Atheists go to Heaven too

[fr0d0]

Funny thing someone who delved quite deeply into Mormonism told me, was about the link with Joseph Smith and hallucenegenic drugs.

So JS wanders into the woods one day, and comes back with tales of stainless steele tablets. Yah, mushrooms would do that.

http://www.i4m.com/think/history/holy-ghost.htm

Twenty years later, in 1864, members would ask Church leaders, “why it is that we do not see more angels, have more visions, that we do not see greater and more manifestations of power?”

The mystery seems to center around Joseph Smith himself. According to church historian Richard Bushman, it was Joseph Smith himself that connected converts to heaven by some power that he possessed, a power that remains a mystery to this day. (Bushman, R. L. (2005). Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. P. 560)

But is Joseph Smith’s spiritual power to connect converts with heaven really beyond our ability to investigate and understand?

Over the last 50 years Joseph Smith-like spiritual power has come under examination by an ever increasing number of anthropologists, religious historians, ethnobotanists and ethnomycologists. It now appears that spiritual power comparable to that of Joseph Smith can be acquired in the course of consuming visionary plants, mushrooms and cactus. Otherwise known as psychedelics and hallucinogens, when these visionary materials are taken in a religious setting, they are often referred to as entheogens. An entheogen is any substance, such as a plant or drug, taken to occasion a heavenly vision or spiritual rapture.

LDS Historians D. Michael Quinn and Lance S. Owens have shown that Joseph Smith incorporated elements of ceremonial magic and alchemy imported from Europe. (Bushman, R. L. (2005). Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. P. 107, 131)

Alchemists are believed to have employed the visionary Amanita muscaria mushroom in their occult practice