CustoDioship

"They're making a profit off terminal guilt
The scavengers go on parade"

 

Ministry - Psalm 69

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Бог, Нация, Труд
("God, Nation, Labour")

one of the more honest slogans for the many, many faces of fascist faith

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If you're huckleberrying your way down the Mississippi sometime, you may want to stop about a couple days' raft ride upstream of Mark Twain's boyhood home (an hour by horseless carriage) at a little town called Nauvoo. Not for scintillating high culture nor the scenery, mind you, said real estate being a little patch of uncomfortably moist alluvial dirt that nobody ever particularly wanted. But, after being run out of various towns ~1840, the followers of the confidence artist turned religious confidence artist Joe Smith set up shop there. After His Horndog Holiness started laying claim to every housewife in sight, censored the press by the sword for calling him out on it, then finally got himself shot for his antics (frontier "justice" style) the town's residents fled west. Then a century later, having stuffed their coffers off the Rockies' boundless supply of redneck credulity, their descendants bought up the place again to turn it into a tourist trap.

And that's what you'll find there now. A delightful little propaganda center where you can listen to the word "saints" insistently repeated in transparent desperation to legitimize their young sect among the field's multimilennial bigwigs and you can sit in a theater to watch a sanitized revisionist version of Mormon history, all located, housed and decorated in the weirdest mix of forced puritanical austerity with occasional splashes of kitsch that would gag a Spanish bishop. The "sunstone" decorative fake column capitals alone...

To their credit though, they've also restored and re-enacted several workshops to 19th century approximation, so you can be guided by mildly informed faithful in old-timey garb among collections or facsimiles of products of and gear for tinsmithing, gunsmithing or the ever-popular josephsmithing. They've even got an old printing press, ironically given the role such a press played in Smith's demise... or perhaps intentionally trying to rewrite the event by putting a convivial face on Mormons' relation to said press. And at least the gift shop had one quaint item as keepsake:

(made in China)

Now, however I may wrinkle my nose at the faithful's grobian leanings, I can't deny the reconstructed daily village life portion of Nauvoo actually provides a valuable and welcome dose of edutainment to a wider rural populace increasingly unaware of life before smartphones, much less before assembly lines. Kudos. Everything from antiques to the grounds is admirably tidy and well-kept, tours are well-sized, scheduled and organized, everyone's helpful and polite... if occasionally a bit... y'know... intense. Wide-eyed leaning into you, tenterhook grinning while extolling the virtues of the SAINTS! and visibly itching to score a conversion. But, hey, they're getting the job done.

Wait. Why again are we relying on them for that job?

I myself was born in a land of many churches and monasteries, the older and more decrepit of which have been reconstructed largely by public funds or donations as cultural capital, but are owned/managed/operated for the tourist trade by religious authority. Why? As you stand there being told typesetting anecdotes and rifle barrel lore by the cast of It Came From Planet Kolob you start wondering why your local small town government doesn't instead reconstruct a couple of old-timey crafts shops at the strip mall next to the Piggly Wiggly. There is nothing preserved or explained by goggle-eyed fanatics which cannot instead be explained by a government part time employee, or by a humanities or liberal arts student as practicum. I'm as celibate as any monk. Why aren't I getting free room and board to dust off old pitchforks? The recurring complaint against governments directly operating more sites of public interest as museums (that it would require funding, a.k.a. taxes) doesn't square with the observation that every religious organization playing biased curator of our shared history also requires maintenance, materials and manpower, and is permitted to turn a tidy tax-free private profit off the public. Moreover, Mormons especially are rather famous for not leaving taxation up to personal conscience. (This totes new revelation just in: gimme yer money!) Tax, regulate and audit churches like the for-profit organizations they are and you'll have plenty of money for reconstructions of village life and plenty besides.

 

One might wonder, by-and-by, why Europe has so many Christian relics to preserve, as opposed to all other facets of its culture, but of course only willful, indoctrinated, well-motivated ignorance would let you ignore the many reasons. We still have Pompeii not least because nature conspired to place it out of priests' reach. Now, after a terror campaign two millennia running, we reward the victors of religious warfare for their repeated cultural genocide by letting them hold hostage the little they have not yet burned, whitewashed, dynamited or hammered into oblivion. And the more you feed them, the more they'll take.

Remember that in absolutist religious mentality, all exists to serve the faith, and must be tolerated only so long as it cannot be subsumed or exterminated. Israel for example was obviously headed for theocracy from its religiously-defined inception, and kept in check only by the secularism of its Western backers. I was not aware until recently though of its religious exemption from the draft, fairly shocking in an outnumbered yet continually embattled nation.* Well of course. All others exist to die for the priesthood.

And the more such concessions you make, the more they'll take, feeding one or another extra-governmental power hierarchy whose known and stated goal is to convert, consume or exterminate all that is not itself. Misdefining devotional ownership of culture as culture itself can only lead to further censorship, moral cleansing, and ever-wider seeping, creeping indoctrination. Is Nauvoo a "national historic landmark" appointed by real-world government or a slice of never-neverland where make-believe comes true? The place's Wikipedia entries are lavishly sprinkled with blatant self-interested phraseology like "share a faith based history of the 1840s" ... ummm... ain't no such thing, Clevon. History is history. The 1840s actually happened. A bunch of illiterate farmers fallen prey to a con-man moved into a swamp and then moved out again, and calling them "saints" won't retroactively change a single detail of their sordid and sometimes lamentable escapade.

That love of "alternate facts" also serves as reminder that if the Trumpist evangelical protestant power base does manage to enthrone its god-king this November, Mormons' magic undies won't save them from the looming faith-based purges. Remember the U.S. has its constitutional freedom from religion not due to atheist idealism like my own, but stemming from the pragmatic observation that no religion can govern without launching into pogroms and crusades. Hell, the whole point of the Inquisition is that it ramped up specifically AFTER the Catholics saw themselves uncontested, and communist rule attacked proportionally fewer of Abraham's children than Tsarist Orthodox purges of the Old Believers, Jews and other sects to consolidate control. (edit: and, having started this page with Mormons, let's not forget their entire early history revolved around frequently violent conflict with other Christians)

 

Secularism is the best protection religions and the religious have from each other.

 

For twenty years now countries around Europe have been running an event called the Night of the Museums, where they open their public institutions to said public outside normal hours, and it has proven a wildly popular event. Cheap or free admission's standard, and depending on where you live you might get a free bus ride to and fro, maybe some live musical accompaniment or a speech or whatever. The point being: free culture! without being required to pretend any particular breed of pixies will make you live forever in the land of cake frosting and barbecued ribs. Yet the believers in those pixies are as free as anyone to come and view art which (due to the aforementioned darkening ages) is often religious in nature. By virtue of not caring about religion, we atheists don't care if it's religious. If it's pretty it makes the cut. As opposed to the religious mentality that anything too pretty must be cut for impinging on the glory of the almighty.

 

If you'd let us handle things, you may never have gotten your way... but neither would your enemies.

And now it's too late.

Enjoy the pyre.

 

 

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* Religious draft exemptions may also help further explain Israel's bellicosity. As women all over the world can attest, it's much easier to cheer for warmongering strongmen when you can be sure you yourself will never be thrown into the meatgrinder.