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Mormons

Death Row Inmate Says Mormon Church Interfered in His Trial

A Utah man sentenced to death in a 1985 murder case is appealing his conviction by arguing the Mormon church interfered in his trial.

Douglas Lovell, 58, has been counseled by Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints bishops in prison, and he wanted them to testify as character witnesses after he was granted a new trial, his lawyers wrote in court documents.

But Mormon officials were concerned the bishops' testimony could make it seem like church representatives approved of a murderer, so they told some members to keep testimony brief while preventing others from testifying at all, attorneys argue. One mentor tearfully asked not to be called as a character witness after a higher-ranked member cautioned him against it, Lovell said.

Lovell's lawyers say that kept the jury from seeing how sorry he was for his crime and showing that his life has value, the Salt Lake Tribune reported (http://bit.ly/1NZQSYy).

"The church, out of concern for its policies, pressured witnesses not to testify or cooperate with Mr. Lovell," attorney Samuel Newton wrote. "And put witnesses in the position of having to disobey their church leaders to support Mr. Lovell."

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/death-row-inmate-mormon-church-interfered-trial-39488541
 
16 wives? If they allow you to eat bacon, sign me up.
 
I found this in one of my Edenhall dossiers. I don't think I've posted it before.

A paragraph, perhaps circulated widely but taken here from The Carlisle Patriot, 01.11.1844:

"MORMONISM. - We understand that several disciples of JOE SMITH have come
over from America to propagate Mormonism, and seek contributions for what
they term the persecuted Saints of Nauvoo. As they will probably visit this
county, and other places within our circulation, we would entreat 'JOHN
BULL' to keep his eyes open, and pockets closed against their proceedings.
They are loudly proclaiming, in different districts in Lancashire, the
deaths of the SMITHS to be a continuation of the Apostolic persecutions, not
hesitating, at the same time, to place the blasphemous author of Mormonism
on a level with the divine author of Christianity. We would warn our
readers, therefore, against these men, the burden of whose song is - money,
money, - for what? - for the diffusion of the worst sort of infidelity. -
'Correspondent' "
Found on this Rootsweb Page.

The deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith had take place on 27.06.1844 when they were lynched by a mob opposed to their polygamous ways.

There had been a Mormon presence in the UK from 1837, according to this LDS history page. Preston was the centre of their early activities, so the warning to the Carlisle region was not so far-fetched. :cooll:
 
kamalktk said:
A long and interesting article.
Click to expand...

Best read of the week!

I guess when your net worth is in nine figures (!) the ordinary rules don't apply.

Even so, the visionary scheme is not exactly inspiring when you look at the size of the dwellings with their as-yet-unperfected robots to move stuff around, like a stage-set. It is interesting that the Antals' own dream runs only to a tiny house yet - for all the edenic homestead trappings, it is surely built chiefly on the salary of the computer-engineer in the family. :rolleyes:
 
A fascinating lecture! I learned a lot about 1850 folklore.


The purpose of this video will be to reconstruct the original story and restore it to its folk magic and treasure seeking context—a part of the story the average Mormon is woefully unaware.

I do not use the term "occult" to imply Joseph Smith was a Satanist, but rather that he practiced a heterodox form of Christianity that included what might be termed white or Christian magic.
 
Ex-Mormon bishop of Helston Steve Bloor reveals how church controlled his life – even his underwear
By G_WIlkinson | Posted: November 04, 2016

A former Mormon bishop has spoken out of how the church controlled every aspect of his life - even which underwear he chose. He has now been excommunicated and cut from the church forever, causing anguish to him and his family.

Steve Bloor, 52, was the bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Helston for seven years until 2011. As a child, he had joined his parents and fellow church congregation to help build their place of worship in Clodgey Lane.

But Mr Bloor split spectacularly from the church after he questioned the faith's version of historical events and the way it controlled members. He spoke out publically two years ago but has now had his name removed from the church records.

He said: "As a fervently believing Mormon, I believed that the only way to true happiness in this life and the next was through the Mormon Church. So every decision in life, from who I made friends with, I married, music I would listen to, what I ate or drank and even what underwear I wore - which had to be bought from the Mormon Church – were all based around the teachings of the church.

"To remove your name from the membership records is the worst punishment they can give. It removes someone from their relations in the next life. This has had an enormous effect on me emotionally. My initial feelings were of betrayal by the people I trusted most in my life. I grew up believing church leaders were divinely called and trusted their words as if they were god's mouthpiece.

