Mormonism, the Death Cult

Tal Bachman

Mormonism is, in the end, a death cult.

Now, just before all you TBM lurkers start feeling pride at being so unique and "peculiar" (in the Petrine sense), or glorying in "persecution", I ought to point out that there is nothing unique about any genuine cult being a death cult, for in the name of life, every single one of them ends up worshipping death in their own way: Islam, Nazism, the J Dubs, the Jonestown people, the Solar Temple people, the Heaven's Gate people, the Mormons, all of them. I might say that if anything is sacred, life is, and therefore, all of those cults constitute the ultimate in blasphemy, Mormonism not excepted.

That Mormonism is a death cult in the end is true in many senses, broad and specific. For example, the ultimate sacrament ritual, symbolized by the partaking of the bread and water, is the sacrifice of Christ's body as a means of uniting all (worthy) humankind together, and humankind with God. And as Paul makes clear (in an almost gleeful kind of way), each human being must re-enact Christ's sacrifice not just through taking the bread and water, but through the annihilation of his/her own humanity, that is, the "crucifixion of their own flesh" (see, e.g., Galatians 5, Romans 6, etc.). While Mormonism seeks to sidestep the blatantly macabre aspects of the Catholic focus on crucifixion and death by cheerily offering up glib slogans about worshipping the “risen” Christ versus the slain Christ and refusing to place crosses on its churches, at its core it posits the same things as Catholicism and all Christianity does: there was once a golden age of innocence and virtue - the human race fell - it is only through the human sacrifice/deicide of Jesus of Nazareth that we can begin to overcome natural filthiness.

But Joseph’s cult, as in so many other ways, takes this to a whole new level of weirdness and invidiousness. We have as Mormons the obligation of murdering all those parts of our humanity which can’t in the end squeeze into the church’s unusually constricting mould of the “ideal” male and female. In other words, cult righteousness equals de-humanization. The “natural man is an enemy to God”. Feminists must become Mollies. “Los machos” must give up the motorcycle tours, Metallica, and Maxim magazine, and Ned Flanderize themselves. Those with some sense of autonomy must overcome their “rebelliousness” and submit every last aspect of their lives to priesthood “authority”. Homosexuals must become heterosexuals, or at least, are required to spend their lives killing off what now appears to be an innate proclivity. Males and females who would rather remain childless must overcome this “wicked tendency”, and reproduce. Those who see wisdom in waiting to marry, see wrongly - they must marry when they are young. They don’t know what is best for them.

Social liberals must become social conservatives. Those women who think they might be more attractive with two earrings in an ear, those men who fancy tattoos, must not indulge themselves. We must kill off our own tastes, our own innate predispositions, our own feelings and longings and ambitions and dreams and conclusions - our own conscience - everything that makes us the miracles we are. Each one of us is a “self” - and we must kill off that self. We must turn ourselves into fodder for the machine, just to keep it going. In a cult, no one is an end in and of his/herself. No one is a "fellow human being, period" - we are all means, means to some end. We are not humans to be loved and embraced just as we are; we are “people who have yet to achieve what they should”. Evaluation of how far we have, and everyone else has to go to achieve whatever end we imagine each should be achieving, then becomes the prism through which all social life is experienced. In allowing this, we cut ourselves from the ability to feel that “philanthropos”, or brotherly/sisterly love, which was what the whole cult was supposed to be about in the first place. But they never are in the end about that, because they are all frauds. In the end, they are about the destruction of all that could be considered humanity, since the realization of the selfish ambitions and stupid delusions of the cult leader is completely incompatible with the existence of humanity, with the preservation of human nature. Humanity must be annihilated.

Once I longed to be a martyr for the church (in Argentina, on my mission). When that didn’t pan out and I returned home, I myself undertook to effect just that demolition of my own uniqueness and character in its service. I hardened myself against embarrassment when asked in public about polygamy or temple garments or man’s eventual deification. I censored my thoughts, my words, my own feelings. I read the Heber C. Kimball and Jedediah Grant sermons in which they proclaimed proudly that they loved the prophet more than they had ever loved any of their wives. They announced that any wife of theirs who would disobey the prophet would be ejected from their families. I knew that was where my own devotion to the church had to be. I had taken a vow of consecration; I had to be willing to sacrifice anything - all my money, my children, my wife, my life - for the cult. And guess what? I made it, to a surprising degree. I myself, just as all others have, became the happy agent of the destruction of my own humanity. So, my children weren’t “my children” so much as they were “future priesthood holders”, “future Eagle scouts”, “future missionaries”, “future married-in-the-temple people”, etc. They were everything but what they themselves, through the miraculous course of nature, were: unique, breathtakingly complex wonders of creation, valuable in their own right, HUMAN BEINGS whose worth had NO tie to their future “progress” within some sterile, sicko sect piggybacking on to Christianity while demonizing every other manifestation of it in its founding documents. When I looked at my children, I saw them in a way as expressions of my own ego. They would not fail. They would become righteous Mormons. That to a large degree was why I loved them. They were means to the end of me ultimately believing that I'd been a fantastic father, evidenced by my children having become just as much slaves to the thing as I had become.

