#mormons

[spurgie-cousin]

This is such a good, succinct way of describing the illusion of choice many fundamentalist women and men have when it comes to life paths.

[mysharona1987]

[lizartgurl]

I gave Kearon a tie

[that-bitch-kat3]

marauders as shit my friends have said:

remus: if you could see anyone live who would it be?

james: the beatles

sirius: queen probably

peter: the mormon tabernacle choir

remus: … why?

peter: i just feel like they’ve really got something special

[uncle-beanbag-mojave]

Joseph Smith is responsible for starting World War I. You can actually go back even further than that to the Protestant Reformation and the invention of the printing press allowing dissemination of information, which allowed people to read the Bible and interpret it in their own hands. It took the power away from the clergy, which the poor people wouldn't necessarily be literate enough to read the Bible, so they had to trust the clergy to interpret the Bible for them. This led to a lot of schisms, which led to a lot of offshoots, especially in upper New York in the early 1800s, which is where Jehovah's Witnesses come from, Seventh-day Adventists come from, and Mormons. Joseph Smith is the man who started the Mormon religion, and he is responsible for creating it and gaining followers to it.

There was a gunsmith who was named Jonathan Browning. And he left his first wife to convert to Mormonism and take a second wife, and then came out to Orm, Utah. There he had a son named John Moses, who ended up creating his own rifles, and the rifles made their way back east to the Winchester Company, who saw the single shot drop action, or single shot rifles, loved the design, went on a train out to Utah from Connecticut to meet with the designer of the rifle. Found out it was a kid who was less than 20 years old at the time. They hired him on to do work with them, and he would be paid per patent. A lot of Winchester's iconic rifle and shotgun designs come from John Moses Browning.

John Moses Browning, after several years of working with Winchester, wanted to be paid royalties on his patents, and Winchester denied paying royalties. Since he had operated as a flat rate per patent, that's all they were willing to give him, so he went elsewhere. First he went to Remington, but that deal didn't quite go through until much later. But then he went on a trip to Europe, and a company that was nearly bankrupt called Fabrique Nationale in Belgium, ended up purchasing a couple of his designs, and he helped bring the company back from the verge of bankruptcy. Fabrique Nationale took one of his designs and created the Model 1910 pistol, also known as the Model 1910 Browning, which was a very popular pistol in Europe. In 1914 in Sarajevo, a man by the name of Gavrilo Princip took a Model 1910 Browning pistol that was created in Liège, Belgium, and shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary with it. The assassination of the Archduke with the Model 1910 pistol kicked off the First World War. It's a direct line, but Joseph Smith is not directly responsible for it, and you can argue, yes, Gavrilo Princip could have used any other type of handgun, but he didn't. He used a Model 1910 Browning, which was created by John Moses Browning, who wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the Mormons, and his father converting to Mormonism and taking a second wife, and Mormonism wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Joseph Smith. So in a direct line of causation, Joseph Smith is responsible for the start of World War I. But you can go beyond that, because World War I fundamentally changed the entire structure of the world. So the modern world as it sits can be blamed on fucking Mormons.

[ramshacklefey]

It's amazing to me just how good the Mormon church has been at hiding just how bad they really are from public view. Even the shit that gets spread around is the relatively harmless bullshit. They had a crazy prophet with magic glasses. They believe in god-mandated polygyny. They think everyone who is good enough will get their very own planet after the world ends. They wear magic underpants. Mormon men are all paladins.

Here's one of the ones you hear less often:

See, like many other Christian sects, the Mormons really do believe that the existence of Christ obviates the existence of Judaism. Judaism was just a placeholder until the "real" church could be established by Jesus.

And the Mormons in particular believe, dead ass, that the entire inheritance of Israel has been given to them, because the Jews failed to recognize the Messiah when he was on Earth. They really do. They have this whole system where people are given a "divine revelation" about which of the Tribes of Israel they're a member of (don't worry, they decided that most people belong to the two tribes that are willing to "adopt" people. Only the most specialest boys and girls are members of the original ten).

Let's sum up so far. The Mormons believe that they are the people of Israel, chosen and protected by God. If Jews want to get back in on that party, they can always repent and convert to Mormonism, the one true church to which God gave all the rights and blessings that were originally bestowed on Abraham's house.

But it doesn't stop there!

The Mormons also believe, in all seriousness, that all Indigenous peoples of the Americas are descended from a small group of Jewish people who left just before the fall of Jerusalem (~600 bc iirc). Their entire weird-ass extra bible is a chronicle of those people's history in [unspecific part of America]. At the very beginning of the book, two brothers in the original family turn away from god, so they and all their descendants are cursed with dark skin, so that the good Nephites (who remain "white and delightsome") will always be able to tell themselves apart from the wicked Lamanites.

So, you've got supposedly Jewish people running around the Americas. And the "good" ones are white, and the "bad" ones are brown. Then, ofc, Jesus comes to visit them (I guess supposedly that's part of what he was doing during his dirt nap? Or possibly after he left again, it's not clear), and they all convert to Christianity, which they think is clearly the natural evolution of Judaism. Well, at the end of the book, all of them become wicked, in a kind of weird pseudo-apocalyptic series of events. They are all cursed with dark skin, until such time as they repent for their ancestors sins and return to the gospel.

But of course, Mormons being the good and kind people they are, they want everyone to receive the blessings of God and be brought into the houses of Israel etc etc. And it isn't the fault of those poor little Indigenous children that their distant ancestors turned away from God and became wicked.

So what's the natural answer? Well, Mormons are real big on missionary work, as we all know. But apparently that wasn't enough in this case.

Because the Mormon church has been one of the big players in abducting as many Indigenous children as possible, in order to indoctrinate them into being good Mormons, so that they can turn white again and be blessed. My mother remembers hearing talks about this in the 70s and 80s. The church literally had a "Lamanite Adoption Program," where families in the church were encouraged to get as many Indigenous children as possible away from their families and not let them be reunited until they were fully assimilated and ready to go back and proselytize about how wonderful the church is.

The church leadership literally talked about how wonderful it was to see these children becoming whiter. Actually whiter. Like, saying that when they finally saw them with their families again, it was beautiful how much paler they were.

I'm pretty sure this program has been officially ended, but it doesn't take a genius to speculate about who might be behind the curtains on the movement in the western US to gut the ICWA....

So yeah. Next time someone tries to tell you that the Mormons are just harmless weirdos, please remember that they're an antisemitic cult that advocates for the forced assimilation of Indigenous children to help them escape the cursed brown skin of their ancestors.

[creature-wizard]

I keep seeing people talking about the LDS Church like it's just another form of Christianity. And like, no, it's really not. Its mythology is super racist and it's extremely controlling, especially of women. Go watch Alyssa Grenfell on YouTube and educate yourself.