Persecution, persecution, persecution! Oh! You poor Mormons!

The flowing question was posted on Yahoo! Answers, the other day:

“Mormon haters, why do you hate the mormons? what did we do to you?

i want to know why you dislike or hate the mormons. dont give me the stuff about they said this and this and this so i hate them, because newsflash, people are going to say things you disagree with. so cry me a river, build me a bridge, and GET OVER IT. otherwise tell me why you vow our downfall and suffering.”

Oh, the arrogance of youth!

There was a boy at my school –lets call him Jim- who was constantly whining about how unfair it was that he was always being hit and beaten up by other pupils at the school. Jim complained to his mother who complained to the headmaster about how her dear little boy, Jim, who never did anything wrong, was always being picked on and how it was terrible that the teachers would do nothing to help Jim or to look after him.

His mother and father were so concerned that they asked for the headmaster to arrange a meeting to discuss what the school could do about the terrible problems their son Jim was facing.

This presented the headmaster with something of a dilemma. He had to find a way to tell Mr and Mrs that the reason their angelic little son Jim was a great, hulking brute, who kept being bested in fights was because he would goad and bully other children, who were usually much younger than he was, and would goad and deliberately start fights with pupils of his own age or slightly older.

He would land the first two blows and when they instinctively hit back, Jim would thrown himself onto the ground, curl up into a ball and start yelling and screaming at the top of his lungs that so-and-so was beating him up. (Eventually the teachers got wise to this and ignored it as much as they could.)

Nobody ever was able to work out what Jim’s problem was and I think his parents refused to have Jim seen by the school psychologist, the service of whom was offered by the headmaster. Well, after all, they knew that it wasn’t their son’s fault, so why would HE need to be seen by the school psychologist?

I think this genuine case is a good analogy for the so-called persecution of the Mormon Church and the Mormons. In the early days of its history, the Mormon Church was by-and-large welcomed with open arms by the local people who they came to live near. But the leaders of the church began to covert the goods, land and property of their neighbours and plotted to steal it from them. With violence and murder if needs be.

When the so-called gentiles found out about this they decided to defend themselves against the Mormon menace as it had become.

“Persecution, persecution, persecution!” screamed the Mormons. “Why are you persecuting us?”

“Because you are members of a dangerous robber-cult lead by a murderous set of crooks, criminals and fraudsters who plan to kill us, drive us from our homes, take our widowed wives to marry for yourselves and also steal our lands and property!” was the perfectly reasonably reply.

The Mountain Meadows Massacre was a perfect example of what happens when a religious cult is founded and operated by bad men.

In more recent years (with the several exceptions of Mormons like Ted Bundy) the Mormons have tended to concentrating on killing their own, so the idea of Mormons (usually, though not exclusively, the traditional Brighamite Mormon groups) as murderous thugs has faded somewhat from the conscious mind of the public. Though a vestigial memory of Mormons as dangerous and murderous thugs might still be part of folk law memory of some areas. And finding out that Great-great Uncle Zeke was taken out and murdered by Danites and his body never recovered might upset some people to this very day.

The Mormon exclusion of non-Mormons from temple weddings is very upsetting for non-members and baptism for the dead is perceived by many as being morally wrong, repulsive and evil at worst and at best, culturally offensive.

Mormons cannot conceive that they are offensive and arrogant. That in fact they, the Mormons persecute other Mormons and non-Mormons on an almost continual basis. So when someone snaps and response to the goading and proddings of the Mormons or the Mormon Church, the wail of “Persecution, persecution, persecution!” is raised up and the Mormons put this down to the wickedness of the world. Not to their own wickedness, of course.