My final exam

Final Exam 2007

Question 1- Abdullah Juma Alaraimi
Question 2- a.alaraimi, a.alaraim@yahoo.com,
Mr.alaraimi, mr.alaraimi@gmail.com
Question 3- Missed 3 days and 4 days late
Question4- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2039852550211418553&q=abdullah+alaraimi&total=1&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
Question 6- My grade in midterm is “A”
Question 7- I think I deserve “A”
Question 8- My video was about the role of women in Islam. I started to think radically about this subject, because I fell as if there is a lot of misunderstanding. If is evident to me, because I am often asked by American questions that deal with women and Islam. Because I am not an expert, I started my research at the local Mosque in Anaheim. There was a speaker recently there, Imam Ali. This is why I fell I deserve extra credit.

Question 9 – Autobiography
My birth place and home city is Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This is the capital city of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is a modern metropolitan city of nearly 3 million people now. This is where the seat of the Saudi government is including all major members of the House of Saud who are the de facto ruling authority in the Kingdom. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is also the historical and cultural center of the country since its formation after the collapse and break up of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I. Official independence was recognized internationally in 1932 with the unification of the Hejaz and Najd kingdoms into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with the House of Saud in political control of the new country as a monarchy assisted by a Consultative Council of 90 appointed members.
One of the most significant and dignified roles of this monarchy is to function as the Protectorates of Islam’s two holiest cities, Medina and Mecca, which are within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and provide safe passage for all Muslim pilgrims who are making their once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Islam’s holy centers, primarily to the Great Mosque in Mecca where Muslims enter into the sanctuary where the ancient Ka’baa rests in the middle as representative of the stone that Abraham nearly sacrificed Ishmail to prove his faith in Allah. This place of holy worship is held sacred by all Muslims because Prophet Muhammad said that every Muslim should make a pilgrimage to undertake the holiest of Islamic rituals to become an official Muslim pilgrim that has completed his or her obligations to this religious faith which I was raised in all my life.
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is a place of almost three million people but this is a place of almost one hundred percent Sunni Muslims and the religion of Islam dominates and prevails over the daily rituals, routines, and habits of people going about their business and doing their trade and exchange as any sophisticated city. The prayer times for Muslims are five times per day every day and the prayer ritual is short so the Muslims during their work weeks are always taking this specific break time to undertake their daily ritual prayers to Allah. The Saudi businesses are all by law required to permit these prayer times as breaks in the work schedule so that the Sunni Muslim work force can meet these religious prayer obligations. Obviously, Sunni Muslims are able to enjoy full rights to religiously express themselves on the job and amongst each other. People in Riyadh are Sunni Muslims first in their daily routines and their other personas are second place. This is how Riyadh has been for centuries because of the importance this city has been in the history of Islam as much as it has for Saudi Arabia.
This growing up around one hundred percent Sunni Muslims in my neighborhood and community was definitely a huge impact on my life and perception of other human beings. In my childhood perspective, the only people on this earth were Sunni Muslims praying five times per day, attending to the mosque on Fridays as a community, and having grand dinners and feasts on appointed ritual days of celebrations where all the older generations of people would wave the tales of all the heroes and heroines from our ancient past and recent past to retain such strong determination to keep faith in Islam.
Muslims were the only people I knew in my youth and all my friends, teachers, and authority figures were all Sunni Muslims that I can recall with the exception of one high school English teacher that was an American from Los Angeles, California and who taught the English language classes my junior and senior year in the Riyadh high school I attended. This American language teacher was a free thinker from what I can recall about him. He wasn’t a religious person he told us in class but respected our religious faith of Islam. He was kind, considerate, and understood to take the proper break times for Muslim prayers and raised no objections to being around Muslims all the time either. Mr. Lewis was an open-minded teacher who had taken the opportunity to teach overseas in Riyadh to experience a new culture and a new lifestyle among different people.
