This is a Wall Street Journal article I've seen bouncing around facebook.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444450004578002010241044712.html
While the author takes a pretty narrow-minded approach (he paints Liberals as the only persecutors of Mormonism, when this election's Republican Primaries showed Conservatives just as willing as anyone to criticize Mormonism, and asserts that "a great religion surely cannot be goaded into frenetic mob violence on the slimmest provocation" concerning Islam while ignoring Christianity's violent history, even here in the US etc.) I think he poses an interesting comparison between the public's reaction to the Book of Mormon musical vs. the film "Innocence of Muslims" and wanted to know your responses--especially because of your background with US religious history. Do you think this is a fair comparison? Does it say anything about religion in the US, or Islam and Christianity in the US? And what do you think he did right or wrong with his article?
If you have time, I'd really love to hear what you guys think about either my questions/thoughts or whatever you came up with while reading! Thanks!
haha! you beat me to the punch! I came here strictly to post about this. I really enjoyed the article, it's one of those that Mormons can read and think, "yeah! we're great and non-violent!" Mormons are really good at laughing off criticism, I think it comes from the understanding that we are to be peculiar, while we are also told that we are the truth. Those two points are engrained in us from a very young age.
ReplyDeleteI think we need to remember that the rioters are most likely the minority. Media does a great job in creating the illusion that the extreme are the majority and that they represent the entire group.
It seems that the only time you can get Mormons to be violent is in a football stadium one BYU-Utah game day. :)