"It felt like a death in the family - my death. And my wife felt the same way. The fact that some of my extended family couldn't understand, but rather believed the church, hurt me even more. As a result I became withdrawn and stopped even thinking or talking about the church for almost a year because it was just too painful."

etc...

http://www.westbriton.co.uk/ex-morm...is-underwear/story-29868238-detail/story.html

Just realised I know that church - it's next to Helston Football Club, where my astronomical society used to meet!
 
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Life during and after being raised by Survivalist Mormons.

Educated. By Tara Westover. Random House; 385 pages; $28. Hutchinson; £14.99.

IN A lecture during her first semester at Brigham Young University, a Mormon college in Utah, Tara Westover encountered an unfamiliar term. “I don’t know this word,” she told her professor. “What does it mean?” He snapped at her angrily—but Ms Westover was not making a tasteless joke. She had never been taught about the Holocaust. Nor had she learned about the civil-rights movement, or physics or any geography beyond the mountains and valleys that surrounded her family home in rural Idaho. That semester was the first time she had ever set foot in a proper classroom. She was 17.

Ms Westover was the youngest of seven children raised by Mormon survivalists in a town of 234 people. Like her siblings, she was kept out of school, which her father regarded as “a ploy by the government to lead children away from God”. Her early education consisted largely of helping him sort metal scraps in the family junkyard, and watching her mother concoct herbal remedies for headaches, burns and cancer—required because the family also avoided doctors. Even when her siblings were maimed, their skin charred by blowtorches or brains injured in car crashes, they were treated with their mother’s homeopathic mixtures.

In “Educated”, her riveting memoir, Ms Westover brings readers deep into this world, a milieu usually hidden from outsiders. Scarred by the Ruby Ridge incident of 1992, in which several members of an Idaho family were fatally shot by federal agents after resisting arrest, her father became convinced the feds would ultimately come for his clan, too. He loathed the idea of “registering” with the government, so did not obtain birth certificates for Ms Westover and three other children. He spent his meagre income from scrap metal on a cache of huge guns and a giant gasoline tank, for fighting or fleeing when the authorities showed up. Ms Westover slept with a “head-for-the-hills” bag by her bed. ...

https://www.economist.com/news/book...tingmemoirofabrutalupbringingtheartofsurvival
 
I often get accosted by Mormon Missionaries in the city streets of Scotland, since I try to avoid driving whenever I can.

I find that the most-effective way of dealing with these well-meaning-but-scary individuals is to say that you are a committed member of the Church of Scotland/England/Ireland/Wales/Satan/Rome etc (either with, or without, your fingers crossed) and to ask (earnestly or otherwise) after the health of one of their street colleagues in another city (their requisite name cunningly-remembered from a previous encounter....they wear name-badges).

This (possibly-patentable) combination of tactical response to their diamond smiles completely screws-up their progamming, and they become like Furbies on flat AA batteries.

Their eyes flicker upwards, lost, and they look towards each-other for guidance (they hunt in same-sex pairs....the girls are always plain-happy pretty, and the boys have square-jawed handshakes that would squeeze the Lucifer out of Las Vegas.

I'm sometimes tempted to swap-over their wrist-watches, and change their bibles for Samsung Galaxy Tabs (whilst they're bamboozled), but I know it might backfire on me. So I refrain. Usually
!-(
 
Tales of a pioneer trek re-enactment and a Mormon adolescence:

Once, in a special church meeting just for boys aged twelve to seventeen, my bishop said, without irony, “Young men, we need to discuss the grave sin of masturbation. Does anyone want to take a whack at that?” I fell out of my folding chair laughing. My friends suppressed giggles. The bishop lunged forward to stand over me and boomed, “Brother Fuller, why do you not take your salvation seriously?”


A Long Hot Walk to the Mormon Promised Land
Sexually frustrated teens in period costumes undertake a Mormon pioneer trek. The worst part isn't the heat. It's the singing.
By Miles Fuller

In 1847, the three largest groups of Mormon pioneers entered the Salt Lake Valley. One hundred years later, on July 24, my people took a commemorative “Pioneer Trek”—this time with automobiles decorated with oxen-shaped cutouts and canvas wagon covers—and drove together for eight days, from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Salt Lake City, Utah. It was symbolic, a centennial celebration. But in the decades since, we haven’t stopped trekking. To commemorate the sesquicentennial in 1997, a caravan of six hundred walkers and handcarts spent three months on the trail. As I was becoming a teenager then, a cottage industry emerged of people who made pioneer costumes and handcarts, and every Mormon kid was coming back in tears about how they’d never felt closer to God than when they were lost in the woods.