This was a great experience for me because of knowing only Sunni Muslims because of my neighborhood being in the section of the City of Riyadh where there was no other religious organizations and groups present in our communities. We were a Sunni Muslim stronghold from ancient times which made this sense of tradition and ritual habits to be very important and valued by the older generations compared to us in the younger generations. However, as we grew older, us younger Sunni Muslims in my neighborhood grew to appreciate this ancestral value placed in our Islamic faith and its numerous criteria to remain a faithful, obedient member and ally of Allah. We grew to understand the strength we gained from Ramadan fasts and undertaking the ritual breaking of the fast with our older family members to achieve closer communications and understanding across generation gaps. We were very different us in the younger generation because of the Internet, the television access we had, and the information we learned compared to the older generations of Saudi students and young people. We were able to be the first really global Saudi generation in Riyadh since we knew about the other parts of the world and we knew issues in newer, more open ways than our family ancestors and our community elders. We were seeing the world from globalist perspective as we were opening up our country in the future for certain to more global participation in the international economic, political, and social order forming around the world right now. Us in the youngest Saudi generation were indeed still anchored in our religious faith of Islam more than anything else no matter what information sources we now had available to us and how much information we learned outside our family homes and religious schools in our neighborhood. We were going to be global minded no matter what our parents and grandparents told us young Saudi Muslims coming of age in the late 1990s and then facing the pressures and predicaments of the post-9/11 fallout with the Western powers, particularly the United States.
This was a problem time for us young Saudi Muslims because we were facing the prospect of a significant global challenge from other parts of the world to challenge our religious faith at its core and disagree with some of its prime tenants that militant Islamic groups were twisting horribly against anything us peaceful Muslims believe these parts of Islam mean. For example, the concept of jihad is overblown in the Western press as part of every Muslim believer’s core personality and that Islam is a religion that requires blood sacrifice for God to advance its radicalized, militant agenda. In fact, jihad is a concept that Prophet Muhammad has even said meant that internal struggle that the Muslim believer must encounter in life with doing what is right and what Allah approves or doing what is wrong and violating what Allah approves.
Coming to America then on scholarship to get my education and get my undergraduate degree, and possibly my graduate’s degree, meant in fact coming into an increasingly hostile culture towards Muslims and the religion of Islam because of the recent over blown mass media stereotyping and slandering of the Arab Muslims to create and sustain these negative characteristics and stereotypical images of my people and my religious faith. I came into America thinking some negative things about the country and its people because of this prospect of facing hostility and prejudice towards me as an Arab Muslim college student. In fact, there has been no overt acts of racist prejudice or hostile feelings expressed towards me by any American and this means being around them all the time too on campus, in my apartment complex, and when I go to Los Angeles to check out the night life. Yet, I felt that it might happen a few times but this is just something that was in my own mind. Because I came here with a lot of hype about the anti-Arab Muslim thing going on in America after 9/11 and the targeting of Saudis may be going on because of some of the attackers coming from my country. But, this is all mass media slander, defamation, and hype of stereotyping Saudi people as militant, radicalized Muslim terrorists when we are simple, good, and honest people because of our strong religious faith which is a religion of peace and brotherhood. Islam is not a religion of hate and war. This is pure media hype in the Western press to sell magazines, newspapers, and get high ratings for the television shows.
My religious identity as a Muslim and my ethnicity as an Arab from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been held up in confidence and with great prestige by me and the Americans have been friendly and kind in almost all situations as I pursue my degrees in business and management here. This experience has impacted my life in other ways because I realize that us Saudis and Americans are so alike in our basic needs to want safe, healthy lives for ourselves and our families and have our freedom to practice our own religious beliefs on our own terms like we have done so for centuries so far. And we are very much a like in wanting independence from outside interference and we are trying to achieve a global world together where we can all live side by side in peace and on equal terms with each other politically, culturally, and socially and respect one another’s differences in religious beliefs and in ethnic identities.
Question 10 – First Person Narrative of Visit to Religious Center
My field trip to a Roman Catholic Church mass on a Sunday morning in early December was a chance for me to learn about a religious group’s services distinctive from own. Being a life long Muslim in a country with all Muslims around me, my understanding of Christianity and Roman Catholicism is very limited. Although the central figure in the Roman Catholic faith, Jesus, is the second greatest prophet in my religion, next to Prophet Muhammad, I only learned about Jesus from the Muslim perspective as a human prophet rather than God’s Son and humanity’s long-awaited Messiah.
This Sunday Mass at St. Matthew’s Catholic Church started at eleven o clock sharp so I was there ten minutes ahead of time and watched as Roman Catholic believers of all different ethnic groups were putting their hands in the holy water inside the church and doing the sign of the cross. I watched this with great interest because I was never exposed to this ritual in my life before. It was my first experience with the sign of the cross even though I know that the cross is an important, powerful Christian symbol.
