#mormon
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@wdlindsy@toad.social"You’d be a sucker to take as truth anything coming from Republican leadership now, after the FBI announced catching the wrong person twice."
~ Marcie Jones
#TylerRobinson #Utah #Mormon
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https://www.wonkette.com/p/regime-already-working-overtime-to
So much for FREE SPEECH!
Wonkette @wdlindsy@toad.socialA very specific culture produced Tyler Robinson.
That culture deserves attention, in a nation that constantly claims religion has a robust role to play in the public square — but with media and powerful figures seeking to define religion in a very exclusive way that prioritizes some religious expressions and demonizes others.
We need honest, real, open discussion of these matters.
@wdlindsy@toad.socialStaging is now being set into place to produce a sleight-of-hand trick that will resurrect the lie that a trans leftist person lies behind Charlie Kirk's shooting, even after we've learned that a white cisgender male raised in a gun-toting Republican-voting Trump-loving Mormon family is the accused shooter.
The media are playing along with this staging and assisting Cox and the Mormon community in deflecting attention from Robinson's Mormon roots.
@wdlindsy@toad.socialUtah governor Spencer Cox is a 6th-generation Utahn and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints — a Mormon.
Charlie Kirk's shooter Tyler Robinson was raised in a very devout Mormon family. When Cox states that Robinson's values are different from those of his right-wing Republican-voting Trump-loving gun-toting family, he's trying to distance Robinson from the Mormon culture that bred, nurtured, and produced him.
Spencer Cox says suspect had been ‘radicalized’ and…
The Guardian @wdlindsy@toad.socialA high school classmate of Tyler Robinson tells us who he is, from her close-up perspective: not jusst cis, straight, white, a Nick Fuentes follower, but DEEPLY Mormon.
This is from a Threads posting linked below, turned into an Instagram graphic by meganandmeme.
#CharlieKirk #TylerRobinson #NickFuentes #Utah #Republican #Mormon
12. Mormon mother who says she's "been looking up at that old black ridge" since 1877... Gunlock, Utah
#Mormon #Gunlock #DorotheaLange #American #theGreatDepression #America #DorotheaLange-1234 #DorotheaLange’s #GunnisonCounty #Colorado #undefined #photography #DorotheaLange
9. Young mother. She lives in a Mormon hamlet... Gunlock, Washington County, Utah
#Mormon #Gunlock #WashingtonCounty #undefined #photography #DorotheaLange
I don’t think Mormonism is a cult. It doesn’t have the antisocial tendencies or harmful effects on members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance.
While LDS scriptures describe events set in the Americas, seemingly involve tropes about Whites and Amerindians, and react against beliefs common in American Protestantism like sola fide and predestination, it is not as American-centric as Islam is Arab-centric, with its ingrained hostility to relying on translations of the Qur’an.
One LDS thing I am a major fan of are the celestial rooms in their temples. Like even more splendid versions of a parlor in a fine home, they are like a sacralization of everyday life. #LDS #Mormonism #Mormon #architecture
RE: https://rape.pet/objects/c0062b36-89eb-4069-88e4-794496454677
I bet a sizeable portion of the Canadian traitors who long to be part of the US are Mormons living in Alberta. It’s part of the religion to believe that America is God’s chosen nation. My Mormon family members dream of getting “the call to the mountains” and moving to Utah for the second coming. They live in Southern Alberta where many Canadian Mormons live. #mormon #america #canada
TL;DR: I think a specific kind of "backward" reasoning, common in conservative religious traditions in the US, is one of the things driving the current crisis.
Long version:.......
First, my experience is with the LDS church, which has spent a few decades trying to be Evangelical enough to be buddies with the actual Evangelicals, and my experiences so far suggest that LDS church members have a lot in common with Evangelical Christians at this point in time, in regards to the issues in this long-ass post.
I was #LDS (i.e., #Mormon) for the first mumblenumbermumble decades of my life. I was taught--expicitly, not by the also-ubiquitous methods of "read-between-the-lines", "pay attention to consequences instead of words," etc.--that the right and proper way to #reason about all things religious was thus:
Find out what is true
Use all resources after that to support, justify, explain, and believe that truth
The first point is a problem, of course, because it comes before any external evidence. There is #evidence of a kind, but it is 100% subjective: the results of your #spiritual promptings or feelings or inspiration. You get these by praying really hard, thinking the right thoughts, etc. Thinking "negative" thoughts (often any kind of skepticism or doubt is included in this category) will drive the Holy Spirit away and he won't be able to tell you how true all the stuff is.
