Recently I read Fawn Brodie’s biography of the charismatic charlatan and all around creep, Joseph Smith, founder of the cult religion, Mormonism. The book came out in the early seventies and is a bit stodgy; however, it is backed up with solid historical matter, for Brodie was a historian of some note, a Pulitzer Prize winner. Jane who is an apostate Mormon (which means she is psychologically free), to use their jargon, cued me into the book. What I came away with are some generalization about Smith and the abominations he created from his so-called “revelations.” As an atheist I just wagged my head continually as I read about this mouse that roared across America. As Brodie says somewhere, these early religions in America were mostly a combination of piety and avarice (Anabaptists, Methodists, Shakers, et al). Associate to Elmer Gantry.
Materialism runs rampant throughout Smith’s life, the attaining of riches, the grifter seeking ways to accumulate riches, telling others that his dicta was “divinely” inspired. It continues with Brigham Young, a cretinous, vicious man who increasingly foisted polygamy upon Mormon women for his own sexual needs, and for the sexual needs of Mormon men basted in a sauce of religiosity, all man-made, of course, to serve their purposes. I define Mormonism as a man-made religion (aren’t they all?) that is rooted in misogyny and materialism. Some caustic Catholic wit of the Renaissance said that English Protestantism came from the testicles of Henry VIII. Mormonism flowed from the demented, self-acquisitive mind of a delusional grifter who composed a hodge-podge of Old and New testaments, Egyptian hieroglyphics, racism, into a potpourri of self-justifications we now call the Book of Mormon, or as Twain said about its prose and content, “Chloroform in print.” The only other book so made up of babble is the Koran.
Reading Brodie’s book I was appalled as each self-serving idea that Smith came upon or thought of was then justified or rationalized by a concomitant “revelation” to support it. Smith would later on walk about with scribes as if anything that emerged from his mind to his lips was holy writ. Often he would go into a room and compose his revelation and return to his congregation with this newly minted canon. Charlatan supreme! Remarkable to read about. After years he had pages rife with all kinds of revelations, so many, I imagine, in contradiction to others; so he made up his junk theology as he went along. At one time he had a seer stone that he “consulted” privately and which supposedly he could get divine inspiration or revelation for after all, he was a “prophet.” What is appalling, what is achingly mysterious, what is frightening is the immense gullibility of his followers. I could argue that about Christianity — Magi, Star of Bethelem, ascension and resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, many rooted in Greek myths, Apollo, to wit. For edification and support for my contentions see Homer Smith’s Man and His Gods, with an introduction by Albert Einstein.
The blackest deed of all with respect to Joseph Smith was to foist his inner delusions as conscious theology, grounded in his gamboling narcissism, upon abject believers, many of whom, seemed feral in their worldview. Others knew he was corrupt; others did not want to believe so. The whole fabricated story of golden plates, how he constructed a box to contain them, and how he very often refused even his closest friends or followers to see his seer stone, and his “visions” et al strains one’s idea of rationality. C’mon, fo/ks, he came from upstate New York and was one of the locals! His early life was as a scam artist ( all of his family had visions as well) and a he grew to learn that the greatest scam game of all was religion and how improving upon this street alley shell game, he realized as the years went along that he had a very good thing going here. We all have our Pauls, the fabricator of Christianity. Rather, Smith was an imposter, and the DSM III, used by psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers lists this as a character disorder. He was more than a narcissist. There is not a religious leader alive, in my opinion, who is not in some aspect paranoid. After all, they speak for god, tell us what god would feel about social issues and so on. The megalomania is manifest. If you hear voices, if god speaks to you, if you listen to a burning bush, that is there, I contend. There is a body of psychological thought that maintains it is so, that most human beings are psychotic. Think about it before you dismiss it.
Human beings are capable of gross stupidities. Their eternal need to go on in an after life drives almost all religions and especially Mormonism which, in fact, justified polygamy as a way to continue on well-heeled and with one’s life and wives! – as any Egyptian pharaoh in eternal life. In fact, the more wives you had here in the present the better your reign with your “celestial queens” would be in the after life. And do not be deceived to think that only the ignorant and illiterate swallowed up this canard; the Puritans were well-educated in many cases and they wallowed in their Salem witch trials. The Mormons also went through inquisitorial periods, the “Reformation”, as it was called and the hideous deformation called “Blood Atonement,” really justifications by the Mormon “priestly” class to sustain, reinvirgorate or to maintain the status quo. All religions purge heresies and exercise cruel ways to deal with apostates. This week the US Congress voted to reaffirm the motto “In God We Trust,” because we had nothing else to do but essentially slap Obama for some misquote he made about it. The ridiculousness to affirm a deity while Joe Blow can’t get work next store is just a monument to the unpleasant assholes we are as a species.
