Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 10:54:02 -0400
From: Steve Smith <sgs at aginc.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Fw: reparations: a Libertarian speaks out
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

Ted White wrote:

> 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.

Coupla nits.  The Mormons weren't the only 19th century sects practicing
polygamy, by a long shot.  There were a number of Mennonite sects that
  practiced polygamy; they didn't get a tenth of the hassle the Mormons
did.  The big problem that folks had with the Mormons was with their
whole concept of "latter-day revelation" -- ie, the Bible isn't
considered the only Holy Book and Yeshua ben Yousef wasn't the Last Prophet.

We have the same thing in the Islamic world with the Baha'i.  I remember
a few years back that the government of Iran proudly announced that
Baha'i was now extinct, the Iranians having hunted down and killed the
last ones in Iran.  (They still exist outside of Iran -- I've met a few.)

> 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.

Actually, the Scientologists in Germany pushed it even further.  They
weren't just a tax scam -- they had gotten into out and out real estate
fraud.  In the US, they're the only "religous" organization that has
fixed-price "services" that are tax deductable.  Thank you, George Bush
the Elder.

--
Steve Smith                                           sgs at aginc.net
Agincourt Computing                            http://www.aginc.net
"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."