“Don’t leave those apple cores outside the tent, the coyotes will come sniffing,” I said to a girl, two years my junior, who was pretending to be my sister for the week. I met her for the first time the day we started walking, when I threw her backpack and pillow onto the wooden cart and began pulling hundreds of pounds toward the horizon—miles before the lace on her bonnet became stained with red dirt. Each morning, our group—an older couple in the role of our parents, two boys I was told to call brothers, one fake sister, and a plastic doll named Emma—tried to pack and leave early so that we could take the lead. Otherwise the rising dust from the other handcarts would choke us and sting our eyes all day. July in Utah can climb into the triple digits, even at high elevation; we’d march for a few miles in the morning while it was cool, then in the hottest part of the afternoon we’d stop the carts under some trees and say a prayer over cold sandwiches. But the worst part of moving again wasn’t the heat. It was the singing. “Pioneer children sang as they walked and walked and walked / Pioneer children sang as they walked and walked and walked and walked…” If there were more lyrics to the song, none of us knew them; it was a Mormon version of “The Song that Never Ends,” an earworm we’d learned as toddlers. ...

https://www.guernicamag.com/a-long-hot-walk-to-the-mormon-promised-land/
 
ramonmercado said:
Tales of a pioneer trek re-enactment and a Mormon adolescence:
Once, in a special church meeting just for boys aged twelve to seventeen, my bishop said, without irony, “Young men, we need to discuss the grave sin of masturbation.”
Click to expand...

Ah sweet memories! Our male biology teacher once gave us young teenage boys a sex education lecture in a blacked-out science lab with diagrams of the internal plumbing of males/females projected onto a screen.
Most of us knew it all anyway and were bored, but a few kids found it er - stimulating - and there was a series of rhythmic low grunts and frantic movements coming out of the shadows all around..
 
I only heard of this when Mitt Romney ran for President of the USA and a reporter asked him about his magic undies:

Unlocking The Mysteries Of The Mormon Underwear Known As The Temple Garment

They're not supposed to let anyone see it or even talk about it, but here's everything you always wanted to know about the Mormon underwear they call the temple garment.

The Mormon temple garment, or garment of the holy priesthood, is worn under the clothes of adult members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) virtually at all times and they consider it a sacred symbol of their personal commitment to God.

Not only sacred but also extremely personal for believers, the temple garment had long been a mystery to non-members, those who even knew of its existence in the first place.

In fact, the temple garment (popularly referred to as “Mormon underwear”) is specifically meant to not be discussed and to be concealed from anyone who would not understand its religious significance. Even when not wearing it, Mormons are supposed to not let the garment hang in a place where it could be seen by anyone else.
Click to expand...


http://allthatsinteresting.com/mormon-underwear-temple-garment
 
Spent a lot of time recently talking to a mormon lad. Mostly because we were both playing the same game and would end up talking to each other.

I teased him mercilessly, of course. But he took it well. And I have to say that I ended up with a great deal of respect for him, and for the strength of his beliefs.

Not an easy path to walk, but his determination to be the best person he could be within his own tradition, was admirable.

And never once did he try to convert me. I told him early on not to try, and that he would have to wait till I was dead and convert me retrospectively.
That made him laugh, and he assure me he would. lol.

Much respect to that young man and his faith.
 
Ditto Newt.

We used to get Elder wood and Elder graham knock on our door in the mid seventies, with pretty much the same situation. The initial meeting was scoping us out and the mistake of offering them a cuppa tea. Hahaha...hmmmm.

These two were both farm lads and because we had, at the time, a small goat dairy, conversation got smelly and hairy quickly. They were both lovely lads and I learnt a lot from them.

We sort of made it a regular thing for the duration of their mission.

As I you Newt, I have much respect for these young men.
 
Jason Colavito discusses some current Mormon Forteana.

It was a big week for Mormon news.

The owner of Skinwalker Ranch, Brandon Fugal, discussed how his Mormon faith in infinite populated worlds helps to shape his investigation of Skinwalker Ranch, which culminated in his assertion that the ranch is inhabited by a noncorporeal “precognitive” intelligence that adapts its supernatural manifestations to the subconscious “intentions” of each visitor. “It can anticipate and even be aware of your thoughts and consciousness and react according to your intention that you bring to the property,” Fugal told Salt Lake Magazine. That sounds a lot like people are seeing what they want to see and are experiencing their own expectations reflected back at them through the mirror of their own minds. In other words, there is no interdimensional intelligence, just people scaring themselves with their own fantasies.