After the mass, I talked with some of the Roman Catholics and they made it clear to me that this object that Jesus was crucified on represents the very act of God that saved humanity itself from impending disaster because Jesus Christ as God’s Son died on that Cross that day to resolve human sins through God’s act of unconditional love. This is a comment that I memorized and wrote down from one of the Roman Catholic believers which I thought to be an excellent answer. This was an important answer for me to also help me interpret the rituals and rites used in the Sunday Mass services that I attended.
The mass opened up with a small group of people near the front of the altar to the right playing a couple of guitars, a piano, and two flutes and singing a very beautiful song. Although I had a music book to leaf through it took me a while to figure out the words to the song and the actual song in the book. It was pointed out to me finally be a neighbor in the church pew who showed me the song page number on her book. I turned to it and found the title: “Come All Thee Faithful.” This is a Christmas song based on the fact that the song book was one of Christmas hymns. This is a beautiful song because it is about the birth of Jesus as Christ among us ordinary humans in the town of Bethlehem near Jerusalem. The birth of Jesus is also celebrated as a great event by us Muslims because of the high status as a great prophet in our religious faith and that his mother Mary is the only woman’s name in our entire holy book. And Mary is believed by us Muslims to be a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus and therefore God had caused a miracle to happen when she became pregnant with Jesus.
The Sunday Mass is centered around Jesus as the Christ is what I realized as the priest at the front of the altar began to recite some ritual prayers and spread out his hands in the air. All the Roman Catholic faithful would recite as a whole group back to the priest after he would recite some type of prayer. This ritual of the priest saying prayers and the crowd answering them is somewhat similar to a practice that we engage in when we gather for our Friday prayers at the mosque in our Muslim communities in my home country. The difference is that Jesus is God’s Son in these prayers and that there is a third part of God as well called the Holy Spirit. I heard the name the ‘Holy Trinity’ a few different times and I could tell this was the focus of the Apostle’s Creed which everyone in the church building recited line for line together.
The Sunday Mass then shifted over to the readings from the Holy Bible that were done not by the priest but by some young members of the Church who were nervous but did well since they had microphones to read into and everyone in the audience could hear them despite their soft voices. The first reading came from the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament of the Holy Bible and these proverbs, according to the reader, were written by King Solomon during his reign over Israel. And King Solomon’s words of wisdom are to avoid being selfish and greedy with material things and material possessions. The second reading was from the Gospel of Luke which is found in the New Testament of the Holy Bible. The four Gospels are the central story and teachings of Jesus while he was alive two thousand years ago. And this particular story was about Jesus turning the water into wine at a wedding to please the wedding guests and please his mother who requested it. This miracle of turning the water into wine shows Jesus possessed extraordinary, godlike powers and could do incredible acts that defied regular human imagination. This turning the water into wine was done by Jesus to prove that he was someone very different than the ordinary people of his time.
The Bible readings were followed the priest coming to the podium and microphone to give a sermon on the two Bible readings and relate them to modern day life for the Roman Catholics in the audience. This priest spoke for about twenty minutes on the way that the proverb wisdom from Solomon applied to people’s materialistic concerns in modern life and how people have to realize that they can’t be too greedy and too materialistic or they lose faith in God’s love and God’s way. The priest also talked about how the miracle act of Jesus Christ at the wedding to turn the water into wine was done out of love from his heart to please his mother and people and to prove that he was an extraordinary human being that was blessed and gifted because Jesus is the Son of God.
The priest then shifted his attention to doing the whole ritual surrounding the Sacrament of Communion that all the Roman Catholics in the audience were obliged to participate in and receive a white wafer on their tongues and drink some red non alcoholic wine from a chalice and then declare themselves as one the same with the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. This whole ritual was first performed by the priest. This was a re enactment of the Last Supper of Jesus Christ the night before he was arrested and then crucified. The priest held up the big white wafer that he had in front of him on the altar and declared it as the Body of Christ. He then held up the gold chalice and declared this to be the Blood of Christ. And like the apostles that night who were with Jesus at this Last Supper event, the priest then eats the bread and drinks the wine from the gold chalice to convey his symbolic and physical commitment to Jesus Christ as Son of God and Savior of humankind.
The participation of the rest of the church in the Communion ritual was something to see because all the people took their time and took turns to line up in the aisles and go up front to receive a white wafer and take a drink from gold chalices. The whole ritual took about fifteen minutes as everyone returned to their church pews and get on the kneelers and meditate or pray for a few minutes. Later, when talking with the Roman Catholic church members after the mass, the believer is returning to pray to God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost to purify and cleanse all evil and impurities from his or her soul, heart, and mind. Two or three more group prayers were done and then the congregation was dismissed with a concluding song that was really sweet and long.
