I was watching a fascinating history of the Mormons on PBS last night. Like all religions it is built upon faith, the belief in things not supported by any objective evidence. (The full documentary is available for purchase or to watch online.)
Born at a time when new religions were popping up like weeds, Mormonism survived when most of the others failed. One historian interviewed in the documentary speculated that it was the Book of Mormon, authored by Joseph Smith, who claimed it was a translation of revelations found in gold plates delivered to him by an angel, that gave the religion a sense of legitimacy that other religious start-ups off the time did not have. Nobody but Joseph Smith ever saw the gold plates or the angel. No surprise there.
It’s an amazing story because it is so bizarre that anybody would believe such things, but the fact is they do, by the millions. As Clifford Irving, who authored the totally fabricated “authorized” biography of Howard Hughes found out, the more fantastic the tale, the easier it is to get people to believe it.
People really will do just about anything to escape from reality.
The bit of Mormon history that shocked me the most was the Mountain Meadow Massacre where a group of Mormons, after promising safe passage to a group moving west to California through the Utah territory, brutally murdered 120 men, women and children.
From Wikipedia:
The emigrants stopped to rest and regroup their approximately 800 head of cattle at Mountain Meadows, a valley within the Iron County Military District of the Nauvoo Legion (the popular designation for the militia of the Utah Territory). [1]
Initially intending to orchestrate an Indian massacre, [2] two men with leadership roles in local military, church and government organizations, [3] Isaac C. Haight and John D. Lee, conspired to lead militiamen disguised as Native Americans along with a contingent of Paiute tribesmen in an attack. The emigrants fought back and a siege ensued. Intending to leave no witnesses of Mormon complicity in the siege and also intending to prevent reprisals that would complicate the Utah War, militiamen induced the emigrants to surrender and give up their weapons. After escorting the emigrants out of their fortification, the militiamen and their tribesmen auxiliaries executed approximately 120 men, women and children.[4] Seventeen younger children were spared.
It’s ironic that it culminated on September 11, 1857. September 11, 2001 would become the date of another very famous massacre orchestrated by religious fanatics.
In another similarity, the Islamic terrorists who massacred so many at the WTC believed their reward in heaven would be 40 virgins. Mormons at the time of their massacre regularly practiced polygamy believing that for a man to get closest to God he had to have multiple wives.
A representative of the LDS organization commented about the massacre that it was a blemish on the church’s history that was difficult to reconcile but he hoped that God had provided for the victims and also found a way to forgive the perpetrators.
Belief in God is so useful when you want to gloss over the contradictions and the ugly, criminal consequences of your faith.
Some historians believe that Brigham Young ordered the massacre or at least facilitated it. Young was president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was married to 52 women. (Young denied any involvement in the massacre in a deposition for the trial of John D. Lee. But other researchers have concluded that he played an active role in the massacre and in its cover-up. Much more detail here.)
Another historian noted that either the revelation from the gold plates that Joseph Smith described either happened or it didn’t. That’s your binary circumstance again! If it didn’t happen, then Mormonism is a total fraud, like as Christianity is a fraud without the resurrection. That’s why it’s so important to have evidence to support beliefs.
Given that all religions are built on one or more one-time miraculous events that have never been replicated, it is far more likely that they are all frauds and that humans desperately need to believe in something that promises that death is not real but only an illusion. All th evidence suggests that death was quite real and final for the victims of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Certainly those who committed the murders believed it was final as well, otherwise they would fear that those they killed might haunt and harass them from the next life, which is by their own account is a place where humans have more power.
I highly recommend the PBS documentary if you ever get a chance to see it. I still haven’t seen the second half.