Ironically, a few basic tenets of Mormonism which reflect Christianity’s belief in the goodness of a kind god, of redemption, of charity and forgiveness, and all the rest circulate about the core of Mormonism, but in my eyes, they are and have been only minor moons to this Leviathan of repression, suppression and often times hate and vengeance, the notorious Mountain Meadows Massacre, to wit. I go to a Mormon dentist and we chat now and then. I brought up this historical heinous deed in which Mormon men and some Indians attacked a wagon train of men, women and children, or Gentiles, essentially on a hideous errand by Brigham Young, who washed his hands of it as he always did, to staunch this supposed threat to Mormonism. The pioneers were savagely cut down after being told they would have an armed escort for their protection; children were slain, one raped by a Mormon elder, Mr. Lee. All children were purposely killed who might remember any of this. Infants were given up to adoption in some cases. All in all, similar, to some degree, to what the Nazis did in WW II at Lidice, in retaliation for the killing of Heydrich. I would argue that in Mormonism over 150 years ago their was a fascism of a kind that emanated from the priestly class.
Parenthetically, the dentist told me that essentially the religion was good but that men do evil deeds. Ah, an apologist, for he is so conditioned he cannot allow his mind to consider from whence he originated or to challenge the source of his belief system. Stick to teeth, doc
And now I can speak of Stenhouse who wrote Tell It All. As I said, I read Brodie’s biography and prior to that a fairly objective acount of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. A quick tangent. For over a 100 years the Mormons have twisted and lied about that event once it got around; they have excused it, and of course, rationalized it and mostly denied it. Historical reasons given for its occurrence. All bullshit. Only very recently was a monument set up at the sight and Jane who went to visit it, shared with me how there was a dearth of signs to lead the way. In short, it is an embarrassment and because of that you have to get lost before you can find the memorial. Even in their death, these people can’t get their due. Oh why speak about injustice. If you were to define humanity, part of the definiton would have to ascribe to our species its capacity for inhumanity and injustice.
So with two books behind me I was given this book by Stenhouse, a Mormon believer, who decided to reveal all of her experience as a Mormon and Mormon wife, as the wife of a polygamist, of her internalizing absolute rage toward this practice and having to keep her own counsel and wits about her, lest she would be punished in some way. Brilliant in the writing, it is also brilliant in her capacity to touch upon the slights and psychological insults done to her — and all women she would remark –by polygamy. Polygamy was added on while Smith still lived and exquisitely developed by Young. I have to say that her writing strikes me as something composed by Jane Austen or the Brontes, rather a merger of both. The book is riveting, tremendously insightful not into Mormonism alone but of the terrible havoc wrought upon women. Her insights into women far outweigh her insights into men, for I have concluded there is not much to men to begin with when compared to the sensitivites and sensibilites of women. One can make the case that this is also a forerunner of feminism.
I relish each page as I am reading it now, the prose of the Nineteenth Century, Latinate in expression, but once you get the pattern it is a go. I respect her love for what is good in any religion and here, as an atheist, I can readily accept that in her as she might accept, perhaps, my atheism. We disagree on first causes; however, after that she is the sharp scythe of death as she examines how what she believed in from her youth is slowly eviscerated, corrupted and abused for all kinds of reasons by a priestly class run on testosterone. I have come to like this woman for an oxymoronic feeling of being stern and soft, caring and compassionate and yet using that steely mind of hers to see through cant. I struggle with her need to overthrow the tyranny of an abyssmal religion with abyssmal consequences especially for women, and yet she retain her humanity and goodness. An acute reader of men and women, I will quote only one line that got me chuckling for its aptness and acuity. She says of polygamy and the men who installed it for their own sexual needs:”She little knew, poor girl, when she married, that a Mormon’s heart is like a honeycomb — there is always a vacant cell wherein another may nestle.”
