From The Wall Street Journal:
[A] comprehensive new study released by Baylor University … shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.
Most Mormons know little about these dark corners of their history, usually because they are told that they should not give credence to anything that is not “faith promoting”, which is too bad. In the last year, I have done my own reading on the history of the LDS sect and on Joseph Smith in particular.
The Washington Post has a recent review of two books on Mormon history. The first, Devil’s Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy by David Roberts, recounts the migration of Mormons to Utah in the mid-1850’s under Brigham Young’s leadership:
To save money and thereby maximize the number of Mormons able to make the trek, Young decided to forgo horse- and oxen-drawn wagons in favor of human-powered push carts. The handcarts cost a 10th of what wagons and draft animals did, and they promised to fill Utah with Mormons before too many gentiles arrived.
The journey of the handcart travelers from Iowa to Utah became a defining myth of Mormon history, the equivalent … of the voyage of the Mayflower in American colonial history. Subsequent generations of Mormons took pride in their descent from handcart pioneers; as with the Mayflower, more than a few of the claims of lineage were spurious.
[T]he mythmaking has a sinister aspect, crossing the line into historical cover-up. The handcart companies — as these traveling groups were called — suffered from hunger, disease, exposure and death; their mortality rate dramatically exceeded the average for overland companies, despite the fact that the Mormons traveled but half the distance covered by the much more numerous immigrants to California and Oregon. Most of the 3,000 handcart travelers treated the journey as a heavenly ordained test of their faith; Roberts, making compelling use of their diaries and other records, considers it a criminal fiasco imposed on the innocent migrants by the arrogant, unbending leaders of their church.
Throughout Devil’s Gate, Roberts shows great sympathy for the travelers but none for those who set them in motion.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre is a totally different story (Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy, Ronald W. Walker):
No such positive interpretation is possible regarding another, almost contemporary episode in early Mormon history. During the summer of 1857, an emigrant wagon train from Arkansas crossed Utah heading for California. The train had nearly cleared Mormon territory, reaching Mountain Meadows in the southeastern part of the settled region of Utah, when it was attacked by a band of Paiute Indians. Several members of the train were killed, and the survivors circled their wagons to defend themselves. After a few days of siege, a party of Mormons appeared and offered to escort the Arkansans past the Paiutes to safety. The Arkansans accepted the offer and filed out. A short distance from the wagons, the Mormons fell on the emigrants and massacred 120 adults and teenagers of both sexes, sparing only the young children.
For decades the leaders of the Mormon community concealed what happened at Mountain Meadows.
I recommend the following books if you want to understand the LDS sect:
I re-read this article at least twice a year. Why do people refuse to change their way of thinking and way of life? This has unavoidable religious implications:
What if you were given that choice? For real. What if it weren’t just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate performance with life and death? Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing CEO. We’re talking actual life or death now. Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn’t, your time would end soon — a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?
Yes, you say?
Try again.
Yes?
You’re probably deluding yourself.
You wouldn’t change.
Don’t believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That’s nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?
This revelation unnerved many people in the audience last November at IBM’s “Global Innovation Outlook” conference. The company’s top executives had invited the most farsighted thinkers they knew from around the world to come together in New York and propose solutions to some really big problems. They started with the crisis in health care, an industry that consumes an astonishing $1.8 trillion a year in the United States alone, or 15% of gross domestic product. A dream team of experts took the stage, and you might have expected them to proclaim that breathtaking advances in science and technology — mapping the human genome and all that — held the long-awaited answers. That’s not what they said. They said that the root cause of the health crisis hasn’t changed for decades, and the medical establishment still couldn’t figure out what to do about it.
Dr. Raphael “Ray” Levey, founder of the Global Medical Forum, an annual summit meeting of leaders from every constituency in the health system, told the audience, “A relatively small percentage of the population consumes the vast majority of the health-care budget for diseases that are very well known and by and large behavioral.” That is, they’re sick because of how they choose to live their lives, not because of environmental or genetic factors beyond their control. Continued Levey: “Even as far back as when I was in medical school” — he enrolled at Harvard in 1955 — “many articles demonstrated that 80% of the health-care budget was consumed by five behavioral issues.” Levey didn’t bother to name them, but you don’t need an MD to guess what he was talking about: too much smoking, drinking, eating, and stress, and not enough exercise
Mind-bending.
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said “Stop! Don’t do it!”
“Why shouldn’t I?” he said.
I said, “Well, there’s so much to live for!”
He said, “Like what?”
I said, “Well…are you religious or atheist?”
He said, “Religious.”
I said, “Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?”
He said, “Christian.”
I said, “Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?”
He said, “Protestant.”
I said, “Me too! Are you Presbyterian or Baptist?”
He said, “Presbyterian!”
I said, “Wow! Me too! Are you a conservative Presbyterian or mainline Presbyterian?”
He said, “Conservative Presbyterian!”
I said, “Me too! Are you presuppositional, or are you evidential?”
He said, “Presuppositional!”
I said, “Me too! Are you a theonomic, or a non-theonomic?”
He said, “Theonomic!”
I said, “Me too! Are you a sabbatarian, or a non-sabbatarian?”
He said, “Sabbatarian!”
I said, “Me too! Are you a psalm-singer, or a hymn-singer?”
He said, “Hymn-singer!”
I said, “Die, heretic scum!” And pushed him off.
(with apologies to Emo Philips)
