A person visited a Mormon church and ended up getting into a fistfight with a missionary.

A few words on the charitable giving of the Mormon church from Nemo.

In a 1993 talk then-president of the Mormon church Boyd K. Packer warned that the three greatest threats to the church were “feminists, homosexuals and intellectuals”.

The first two are pretty much what you would expect to hear from any conservative Christian-aligned church but the third, intellectuals, is especially interesting.

Essentially, the church doesn’t want members that think for themselves, or that research and study various topics like history. They only want members that listen to and obey whatever the church and church leaders say, as if the church leaders were the gods themselves.

A Quick Pucker

It’s fairly well-known that most of Reddit is garbage. There’s a reason the stereotype of a Reddit mod exists. We seem to keep using it anyhow, for some reason.

Personally, I tend to use it as a way to check news headlines that might not show up elsewhere, though more and more I’m thinking it might be better to find an alternative way to find my news, perhaps curated through an RSS reader.

As mentioned on the About page, the Mormon leadership and the Mormon church in general is largely about control, and this behavior is often mirrored by some of the members and their endeavors.

For instance, on Reddit there are two groups dedicated specifically to people that are still active in church and they exemplify the Mormon need to control the narrative and the members of the group.

Among the groups based around those that either have questions about the church or have already left, it’s a well-known meme that saying anything in one of the active groups that’s even one slight iota off from the most strict and loyal line will not only get your post removed, it’ll get you banned from the group. What you say doesn’t even have to be offensive or controversial. It can be as simple as posting a question or comment about how the church is going to respond to a particular situation or handle evolving social or scientific issues, and you’re banned.

Your Power is Your Own

In the Mormon church, the bishop is the leader of a congregation, and members tend to revere the bishop just like they revere any other leader. While perhaps not placing them on a pedestal as high as the upper church leaders and church president, they still view the bishop as the representative of God among the ward, or congregation.

They also tend to believe the bishop has supernatural spiritual powers above those of the other ward members. This tends to lead people to be nervous around the bishop, or it leads them to think the bishop has some sort of special insight that he doesn’t actually have.

Temple Grift

The Mormon church has turned one of the elements it preaches is the most sacred, its temples, into a grift and most members don’t even realize it.

It’s quite simple really. The Mormon church teaches the members in order to attain complete salvation and exaltation, they have to go to the temple. However, in order to gain access to the temple, you have to be what the church calls a full tithe payer.

The Wobbly Word of Wisdom

The Word of Wisdom, the Mormon health code which dictates what a member can and can’t eat and drink, is an interesting thing.

The Word of Wisdom was created by Joseph Smith in the 1800s during a time when many various Victorian health trends were popular, but that’s a topic for another post. In this post, the focus will be on the modern implementation of this Mormon doctrine.

Essentially, it’s because of the Word of Wisdom that Mormons avoid drinking coffee and tea. They treat the avoidance of both substances equally and partaking in either is enough of an infraction that doing so will prevent a member from being able to go to the Mormon temple.