What if the LDS church had served him instead of shunning him?

[Sapphocrat]

Oh, it's provocative, all right, but it's a valid question.

Re the murder of Mormon bishop Clay Sannar in Visalia, California (my writing, so I can post as much as I want):

...(H)e was an excommunicated Mormon — and Gulf War vet, apparently suffering from severe PTSD — settling a decades-old grudge after trying to win his way back into the church, who believed “the Mormons were sending him to hell”.

<snip>

We can’t help but wonder: If the Mormon church had helped the lost and broken Kenneth James Ward instead of shunning him (as is its standard wont), would he had gone off the deep end?

This was a soldier who fought for the very freedoms LDS, Inc., swears — wrongly, mind you — it’s in danger of losing. A soldier who fought for the right of hatemongers like Miss Maggie to conjure up the most despicable lies about her imagined enemies. A soldier who protected the First Amendment rights of Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps to protest the very existence of soldiers like Ward himself.

What if the Mormons had served him as he had served them, and had served all other Americans?

What if? ...

More...

I know it's harsh, but I'm not being at all cute, or coy, or manipulative, about his service to the nation. The guy was a Gulf War vet, who, I assume, after being abandoned by the military, was abandoned by the only "home" he knew -- his church.

It's not lost on me that he went home -- literally, to his childhood home -- to end it all.

Thoughts? Does anyone think this might put even the smallest chip in the seemingly impenetrable armor of collective LDS cognitive dissonance?

(I'd especially love to hear from ex-Mos.)

[RandomThoughts]

1. Sounds like a sad story.

hard to answer such things, I would hope that someone could help him get away from thoughts of going to hell, and more on the better thoughts of love and salvation.

[Sapphocrat]

4. I stopped just short...

...of going on a rant about how the LDS church drills hell, Hell, HELL into their members' skulls, even far more than the RCC does (I'm a recovering Catholic/atheistic-leaning agnostic still trying valiantly to flush the last of the guilt out of my system).

That's what I keep thinking, too: "that someone could help him get away from thoughts of going to hell, and more on the better thoughts of love and salvation."

There was no one -- no one? -- who saw what he was going through, and was willing to help?

I'm particularly disturbed by this... My first "boyfriend" (when I was still pretending to like boys -- although my sweet, kind, beloved -- and now departed -- Tom remained one of my closest friends) was thrown out of the house by his ever-so-pious, door-knockin', self-righteous Mormon-missionary parents after he finally came out (not sure whether they were more upset by the fact he was gay, or that his lover was black)...

...and then there are the off-the-scale Mormon suicides (I wonder: did Kenneth Ward commit suicide by cop?)...

...and then there was the beautiful, young, gay Mormon man who blew his brains out on the steps of his LDS temple in my town -- and his bishop (our coldblooded mayor!), who has to this day never acknowledged that boy's pain, or the reason he did it...

I just keep thinking: With all their vast resources, couldn't the LDS save just a few people -- with just so much as a kind word, which wouldn't take a penny?

[RandomThoughts]

6. Interesting comment.

I was once given a penny, I think the people that did that did it as a compliment, but I missed the reference it was to. I was thinking in material mode at that moment, when a penny can also be a spiritual reference.

A spiritual penny can't be measured in material worth, funny thing that is, it is the smallest denomination in monetary thinking.

And the largest in spiritual.

Bing Crosby Pennies From Heaven.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uROuR3Jm6M

[Sapphocrat]

11. Did you give someone a knife as a gift?

I'm so tired right now, you're going to have to Google it -- or wait 'til I ask my mom, or wait 'til some older-and-wiser DUer chimes in -- but:

When you're given any sort of knife as a gift -- a cooking knife, a penknife, any knife -- it's customary for the receiver to give the giver (of the knife) a penny. I can't for the life of me remember why.

Either that, or someone gifted you with a wallet, or a coinpurse, or a purse -- in which case the giver must (must, I tell you!) stick a penny in the wallet/purse before giving it to the recipient. It's like, uh, a good-luck talisman -- it's supposed to... breed more money for the recipient.

(Do I believe this baloney? Hay-ell no! Would I be caught dead not caving in to superstition? Ehhhhh... See Pascal's Wager. LOL)

[RandomThoughts]

14. I was thinking a bit differently on penny, more about it not being about money.

If you give a dollar, and you do it from the heart, it means something, if you give a million and do it for love or to help it means something.

If you give to earn something, it doesn't mean anything.

It is a trap many that try to build houses in heaven fall into, if they do for glory, it doesn't mean anything, or that is how I think of it.

So I think of everything in the spiritual not having any monetary value.

