I have been somewhat of a follower of conspiracy theories largely because of the unpopular thing’s President Benson testified of (”I Testify” – a very pointed talk given by Pres. Benson) and the overt claims made within The Book of Mormon, , though I generally find that culture highly problematic.

That is somehow a conclusion I missed in your post. Though you are absolutely right:

“The secret combinations in the Book of Mormon are large-scale secret societies that bring down governments.”

Moroni specifically warns that they will also be our undoing if don’t awake the state of our awful posistion. I have been somewhat of a follower of conspiracy theories, though I generally find that culture highly problematic, largely because of the unpopular thing’s President Benson testified of (“I Testify” – a very pointed talk given by Pres. Benson), and the overt claims made within The Book of Mormon. It has been said, and I fully believe, that if the primary purpose of The Book of Mormon was to stand as “Another Testament of Jesus Christ”, then the secondary purpose was to stand as a witness to the alleged Modus Operandi of Satan, corruption through “Secret Combinations” (Moses 5).

I recognize that this is a matter of debate, but it is fairly easy to see how the Gadionton Robbers could have been a hysterical 19th century critique on Freemasonry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WSGwnz7XpY&feature=related

along with that final farewell speech by Eisenhower, says it all I believe.

Pt George W Bush fits the bill of one who was now just a puppet of that complex; expanding expenditure by billions when only some Saudi’s and Egyptians committed criminal acts inside the US. It should have been a response of increasing the budget of the FBI to catch those criminals, nothing more.

Yes, if more mormons actually read and studied the BoM, there would probably be a lot less mormon republicans.

Problem is that people are still living in the Eisenhower years in Utah, and still think the man is in government, when actually Eisenhower was the one who started preaching against that military industrial complex which has overtaken the republican party. Plus when you add the religious right…well enough’s said.

I find it hard to call Communism a secret combination. It certainly wasn’t any big secret. We conducted espionage and sabatoge against communist nations. They did the same to us. I suppose that part was secret.

Organized crime is a secret combination. It would seem there are elements in the world of high finance that are conspiracies. Where there’s money, there’s motive, and there’s a lot of money in the world of banking.

As for the Communists, well, once the Cold War ended access to KGB files revealed that a lot of the conspiracy theories about their activities had basis in fact. (The main difference being that conspiracy theories vastly overestimated the effectiveness of the Communist conspiracies).

http://www.meridianmagazine.com/critics/080520robbers.html

Were the Gadianton Robbers only Thinly Disguised References to Freemasons?
From FAIR, the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research

Many have speculated that the description of the Gadianton robbers is an attempt by Joseph Smith to discredit the Masons during a time when there was widespread criticism of the Masonic organization.

This use of anti-masonic language in the Book of Mormon, they say, is “proof” of 19th century authorship. The authors of these speculations fail to take into account four critical issues that discredit the association between the Gadiantion robbers of the Book of Mormon and the anti-Masonry of the opening decades of the 19th century [1826 through 1845].

http://www.meridianmagazine.com/critics/080520robbers.html

I think it is better for us not to know too much about it because it would really shake the foundation of our society to a point that would be hard to rebuild from.

Of course I don’t think that any of them are seriously indicting the modern church as being a secret combination, but with such language as is used, it seems like anything that anyone wants to demonize can be demonized. It’s like a horoscope that says bad things instead of good ones.

For example, as BillM wrote in post 2

#2. For some crazy reason I never even considered the Republican Party as a secret combination. Interesting.

What the book of mormon warns us against is ‘Secret Combination’s’ which may change names from time to time but at their core they are all alike. they will kill others for money and gain, like gangs and crime families and like the 21-century Republican Party who were willing to bomb innocent people in their homes, to have a beach head in the muslim world and more control over oil.

Actually the Republicans would fit the profile of Book of Mormon secret combination better since they were mostly in the very heart of government and capable of killing thousands of people for money ie oil plus the military industrial complex’s cash payments. The GOP has managed to take US military spending to almost 50% of the worlds entire military related spending. Plus they invaded 2 nations and tried to start a war with China before that in the summer of 2001! All so that tax payers could send more cash to that military-industrial complex plus run some Iraqi oil companies -and leave the nation’s finances in a mess now that they are leaving.

The part about describing secret combinations in terms of gangs, drug cartels, etc., sounds more reasonable to me…that’s what I always thought about them. And in that case, it seems very reasonable to stay away from them…but I must admit that the idea of a secret combination has much less magic and wicked allure to it if they are *just* things like gangs. It’s like realizing that in the real world, there’s no such things as supervillains and instead we just have a bunch of regular villains — it’s underwhelming.

My former member senses tingle when I read the part about secret combinations having “secret signs and code words…secret rites and initiation ceremonies.” But I’ll leave that off my comment, to avoid marginalizing myself. I’ll turn my comment around into a more faith-positive one — I have to say that relating something like Masonry to a secret combination is counterintuitive to the Church…