Evils of religion Part 11: Brigham Young and the Mountain Meadows Massacre

 

 

The Mormon Church has - finally - officially acknowledged that Joseph Smith was a polygamist, having had as many as 40 wives. Though they stopped short of calling him a pederast (as I did in a previous column), they did admit that one of his wives was only 14 years old.

Evils of religion Part 9: How a sexual predator became a spiritual leader

While it was recently acknowledged by the LDS church that Joseph Smith did, indeed, practice and teach polygamy, less well known is his sordid sexual history.

Like nearly all charismatic cult leaders from Muhammed to Jim Jones to David Koresh, Smith (and his successor, Brigham Young) claimed it was “God’s will” to take the pretty daughters and wives of his followers for himself.

Evils of religion Part 8: The scam that became Mormonism

 

There is no perfect church. While I believe in the Christianity Jesus started, even a religion that has hewed as closely as possible to Christ’s teachings will be populated by imperfect people. Every religion has embarrassments both in their past and their present. How can a reasonable person decide which of these embarrassments is forgivable, and which is a deal breaker?

More on the Book of Mormon

Turtle Submarine

1875 artist's depiction

As I was slogging through the Book of Mormon for the article I wrote last week, I kept thinking of The Emperor’s New Clothes.That story was first published in Denmark in 1837, so it’s unlikely that Hans Christian Anderson had the Book of Mormon in mind specifically. But no doubt he’d met his fair share of charlatans and was writing about all of them.

When you read something hard to understand, there is a tendency to assume that you’re not smart enough, that the writer must know things you don’t. And if the writing contains a lot of “thee, thou, thine” language, it must be old, right?