Completely crazy anti-Mormon novel


Sunday21
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Blessed be the Wicked by Bartley

I never realized how completely nuts you have to be to hate us! This is a detective novel that is set in Utah and is anti. It tries so hard to find reasons to hate us. The idea is that the church has declared that there are ‘unforgivable’ sins. Well, yes. There is one but no  one I have ever met, understands it!

Okay, back to the plot: So as some sins are unforgivable, this is so nuts, you have to kill the sinner! Can anyone follow that logic? I can’t!

Next: Apparently we have a committee that monitors all the communications including emails of suspected apostates. That would have to be a huge committee! 

I picked this book up with no suspicions and it just started in on this lunacy! 

I have to keep reading and find out how we are these cold hearted murders! 

 

Edited by Sunday21
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17 minutes ago, Sunday21 said:

So as some sins are unforgivable, this is so nuts, you have to kill the sinner! Can anyone follow that logic? I can’t!

At some point Brigham a young taught something called “blood atonement” which might be what he is referencing.

Edited by Fether
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37 minutes ago, Sunday21 said:

Blessed be the Wicked by Bartley

I never realized how completely nuts you have to be to hate us! This is a detective novel that is set in Utah and is anti. It tries so hard to find reasons to hate us. The idea is that the church has declared that there are ‘unforgivable’ sins. Well, yes. There is one but no  one I have ever met, understands it!

Okay, back to the plot: So as some sins are unforgivable, this is so nuts, you have to kill the sinner! Can anyone follow that logic? I can’t!

Next: Apparently we have a committee that monitors all the communications including emails of suspected apostates. That would have to be a huge committee! 

I picked this book up with no suspicions and it just started in on this lunacy! 

I have to keep reading and find out how we are these cold hearted murders! 

I'm not too worried about a novel like this to be honest.  I don't see this as any different than Dan Brown's DaVinci Code.  I thought it was an intriguing book and full of action and thoughtful ideas.  But I surely don't believe Catholics have these secret assassins going around killing people.

Nor do I believe the Danites were anything but a disgruntled ex-Saint's vivid imagination.  But it's still fun to see a movie about them.

We'll survive this, trust me.

Edited by Guest
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3 hours ago, Sunday21 said:

Apparently a subset of us ‘parade’ at church in jewels and new clothes. Really? Can’t you think of anything worse than to say that some of us are snappy dressers?

Am I not supposed to wear new clothes to church? Or just not when I'm also wearing jewelry with gemstones? I may need to adjust my clothes-shopping schedule from "when I need something new" to "several months before I anticipate needing something new".

Edited by SilentOne
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Just my opinion, but i think there are plenty of things i think the average member doesn't know that would make their hair curl.  But that could be said about just about everything and everyone out there.

People lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, get depressed, addicted, are bigots, are kind, loving, sacrifice, humble, charitable gentle, and honest - usually all in the course of a single lifetime.  And then, if they can, try and doctor up the records to exclude either all the good or all the bad.  Consistent, sensible narratives are so very alluring.  

Again, just my opinion, but if you believe that any organization or group of people didn't do things that were pretty much unacceptable by any yardstick imaginable, chances are, you just don't know them well enough, or are only listening to the history that one person with a very explicit agenda wants you to hear.  And i think ex-members are absolutely affected by that also.

i'm sad to see books like this one.  It just reinforces the caricatured stereotypes members and ex-members have of one another.  

Edited by lostinwater
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4 hours ago, Sunday21 said:

Apparenlty, we had a Mormon Reformation period, that we do not like to talk about, in which we ran around killing each other.

This may be a reference to the Retrenchment Movement which was initiated under Brigham Young in the late 1860's. It had some sort of similarities to a reformation.

