Posted on 09/22/2019 4:04:02 PM PDT by robowombat
Affixing blame for the Mountain Meadows Massacre SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 BY DAN PETERSON
This is not a photo of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. We have none. So I went for a cheerier note. This is a photo (by James Jordan) of director Mark Goodman working just a few days ago with extras in Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts, for the “Witnesses” film project.
I note that I’m being accused by a small handful of people of blaming the Mountain Meadows Massacre on “anti-Mormons.”
First, two preliminary observations:
1) When I write anything for the public, at least some people will misread it in the most negative way that they possibly can.
2) The Mountain Meadows Massacre is, for quite manifest reasons, a controversial topic. And, accordingly, it’s one that some people are strongly inclined to exploit for ideological ends.
Of course, I don’t blame the Massacre on “anti-Mormons.” I blame it on the people who did it.
But the perpetrators interest me very particularly because, overwhelmingly, they do not seem to have been conventionally bad people – thugs, murderers, and the like – either before September 1857 or, for the most part, thereafter.
So the question that puzzles me (in this case as in more than a few others) is, What makes ordinary, decent people commit so extraordinarily horrific a crime?
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.
To me, if we see the people who committed the Mountain Meadows Massacre as utterly unlike ourselves, we’re not only falsifying history (and not merely in the sense that they, like me and many of my readers, claimed membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) but refusing to see a lesson (or, more aptly, lessons) in what happened. If they were something of a different species, their cautionary tale can have little if anything to teach us.
In order to understand what they did, we need to understand what factors acted upon them. And, beyond any reasonable dispute, one of the most important of those factors was a prior history of persecution and forced migration.
That doesn’t mean that the Missouri mobs bear legal and moral responsibility for the Mountain Meadows Massacre any more than an abusive father is responsible for the violent acts committed much later by a criminal son. But neither are the two unrelated. Human evils ramify. They do damage, among other things to human psyches.
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.
I'm sure you can cite some magic your religion ascribes to that wondrous apparitional visitation which makes god a man ascended to godhood, right?
It does not make it ok.
Was Hans Mill good or bad in your way of thinking?
Do you think it was good and right to steal Mormon property, kill them, and drive them out in the middle of winter?
Did your class also teach the many instances where Walter Martin and the Tanners were proven to be ‘Fake News’?
If you want to learn about Trump don’t go to CNN. If you want to learn about the LDS Church don’t go to Martin or the Tanners.
Sorry .... your the victim of Fake News and Fake History!
teppe, teppe, it is not religious bigotry to warn someone who is on the broad road approaching the wide gaet to hell that they need to turn around. Turnabout, teppe, before it is too late.
I don’t think God will be able to tell you anything beyond what you already think that you know....
So, be happy with that. Ignorance is bliss!
Maybe Hell isn’t such a bad place, as you seem to be enjoying it very much.
They’re Mormons. Nuff said
“I like Mormons ....a lot actually”
If that were true you would take the time to learn why what you sait was not only untrue, it is insulting.
Fix your reading comprehension proy. I stated one evil does not remove the evil from another evil deed. But that may be too complicated for you at present.
Thanks for the help .... but true religious bigotry only attacks, never seeks to understand.
Many of these people are latter-day pharisees who never learned the Christ-like virtues of being a Christian.
The Mormons knew for at least a week, maybe more, that the Fancher Party was not the the U.S. army trying to invade. After the Fancher party held off the Mormons for four days, the Mormons deceived them under a flag of truce promising safe passage, split up the survivors, then murdered most of them.
OK, the Fancher party did not have the pass that Brigham Young decreed to travel through Utah. Except that decree was not made public until September 15, when the Massacre (under the flag of truce and promise of safe passage) was over on Sept. 11, four days after they were dead.
How can you cloak yourself in religious piety, accuse others of religious bigotry, while justifying a massacre of innocent people by ignoring the facts?
Teppe, remember ... do not take the mark of the beast even if an apparition commands it. Do Not Take The Mark Of The Beast, if you are alive after the Rapture exiting of The One True Body of All in Christ since the Day of Pentecost.
Then why don’t you condemn those ‘Christians’ that murdered ‘Mormons’ long before the Mtn Meadows Massacre, and created the hatred in the hearts of those people who committed the horrible massacre.
It’s likely that you could care less. I suppose that all people who don’t see Christ the way that you do deserve to die.
Teppe, you would do well to go get a breath of fresh air.
I’m sorry
Your historical precedence is absurd to me
I’m sorry that’s insulting
Honestly
See post 89 just above.
Mountain Meadows was wrong.
That said, how much do you know about why the Mormons were in Utah to begin with?
Why did the people in Mountain Meadows see the wagon train something to fear?
What are you going to do so you do not make the same mistake again?
Well put
“religious bigotry only attacks, never seeks to understand.”
For some reason there are people who only know how to put others down to build themselves up.
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