https://www.amazon.com/White-Savior-Racism-American-Church/dp/B07VMYTLBJ

White Savior: Racism In The American Church

Despite the progress many see in the US over the years, it' become increasingly clear that the deep roots of racism and white supremacy continue to run through our political, cultural, and religious institutions. White Savior explores the historic relationship between racism and American Christianity, the ongoing segregation of the church in the US, and the complexities of racial reconciliation.

Great show on Amazon. It could have gone into a lot more depth with Mormonism, but the thing that stood out to me was that race was never a thing in the Bible. Nobody ever mentions a person's skin color or continent they came from. Race was a relatively recent development. It would be interesting to do the same documentary, but about America's homegrown 19th Century Religion, Mormonism, which is the only religion to make the mistake of cobbling together racist 19th Century myths, used to dehumanize two entire races of people, in order to justify slavery and genocide against them. Joseph's Myth is a perfect example of how racist myths and ideologies are maintained and aftificially given legitimacy by being canonized in "revelation", the word of God.
Now Mormons are thought of as racists first of all, sexists and sex fiends and homophobes, and they deserve all that as a reputation, for refusing to denounce racism, plural marriage, sexism and homophobia.
It aint just racism, it's bullying and MORmONs are fine with straigt white male authority figures abusing everbody else.

I know Jesus is White and has Blue Eyes. More than one member has stood up in Testimony meeting and said they have seen him and this is how he looks.

It is Testimony meeting, they can't lie.

Interestingly my Mexican friends tell me the questalquattle myth says just that, a white dude with blue eyes and a beard came from the sky and taught them agriculture tricks and to stop murdering babies on the alters, then went back up into the sky saying he'd come back some day.

Wow.

Then how do your friends explain the imagery in the codexes produced by Mayans and Aztecs before and slightly after the arrival of the Spanish, in which Quetzacoatl is depicted as a feathered serpent, one of four sibling gods, with a dark face? I mean, a god whose sacred animal is the rattlesnake doesn't sound much like Jesus, does it?

So what's more likely--that Jesus visited the Americas or that missionaries decided to co-opt an indigenous myth to make their religion seem more authoritative?

Now, who do you think I should believe?

You, Mrs. Lot, and your fancy algemabra and book learning edumacation, or Maca's Mexican friends?



The Catholic Church knew way before Liberty Valance was shot: Even when facts abound, always print the legend.

Also, the victors write the history books. In this instance, 50 years passed before the legend was printed, based on a brief conversation Cortez supposedly had with a priest after Cortez met with Moctezuma.

macaRomney Wrote:
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> Interestingly my Mexican friends tell me the
> questalquattle myth says just that, a white dude
> with blue eyes and a beard came from the sky and
> taught them agriculture tricks and to stop
> murdering babies on the alters, then went back up
> into the sky saying he'd come back some day.

Sounds about as reliable as "Ancient America Speaks"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrKNYkEKwcM

While Mormonism may be the first home-grown religion to be founded upon racism (I'm not altogether sure of that), it wasn't the first U.S.-based religion that made concessions to white racism and the slaveholding society of the South. As Kevin Phillips writes in his 2006 book, A Political Warning Shot: American Theocracy:

"But if the Scottish ancestry is clear, the enthusiasm and lack of re-straint does seem to have been greater in the New World. New physical ecstasies joined
"Quaker" and "Shaker" in the religious lexicon. One Methodist recalled that "while I was preaching, the power of God fell on the assembly, and there was
an awful shaking among the dry bones. Several fell on the floor and cried for mercy."23 Cane Ridge, Kentucky, where on one evening in August 1801 twenty
thousand sobbed, shrieked, and shouted themselves into near hysteria, gained particular fame as a revival ground. Between 1800 and 1850 the western half
of New York became known as "the burned-over district" because of the emotional inflammations there that matched the searing heat of forest fires.24

Both evangelical insurgencies saw their flocks multiply. Between 1776 and 1806 Methodist ranks in the United States increased by 2,500 percent -- from
4,900 adherents to 130,000 -- while Baptist membership ballooned from 35,000 in 1784 to 173,000 in 1810.25 By 1850 populist outreach had made Methodists
the largest U.S denomination, with 2.7 million members, the Baptists placing second, with 1.6 million.26 Successful American Protestantism proselytized
with an evangelical accent.

For both churches the burgeoning South (including the southern settled Ohio Valley) had emerged as their principal center of gravity.27 Nevertheless, before
the Baptists and Methodists could make evangelical religion dominant below the Mason-Dixon Line, they had to -- and did -- shed notions that were perceived
as radical, such as opposition to slavery and enmity to social hierarchies, as well as their early emphasis on selfrevelation and church fellowship, which
in some localities had been deemed harmful to family bonds. As one recent historian of the Bible Belt has pointed out, this meant "altering, often drastically,
many earlier evangelical teachings and practices concerning the proper roles of men and women, old and young, white and black, as well as their positions
on the relationship between ... Christianity and other forms of supernaturalism. As a result, evangelism looked much different in the 1830s than it had
in the 1790s."28 In some poor, low-slaveholding areas, white dissidents did break away into minor sects."

https://www.npr.org/2006/03/21/5290373/a-political-warning-shot-american-theocracy

For anybody who hasn't read this chapter in full (it's free from the NPR site above), I highly recommend it if you want to understand how religion developed in the early U.S. and its effects on our current social and political orders.

Name another religion that elevated common 19th Century racist myths, used to justify slavery and genocide, to "Word of God" status, by canonizing them in their scriptures?
Name another religion that still publishes those myths and distrubutes them far and wide, long after 20th Century genetic science debunked those racist myths.
Name another religion that still refuses to redact those clearly racist and dehumanizing myths from their "Word of God" when they've made over 4,000 changes to the most correct book on Earth since it was first published.

Thanks for this

I always thought I could never disbelieve. But I've also never felt comfortable with what felt (feels) like racism and homophobia. I can't help but wonder if I'm a disillusioned heretic or a nihilist, in which case I should obviously kill myself. Has anyone else experienced this? Or do you still have faith in some other kind of god?

SheilaDawn Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I always thought I could never disbelieve. But
> I've also never felt comfortable with what felt
> (feels) like racism and homophobia.
>I can't help
> but wonder if I'm a disillusioned heretic or a
> nihilist, in which case I should obviously kill
> myself.
> Has anyone else experienced this?

I have. After 9-11 the first thing I said was, "Nietzsche was right, God is dead." I found myself in a deep, dark depression, but it was liberating to realize that we're on our own. There's no savior that's going to come save us from the worst aspect of ourselves, which was pretty obviously tribalism. I decided I wanted nothing to do with tribalism after that point. But I needed something more than that. I needed hope for the future. I came across a quote by Gandhi, "Be the change you want to see in the world." And that worked for me. That's all I needed to give me the courage to do what I needed to do to be honest with my kids, my TBM Wife and the rest of my TBM family.
I followed my conscience, right out the door, out of my marriage, out of a dead end job and on to do what I really wanted to do all of my life, which I was free to do for the first time.

> Or do
> you still have faith in some other kind of god?

I have faith in the god of Spinoza/Einstein/Sagan/Hawking and Kaku, which is the way of nature.

I believe there are plenty of good candidates for what Einstein called, "The Mind of God"

Science gives me hope especially when combined with ancient wisdom.

If nominated, I will run.

And if elected, I will serve,

so help me Dog. Ahwoo!!

I've always thought of you as God's Nevermind. You know, like how he needed a Mulligan in Noah's day.

But you still have my vote. I suspect a world ruled by the Great Canine would be a lot more fun than this one!