This is what th eEncyclopaedia of Mormonism says about it:

https://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Retrenchment_Association

The retrenchment movement, conceived in 1869 by President Brigham Young to encourage LDS women to "spend more time in moral, mental and spiritual cultivation, and less upon fashion and the vanities of the world" (Woman's Exponent 11 [Sept. 15, 1882]:59), spawned two similar but distinct organizations. Mary Isabella horne, appointed by President Young to head the initial movement, established semimonthly women's meetings in Salt Lake City to promote the "reformation." Shortly thereafter, Brigham Young organized his daughters into a Young Ladies Retrenchment Association as a model for similar organizations in each ward of the Church, appointing Emma Young Empey as president (see Young Women). Though the young women's retrenchment societies held independent ward meetings, the parent association, calling itself the Senior and Junior Cooperative Retrenchment Association, remained a single, overarching entity that superintended the subsidiary societies while pursuing its own agenda.

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Quote

Okay, back to the plot: So as some sins are unforgivable, this is so nuts, you have to kill the sinner! Can anyone follow that logic? I can’t!

Quote

At some point Brigham a young taught something called “blood atonement” which might be what he is referencing.

I haven't read the novel in question and have no desire to, but yes the book is almost surely speaking of blood atonement.

Here are some of the quotes (there are a lot more) by Brigham Young on the matter.

Journal of Discourses, volume 3, page 245:


Suppose you found your brother in bed with your wife, and put a javelin through both of them. You would be justified, and they would atone for their sins, and be received into the Kingdom of God. I would at once do so, in such a case; and under the circumstances, I have no wife whom I love so well that I would not put a javelin through her heart, and I would do it with clean hands....The blood of Christ will never wipe that out, your own blood must atone for it.

Journal of Discourses, volume 4, page 219:

The time has been in Israel under the law of God, the celestial law, or that which pertains to the celestial law, for it is one of the laws of that kingdom where our Father dwells, that if a man was found guilty of adultery, he must have his blood shed, and that is near at hand.

Brigham Young did make such comments, but reading through them, it seems evident that he was speaking about a future time (and more modern Church leaders don't seem to agree with him on this).   I don't think anyone was executed for sins other than murder or treason during that time period.  
 

 

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5 hours ago, SilentOne said:

Am I not supposed to wear new clothes to church? Or just not when I'm also wearing jewelry with gemstones? I may need to adjust my clothes-shopping schedule from "when I need something new" to "several months before I anticipate needing something new".

Apparently in Old Boston, the social elites would not wear clothing immediately imported from Paris. Such clothing was left in the attic for a few seasons until it was no longer fashionable and only worn once out of fashion. 

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1 minute ago, MarginOfError said:

Are you saying you don't believe the Danites existed at all, or just not as portrayed in the film?  

I believe there were some people who performed roles of bodyguard and security and so forth.  But that they were trained assassins setting about to kill apostates was a myth.

But I really liked Berenger's "Avenging Angel" with Charlton Heston playing Brigham Young.  I thought it was a great movie.  I even appreciated the line offered by (IIRC) Andrew Pine

Quote

There was a time when you Danites were a necessary evil.  You protected us from men more ruthless than yourselves.  But over time you changed from a defensive force to a pre-emptive one.

 -- then he got killed by a gunshot from outside the building.  Pretty sad.

(wipes tears) I loved that movie.

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10 hours ago, Sunday21 said:

Blessed be the Wicked by Bartley

I never realized how completely nuts you have to be to hate us! This is a detective novel that is set in Utah and is anti. It tries so hard to find reasons to hate us. The idea is that the church has declared that there are ‘unforgivable’ sins. Well, yes. There is one but no  one I have ever met, understands it!

Okay, back to the plot: So as some sins are unforgivable, this is so nuts, you have to kill the sinner! Can anyone follow that logic? I can’t!

Next: Apparently we have a committee that monitors all the communications including emails of suspected apostates. That would have to be a huge committee! 

I picked this book up with no suspicions and it just started in on this lunacy! 

I have to keep reading and find out how we are these cold hearted murders! 

 

Unsuprising honestly. Antis have to make us out into unimaginable ogres in order to have us be the bad guys. It's a pretty standard human reaction to completely demonize a group you don't really understand in order to justify your hatred. As a group, they are best pitied and ignored. Although we do have committees that keep track of less actives. It's just we are usually talking about sending them cookies or raking their leaves so we can help them come back, I don't remember the assassin portion of ward council😁.

