From: "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Fw: reparations: a Libertarian speaks out
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 00:21:16 -0400
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: <WSFAList at KeithLynch.net>
Sent: Friday, August 23, 2002 12:05 AM
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Fw: reparations: a Libertarian speaks out

> "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net> wrote:
> > One assumes he is describing the nut cult which became the Mormon
> > Church.  "God's commandments"?  Or those of an unlikely "angel"
who
> > visited Joe Smith?
>
> One person's nut cult is another's sacred religion.  They all look
> equally silly from outside.
>
> As long as nobody tries to impose his religion on me, I'm not going
> to ridicule it or try to argue him out of it.

The advantage of most of the world's major religions is their
antiquity which allows them to shroud themselves in myth (as well as
to co-opt and incorporate older religions, of course).

The Mormons are at a disadvantage:  their history is relatively recent
and fairly well documented -- including their slaughter of wagon
trains' of settlers heading further west and their (still extant)
polygamy (which was the reason Smith founded his church and he and his
followers got kicked out of successive states until they found, in
Utah, a land no one else wanted).  "Nut cult" is a *kind* description;
I've heard much worse.

The Mormons find an interesting parallel roughly a hundred years later
in the Scientologists, who have turned an outright tax scam into a
"religion" and are now crying "religious persecution" in Germany,
where that government has them accurately pegged.

--Ted White