And I think I am given pennies from heaven, not because I earn them or deserve them, but by my guess because they might make someone smile

But it is an odd thing all that stuff, and really cool, doesn't matter if that stuff can't get money or stuff.


Although real world money that is a different story, I understand the humble and the foolish given power, to show that what a person thinks is most important is not what is only important. But some people, they are just heartless and mean, actually the actions of some on TV, due to correlations, it seems they know some things. Not a single one of them corrected issues. Not a single one of them, not even one of them. I wonder about that, and feel sorry for them.

But at the same time they do many other good things.

I have a hard time figuring out that contradiction, it does not make sense in a reality based concept of existence.

[Sapphocrat]

15. That part, I already understand...

...the giving without taking. If I didn't, I'd be a Republican. :D

Seriously, you've spelled out my problem with religion: "It is a trap many that try to build houses in heaven fall into, if they do for glory, it doesn't mean anything..."

Sadly, nearly everyone does. There are precious few who do it for the glory of absolutely nothing, other than to do.

[RandomThoughts]

24. I do the same thing.

Figure most people do.

It is like if you are walking on a road, and you are trying to reach some point further down the road. Then the walking is not for something else, but so you can reach some point.

But when you stop to smell the roses, it is almost like that joy becomes in part something for you, even if not about the path, making it the same as the path, just not by your intent to reach some location.

So the destination can be all around you, while you try to reach the destination.

Sort of the concept of pennies from heaven in my view.

[sfwriter]

2. I've been thinking the same thing...

What if....


This was a tragedy.

[soleiri]

3. It's a tragedy, yes.

But a church (especially one run by lay persons and not clergy) is not equipped to handle PTSD.
If anyone should have been helping him, it was the military.
I don't mean to be rude, but reading the articles, I don't get where the mormon church "shunned" him.
Other than being excommunicated, which people (and I know several) can initiate themselves.
It also doesn't say whether or not the mormon church did or didn't try to help him.
It assumes, based upon his excommunication, that they didn't.
I don't think it's fair to make that assumption.
I'm all for making churches (all denominations) accountable for what they do
(Prop h8, pedophilia, rightwing nutjobbery, etc),
but I don't think they are responsible for this tragedy.

[Sapphocrat]

5. Shouldn't the church have tried to help him anyway?

Is PTSD grounds for a church turning away from him?

If they really believe, then they would not give up on him, no matter what he did.

Is that wrong? If so, how?

I don't know what he did -- but is no "sin" entirely unforgivable?

Don't all Christians believe Jesus said: "...with God all things are possible" - ? (Matt. 19:26)

Never mind if I believe it -- do Christians believe it? Do Christians (and Mormons) not put their faith in that?

And, if they do, why wouldn't it apply here?

Aren't all "sins" forgivable? Are not all men redemptible?

And if they are not, does that not render the entire message of the New Testament moot?

Was the church, at the very least, not responsible for finding a qualified therapist for him?

Was not the church -- which, I agree, was likely not equipped to help him on its own -- nevertheless obligated to help him find the help he needed?

[soleiri]

7. Who says they didn't?

[Sapphocrat]

8. If they did...

...their best wasn't good enough.

[soleiri]

9. That's the tragedy of mental illness.

I guess this is a topic which is a little painful for me.
Members of my extended family (they are lds) are coping with their son's mental illness
and I can promise that they are doing everything that they can to help him.
I don't think they could do any more or be better parents.
They have cleaned out their savings and retirement plans to get him treatment and have never abandoned him.
This has nothing to do with their religion.

[Sapphocrat]

10. I hear you.

At the same time, I ask you -- and I swear, I am not trying to trap you, or to be cruel --

A church that takes such pains to take care of its own... Where are they now? The LDS church is obscenely wealthy -- besides with money, I mean; it is filled to the brim with doctors, lawyers, shrinks... Why aren't they helping? With a member-family in crisis, why aren't they rallying around this young man, and around his parents?

Rhetorical questions -- I'm not challenging you. Just throwing it out there: Where the hell is the church when this family (your family) needs it the most?

I bet those parents are indeed doing everything under the sun -- any parent would throw him-/herself under a steamroller if s/he knew it would save his/her kid.

But no one is superhuman. If they rely on their church for everything (as Mormons usually do), that church is obligated to help.

FWIW, I'm really sorry for their pain, and for yours. I don't know if it's worse to go through it as the ones trying to stumble their way through unknown territory, or as a bystander totally helpless to do anything about the situation.

It just seems to me that if a member isn't capable, temporarily or permanently, of pulling his/her own weight up to the impossible standards of the LDS church, the church throws them away as if they were dirt -- when they're useless to the church, they may as well be dead.

I hope that boy gets the help he needs. I hope his parents find the right help for him -- and, just as important, for themselves.