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2 minutes ago, MarginOfError said:

Okay.  just checking.  The existence of the vigilante group the Danites is pretty well documented.  But yeah, what the Avenging Angel portrays is...well, the Danites were neither organized nor intelligent enough to pull off that kind of work.

You mean like this:

https://www.lds.org/study/history/topics/danites?lang=eng

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4 hours ago, Scott said:

I haven't read the novel in question and have no desire to, but yes the book is almost surely speaking of blood atonement.

Here are some of the quotes (there are a lot more) by Brigham Young on the matter.

Journal of Discourses, volume 3, page 245:


Suppose you found your brother in bed with your wife, and put a javelin through both of them. You would be justified, and they would atone for their sins, and be received into the Kingdom of God. I would at once do so, in such a case; and under the circumstances, I have no wife whom I love so well that I would not put a javelin through her heart, and I would do it with clean hands....The blood of Christ will never wipe that out, your own blood must atone for it.

Journal of Discourses, volume 4, page 219:

The time has been in Israel under the law of God, the celestial law, or that which pertains to the celestial law, for it is one of the laws of that kingdom where our Father dwells, that if a man was found guilty of adultery, he must have his blood shed, and that is near at hand.

Brigham Young did make such comments, but reading through them, it seems evident that he was speaking about a future time (and more modern Church leaders don't seem to agree with him on this).   I don't think anyone was executed for sins other than murder or treason during that time period.  
 

 

It should also be noted that pretty much every time someone disappeared or turned up dead in territorial Utah—a not-unheard-of event anywhere in the frontier west—lurid tales of having somehow become a victim of the Danites tended to be trotted out without any real evidence (the Babbitt train attack, for example).  

As MoE hints, the LDS leadership were given a LOT more credit—both for their purported omniscience, and for their control over the minutiae of daily life—than they really merited; and based on the fragmentary statistics available it appears that on the whole, frontier Utah was safer than pretty much anywhere else in the Old West.  

Edited by Just_A_Guy
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10 hours ago, Maureen said:

Have you never heard of Strenghening Church Members Committee?

M.

Maureen, to just float that and then skitter away without further elaboration does a real disservice to truth.  

Yes, the committee in question is known to have clipped public news stories about high-profile Mormon dissidents and passed them on to local leadership.  No, it does not “monitor all communications, including emails” of particular targets; and never has.  

Edited by Just_A_Guy
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Yay - anti fiction!   If you get through to the end and are still unsated, I'd recommend this one:

1190.jpg?v=1524640993

The full title is, get this:

Quote

U.S.A. Uncle Sam's abscess
or
Hell upon earth for U.S. Uncle Sam.
By W. Jarman, Esq.,
K.G.L., T.C.K., Knight of the Grand Legion of North America,
who
suffered twelve years in the Mormon hell on earth,
as one of the "virgins without guile,"
and a priest after the order of Melchizedek:
where polygamy, incest, and murder are taught and practised as religion under the "all seeing eye,"
and the sign "Holiness unto the Lord." 

It tells quite a story.  Dude wakes up and tries to get out of Utah, so they sick Porter Rockwell on him.  Porter is about to kill him, but dude offers him some booze, which is so good apparently, that Porter lets him go as a gesture of respect for a fellow whiskey drinker.   1884 was a good year for romanticized fiction loosely based on names that occasionally made the news back east.

 

Edited by NeuroTypical
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8 minutes ago, NeuroTypical said:

It tells quite a story.  Dude wakes up and tries to get out of Utah, so they sick Porter Rockwell on him.  Porter is about to kill him, but dude offers him some booze, which is so good apparently, that Porter lets him go as a gesture of respect for a fellow whiskey drinker.   1884 was a good year for romanticized fiction loosely based on names that occasionally made the news back east.

Those were the days that the honor of a man actually meant something.

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