There are many people--and I truly believe they are almost all sincere and well-meaning--to help you navigate this difficult process. This means to help you come to the right conclusions (i.e., that Jesus is God and died for our sins, that Joseph Smith was His prophet, that the LDS church is the only true #church etc.). Coming to the "wrong" conclusions means you aren't doing it right, hard enough, humbly enough, etc. so you will keep at it, encouraged by family, friends, and leaders, until you get the "right" answer.
See, you make up your mind about the truth of things before acquiring any outside #evidence. I was a full-time missionary in Mexico for two years; I am aware that of course evidence does get used, but not the way a scientist or other evidence-informed person would use it. We used scriptures, #logic, personal stories, empirical data, etc. as merely one of many possible tools to bring another soul to Christ. LDS doctrine is clear on this (where its notably unclear on a huge range of other things): belief/#faith/testimony does not come from empirical evidence. It comes from the Holy Spirit, and only if you ask just right.
Empirical evidence, clear reasoning, etc. are nice but they're just a garnish; they're only condiments. The main meal is promptings (i.e., feelings) from the Holy Spirit. That is where true knowledge comes from. All other #knowledge is inferior and subordinate. All of it. If the Holy Spirit tells you the moon is cheese, then by golly you now have a cheesemoon. More disturbingly, if the Holy Ghost tells you to kill your neighbors, you should presumably do that. This kind of "prepare for the worst" thinking is a lot more common in conservative Christian groups than I think some people realize.
Anyway, you get these promptings. They're probably not because you're a sleep-deprived, angsty, sincere teenager who has been bathed and baked in this culture your entire life and has no concept of any outcome other than this. You get the promptings. Now you know. You know that Jesus is your Savior, that Joseph Smith was his prophet, that the LDS Church is the only true and living church on the face of the etc. etc.
You don't believe; you know.
So the next step is... nothing specific, really. You're done learning. That step is over. As we were reminded repeatedly as young missionaries: your job is to teach others, not to be taught by them. You go through the rest of your life with this knowledge, and you share it whenever you can. Of course, some events and facts and speech might make you doubt your hard-won knowledge. What to do?
You put the knowledge first and make the #facts fit it. You arrange the facts you see or read or whatever so that they fit this knowledge you acquired on your knees late at night with tears in your eyes, or in Sacrament Meeting the morning after a drama-filled youth conference. If you can't make the facts fit your knowledge, you reject the facts.
You seriously reject facts, and pretty casually. You might decide they aren't facts, or you might get really interested in the origin of anidea so you can discredit it, etc. Some people reject the theory of evolution. Others reject a history in in which many of the founding fathers of the USA were #atheist, #agnostic, or Not Very Good People. You can reject anything, really. You can reject the evidence of your eyes and ears, as the Party demands. It's kind of easy, in fact.
Millions of people think like this: they explicitly reject information that does not fit the narrative they have acquired through a process that depended 100% on subjective experiences (and, afterward, is heavily dominated by "authority figures" and trusted friends who tell you what to believe this week).
As a psychologist, even though #DecisionScience is not my area of research, I can tell you various ways in which one's #subjective experience can be manipulated, especially with the support of a life-saturating religious worldview and community. Relegating facts to a supporting role (at best) means giving all kinds of biases free rein in influencing your views. Facts were one of the things that might have minimized that process. In fact, I think facts as correctives for human biases was a main motivation underlying the development of the #ScientificMethod.
This becomes how you live your life: find out what's true, then rearrange your worldview, your attitudes, your specific beliefs, your behavior, and potentially even how you evaluate evidence to fit that knowledge. You aren't faking it, you aren't pretending; you simply believe something different. You see the world differently. I'm guessing you'd pass a lie detector test.
Note that nowhere in this process is there ever what a #philosopher, a #scientist, or a mathematician would call an "honest, open inquiry." That would imply uncertainty about the outcome of the inquiry. It would imply a willingness to accept unexpected answers if the evidence or reasoning led there. That's not possible because there can be only one answer: what you already know. Evidence cannot be allowed to threaten knowledge.