Light outside the cult illuminates, in the most flattering way, all those cliches we used to laugh at so much, or in some cases, used to Mormonize. “Each one of us is a miracle”, “Everyone is special”, “All we have is each other”, “Love makes the world go round”, even lifetime criminal Rodney King’s much-mocked question: “Why can’t we all just get along?”. That now seems like the greatest question ever asked, and one we probably ought to be searching out an answer for. (And no, the answer is not, “because we are not all Mormon, or Jehovah’s Witness, or Muslim”, etc.). Questions like “How do we get John and Mary to better serve the church?” (that is, “how do we get them to more fully annihilate their natures so as to further the ends of my cult?”) have now, deo gratias, been replaced by questions which do NOT rest on the completely fallacious assumptions of cult fanatisicm (like the infinite malleability of human nature, absolute knowledge via feelings, the solution for all life’s problems is global conversion to Mormonism, etc.).

Once we begin to see that, really, all we do have is each other, and that the ceiling of our own mortal consciousness prohibits clear answers about the purpose of life, who or what might be running the universe, etc., we begin to ask questions like, “How can we live so as to get along better with each other? How do we best alleviate suffering? How do we most effectively bless the lives of our fellow human beings? How can I help leave the world a better place than I found it?”. What is so peculiar now is that it is precisely THOSE questions which yield the best chance of leading to answers which will truly help life to flourish, to be lived to its full potential. It is the insatiable demands and mean, cheap, petty questions of cults based on claims which have NO evidence to support them, like those of Mormonism, which seem to do the most damage to life.

How can that be? In the name of life, they destroy life; in the name of the ideal, they grind you up, and then leave you behind like so much dross. And God help you if you ever reveal that you have come to believe that the Mormon project is misguided, and based on Joseph’s original deceptions. Daniel Peterson has devoted his entire life to the church. What would happen if he ever expressed doubt? His fellow colleagues would first express “sadness”, and then go about the job of smearing his character, metaphorically killing him. They'd have to, to keep themselves in that psychological state upon which we grew so dependent. It wouldn't matter if he was right - in fact, the more correct he was, the more vicious the attacks would be.

In the end, the church doesn’t care about any life except its own. It views as its mortal foe every aspect of humanity, which it cannot control. In fact, in this sense, the entire cosmos, the whole structure of reality, is “anti-Mormon” (since Mormonism is out of alignment with what it purports to be synonymous with: truth and reality) and so we should cease to be surprised when the church murders historical facts for Joseph, as it does on its new website, murders archaeological and genetic and linguistic facts for the Book of Mormon, murders - through all the anti-depressant prescriptions handed out by LDS Social Service headshrinkers - the conscience of women who keep sensing there is something wrong, or who acknowledge to themselves that they are miserable, etc., etc.

And of course, in the end, it doesn’t even really care at all when its missionaries are literally murdered for it. The church ignored the many death threats issued by Bolivian terrorists against Mormon missionaries; it ignored the bombs left at La Paz chapels; it ignored the firebombing; and left the missionaries there in La Paz. Then, after the assassination of Elders Ball and Wilson, the church left its missionaries there just the same as always, just as they had after the warnings started coming in. And Hinckley went to Wilson’s funeral, once his bullet-riddled body arrived back in Utah in a coffin, and said, “It doesn’t really matter how long we live in this life”, and then left, accompanied by his bodyguards.

The Mormon church, for all its shiny, happy photo models, can only survive when all that we would associate with being truly human, and all we would associate with reality, is killed off. It must eradicate to stay alive, and the sooner I cease hearing about grown men cowing to the threats of their wives and agreeing to keep quiet, when their children are being brainwashed and having all that is potentially most unique and valuable about them sucked out of them, just to serve Joseph's cult, the better. The truth deserves better than that, and so do our children, for Mormonism is a cult and a fraud, and a million smiles and barbecues and fake friends won't change that.

Just my 200 cents,

T.