The most powerful theme here is that a woman with a first class mind, with acute sensibilities, with a rigorous mind that considers reason a way out of and a way into, had to squelch and stifle her not inconsiderable abilites for decades, abiding with polygamy, with her becoming a second wife, of dealing with a stranger in her midst of equal weight to herself, almost, as a first wife. The intricacies of that kind of life are explored, but given the times she alludes to or hints at the sexual intimacies that are also involved, for instance, that Mormon men far past their middle age, seek out young wives in their teens because it is written or it is revealed that the more children they have now the more their estate will be in the hereafter. Mormonism rests upon a gland. She leaves the machinations of sex to our minds which lets us fill in the spaces. Stenhouse does free herself, but that is for another blog. Sister Stenhouse is Sysyphus revealed and her slog through the moral turpitude which was Mormonism at that time is something to behold. The costs were immeasurable to her sense of self-respect, dignity and integrity, constantly under assault while she kept her own counsel. I can only imagine what her blood pressure was like.
If I knew where she was buried and if somehow in that locale, I would pay her grave a visit. A great woman!
Pastiche and that Mormon Thing
Since my last blog I’ve been preoccupied with editing This Mobius Strip of Ifs, which is a mixture of essays and memoirs on education, Existentialism, writing, family, movies, death, living, separation, attachment and psychological abandonment as well as societal conditioning. Whew! After pretty well “scrubbing” the text, Jane and I still found about 50 corrections to make, some requiring re-phrasing, others making the text more felicitous. All tedious and necessary. It is a sturdy book; if better than that, I leave it to reviewers. I have sent out a copy to a contest as well as other work as well. I am a believer in contests, all so Darwinian. Concomitant with all this, I’ve made lists of literary bloggers and have posted queries to about 150 sites and I expect to get a small sampling back. You just have to keep scouring directories, Yahoo, New Pages, etc for sites that suit your genre, in this case memoir/essay. Although not a joiner, I did sign up at bookblogs.ning.com which deals with all kinds of variations, including non-fiction work.
While all this is going on my next book is at the starting gate, “I Truly Lament,” a collection of short stories on various aspects of the Holocaust, a follow up to The i Tetralogy.” It has been edited very well, quite spiffy, and except for a few final touches it will go out to a major contest within a week or so as a word document or PDF, as some reviewers are willing to do that — the writing world is changing as I write. I will coddle this book, hopefully acquiring a publisher rather than self-publishing. It has stainless steel balls, for 10 stories have been published in 2010-2011 from the collection. As usual I go out on the limb in this book.
I lurch daily from editing, seeking out bloggers for possible reviews, making lists of potential things to do to push the book, worrying about deadlines for this and that and squeaking in here and there a book to read, which in this case is American Massacre by Sally Denton, the sordid tale of the Mountain Meadows Massacre committed by the theocratic state of the Mormons. Let me be clear here: it was the most significant atrocity ever committed on American soil until the bombing by Mcvey in Oklahoma. I have read at least three able books about the Mormons, one on the massacre itself and it wasn’t until I read Denton’s work that I got a more complete understanding of what had happened. A previous blog on Fanny Stenhouse will bring you up up to date, for I’d rather give my emotional response to what I read without giving all the details — that is your task if interested.
Observations: Brigham Young was a crypto-fascist, wrong word to use, but in all aspects he was; he did not collude in the massacre of an emigrant wagon train of settlers from Arkansas. He was directly responsible as much as Hitler was responsible for Dachau. One does not have to turn on the gas to be responsible for the act. The Mormon “church,” if that is what it is, has spent over a century in a cover up, in one fashion or another for the killing of at least 140 men and women, the rape of one girl if not two by R. D. Lee, the enrapt and obeisant follower of Young. What I am about to say is the crux of it all. The mental conditioning, the cult-like behavior within the church’s own doctrines and the theocracy which ruled Utah was so despotic and corrosively and psychologically invasive of its people it led to the classic “in” group versus the “out” group, in this case Mormons versus the Federal government. When you read about this group you sense that it is like reading about Jim Jones, except in this instance, the Mormons externalized their rage and fears on an innocent group. I conclude it is a church of followers; consequently I doubt in the forseeable future any great art emanating from this insular group.
