Woo: If You've Got A Third Eye I've Got An Extra Target

Mormonism's malarky, but it's also a con job, so it's got bite:

 “In an article released this month by the LDS from their headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, church leaders and historians are cited in what is meant to be an explicit disapproval of past racially restrictive policies. Yet, an actual read of the article is disappointing.

What should be a mixture of apology and hope for black members reads more like a quasi-historical blame game, dumping some of it on Brigham Young, most of it on America’s mores during the early 19th century, yet none of it on the racism inherent in the doctrine. At no point does the LDS’s statement break canon or actually admit fault.

They even suggest that Brigham Young actually wanted black members to be part of the church by referring to the quote, “blacks would ‘have [all] the privilege and more’ of other members in the future” from a speech in 1852, which also includes gems like, “Cain and his posterity must wear the mark which God put upon them; and his white friends may wash the race of Cain with fuller's soap every day; they cannot wash away Gods mark" (Page 2, “To The Saints”).

This view is still the driving justification behind racism against black members in multiple religious groups, including Syriac Christianity and the Southern Baptist church. Those same ideals are echoed in sermons today, but no responsibility is taken for the incongruent racial implications because they are part of the Holy Scripture, and therein lies the problem. This is especially difficult for black members of the LDS church, who’ve had to ignore the worldview where they are not worthy of attaining higher rank or ultimate salvation.” 

Remember when the Republicans were trying to christen this open racism as America's new "nice" religion or some BS? "The Mormon Moment"? We were in such rank racial waters the gag reflex needed to be adjusted.

Blacks had the problem we were told. 

I still think "open-minded" Right-Wing racists defending Mormon racists, by accusing blacks who wouldn't go along of being "bigots," was a very good example of American racists attempting to be clever:

They actually thought they were being smart.

Unfortunately, clever ain't shit to reality,...

 

Everything's Working Fine As Long As The Blacks Lose

Do you see how racism, like NewAge, "works"? 

A black guy takes the heat online, going over a couple of years, for telling the truth about Mormons in the face of vicious opposition. Then, the Mormons step out with this bullshit, and will undoubtably get massive credit (instead of being forced to break up) for this previously-hidden honesty they didn't possess while they were too busy attacking that black guy with over 100 years of LDS lies:

  “In the past, the LDS Church has said history isn’t clear on why blacks were banned from its all-male priesthood for more than a century.

Apparently, it now is.

The reason, according to a newly released explanation from the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is rooted more in racism than revelation.” 

If I replaced "whiteness" with "racism" in that last sentence, it wouldn't change significantly.

Because, in the end, the whites' actions mean that black guy's marginalization for telling the truth will stay in place - with his readers, donations, and credibility gone - as those who ruthlessly wronged him continue on, as though nothing important ever happened they need be concerned about.

 You know - like slavery and Reconstruction.

The results will always speak for themselves: 

The Mormons - just like these other whites I'm speaking of - are the best I could ever hope for,...

 

Murdering People Is Wrong, I Mean - SQUIRREL!!!!

It's pretty sad when murderers have better ethics than most "spiritual" folks:

"I killed. I deserve to be killed."

Those are the words of "Donald Moeller, a man who was convicted of raping and killing a 9-year-old girl 20 years ago." Sorry, Mormons, I can't help but compare them to the weasel words of John G. Turner, author of the new biography Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet:

"He preserved a church and created a people, but that success damaged and even destroyed some lives."

Talk about letting somebody off the hook! As the late Christopher Hitchens was so fond of saying, bad men will do bad, but for a good man to do so - and, I'll add, for he and his "church" to get away with it - he needs religion. Consider this passage, from a review of Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, from the website Religious Dispatches:

The other reason that Anderson deserves recognition as an honorary scholar of new religious movements is that his curiosity about new religions has brought him into conflict with a culture that still approaches the religious other through an un-nuanced “us vs. them” mentality. Most religion scholars who deal heavily with new religious movements have been branded as “cult apologists” at some point in their careers. At stake in this accusation is an assumption that “whoever is not for us is against us,” and that anyone who is not actively attempting to debunk and discredit minority religions has decided to defend them unconditionally. 

I have written for here and elsewhere that for some commentators, ridiculing Scientology seems to have become a kind of hobby. There are, of course, plenty of reasons not to like the Church of Scientology. Not the least of these are the serious allegations that have been leveled against the Church by former members, especially the children of Scientologists who were raised in Scientology schools or pressured to serve in the Church’s elite order, Sea Org. 

But as disturbing as these stories are, I am more interested in the motivations of groups like Anonymous, who organized angry protests in front of Scientology buildings, and journalists like Tony Ortega, who in two years produced 465 articles attacking the Church of Scientology. 

In a world threatened by the possibility of nuclear conflict in the Middle East, global warming, and growing economic injustice, why direct so much energy toward a religion that is culturally and politically irrelevant outside of Hollywood? What is the sense of satisfaction some people find in crusading against Scientology? Popular animosity toward Scientology is interesting because it seems to point toward much larger patterns in how Americans respond to minority religions.