This is an experience that I will never forget as a devoted Sunni Muslim who has never been to a Christian facility nor church nor have I ever encountered any of the Christian rituals, readings, and faithful praying together that I witnessed and observed at St. Matthew’s Catholic Church that Sunday morning in early December. This was an experience that made me recognize that all religions have their people converge together to pray, love God, and appreciate their sacred rites, rituals, and readings from their holy books. The Roman Catholics were clearly putting a lot of attention on the Last Supper of Jesus Christ and his crucifixion for all humankind’s sins because of the number of rituals associated with these events of his life. However, the teachings of Jesus in the Four Gospels is also a centerpiece of the Roman Catholic Sunday mass. The priest took almost twenty minutes to explain the implications and meanings of Jesus turning water into wine at his mother’s friend’s wedding.
Question 11 - The Miracle Story Surrounding Lady of Guadalupe
This miracle story has a brown skinned Virgin Mary appearing to a Mexican peasant near Mexico City and her image was cast on the under side of his coat. This visit of the Virgin Mary was also accompanied by a message to the peasant man to get the Mexican people to convert to followers of her son, Jesus Christ, and recognize him as their personal savior. It was a pivotal event in converting the Mexican people into Roman Catholic believers and continues to be a seminal event in the religious history of the people. The Mexican people recognize and honor the Lady of Guadalupe as their own revered icon.
The Lady of Guadalupe miracle story incorporates the Mexican people, who are descendants of the ancient Mesoamerican civilizations of the Aztec and Maya, into the center of the Christian faith and religious tradition through having their own singular miracle story about the Mother of Jesus. Here the Virgin Mary herself is standing there in a miracle appearance to the peasant man who has her sacred image cast onto his coat, which hangs in a church there, with the supposed physical evidence of the story’s truth. It is a story that makes Mexican believers feel that they are special in a real way since they have this distinctive miracle happening in their country and in their region. The Lady of Guadalupe is their Virgin Mary version separated from the white Christian traditions and therefore a symbol and signal for them to undergo conversion. The conversion rate of the Mexican people to Roman Catholicism was speeded along and widespread after this miracle story was spread through the population.
In Southern California today, Mexican American communities honor the miracle story of the Lady of Guadalupe within their family traditions and practicing of their religious beliefs which for the most part are strictly Roman Catholic. The Lady of Guadalupe icon is found in many Mexican American homes and neighborhoods. She is seen as a spiritual benefactor as well as a protector as evident in the fact that even Mexican American gangsters bear tattoos of her image to provide spiritual protection. In other words, the Mexican American people today have carried on this tradition of the Lady of Guadalupe protecting them and serving them exclusively and distinctive from other groups.
Question 12 - Latino Religious Experience Distinctive from Asian Experience in North America
The Asian people, the Chinese, Japanese, and Pacific Islanders, came to North America with their own distinctive religious traditions, beliefs, and values distinctive from Christianity. These religious experiences were entrenched in Confucianism, Buddhism, and other Asian religious faiths that recognized no all-powerful, personal God like the Christians but felt the religious need to find the ultimate peaceful, tranquil consciousness internally. Bringing their Buddhist, Confucian, Shinto, and other Asian religious faiths to North America was done without problems by the Asian immigrants because of them being segregated from the whites and their Christian religious beliefs in the early immigrant experiences to North America. The historical presence of Chinatowns are still found in many places because of the Asian immigrants being segregated and confined within their own separated community apart from the whites. As a result, the Asian immigrants kept their language, their customs, and their religious beliefs solid and strong when they immigrated to North America in their insular, segregated communities.
The Latino religious communities in North America were almost all Roman Catholic believers because of their conversion to this religious faith over the decades after the Spanish Conquest of the 16th century. The Latino religious communities were converts to Spanish style Roman Catholicism that preserved the Catholic beliefs and rituals from the medieval times in Western Europe. This old style Roman Catholic belief system was adapted and adopted by the Latinos in all areas by the 19th century when the United States took over the American Southwest and California in the Mexican-American War of 1846. This acquisition of the northern part of the newly independent Mexico resulted in the Mexican American and the Latino community as a whole being segregated apart from the whites once they flooded in. For the most part, the majority of white settlers were Protestants and anti-Catholic. Between the fact that they were Catholics and brown skinned, the whites made sure the Latinos were segregated apart from their Protestant, all white communities.
