Ask an ex-Mormon

[Ranjr]

What is the Mormon spin on the Mountain Meadows Massacre?

[Brian37]

What is the Mormon spin on the Mountain Meadows Massacre?

White people are always right?

[zwanzig]

Have you ever been in the celestial room?

Yes. Many times. It is the finishing room for an endowment ceremony. Most temples have you move through a curtain into different rooms, starting with the Creation Room and ending through the veil in the Celestial Room. All the rooms are a sort of "classroom" where you sit for a time, listen to an ongoing lecture and explanation of the handshakes and hand signs, watch a couple films about the creation and the garden of eden, get dressed in certain ritual robes and hats, and ritualistically pray at the altar. After you present at the veil of the Terrestrial Room all the handshakes you learned and tell the orderly representing God all their secret names and meanings, he allows you through the curtain and you go to the Celestial room.

The Celestial room usually looks like a lavish, white, beige/cream, silver, and white gold hotel lobby. There is carpet, several chairs and couches, with ornate end tables and white covered Bibles and Book of Mormons at hand, and chandeliers. Sometimes they have mirrors and plants but it is different in different temples. You can only speak in a whisper and they discourage much conversation in this room at all. Most people when they finish an endowment session just leave to go back to the changing rooms. But others, if they came to the temple to be closer to God in his house, will linger here. They will sit and meditate/ponder, and quietly pray over problems in their lives or read scriptures looking for inspiration from the Holy Ghost. And then they eventually leave but there really is no time limit so long as the temple is open.

The ceremony itself is a meat tenderizer for the mind, three hours of ritual, and the Celestial room predictably leaves you feeling "at peace" and numbed.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

What is the Mormon spin on the Mountain Meadows Massacre?

White people are always right?

What's that got to do with the massacre?

Boru

[zwanzig]

What is the Mormon spin on the Mountain Meadows Massacre?

It is not taught in church. In church, even in college, I was always taught that Mormons were unfairly persecuted everywhere they tried to settle, that many of them innocently died for their beliefs. And everything that is contrary to the church narrative is just Satan influencing people to lie about us and draw members away from God's truth. There are several things I learned when my shelf broke that I can hold up as "THIS, this is one thing that makes it impossible for me to ever be a Mormon again." The Mountain Meadows Massacre is one of those core items simply for the fact that I had to learn about it outside of the church. A horrific event, to be sure, but why hide it if the church is true? The omission reveals the lie.

And make no mistake, despite the church coming out with a Gospel Topics essay on the topic, 1. Those topics are not taught in church, are not promoted, and the subjects are not openly talked about, so, nobody knows they're even there and 2. It is a measelly three or four paragraphs of "woopsie, our bad! Sorry!" Their "regret" means NOTHING if the church leaders don't come out and actually condemn the event or teach about this awful part of their history in Sunday school. But then again, if they did that for everything in church history, only the most foolish and delusional would still believe.

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@BrianSoddingBoru4

Oops! Sorry, I just checked back to page one to see if I missed anything and I did. I hope my reply to Ranjr is also satisfactory in response to your question.

[Ranjr]

White people are always right?

You mighta oughta read about it before commenting.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

What is the Mormon spin on the Mountain Meadows Massacre?

It is not taught in church. In church, even in college, I was always taught that Mormons were unfairly persecuted everywhere they tried to settle, that many of them innocently died for their beliefs. And everything that is contrary to the church narrative is just Satan influencing people to lie about us and draw members away from God's truth. There are several things I learned when my shelf broke that I can hold up as "THIS, this is one thing that makes it impossible for me to ever be a Mormon again." The Mountain Meadows Massacre is one of those core items simply for the fact that I had to learn about it outside of the church. A horrific event, to be sure, but why hide it if the church is true? The omission reveals the lie.

