This is the first great test. This probably should not even be responded to, given its obvious intellectual vacuity. The question is: can it be done without ad hominems? Without personal attacks? Without invective, yet, while still being honest regarding its obvious inanity?
Let's find out...
I was reading about Charles Manson the other day and found the similarities between himself, Joseph Smith and their followers to be quite shockingly similar.
That's strange, I've noticed no coceivable association between them in 40 years of studying about both.
Here we have two people who are so charismatic as to get women to align themselves sexually to them (with some talking, urging and persuading).
Both groups have the heads of their organizations / cults awarding women (and therefore sexual favors) to their followers.
The author here apparanlty has no understanding of plural marriage as it was understood and practiced by the early Saints, so we can skip this.
Both groups have women who think so highly of their leaders, and so little of themselves, that they willingly ‘obey’ their leaders and marry / prostitute / give sexual favors to whomever the leaders tell them.
Ed Decker level slanderousness without concomitant understanding of the history or doctrine.
Here we have two people who are able to convince their followers to commit murder (Danites - not sure how ‘real’ or ‘accurate’ those reports are of Joseph Smith’s Danite gang…Mountain Meadows Massacre (yes that's the time of BY but the principle of blind obedience in LDSland is still the same) wherein 120 innocent men, women and children were killed…and the multiple killings of ‘The Family’, Charles Manson’s followers committed on his orders).
Not a shred of historical evidence that the leaders of the Church had the slightest thing to do with the depredations and isolated incidents perpetrated by these Mormons who were acting completely outside of LDS norms, doctrine, and moral teaching. The ideology and psychological motivations of Manson and his "faimily' have no relation whatever to what motivated either the rogue Danites or the perpetrators of the MMM. This is why defenders of the Church get weary reburying these dead horses time after time after time.
Get serious please (a tall order, I know, given the substance of this thread).
Both groups felt very strongly about their leaders…and BELIEVED in them implicitly and explicitly.
A logically meaningless comparison. Mormons, Roman Catholics, Shaolin monks, and Manson family leaders feel very strongly about there leaders, ergo...
Both groups felt that there was an impending doom and Armageddon and destruction going to happen upon the ‘wicked’ (ie. anyone who was NOT them).
Mormons believed in a future eschaton, with some significant doctrinal differences, very much along the lines of most Christians of the day, and as most conservative Christians still do today. I'm not sure how Manson's convoluted ideology, derived from a concept of looming race war and Beatles lyrics combined with bizarre interpretations of the Book of Revelation are relevant.
I felt sick reading about Charles Manson because, frankly, I found the similarities in the thinking and actions of both him and Joseph Smith and their followers to be quite profoundly similar.
It which case it appears that our author has a mind as fertile--and overwrought--as Manson's.
I also found that the blind (and yet oh so faithful) willingness of todays TBM Mormons to give their 14 year old girls to prophets and or already married men (like my wife has said she’d willingly do since God Himself is leading and standing behind this Church)…well, it makes me sickeningly frustrated, sad and embarrassed to be associated with people who think this way — the thinking (NON-thinking) and not necessarily the people themselves.
It is also sickening to meet someone who thinks like Charles Manson, so let's call it even.
There. Not bad. A few derogatory remarks about the author, but I see no possibility of avoiding them given the...subject matter.