Coincidentally, now you're a perfect member of the Trump/Musk/whoever personality cult. All you need are some trusted sources (e.g. friends, neighbors, celebrities, local church leaders) to tell you that #Trump is a Good #Christian, that #AOC is secretly a communist, that #Obama was born in Africa, that Killary is literally eating babies, that a pizza parlor has a torture basement, that Zelensky is a villain and Putin a hero, etc. Literally anything. You haven't just learned how to do this; it is how your brain works, now. This is how "reasoning" happens. This is how belief and worldview and personal commitment are formed and shifted.
Now you casually accept new concepts like "crisis actors", "alternative facts", the "deep state", and "feelings-based reality." You have no problem doing this. Conspiracy theories are a cakewalk; you could fully believe six impenetrable Qanon ravings before breakfast.
I've seen progressives casually assume that Evangelical-type Christians are hypocrites, or lying, or "virtue signaling" as they state their support for whatever value-violating thing Trump or Musk or any national GOP figure has said or done (e.g., "Hey, I now believe that god doesn't love disabled people, after all!"). I've accused conservatives of those things things myself, though I don't actually believe that's what is happening. What we're seeing is not just hypocrisy or dishonesty. What's happening, at least with many religious people, is that a trusted leader has told them they should believe a different thing, so now they do. It's that simple. Many might even die for their new belief in the right circumstances (certain Christians are a little bit obsessed with the possibility of dying for their faith, so this isn't as high a bar as you might think).
Sure, some people who flipflop overnight probably are lying or putting on an act even they don't truly believe. However, many more are simply being who they are, or who they've become by existing in this ideological/cultural system for years.
Obviously, I believe this kind of reasoning is not good and makes the world a better place. I would like to reduce it or even eliminate it. It is embedded, though, with other dynamics: ingroup/outgroup tribalism, authoritarianism (boy howdy do conservative churches train you to be an authoritarian), prejudices of various kinds, and basic cognitive biases (which run rampant in such environments).
It's also bound up with religious #AntiIntellectualism. In the LDS church, for instance, there's a scripture that gets tossed around at election time saying that being educated is good, but only up to a point (any education that leads a person to question God's words, etc. is by definition too much" learning). As a person with a graduate degree, my last decade or so in the LDS church was marked by a more or less constant social tension from the possibility that I might "know too much".
Education reliably reduces this problematic kind of thinking/believing system in many people. Specifically, "liberal arts" education (which isn't about liberalism or necessarily arts) is the special sauce; the classes many students will be forced to take for "general education" at most US universities are pretty good at teaching students different ways of thinking and helping them try on alternative worldviews. Many of the people learning multiple worldviews and getting some tools for reasoning and evidence, etc. tend to use them for the rest of their lives. Even truly exploring one or two wrong alternative worldviews or thinking patterns tends to yield big rewards over time. Notably, the GOP's attacks on higher ed have become much worse, recently.
Anyway, this is (IMO) what progressives are up against in the USA. It is not just that some people believe different things; it's that many of those people have entirely different cognitive/emotional/social structures and processes for how belief happens and what it means.
Undoing this will take generations. In the meantime, I encourage pushing back on conservative flip-flops. No matter what, not even Evangelical congressmen want to look inconsistent. Even the evangelicalest of Christians will sometimes engage with facts and reasoning to some degree, and pressure simply works, sometimes. Keep your expectations for personal change low, however.
#religion #uspol #politics #thinking #epistemology #philosophy
The church in the center of town (Mormon). Escalante, Utah
#Mormon #Escalante #America #American #onemile #DorotheaLange #GreatDepression #DorotheaLange #undefined #photography #DorotheaLange
![The image depicts a monochrome photograph of an old one-story schoolhouse situated in what appears to be the rural parts of America. The building has classical architecture with white walls and is topped by a steeply pitched roof, suggesting it may have been built during late 19th or early 20th centuries when such structures were common for educational purposes.
The structure includes several windows along its facade, each framed by what seems to be wooden trim. There's an entrance accessible via stairs leading up to the door which is on the right side of the building as viewed in this image. The most distinctive feature at the top appears to be a small bell tower with a triangular roof and a spire.
The ground around the schoolhouse looks dry, indicating perhaps it might have been taken during late fall or winter when snow has melted but rainfall isn't sufficient for vegetation growth. There's no sign of current occupancy; there are no windows reflecting sunlight nor is there any interior activity visible through them from this angle. The surroundings look barren with few trees in the distance and an open sky above.