The Asian and Latino immigrants were both similar in holding onto their family religious traditions, ways, and beliefs as best as they could in their segregated, insular communities apart from the whites. These religious traditions and beliefs were a source of refuge and relief from the system of white racism and white supremacy that was imposed on both the Asians and Latinos. Racial segregation meant that both the Asians and Latinos were isolated and alienated in their separate neighborhoods and forced to turn inward to religious beliefs and religious feelings. Through the decades of racial segregation and racist treatment of the Asians and the Latinos, the religious traditions, beliefs, and rituals have been a source of integrity and strength for them to endure the white rule over them. Since the eroding away of racial segregation and racism in recent decades, the Asian and Latino communities have continued to uphold their distinctive religious traditions and beliefs as morally and ethically reflective of their inner strength and endurance in a racist culture and society. The Asian religious experiences and Latino religious experiences were sources of refuge and strength for them to resist and endure the racist, unfair situations and experiences that they had to face as minority ethnic groups. They were permitted to exercise their religious freedom in North America because of their isolation, alienation, and separation from the mainstream white race. As a result, the Asian and Latino communities have distinctive, original, and interesting religious traditions that show they were able to endure this long period of mistreatment and lower racial status among the white racists here in North America.
Question Thirteen - How Buddhist Church Served as Ethnic Adjustment for Japanese Americans
The Buddhist principles, rituals, and churches were very important for Japanese Americans to make the ethnic adjustment of being a minority race that encountered racist hatred and racist policies from the white majority. The Buddhist faith teaches a believer to become Buddhist saints in mind, action, and feeling by detaching from the external, material world and finding inner enlightenment called Nirvana. It is in this state of total suspension and detachment from material self where a person is able to extinguish that material self and become non-self as one with the greater self. This extinction of the material self is considered the only means to happiness and individual freedom in life. The Buddhist church served as an important refuge and source of spiritual strength for these Japanese immigrants coping with racism and unfair treatment from whites based on ethnicity. The Japanese are a very proud, honorable people who considered themselves a superior race of Asia and therefore were literally unprepared for this degrading, humiliating experience of being dubbed a secondary, minority ethnic group by the white majority in the United States. Segregation, alienation, and isolation of the Japanese immigrants into their own communities apart from the white race was something that made Buddhism extremely valuable and attractive to the immigrants.
Japanese Americans could also converge together in the Buddhist churches to air out their opinions, feelings, and differences about the American experience for themselves. They tightened their ties among one another in the Buddhist churches to make themselves have at least each other in a segregated, racist society. These Japanese Americans were able to assimilate into the American mainstream culture through having the best of both worlds including their Buddhist churches available. By learning the English language, attending American schools, and working American jobs, the Japanese immigrants made their adjustments to the American cultural life and economy. Yet, at the same time, the Buddhist churches remained a source of ethnic pride and heritage for the Japanese Americans. Here in these churches they could be themselves again as practicing Buddhists who were detaching from their material selves and material lives.
Question Fourteen - Lessons Drawn on Diversity of Religious Experiences
There are some hurdles to overcome in American society to practice religious beliefs and in the past these conflicts sometimes turn ugly and racist in nature. The most recent example was the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 when the Arab Muslim ethnic group was targeted for racist attacks and racist hate crimes. White Americans couldn’t distinguish between the differences among Muslims and that the Muslim terrorist groups are not representative of either the Muslim religion or the vast majority of the Muslim people. Yet, these racist attacks demonstrate how Muslims were cast as the enemy and the Islam religion was defined as a source of violence and anti-Americanism. The Arab Muslim communities in the United States faced threats, attacks, and discriminatory treatment by the public in the aftermath of 9/11 and this racist perspective still exists in some places.
Likewise, the Native Americans were targeted back in the 18th and 19th century when they tried to practice their religious beliefs. One of the examples that emerged in the 19th century was the spread of the use of the Ghost Dance to make Native Americans immune to the white ways and bring back the old Indian beliefs again. The Ghost Dance was targeted as a religious ritual that defied and opposed white rule so the U.S. government denounced it and sent military troops to stop Ghost Dance activities in some native tribal lands. The Ghost Dance ritual was used by a variety of tribes during the late 19th century when the Native Americans were being attacked and forced into reservation systems by the U.S. military forces. The Ghost Dance ritual was the source of the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 when U.S. regulars opened fire on defenseless Native Americans.
