Fence Sitter wrote:I do not know Bill's history as a Mormon but as for me, being BIC, I never looked at the reason I was a Mormon as being voluntary, I was just born into to it, similar to how most Germans became citizens. And in my case, comming from an extended faithful family and friends circle that I do, leaving Mormonism is not really a matter of simply deciding one day to walk away. My inactivity and disbelief has had a decided negative affect on all my close Mormon relationships. I still retain my membership because I know what my resignation would do to my parents.
As far as your description of what went on in Germany as being a "genocidal campaign of a mad totalitarian government." I think that does not acknowledge the willing participation of many the local citizenry who not only encouraged many of the atrocities but participated in carrying them out. Some of them continued to carry out their efforts even after Germany had surrendered and no longer even had a functioning national government. So I see it
some similarities in the comparison being between the voluntary participation of local leadership in excommunicating someone and between the voluntary participation of the local leadership in the holocaust.
If you're interested that is a really good book on this subject called
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
My dear Fence Sitter, I will leave aside the fact that that book is widely discredited among serious historians of the Holocaust in order to express my total disbelief at the irrationality of your analogy. I fear that sitting on that fence is obscuring your view of things, and perhaps you should come down into the weeds a bit. Excommunication by local leaders has no similarity, formal or substantive, to a local
Gauleiter expropriating the property of local Jews before a bureaucrat assigned them to starvation in a holding center and, eventually, a supply-chain manager had them shipped off to a liquidation center.
I also grew up in the Church, and, like you and most people reading this, have experienced an unhealthy amount of negative repercussions that come from dissenting from the wider culture I grew up in. It is not easy thing to exit. It is unpleasant to disappoint the hopes of one's parents.
However, it is one thing to invoke the Nazis to support one's position, quite another their victims.
A little perspective might be in order. It's a damned Church based largely in the sparsely populated western United States, most of whose purported 15 million members there and elsewhere don't even take it seriously enough to attend or call themselves Mormons and suffer little to no real consequences for that. It's too bad, I suppose, that some people really believe a half-literate farmer on the 19th century frontier was led by an angel to buried treasure in his backyard. It is a pity that some people really can't tolerate dissent from that blindingly obvious fairy tale, and that they mistreat those who do so dissent. Worse still, some are intolerant of insensitive or indifferent illustrators of movie posters.
But no person in a rational moment would see even the slightest analogy between what leaving Mormonism entails and what being Jewish entailed in the Generalgouvernement in Eastern Europe in the 1940s.. The fact that local leaders who are ignorant of the factual parts of the CES letter do the excommunicating rather than someone else ignorant of the CES letter is not quite enough to link your experience up with Jews in Europe during World War 2 so that a sense of victimhood can justify some minor unethical behavior by people like Bill Reel and Mike Norton. We are not victims, despite the fact that many Mormons vigorously disapprove of our choices and voice their opinions of hurt feelings and anger. We're just grown-ups, and like all grown-ups who have never had anything to do with Mormonism, we don't need victim status to justify the relatively minor sins of surreptitiously recording an excommunication or a temple ceremony because we can just point out that these sins are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, much the like the Church itself and much like our experience in it and after it.
A more therapeutic analogy is to a gym that has asked one to stop coming because excessively loud and unpleasing grunts while dead-lifting. It's not fair, because other people are also loud—you've even got video on your phone showing how loud other people can be, despite the fact that it is illegal to film other people in this state without their consent. Also, the gym's promotional materials were misleading and they refuse to admit that, and contrary to their guarantee, you have not lost 10 pounds after six sessions with their personal trainer. Also, they overcharged you for years, and added to that, you might lose a rebate on part of your health insurance now. You might even disappoint your spouse who extracted from you a promise to improve your physique—don't think you're not gonna get snarky comments for a long time to come. The worst part is that they continue to charge your credit card and cite "the contract" whenever you complain to the manager—you've even recorded one of these conversations and have threatened to post on Twitter so that potential gym-members in the future will have access to the information and won't be duped by glossy brochures and sleek salespeople. It is not legal to do that, of course, but they're stealing money and lying to people about the effectiveness of gym memberships! You've come around so often to demand this practice stop, in fact, that they've threatened to get a restraining order against you.
damned Nazis!
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie