Mormons in general? -- is confused about the timing of Old Testament events I guess. I recall the BoM saying 600 BC but there's Beck saying 5000 years ago. Maybe they rewrote the BoM since I read it? I know they have a habit of doing that when their errors become embarrassing.], some Israelites took off in a boat and ended up in South America. Or was it Central America. Somewhere south of us anyway. The leader's name was Nephi, and there are other names that may come back to me or may not. (I answered this girl among other things that God had told the Israelites through Jeremiah that they HAD to go to Babylon, He wouldn't let them even go to Egypt. So here are these renegade Jews taking a boat across the ocean? Against God's clear directives? And they survived the trip? In 600 BC?)

[Here's another thought: If the Mormons believe that the 600 BC time frame of their Book of Mormon is the same time frame as Moses' bringing the Israelites out of Egypt, they are going to have to explain how it is that so much of the book of the prophet Isaiah is reproduced in that same Book of Mormon. Isaiah precedes Jeremiah so the "Nephites" could conceivably have taken it with them to America, timewise anyway, but if they think it all happened at the same time as Moses there was no Isaiah yet. Of course such facts wouldn't have stopped Joseph Smith. Faced with such a disparity he would no doubt simply have claimed that those passages of Isaiah were given to them direct from God. Even in the exact English of the King James of Smith's era, not even in Hebrew, which presumably the "Nephites" should have spoken -- except I think Smith has them speaking some sort of Egyptian -- that's what the BOM was written in anyway. Only absolute total ignorance of history and of the Bible could make any of this seem remotely believable].

I'm fuzzy about the rest of the story but at some point there were warring tribes of these new "Americans" and many died and their religion was lost, and they eventually became the Native Americans, who according to Mormonism are Jews. Jesus Christ supposedly came and preached the gospel to them directly (they say that's because Jesus said He had "other sheep" to tend, ignorant of the fact that He meant the Gentiles to whom the gospel was taken by Paul, at least, and many others of the apostles according to tradition if not scripture. The idea that Jesus would have made a completely secret trip to some other "sheep" across the world is ridiculous. He ascended into heaven, there to remain until His return.)

So these people wrote stuff ("scripture") down on golden tablets and Joseph Smith found them centuries later. There are so many absurdities in the story I couldn't get through it all, but I found enough contradictions with scripture in the first couple chapters to write pages against it for the girl missionary. Who of course didn't take any of it seriously. Or so I suppose since I never heard from her again.

So right off Glenn Beck is preaching Mormon doctrine at his rally. How many recognized this? People cheered at one point when he identified the Native Americans as believers in God. Something very strange about all this. (Perhaps there were a huge number of Mormons in that audience?) About that time any knowledgable true Christians in the audience SHOULD have started walking out.

If I'd heard that part I would have been immediately alerted, but I started listening later when it was mostly a lot of gospel talk of a fairly unobjectionable sort. Even that of course is wrong, as I eventually recognized, because a Mormon doesn't use the words the same way a Christian does. So already there were problems with them all sharing the stage. If it had been just a political rally, no problem. But it turns out that Beck has been getting more and more "spiritual" recently, and that's where we have to part company with him. But I had missed the first part where his Mormon beliefs were overt -- and nobody objected!

So at least thanks to Scott Johnson I got to hear that part.

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But Scott did get something else wrong that really needs to be corrected, because it amounts to wrongly accusing someone.

Before getting to Glenn Beck he responded to somebody who'd written him that Del Tackett of the Truth Project seemed to be promoting contemplative Christianity because he used the term Unio Mystica.

I saw all the Truth Project teachings and not once did Del Tackett say a word about contemplative Christianity unless I suffered a brain paralysis during that segment. I've been wracking my brain to remember what he DID mean by that phrase and I'm not sure. He used various Latin type phrases to characterize different phases of the teachings. ALL of the Truth Project is about cultural Christianity, and how it is derived from Biblical wisdom -- how to develop a Biblical worldview.

I think the term simply refers to the fact that Christian believers are united with Christ through faith, though I don't remember the context in which that came up. In any case, it had nothing whatever to do with contemplative Christianity. But Scott hung this on him with no evidence whatever, simply the use of that Latin phrase which is apparently also commonly associated with contemplative Christianity.

I thought the Truth Project was excellent. Tackett covered every facet of a Biblical Worldview from science to law to government to education to art and so on.

Since watching the Truth Project I signed up for their newsletter and I don't like it as much. In a recent issue on the Biblical Flood, although he did a good job of showing the evidence for the Flood, he went on to allow that an Old Earth is possible although it violates the Bible. That bothered me. Old Earth Creationism is a compromise with worldly evolutionism that denies the Book of Genesis.

In this same talk Scott Johnson also listed some of the problems with James Dobson's Christian beliefs, which I was at least vaguely aware of myself, enough to have wondered how the Truth Project got associated with Dobson's Focus on the Family. I decided there didn't seem to be much connection, and there may not be, but it's hard to know. It may turn out that Tackett shares some of Dobson's errors too.

I wonder who is going to be left standing in the end? Anybody at all?