In other words - pffft! Forget those "damaged and even destroyed" by this nonsense (which even the writer admits "cannot really 'fix'” anything) and "especially the children," the real story are the true crazies amongst us - those who, for some unknown reason, want to stop the hidden or unmentioned death and destruction going on all around them:

Because, as we all know, it is they - the folks who have hurt no one but seek justice for the innocent and injured - they're the ones we should be "more interested in the motivations of,…"
 

Don't Lose Faith: Reading Between The Lines On Mitt, Mormonism & The Reporting Of The New Yorker

In the eighteen-twenties, in Palmyra, New York, a man named Joseph Smith—who had already been arrested for “glass looking,” the phony detection of underground treasures—said that an angel named Moroni had directed him to a set of buried golden plates, inscribed with an ancient script, which, after various stops and starts, Smith and a friend had translated into a Biblical-sounding English. 

The plates contained the Book of Mormon,...

The Book of Mormon is, in any case, only one of many pronouncements that Smith offered his new troops, apparently improvising as he went along,...

Smith held (especially in the sermons he preached toward the end of his life) that God and angels and men were all members of the same species,…

…The doctrine of God-as-Man divided Smith’s cult from the others,…

…Mormonism does have a definite Gnostic aroma,…

…Mormonism was the great scandal of American nineteenth-century religion, somewhat as Scientology is today, though Mormons understandably dislike the comparison.

Wherever they went, they infuriated the non-Mormon locals, and also managed to infuriate one another: the early history of the movement involves a bewildering series of excommunications, internal banishments, and the increasing threat of violence to enforce new rules as Smith received them. Smith was eventually martyred by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, while in the local jail awaiting trial for treason. Which of his doctrines enraged the mob is hard to grasp, but it may have been sex more than heresy.

The success of a new religious movement depends not so much on the mystical visions of its founder as on the executive energy of its first evangelist,…Brigham Young inhabited this role for the Mormons, and about as fully as any apostle ever has.

Young,… is one of the few nineteenth-century public figures to be routinely on the record saying “frigged” and “shit.” Yet the figure who emerges in the biography starts off more like Jim Jones or David Koresh. He preached a brutal doctrine of “blood atonement”…a “chilling perversion of the golden rule.”

For a time, he tolerated a group of frontier thugs who acted as personal emissaries, and, despite Smith’s gestures toward universalism, imposed a hard anti-African and pro-slavery line. (Blacks were excluded from the priesthood and from temple ceremonies.) Young was in power at the time of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in 1857, in which more than a hundred peaceful non-Mormon emigrants were disarmed under an elaborate promise of safe conduct and then murdered en masse. “The attackers mercilessly shot, stabbed, and slashed the throats of emigrants who pled for their lives,” Turner recounts, in an event he describes as “a heinous crime executed after careful deliberation and subterfuge.” For all that, the killers “appeared to remain not just in good standing but in Young’s own personal favor,”...

Smith taught that Gods and men were one species; Young made this idea a practical guiding principle.

Mormons effectively turned away from spiritual adventuring toward the gospel of prosperity. . . . Merchants who invested in the enterprise displayed a [Zion Co-operative Mercantile Institutions] sign on their storefronts, consisting of an ‘All-Seeing Eye’ ,…the Z.C.M.I. in part reflected the socialist,…doctrines that Smith had taught,…

The Mormons in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “The Book of Mormon”…are well-meaning naïfs, essentially sweet and admirable—though, to be a little heretical myself, this may be evidence, along with much of “South Park,” of Parker and Stone’s wanting to take credit for being bold without ever taking the risks or responsibility that come with being brave.

All of which leads to the inevitable question: To what degree is Mormonism responsible for Mitt Romney? Is there a thread, dark or golden, that runs from Moroni to Mitt? …The most striking feature of Mitt Romney as a politician is an absence of any responsibility to his own past—the consuming sense that his life and opinions can be remade at a moment’s need. Romney, according to Romney, never favored the individual mandate, or supported abortion rights, or opposed the auto-industry bailout, or did any of the other things he obviously, and on the record, did.

When, in 1978, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints abandoned the rule prohibiting blacks from serving as priests, one church leader, Bruce McConkie, explained, “It doesn’t make a particle of difference what anybody ever said about the Negro matter before the first day of June 1978.” You could find, or think you’ve found, a similar logic behind Romney’s blithe amnesia when it comes to the things he used to think and say.

Romney is better understood as a late-twentieth-century American tycoon than as any kind of believer,…It’s unfair to say, as some might, that Mitt Romney believes in nothing except his own ambition. He believes, with shining certainty, in his own success, and, more broadly, in the American Gospel of Wealth that lies behind it: the idea that rich people got rich by being good, that the riches are a sign of their virtue, and that they should therefore be allowed to rule.

Then again, almost every American religion sooner or later becomes a Gospel of Wealth. 

-- All bolds mine, with quotes from the (mostly positive) New Yorker Magazine review of four books on Mormon history, "I, Nephi," by Adam Gopnik.