Ma'am; your religion is bogus.
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.
Who?
LDS material is sufficient.
The first 'book' in the Quad is enough to show problems with the next three.
[unctuous, self-promotion alert!]
(or ELSIE can be pinged)
Really??
I guess that old, "Sticks and stones..." thing ain't what it used to be.
“19 years apart and 900 miles away. That is grasping at straws.”
Now it is up to you to find out what also happened in between.
Unless you already know all there is to know to judge that group of people.
Obviously; turn the other cheek does NOT apply here.
"Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God
is death on the spot. This will always be so."
(Journal of Discourses, Vo. 10, p. 110)
"I am a true believer in the gospel of Jesus Christ, I do not believe everything that is now being taught and practiced by Brigham Young.
I do not care who hears it. It is my last word - it is so.
I believe he is leading the people astray, downward to destruction.
But I believe in the gospel that was taught in its purity by Joseph Smith, in former days.
I have my reasons for it.
"I studied to make this man's [Brigham Young] will my pleasure for thirty years.
See, now, what I have come to this day!
"I have been sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner." (Lee enunciated this sentence with marked emphasis.)
Excerpted from --> http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mountainmeadows/leeexecution.html
When all this mud that has been flung about finally dries; I can use it to fill in the low spots in my yard.
Ma'am; your religion is bogus.
That's what SLC wants you to believe.
A portion of the Mormons left; another bunch stayed.
The ones who stayed were not subjected to any bad things later.
The ones who had a spirit of fear and fled, buried many on the arduous trip west.
The approach to the Mountain Meadows Massacre monument The monument in the valley below received an upgrade in 1999, again the product of a partnership between descendant groups and the LDS church. They erected a stone cairn monument patterned after the one the army put up 140 years before but without the cross.
President Gordon B. Hinckley, who took a vested interest in moving the new monument forward, especially after seeing how horribly it had fallen in disrepair, spoke at its Sept. 11, 1999, dedication. Some were hoping for an official church apology, but he stopped short of that. When asked in a later interview who was responsible for the massacre, he said, “the local people.”
A ceremony on the same date in 2007 marked the 150th anniversary. Then-church historian Marlin K. Jensen, who also showed a extreme interest in setting the story straight and remembering the victims, wrote a statement to read on that occasion, but because of illness, was unable to deliver it. Instead, then-Elder Henry B. Eyring, now second counselor in the First Presidency, presented it.
What was done here long ago by members of our Church represents a terrible and inexcusable departure from Christian teaching and conduct. We cannot change what happened, but we can remember and honor those who were killed here. We express profound regret for the massacre carried out in this valley 150 years ago today and for the undue and untold suffering experienced by the victims then and by their relatives to the present time.
The statement went on to voice regret to the Paiute people, who for so long bore the principal blame for the massacre but who would not have even participated in the massacre had they not been convinced by local Mormon leaders.
The word “apology” was never used in the remarks, and no official apology has ever come from church leadership. Despite that, descendant groups have been happy to have built a great relationship with the LDS church and work in concert with it to preserve the memory of the massacre and their forebearers who met their demise because of it.
” serving an antichrist religion is a sin against the Holy Spirit”
Be cautious in your assessment....might want to ask the mods to allow you to retract and then restate....
If following God’s word, and adhering to what the Bible teaches makes me a bigot, I’ll wear that label. I do judge. I judge and use the Bible as a template. You can try to sugarcoat poison, but it’s still just poison.
Mormons followed Islam. Some dood wrote a book that he claimed was given to him by god that allowed sex with children and many women and provided him the right to wage war on all comers.
SSDD.
Your comment seeking to justify the murder of innocents and kidnapping of children is indefensible and despicable.
What is the SLC?
I have read Mormon material and it’s not Christian. Period.
Both of them used nothing but Mormon materials; as it’s said: straight from the horses mouth. There is absolutely nothing Christian about Mormonism. I’ve read their material.
I refer you to Sidney Rigdon’s Salt sermon, a declaration of war on the people of Missouri. There were gentiles in the audience who left to alert the locals.
“I refer you to Sidney Rigdon’s Salt sermon,”
Have you noticed how Freepers sound the same over gun control.
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