{"id":2829,"date":"2012-06-03T21:45:27","date_gmt":"2012-06-04T02:45:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/?p=2829"},"modified":"2012-06-04T09:55:38","modified_gmt":"2012-06-04T14:55:38","slug":"a-bashing-we-shall-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/?p=2829","title":{"rendered":"A Bashing We Shall Go?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This evening my friend Momedy<\/a> posted on Facebook a link to an interesting article about prejudice<\/a>.\u00a0 Based on the article, she\u00a0posed the question, “Is Mormon bashing socially acceptable?”\u00a0 Unfortunately, the answer still seems to be “Yes.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Should<\/strong> it be,\u00a0obviously, is\u00a0“No!”\u00a0 It’s a good article, and there were great comments on her thread.\u00a0 I made a study of the LDS Church in college, and since then have been to visit the public parts of the Temple in Salt Lake City.\u00a0 I should note (while many of those who know me well are saying “Wait, what?”) that I was raised Roman Catholic, and I have studied a LOT of religions – I find belief and faith fascinating, largely since I have very nearly none myself.\u00a0 I think of myself as a militant agnostic:\u00a0\u00a0I don’t know, and you don’t either.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I’ve found that the important part of any such study is to respect not only the beliefs in question but also the people who hold those beliefs, no matter what religion they identify with.\u00a0 Robert Heinlein said that one man’s religion is another man’s belly laugh – and it’s true, but it needs to be a belly laugh behind closed doors, in private, because the other guy is laughing just as hard at your beliefs.\u00a0 In the end, it is our ability to be simply polite to one another that will save us.<\/p>\n

(Go read the article now, it’s short.\u00a0 I’ll wait.)<\/p>\n

So,\u00a0why do people still think it’s OK to disparage Mormons?\u00a0 I think it’s because the LDS church is still very young, in the broad sweep of history, and can still be considered to be in a “cult” stage of its evolution.\u00a0 The difference between a cult and a religion is time and money.\u00a0 The last time I checked on such things\u00a0the LDS Church as an institution was able to keep several billion in\u00a0cash on hand – these days, not as much as the\u00a0Vatican, but a respectable sum.\u00a0 The money’s there, and over time, money can<\/strong> buy respectability.\u00a0 What the LDS Church hasn’t had is 2000 years of training people to expect that, hey, lots of people are Mormons and that’s fine.\u00a0 Christianity was a cult to start with, just as Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam were.\u00a0 That these are all considered mainstream religions now has everything to do with the numbers of faithful of these faiths and with the number of years that “everyone’s heard of them.”\u00a0\u00a0 I have several friends who attend\u00a0Unitarian services; the Unitarians don’t have much of an organization, but they’ve been around for nearly 500 years.\u00a0 Nobody really blinks anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The good news?\u00a0 The LDS Church is growing up at a time when all the world’s connections are growing together faster than they ever have before.\u00a0 It won’t take 2000 years for Mormons to be completely mainstream and for Mormon bashing to be socially pass\u00e9 – it might take 200, but hopefully even that may be guessing wide.\u00a0 I believe in the power of the Internet to highlight this kind of irresponsible prejudice, shine a light on it, and get people to think before they talk.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You know who we can sit around and tell jokes about?\u00a0 Intolerant people.\u00a0 I met this guy once, he was so intolerant,\u00a0he wouldn’t let his kid have a sherbert because all the store had left was rainbow.\u00a0 \u00a0He was so intolerant, he had to ask for a different straw for his soda because he couldn’t bring himself to use one that might bend.\u00a0 He was so intolerant, he asked his wife not to discuss sex while they were having it.\u00a0 He was so intolerant, he was the only man Will Rogers didn’t like.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Are there better intolerance jokes out there?\u00a0 Any thoughts on the main point?\u00a0\u00a0 Can’t we just all get along?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know who we can sit around and tell jokes about? Intolerant people. I met this guy once, he was so intolerant, he wouldn’t let his kid have a sherbert because all the store had left was rainbow. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2829"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2835,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829\/revisions\/2835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}