I'm really sorry they're going through this. And that you are, too.

[soleiri]

12. I'm not a mormon scholar

I have very little information ( a lot of it gathered this evening out of curiosity, so thank you)
on how the lds church is run. My family is this crazy mixture of religions.

As far as the lds church supporting the family, I don't really know that much. They live pretty far away from me. They may be getting "spiritual" support, I guess. I don't think they would ask for money because even though it's hard for them to use the resources they have, they do have them. It would be an assumption to say that they aren't being helped in some way.
I wish I could answer your question, but I don't know. Also, unfortunately, law enforcement is involved, the treatment facility had to be approved and other legal matters. He also ran away a few times, and had to be placed somewhere else. wow, this f*ing sucks. Just writing it makes me sad.

I do know of another person, her husband cheated on her and he was excommunicated. He still attends church (which she hates) and she gets her food and clothes for her and her children from her church. She has for the past few years. In this case, she wouldn't be able to survive (she married at 18, right out of h.s., and has never held a job) without the help of her church. That's really another story, but it does show that in some cases, help is offered and accepted.

goodnight.

[Sapphocrat]

20. I'm no Mormon scholar either.

I would have preferred to remain happily ignorant about all thing Mormon, but when a church you have no ties to, and never gave a second thought, goes on the attack against your family (see: Prop H8), you tend to perk up and try to figure out what the hell their problem is.

Your last paragraph: Very familiar story. They tend to marry very young, and keep the women completely dependent on their husbands -- and the men completely dependent on the church. Break away, and you lose everything -- family, friends, business contacts...

I'm surprised they let the excommunicated husband attend church.

[dimbear]

13. Interesting question, why the Mormon Church is so evil.

I lived among them for many years, right there in the heart of darkness, Salt Lake City. Now don't get me wrong, lots of Mormons are good folks, but after the recent abomination of Proposition Hate, the Mormon Proposition, I have completely lost patience with the institution.

There's the old saw, those to whom evil is done, do evil in return. To that I urge "Get over it." That's ancient history.

One problem is that the Mormon Church's history is fairly recent. It's not hidden deep in the untouchable past. For that reason a little open minded research will quickly convince a rational person that the whole thing is a sham. The Mormon Church's response is, to be studiously fair, additional brainwashing. It is fierce, my friends, fierce.

Educated Mormons have tried to table doubts about the church's historical origins. They find themselves excommunicated.

On the other hand, those who have tried to blackmail the church with documents which throw light on the church's history have been financially rewarded. See the illuminating book "The Mormon Murders."

Strange country, Utah. Very strange indeed.

[Sapphocrat]

21. My condolences for your years in SLC. LOL

Seriously... I don't know what it is about Utah. Even other (devout) Mormons freely admit there's something especially peculiar about "Utah Mormons." All I know is that they're highly territorial... which makes me wonder why they move around so damned much. I've never seen a church so full of people who move all over the country so frequently. (That's something I've noticed from researching Prop H8 donors; also, a lot of Mormons in other states tend to maintain a permanent home address in Utah. Anecdotal and pointless. Or maybe not.)

Absolutely, there are some wonderful Mormons out there -- they just seem to get swallowed up by the vast majority who, will not "evil" themselves, dutifully follow every "calling," while never paying a bit of attention to the damage and pain they can, and do, inflict on others.

But then, that's what the busy little "bee" business is all about, isn't it -- keeping the members so distracted by one "calling" or another, they don't have time to think... literally. Not that introspection is a valued trait to begin with; I have to credit the leadership for managing to convince its members of their "free agency" and obligation to listen to "that small inner voice," while pre-empting any actual use of same.

I've been meaning to read "The Mormon Murders"... and Fawn Brodie's book as well. I love Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven" -- it was my first guidebook to the mindset when I was trying to make sense of a "culture" from which no sense can be made.

(Makes them crazy when you call Joseph Smith a teenage con artist and adulterous child molester, doesn't it? LOL)

Do you think the church's recent experiment in putting missionaries online instead of sending them door-to-door will have an "educational" impact on the missionaries themselves? They're being left to fend off a world of rational thinkers who seem more likely to engage the Mormons online just to rattle their cages (I'm hearing about this happening more and more) than they would be to invite them into their homes and submit to being a captive audience.

I hope they keep the missionaries online, as I doubt the experiment will serve its desired purpose, and maybe, just maybe, a few online realists will pierce a few bubbles of cognitive dissonance.

[dimbear]

26. IMHO, the line is not the Mormon Church's friend.........

Too many sites featuring exposes. Scrutiny is not the Mormon Church's best ally.