I am at the point when I was first learned about the Holocaust — appalled, enraged, furious, angered, hateful, disgusted, seeking some punishment for the perpetrators. Until very recently the Mormons stonewalled any efforts to reveal the total truth, these so-called people of the book. The worst hypocrites are religious people, for they are ruled and dominated by a doctrine and they are in no way free of their conditioning. They revel in their blindness. When unearthing fragments of bones, skulls, and the like, archaeologists were pressured by the Mormon church to cease and desist, an old tradition in that church; the scientists were furious and rightfully so, for their preliminary results pointed directly at white men and not Indians responsible for the killing. In short, historically the church has taken miniscule steps to allow true inquiry into its role in that massacre. And historically, like all good white men of the day, they blamed the local Indians for the deed, although in fact Mormon men dressed and painted up as the Indians controlled and carried out the act, and that act was deliberately carried out through a chain of command going back directly to Brigham Young who used what we would today call, “plausible deniability.” Corrupt, venal, cut-throat, base, coarse, rude and vulgar, he wrapped himself in the relgious cloak of infallibility and let his henchmen take the rap. Years later after two trials only one man, R.D. Lee, was executed. By the way, the U. S. government did collude in not pursuing the case for all kinds of political reasons. A few very honorable human beings did protest, crypto-Schindlers. Ah, the repetition compulsion of the human race.
Like the Nazis, who collected the luggage, shoes, hair and gold teeth from their victims at the extermination camps, after the massacre wagons were loaded up with the dresses of the slain women, their earrings, personal items, their shoes, undergarments, and the clothing of the men as well as the stock they had driven from Arkansas, their wagons — the bodies were left stripped and nude and observers saw wolves feasting on their carcasses for weeks after. In short, all the paraphernalia was collected and driven back to Salt Lake City in wagons where women were employed to wash out the blood from the garments, press and iron them. I associated to how the Germans cleansed human hair and wove them into blankets for their troops on the eastern front. The few very young children who were eight or younger were allowed to live because of some decrepit Mormon doctrine and often assigned to the homes of the very slayers of their parents!The personal trauma was astounding, haunting them for the rest of their lives and their descendants as well. In one grotesque and horrific incident, R. D. Lee heard his young “adopted” girl see his wife and say that it was the dress her mother had and so were the earrings; with that Lee got up and cut her throat. So she was psychologically killed once and now he killed her forever. I give you one of the high officers of the church.
Denton writes in a measured voice, for she is an investigative journalist; it all sneaked up on me, the culminatively arraying of facts so that conclusions are more powerful because they are not driven home. I’m at that point that I am ready to debate any Mormon I find in Nevada about the hideousness of his past, for I do believe that we all have to metabolize our personal and collective pasts if we are to move ahead in some way toward a better life or existence. The Mormons, I believe, are a frozen collective, and in many aspects are a cult much like Scientology. It is brain control of a significant kind. Jane is not a “Jack Mormon,” which according to a definition is a Mormon who does not follow the church but has a measure of devotion to it. Jane is an apostate, thank ”god,”a tried and blue atheist and she sees through her Mormon upbringing with a laser eye. I will only say, perennial shrink that I am, here and there, like a stone on the road I catch Jane’s conditioning , which I point out to her. It often takes the shape of obeisance. And sometimes with love and sometimes with anger, I go after that, for I detest enslavement of any kind, especially mind conrol from a church.
Only recently Jane received a call from a Mormon elder asking if she was interested in…You can fill it in. Jane thought about it and said no. She informedme that they never let go, or stop trying. In any case I think to test her mettle she thought it might be very interesting if she invited the elder back to discuss her reentry into the church. I questioned her about her motives, but she wanted this and saw through to herself. In any case two men arrived, one older than the other, dressed in black, and I was informed by Jane they come in twos. After two hours with them, I returned home because she had requested I leave, knowing that I would have gone at them fast and furious about other things. What had happened? The same old crap, but this time she argued evolution and gave them her considerable knowledge about this and that and as she told me this her eyes rolled up because it was all so useless. I could have saved her the time. When you are a zombie, aspirin doesn’t help and sweet reason does not stay the hand at the oven’s door. A few days letter a note on yellow foolscap, folded in four, was at my doorstep, addressed to Sister Holt, her maiden name, asking her if she would like to attend the next church meeting, etc. Note that Jane tells the story while in a temple in Utah she asked one of the tour guides what was her first name as they were addressing one another as sister. Jane was told this was natural and normal; however, when asked what was the first name of her companion guide, she could not(!) give it because she did not know it. I give you a slave.
Probably the most hated, the most loathed symbol to a Mormon is the question mark.
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Posted in Commentary, Culture
Tagged Brigham Young, Fanny Steinhouse, Mormonism, Mountain Meadows Massacre, Sally Denton