Buddhists, Hindus, and many other religious groups have also encountered obstacles in practicing their religious faiths in the United States. Although they are freely able to practice their beliefs and rituals, the religious practices are kept within their communities. The attempts to try to convert white people to Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto, and the rest of the Asian religious belief practices are not found to be aggressive in the course of American history. The Asian Americans have kept their religious practices within their own groups and they are very insular and closed about their religious belief systems in many ways. The Buddhists, Taoists, and other Asian religious groups quietly do their thing and they do not step on anyone else’s turf or toes for sure. Based on the religious membership of these Asian groups, these are very much ethnic religious groups who have kept their religious beliefs bounded within their own ethnic boundaries. Some whites have joined these religious groups but at their own accord and not because a Buddhist knocked on the front door to come join the group.
Question Fifteen - One Religious Movement Transformed American Life in Unexpected Ways
The most curious, fastest growing religious group in the United States is the Church of Latter-Day Saints, or Mormons, who have been known for their missionaries who knock from door to door to spread the Gospel of Jesus supplemented by the narrative of the Book of Mormon. This religious group can be considered one that transformed American life in unexpected ways from its humble origins in upstate New York. Founder and Prophet, Joseph Smith, was visited by an Angel of God who showed him where to find the ancient plates that he translated through the use of seer stones contained with the plates into what became the Book of Mormon. Called as a Prophet of God, Joseph Smith became the leader of a small group of followers who were persecuted for some of their unique religious practices, including polygamy. The Mormons fled as a group to the backwoods of Illinois where they faced persecution again and where their leader and prophet was gunned down while being held in a jail cell. The murder of Joseph Smith marks the turning point of the religious group because the new leader, Brigham Young, chose to lead the Mormons out to Salt Lake City, Utah. It was here where they established their model religious community under the leadership of Young and the other Apostles. The Mormons built a thriving community in Utah and they became very hard working people, moral people, and giving people despite their strange origins and the mysterious person of their founder and self proclaimed prophet Joseph Smith.
The Mormon religion was a secretive religious group and non Mormons were forbidden from their temples constructed to undergo some of the holiest, most sacred ceremonies, such as Baptism of the Dead as well as the Mormon wedding ceremony. The Baptism of the Dead basically was baptizing dead members of the family to release them from the spirit prisons into Paradise with Jesus, God, and Joseph Smith. The Baptism of the Dead ritual is done in highly secret circumstances. Likewise, the wedding ceremony is secretive and mysterious in its rituals. For example, the husband is given a secret name for his wedded wife so that he and only he holds her key to Paradise since she would only be permitted in when he informs the Heaven Gatekeeper of her secret name. This kind of secrecy and strange rituals has caused many Christians to criticize the religious standing of Joseph Smith and his role in forming this religion.
Was Joseph Smith for real? Did he really translate the Book of Mormon with seer stones? Or, did Joseph Smith write the book himself and sell it off as a Book of God to start this new religion and not only make a lot of money but end up with almost one hundred wives? The Mormon religion today is the fastest growing Christian sect in the West and the position and standing of Joseph Smith remains under heavy criticism and attack by Americans today of other faiths especially since Republican presidential candidate Matt Romney is a Mormon. The attack on Romney from the conservative evangelical Christians is that Joseph Smith is a fraudulent prophet. He was not for real. The evangelical Christians are opposed to Romney because of their disbelief in the prophet hood of Joseph Smith as well as the legitimacy of the Book of Mormon as another book of God. Other Christians have stepped up criticism against Romney and the Mormon faith for its strange beliefs in pre-destiny and God having a human form. These are beliefs denounced as heresy. Also, the Mormon faith preached for a long time that non-white ethnic groups were condemned by God and could not ever have salvation. This Mormon doctrine was finally renounced because of pressure from the national government. In addition, the Mormon practice of polygamy continues in some isolated Mormon communities in Utah and elsewhere in the West.
The Mormon religion is distinctive because of its founder claiming to be America’s prophet and the religion is based in the Americas. The Book of Mormon chronicles the lives and fate of ancient people who lived in Central America and how they were visited by the resurrected Jesus Christ himself. He gave his gospel teachings to these ancient American people before ascending into Heaven to be at the right hand of God the Father. The resurrected Jesus revealed a special fate for the ancient American people and the ordained mission of Joseph Smith was to restore the Christian Church on American soil as desired by Jesus Christ’s gospel given to these ancient Americans in Central America two thousand some years ago. The Mormons have become successful business people and politicians. The Mormons have become prominent community citizens in many places. They are known for their love for God and family. Despite some of the questions raised about their religious beliefs, the Mormons have grown in membership.