Question: What is the difference between our faith and the Mormon faith? My mom thinks that being Catholic is very similar to being Mormon. What really upsets me is how so many people have so many false beliefs and refuse to understand and accept the truth. I am glad I’ve been blessed with the ability to accept the truth and to be so open minded.
So, here are some Mormon beliefs: 1.) Jesus and Satan are brothers; 2,) God is a flesh and blood individual in heaven; 3.) God impregnated Mary to create Jesus; 4.) When humans die, they become angels; 5.) Married couples after death are reunited in celestial marriage on a planet where they continue reproduction of thousands or millions of children.
Joseph Smith, the founder pf Mormonism, came from an unorthodox religious background in Palmyra, New York Smith had many religious visions and refused to join any organized religion.
Wikipedia: The Smith family practiced various forms of folk magic such as using divining rods and seer stones to search for buried treasure. Four witnesses reported that the Smiths used divining rods in the Palmyra area, and sometime between Joseph Smith’s eleventh and thirteenth years, he began "following his father’s example in using a divining rod. Magical parchments handed down in the Hyrum Smith family may have belonged to Joseph Sr. Lucy Mack Smith noted in her memoirs that family members were “trying to win the faculty of Abrac, drawing magic circles or sooth saying.” Smith’s reputation among his Palmyra neighbors was that of a “nondescript farm boy” who was “lazy and superstitious,” and townspeople viewed his family as "treasure-seekers, not eager Christians. Thus, Smith was reared in a family that believed in prophecy and visions, was skeptical of organized religion, and was interested in both folk magic and new religious ideas.
In 1823, the angel, Moroni (etymologically related to “moreno” or “dark”) appeared to Joseph Smith and lead him to gold tablets buried in the hillside near his home. Writing on these tablets was incomprehensible, but could be deciphered by reading through a crystal stone (scrying). Between 1823 and 1829 Joseph Smith translated the tablets into English (The Book of Mormon), then the tablets disappeared.
The relationship between
Mormonism and Freemasonry began early in the life of Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, as his older brother, Hyrum, and possibly his fatherJoseph Smith _Sr. were Freemasons while the family lived near Palmyra, New York.
Nevertheless, by the 1840s, Smith and several prominent Latter Day Saints had become Freemasons and founded a lodge in Nauvoo, Illinois, in March 1842. Soon after joining Freemasonry, Smith introduced a temple endowment ceremony including a number of symbolic elements that were very similar to those in Freemasonry. Smith remained a Freemason until his death. In modern times, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints holds no position
for or against the compatibility of Masonry with LDS Church doctrine.
Spiritually, Catholicism and Mormonism have little in common.