In terms of context, such a building was often associated with rural American communities where education would be provided at these community schoolhouses before widespread availability of centralized schools or modern educational facilities. These were pivotal places for socialization among students from [...]](https://mastodon.ozioso.online/system/media_attachments/files/113/974/810/521/726/642/original/cc187d19a7dcd419.jpeg "The image depicts a monochrome photograph of an old one-story schoolhouse situated in what appears to be the rural parts of America. The building has classical architecture with white walls and is topped by a steeply pitched roof, suggesting it may have been built during late 19th or early 20th centuries when such structures were common for educational purposes.
The structure includes several windows along its facade, each framed by what seems to be wooden trim. There's an entrance accessible via stairs leading up to the door which is on the right side of the building as viewed in this image. The most distinctive feature at the top appears to be a small bell tower with a triangular roof and a spire.
The ground around the schoolhouse looks dry, indicating perhaps it might have been taken during late fall or winter when snow has melted but rainfall isn't sufficient for vegetation growth. There's no sign of current occupancy; there are no windows reflecting sunlight nor is there any interior activity visible through them from this angle. The surroundings look barren with few trees in the distance and an open sky above.
In terms of context, such a building was often associated with rural American communities where education would be provided at these community schoolhouses before widespread availability of centralized schools or modern educational facilities. These were pivotal places for socialization among students from [...]")
The church. Widtsoe is a Mormon community, as are all the settlements in the Great Basin. Utah
#Widtsoe #Mormon #theGreatBasin #America #undefined #photography #DorotheaLange
Joseph Smith, the Original Coke Classic of American neo-muhammads. 
#JosephSmith #Mormon #LatterDaySaints #ElonMusk #LRonHubbard #Dianetics
https://www.kensandersbooks.com/pages/books/63394/constance-l-lieber/dr-martha-hughes-cannon-suffragist-senator-plural-wife https://archive.ph/mAUr5
Would never have guessed. Mrs. Martha Hughes Cannon—the fourth of six Mrs. Angus M. Cannons—actually had to leave the US, spend time in Europe after her husband was jailed for having several wives, to avoid having to provide the Iron Heel testimony against other polygamists.
I expect I’d have rolled my eyes at her support for mandatory vaccination and suffrage activism (though in Utah Territory women’s enfranchisement afforded polygamists added clout), but admired her anti-drug attitude and, of course, her desire to normalize polygyny. #MarthaHughesCannon #pluralmarriage #polygyny #polygamy #LDS #Mormon #Utah #UnitedStates #USA #US #suffrage #firsts #history
@textfiles I almost uploaded a large 1970s community cookbook from my late mother's collection to the #internerarchive , but couldn't honestly say I had any right to it since it had hundreds of authors (mostly #Mormon women, I think) who volunteered recipes without any copyright assertion. It doesn't even have a publication date, although I might be able to find a granddaughter of the editor if I asked around enough Mendon, Utah, LDS meetinghouses.
“Whats Cookin in Mendon” was the title.
Joseph Smith was a petty tyrant who had a newspaper destroyed for criticizing him. The #Mormon Church calls him a "martyr" and his dictatorial action an "attempt to protect the city from mob violence."
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/church/news/timeline-of-96-hours-surrounding-the-martyrdom-of-joseph-smith-and-hyrum-smith
In honor of the 175th anniversary of the martyrdom…
www.churchofjesuschrist.org#MittRomney will be replaced by a guy who sure sounds a lot like Mitt Romney.
#Republican Rep #JohnCurtis, who has occasionally bucked #Trump, won a crowded #GOP #primary on Tues for Romney’s #Utah #Senate seat. He beat Trent Staggs, a #MAGA candidate w/ Trump’s blessing, to secure a win for the mainstream GOP in a devout #Mormon state that has long proved skeptical of Trumpian #politics.
#USpol
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/25/john-curtis-wins-utah-senate-00165005
@atoponce@fosstodon.org@Lee_Holmes What's really fascinating about this for me personally is my personal history (and apostasy) with the #Mormon church.
Joseph Smith, Jr. started the Mormon church in 1830 claiming to have translated an ancient text from "Reformed Egyptian" later call the Book of Mormon.
Traveling salesman Michael Chandler had some Egyptian papyri and heard of Smith's ability to translate. So he took the papyri to Joseph, who claimed is was from the prophet Abraham.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith_Papyri
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@wdlindsy@toad.socialWe cannot discuss child abuse in the U.S., much of it totally legal and societally approved, without examining how it frequently develops in a religious matrix.