A great response, Dr. Robbers. DCP is fond of throwing “atheist regimes” in Gemli’s face, but the quote he translates and offers here is clearly a call for him to reflect on his own place in all of this—and the role of his comrades. Sure, he can point to the Holocaust or Stalinist Russia, but staring him right back in the face are MMM, Mark Hoffman, the Lafferty murders, and so on. And just like the neo-Nazi in his story, he too is capable of being “charming.”
Don’t forget that BY’s bodyguard, Porter Rockwell, assassinated ~140 people and was proud of that fact. The ‘prophet’ had people murdered in pursuit of consolidating his grip on Deseret.
- Doc
Oh dear god, every time i think i have lesrned the worst about this cult in which i was raised ..
...At Rockwell's funeral, apostle Joseph F. Smith, nephew of Joseph Smith and future church president, spoke the following about Rockwell:
They say he was a murderer; if he was, he was the friend of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and he was faithful to them, and to his covenants, and he has gone to Heaven and apostates can go to Hell ...
Mother of God. What a damned cult.
Once again, i am reminded that my greatest accomplishment of my life is getting out of this cult and giving my children an opportunity to live a normal (and FAR superior) life.
DP wrote:
I note that I’m being accused by the usual small handful of people of ignoring the Mountain Meadows Massacre while I’m posting about Nazi concentration camps and, I guess, of suggesting that religious people in general, or Latter-day Saints in particular, do not commit evil deeds. Or something like that.
Reading the Oxford book Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Ron Walker and Rick Turley and Glen Leonard, when it first came out many years ago, I felt as if I were seeing a Greek tragedy unfold. There was a certain inexorable logic to what ultimately happened — a horrible logic, obviously, but one in which it made a certain degree of sense, after one bad step had been taken, to take the next one. I found myself wanting to scream “No! Stop!” while knowing what the outcome was inevitably going to be.
It's almost like DP is describing exactly what can happen in a world where God does not exist, or if he does, chooses not to intervene. God can appear in a grove to Joseph Smith, but save the innocent? No, no. Free agency must be upheld!
Once again, we see God choosing to hide himself and make it look as if Mormonism is a fraud to any objective outside observers.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre certainly isn’t the Restoration’s finest hour. It’s anything but faith-promoting. But it shouldn’t be exploited as a weapon against the Church or against religious belief, either. It’s too complex to be reducible to a self-serving slogan on a partisan bumper sticker.
-_-
Why do Mormons speak like this? It’s so tiresome, to read vauguespeech that is written to blur fact, diminish sin, and to create moral plausibility. It’s pretty gross, and it’s sad to see a man who once held such promise, promise framed in a yearbook from those hallowed days, glowing with potential, hailing from San Gabriel HS, to render a talent into quackery and hackery. What a shame. He should’ve gone into medicine. :/
- Doc
Orwell is a far truer prophet than Nelson, Hinckley, and Monson was combined... this sort of Mormon doublespeak should not surprise us. After all, they are beholden and enslaved by "The System," in this case, the religious system which holds their brains hostage. It is positively Orwellian, and Mormons fit right into it. Don''t make it a bumper sticker eh? Why wasn't that the idea behind "I am a Mormon" online brainwashing campaign? Why NOT make it a bumper sticker slogan, when I see the picture of the Angel Moroni in bumper stickers?
Unsurprisingly, he’s missing the point. His reaction to the Holocaust sites is solemnity and “this should never be forgotten.” With MMM in the other hand, he acknowledges that “Gee, this wasn’t Mormonism’s finest hour” and then engages in a whole bunch of hand-wringing about how the incident is “misunderstood,” etc. Well, is MMM “simply one of those things that must not be forgotten” or what?
It’s just like I said: he’s similar to the neo-Nazi tour guide in the way that he downplays this horrific incident. Plus, as I also pointed out, he rather gleefully posted Jim Bennett’s mocking commentary about UtBoH/the Lafferty murders.
"If, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
Yale social psychologist Stanley Milgram, PhD, conducted an experiment whose purpose was supposedly to study the effects of punishment on learning. The experimenter told the subject that his job was to teach a learner in an adjacent room to memorize a list of word-pairs, and every time the learner made an error, the teacher-subject was to punish the learner by giving him increasingly severe shocks by pressing levers on a shock machine. There were 30 levers whose shock values ranged from a low of 15 volts to the maximum of 450 volts. (In actuality, no electric shock was involved. The "learner" was an actor who only pretended receiving them, but the subject did not know this.) Despite the learner's increasingly pitiful screams and pleas to stop, a majority of subjects (over 60%) obeyed the experimenter's commands to continue and ended up giving the maximum "shock" of 450 volts.
I’m reminded of the electroshock “therapy” BYU subjected homosexuals to some decades back. The willingness of sadists to use authority for a broader aim is distressing, but perhaps even more distressing are those who subject themselves to the “authority” of those who would abuse them and others.
- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
Unsurprisingly, he’s missing the point. His reaction to the Holocaust sites is solemnity and “this should never be forgotten.” With MMM in the other hand, he acknowledges that “Gee, this wasn’t Mormonism’s finest hour” and then engages in a whole bunch of hand-wringing about how the incident is “misunderstood,” etc. Well, is MMM “simply one of those things that must not be forgotten” or what?
It’s just like I said: he’s similar to the neo-Nazi tour guide in the way that he downplays this horrific incident. Plus, as I also pointed out, he rather gleefully posted Jim Bennett’s mocking commentary about UtBoH/the Lafferty murders.
And if I remember correctly Jim Bennett is simply not the kind of Mormon Peterson/Midgley would want to actually be friends with and hang around with together and author books with either... if this is the same Jim Bennett I am thinking of, it is highly unlikely Peterson would endorse Bennett's take on the unique Mormon scriptures.
DP wrote:
I note that I’m being accused by the usual small handful of people of ignoring the Mountain Meadows Massacre while I’m posting about Nazi concentration camps and, I guess, of suggesting that religious people in general, or Latter-day Saints in particular, do not commit evil deeds. Or something like that.
Reading the Oxford book Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Ron Walker and Rick Turley and Glen Leonard, when it first came out many years ago, I felt as if I were seeing a Greek tragedy unfold. There was a certain inexorable logic to what ultimately happened — a horrible logic, obviously, but one in which it made a certain degree of sense, after one bad step had been taken, to take the next one. I found myself wanting to scream “No! Stop!” while knowing what the outcome was inevitably going to be.
It's almost like DP is describing exactly what can happen in a world where God does not exist, or if he does, chooses not to intervene. God can appear in a grove to Joseph Smith, but save the innocent? No, no. Free agency must be upheld!
Once again, we see God choosing to hide himself and make it look as if Mormonism is a fraud to any objective outside observers.
The difference between your God and me is I would stop a rape of a child if I could. Tracy Harris