Meanwhile, a group of Mormons and their Russian allies (!) are searching Montrose, Iowa for what they believe will be the remains of Zarahemla, a fictitious ancient Jewish metropolis invented by Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon. The group believes that Zarahemla had 100,000 residents, mostly descendants of immigrants from Jerusalem, who filled the largest city in the Americas in the fourth century CE. Montrose, on the Mississippi River, is (not coincidentally) the site of an early Mormon settlement that Smith had christened Zarahemla. ...

https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/mormon-group-seeks-lost-ancient-jewish-super-city-in-iowa
 
I'm trying to imagine a bawdy and risque musical which pokes fun at the Koran and Islam, I think theatregoers and the cast would get get a different reception.

Mormons have used a bawdy and risqué musical which pokes fun at their church as an awareness-raising opportunity.

The Book of Mormon, which satirises The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and religion in general, is playing at Newcastle's Theatre Royal.

Theatregoers said church members approaching them afterwards looked so much like the characters they "thought it was still part of the show".

Church elder John Gill said protesting was not "something we engage in". The intention was to inform and "spark that conversation", rather than recruit, he said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-61967316
 
Mormon Crabs.

A rumor began circulating on TikTok this summer that Brigham Young University, with its majority Mormon student population, had recently suffered from an outbreak of public lice. Except the students weren't getting the itchy little crabs on their crotches, because they're obviously having sex outside of marriage. They were in the students' armpit hairs. Because sometimes, you still get horny — especially in college — and you gotta find some way to temper those hormones. So you fuck someone in the armpit, using their deodorant as a lube.

Allegedly.

Rolling Stone looked into this uniquely kinky rumor (along with some other supposed Mormon college sex-alternatives). While they couldn't find any proof of this particular armpit public lice outbreak … that doesn't mean it didn't happen, or that it's beyond the realm of possibility: ...

https://boingboing.net/2022/11/08/a...nts-getting-pubic-crabs-in-their-armpits.html
 
ramonmercado said:
Mormon Crabs.

A rumor began circulating on TikTok this summer that Brigham Young University, with its majority Mormon student population, had recently suffered from an outbreak of public lice. Except the students weren't getting the itchy little crabs on their crotches, because they're obviously having sex outside of marriage. They were in the students' armpit hairs. Because sometimes, you still get horny — especially in college — and you gotta find some way to temper those hormones. So you fuck someone in the armpit, using their deodorant as a lube.

Allegedly.

Rolling Stone looked into this uniquely kinky rumor (along with some other supposed Mormon college sex-alternatives). While they couldn't find any proof of this particular armpit public lice outbreak … that doesn't mean it didn't happen, or that it's beyond the realm of possibility: ...

https://boingboing.net/2022/11/08/a...nts-getting-pubic-crabs-in-their-armpits.html
Click to expand...

"5. Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals#The_Rules

maximus otter
 
rumor began circulating on TikTok this summer that Brigham Young University, with its majority Mormon student population, had recently suffered from an outbreak of public lice.
Click to expand...

Public lice are the worst kind of lice.
 
Christian values at work..

Mormon church fined for using shell companies to hide $32billion​

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced the settlement agreement with the the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS), also known as the Mormon Church, on Tuesday after years of investigations into the church’s investment portfolio.

‘We allege that the LDS Church’s investment manager, with the Church’s knowledge, went to great lengths to avoid disclosing the Church’s investments, depriving the Commission and the investing public of accurate market information,’ SEC director of enforcement Gurbir Grewal said.

The Church was concerned that disclosure of its portfolio, which by 2018 grew to approximately $32 billion, would lead to negative consequences,’ the SEC said.
After an investigation beginning in 2019, the SEC found that the LDS Church approved of the decision to create 13 separate shell companies and filed disclosure forms for them instead.

The SEC also found that church leaders maintained full control over these shell companies.

The LDS Church, which has over 17million members worldwide, collects 10% of most parishioners’ income in a process known as Tithing.

The church’s finances have come under much greater scrutiny over the last few years after a whistleblower alleged they were hiding over $100billion in funds.

After the SEC settlement was announced, the church said they own ‘stocks, bonds, commercial and residential real estate, and agricultural properties.’ They said all of their reserve funds are invested to further the church’s religious mission.

The church agreed to pay out $1million, while Ensign Peak will pay the remaining $4million. The church said this money will come from returns on investments.
Click to expand...

 
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