And make no mistake, despite the church coming out with a Gospel Topics essay on the topic, 1. Those topics are not taught in church, are not promoted, and the subjects are not openly talked about, so, nobody knows they're even there and 2. It is a measelly three or four paragraphs of "woopsie, our bad! Sorry!" Their "regret" means NOTHING if the church leaders don't come out and actually condemn the event or teach about this awful part of their history in Sunday school. But then again, if they did that for everything in church history, only the most foolish and delusional would still believe.

---

@BrianSoddingBoru4

Oops! Sorry, I just checked back to page one to see if I missed anything and I did. I hope my reply to Ranjr is also satisfactory in response to your question.

A very satisfactory response. Thank you.

Boru

[arewethereyet]

I'm not really sure how to ask this so kick me if I goof it up...

What is the feeling among, I guess, mainstream LDS toward those in FLDS?

[zwanzig]

I'm not really sure how to ask this so kick me if I goof it up...

What is the feeling among, I guess, mainstream LDS toward those in FLDS?

Oh, no worries! I get what you mean. So, a little preface.

1. I was not aware of the many other offshoots of Mormonism while I was a member. The only one I knew of was the Fundamentalist group that you mention. 2. I was also not taught about Joseph Smith's polygamy in church. It was a revelation by Smith but a Brigham Young practice and I was also taught(incorrectly, mind you), that it stopped very soon after it was implemented(lol).

So, the general feeling towards FLDS is that they were perverted weirdos led astray by their inability to accept the new prophet, Young, as the true prophet and their desire to continue to practice polygamy. I was also taught that Emma Smith, Joseph's wife, went with them and took Joseph's translation of the Bible with her. So, we didn't have the full scripture retranslation of the Bible that Smith did while he was alive, only a portion that we would reference in classes.

Other than that, they weren't discussed except as giving Mormons a bad name. Because "no, we're not the ones who practiced polygamy; we're the decent ones." When in fact, come to find out, the main LDS branch was constantly having to get reprimanded by the government to stop practicing polygamy all the way up to the 1920's. I know that there are records of secret polygamous marriages being performed by church leadership over the border in Mexico as late as 1947.

[brewer]

Do they (you) all wear the undergarment?

If you wore it/them (I understand that they are two piece) what did it do for you?

Only if you have performed the certain ceremony, the Endowment, in the temple. Usually, this is reserved for after 18, and they get you at pivotal life events on the cusp of adulthood. For instance, young people spend their lives growing up feeling encouraged and pressured to go on a two year mission once they turn 18. So, when they graduate high school and are preparing to make this two year commitment, they are rushed to the temple to get their endowment done and then immediately sent off to serve this mission before they really have a chance to process what they just went through. Others, like me, wait until just before marriage to get it done, with the same thing sort of happening. You've been sold this idea your whole life that families can be together forever, that going to the temple with your spouse is the beginning of eternity together. You find the right person, fall in love, pray about it, and yes, this is the one I want to be in the eternities with. And then you let her pick the temple she wants you to take her to, get a date reserved for the ceremony, and everything else planned and then you get the endowment and before you get that chance to really question what you saw, you're back in the temple getting married. Once you get it done, what are you going to say? "Wait, I don't want to marry her because holy crap, that was weird!" It's all manipulation and social pressure.

You are expected to wear them for the rest of your life after that. The endowment ceremony itself is presented as this sacred step to getting closer to God, like a baptism only for adults. It is a three hour session of sitting in several different rooms and learning the secret handshakes and hand signs that let's God know you're trustworthy. You make a verbal promise to God not to reveal the special tokens to outsiders and to always remain pure and worthy of his trust in you. The garments themselves have symbols on them that mirror these hand signs and thus are a reminder of this promise as well as a physical reminder to remain pure. If you do so, they say the garments will protect you from bodily harm, like mithril chain mail. However, I have also heard examples of this as being a story of a guy in a plane crash who's body burned up except for the parts where his garments touched his skin.

Did you feel that? That cognitive dissonance just then? Heh. YEah.

There are special tokens and hand signs?  I had no clue. Sounds stolen from the Masons.

Another: Why the fascination with ancestry and genealogy? I've heard that it's used to convert a person after they are dead.