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!
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