One aside of interest: Mormon archaelogists. They are shockingly well respected and capable. They do excellent work in recovering hard to read scripts on old mss., palimpsests, and so on. Spectral analysis of old ink, etc. Probably BYU's most respected department.

Here's the kicker. They do all their respected work, AFAIK, in the Ancient Near East and Egypt. Nothing worthwhile in the New World. No recognized sites from the Book of Mormon, except for one which is simply a hill, nothing more.

A little odd when you consider the scope and location of the civilization the Book of Mormon chronicles. So to speak.

Number of non-Mormon archaeologists who don't consider the Book of Mormon a joke? Zero.

OTOH, the places named in the Bible are mostly real places.

Looking forward to having the Mittster explain me all this.

[Sapphocrat]

27. Heheh. I just said that to my wife recently...

...that Bible stories, for what they're worth, at least cite actual places (and more than a few real people, and even a few events easily explained by nature).

It doesn't surprise me at all that Mormon archaeologists won't touch the Americas.

My fantasy is to moderate a Repub prez debate, and take Mittens by surprise with a few choice questions about the Lamanites. ("Good evening, Mr. Romney -- my, but you're looking white and delightsome this evening!")

[WVRICK13]

16. LDS Serves Only LDS

Members exist to serve the church not the other way around. That is the way of all cults, i.e. Catholicism, Evangelicals, and all the rest.

[Sapphocrat]

22. True that.

The question is: What's the key to deprogramming?

[moobu2]

17. Wonder if he had some twisted blood atonement scheme

to save his soul from eternal damnation. "Blood atonement" is this Mormon doctrine concerning the spilling of someones blood upon the ground as the only way to salvation for certain sins. The guy obviously had some sort of obsessive delusion about going to hell and he did call the police on himself, basically letting the police execute him, thus spilling his blood and saving his soul. I dont know, but I could see something like that here.

[Sapphocrat]

23. Now, there's a thought.

Knowing what (little) I do about Mormon blood atonement, that makes a lot of sense (well, as much "sense" as anything else in Mormon doctrine). Something like that could easily have been his real motivation.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

18. I think this is essentially blaming the victim.

Yes, there is an immense amount wrong with the mormon religion.

No, that is not a mitigating factor for murdering mormons.

The victim was innocent.

[Sapphocrat]

19. Only if you mean the church is the victim.

I don't blame the dead guy for one second -- he could have been anybody; the shooter just walked up and asked to see the bishop. They didn't even know each other.

I blame the LDS church, which divides the world into "with us" and "dead to us." That's the message I'm guessing the shooter took from his lifelong experience with the church. Throw in the sort of (untreated?) mental illness the shooter's brother suggests, and you've got a powder keg set to blow.

I bet a lot of people failed him, but he drove 140 miles to seek out his old church, and the man who ran it. He didn't go shoot up a recruiting office.

For all its "good works," vast resources, and ability to concentrate enormous amounts of manpower toward accomplishing a single goal, the LDS church's genuine humanity is glaringly absent -- especially toward its own former members.

As dim a view as I take of most religions, I've never been quite so struck by this sort of coldheartedness in any other major faith. Seriously. If I were starving, even the gay-hating Salvation Army would feed me. I wouldn't, however, expect the Mormons to share even a single grain of rice from one of their many doomsday "storehouses."

Of course, this stuff comes from the top. I'm wondering how to reach rank-and-file Mormons and pierce their blissful ignorance about the most un-Christlike behavior their leadership expects them to engage in. I doubt half of them realize what they're doing as a group; they're too saturated in the self-righteous persecution complex the church bases its very existence on.

Which is why I believe genuine empathy for The Other is an extremely rare trait among Mormons.

I'm not looking for a mitigating factor -- only a way to address a symptom in a manner that might cause a few Mormons to step back and just acknowledge the disease.

It's probably a futile exercise; if the church has lasted this long without addressing the appalling rates of depression and suicide among its own members, it probably won't care a whit about what it might have done to stop one crazy guy with a gun.

[EvolveOrConvolve]

25. I'm a proud exmo

Most of what I have to say about the topic would get my post deleted. Suffice it to say that there was probably a conscious effort by mormons and the church to shun the man, pushing him into an abyss from which he could never recover. Help from LDS services is often conditional, and the conditions required to obtain services often exacerbate underlying mental problems.

[Sapphocrat]

28. That's what I figure.

There's a lot of blood on a lot of hands.

Say, would it be all right if I picked your brain sometime? Nothing comes to mind right this second, but I find exmo POV's fascinating (well, of course -- exmos are the only ones who tell the truth! LOL).

(I confess, I can't make a casual visit to exmormon.org, postmormon.org or The Mormon Curtain without getting sucked in and reading for hours.)