Breaking Victorian taboos, one expedition at a time…
…In a later book, Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil, Richard Burton described a village with 20 per cent more males than females and noted jovially” Is it not a waste of productive power? … Is it not lamentable to see men blinded by the prejudices of education, thus neglecting the goods the gods provide? Surely it is time for some Senhor Dr. Brigham Joven to arise in the land.” The humor was lost on his love interest Isabel Arundell, who was editing the volume, and she made a spirited public protest in a special preface.
(see link at end)…It is therefore time for me respectfully but firmly to assert that, although I proudly accept of the trust confided to me, and pledge myself not to avail myself of my discretionary powers to alter one word of the original text, I protest vehemently against his religious
and moral sentiments, which belie a good and chivalrous life. I point the finger of indignation particularly at what misrepresents our Holy Roman Catholic Church, and at what upholds that unnatural and repulsive law, Polygamy, which the Author is careful not to practise himself, but from a high moral pedestal he preaches to the ignorant as a means of population in young countries. Read More:http://archive.org/stream/romanceofisabell00burtuoft/romanceofisabell00burtuoft_djvu.txt
—If you don’t know it, the Mormon Church has a curious habit (tradition? doctrine? what would it be called?) of baptizing dead people as Mormons posthumously. This is the subject of a blog called Famous Dead Mormons (tag line = “Saved After Death, whether willing or not.”). Apparently baptizing famous people became a bit of a “fad” in the 1990s Think of it, perhaps, as a Mormon “prank.”
Believe if or not, infamously outspoken hater of religion George Carlin is now, that’s right, a Mormon in the afterlife. I’m sure this will be news to him. (Can you imagine his reaction to this???)
Name: GEORGE DENIS PATRICK CARLIN
Gender: Male
Birth: 12 May 1937 Manhattan, New York County, New York, United States
Death: 22 June 2008 Santa Monica, Los Angeles, California, United States
Individual Ordinances
Baptism Completed, 14 August 2010, Columbia South Carolina Temple
Confirmation Completed, 26 August 2010, Provo Utah Temple
Initiatory Completed, 8 September 2010, Jordan River Utah Temple
Endowment Ready
Read More:http://dangerousminds.net/comments/george_carlin_eazy-e_frank_zappa_were_mormons
What Isabel Burton (Arundell) missed altogether in The City of the Saints was her husband’s shrewd perception of what was missing in the Mormon plural marriage:
(see link at end) “… The choice egotism of the heart called Love–that is to say, the propensity elevated by sentiment, and not undirected by reason, subsides into a calm and unimpassioned domestic attachment: romance and reverence are transferred, with the true Mormon concentration, from love and liberty to religion and the Church. The consent of the first wife to a rival is seldom refused, and a `household of three,’ in the Mormon sense of the phrase, is fatal to the development of the tender tie which must be confined to two. In its stead there is household comfort, affection, circumspect friendship, and domestic discipline.” Read More:http://www.bunker.org/book/chp11.html
—A quick consultation on available records of people posthumously baptized by the LDS has enough controversial power to ignite a few small towns. Jewish groups, for example, have objected the inclusion of Holocaust icon Anne Frank, Sigmund Freud and Israeli first PM David Ben-Gurion.
Karl Marx, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung and Ho Chi-Minh are there. And so is Buddha and ‘Ms. Buddha.’ Next to Eva Braun and her adorable Fuehrer, in what could be called the mass murderers row, there’s also Ivan the Terrible, Vlad, The Impaler, (yes, that Dracula) and Rasputin.
Since not even such distinguished group of fine human beings was able to dissociated themselves from the religion they never knew they’d one day belong to, it’s hard to imagine relatives of Carlin, Zappa, Nancy Spungen, Richard Burton, George Orwell or Truman Capote doing it.
And it’d be useless to ask President Obama to intervene. In 2008, after he secured his own party’s nomination, his mother Stanley Ann Dunham was also baptized as a Mormon, 13 years after her death.—Read More:http://colltales.com/2012/01/07/beyond-the-grave/
The result he said, was a pervasive atmosphere in Salt Lake City which could best be described as “gloom.” Similarly Isabel Burton misunderstood her husband’s appraisal of Moslem polygamy. Moslems, he said, “do their best to countermine the ascetic ideas inherent in Chrsitianity, are not ashamed of the sensual appetite, but rather the reverse.” In his “Terminal Essay” to The Arabian Nights he developed the theme at length:
Lastly, Moslems and Easterns in general study and intelligently study the art and mystery of satisfying the physical woman. In my Foreword I have noticed among barbarians the system of “making men,”349 that is, of teaching lads first arrived at puberty the nice conduct of the instrumentum paratum plantandis avibus: a branch of the knowledge-tree which our modern education grossly neglects, thereby entailing untold miseries upon individuals, families and generations. The mock virtue, the most immodest modesty of England and of the United States in the xixth century, pronounces the subject foul and fulsome:“Society” sickens at all details; and hence it is said abroad that the English have the finest women in Europe and least know how to use them. Throughout the East such studies are aided by a long series of volumes, many of them written by learned physiologists, by men of social standing and by religious dignitaries high in office. The Egyptians especially delight in aphrodisiac literature treating, as the Turks say, de la partie au-dessous de la taille;…Read More:http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/burton/richard/b97b/afterword4.html
Burton was at his best in describing Brigham Young. He was astonished at Young’s youthful appearance; though fifty-nine, he appeared to be about forty-five. With his marvelous eye for detail Burton came away from the interview with a total recall of face, hands, hair, clothes, mannerisms, and an astute judgement on Young’s character. “The first impression left upon my mind by this short seance,” he wrote, “was that the prophet is no common man and that he has none of the weakness and vanity which characterize the common uncommon man.”
Burton was impressed by the absence of bigotry, dogmatisim, and fanataic
by his cold, “somewhat bloodless” manner, by his sense of power. “There is a total absence of pretension in his manner, and he has been so long used to power that he cares nothing for its display. The arts by which he rules the heterogeneous mass of conflicting elements are indomitable will, profound secrecy, and uncommon astuteness.”
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)… “There are rules and regulations of Mormonism–which disprove the popular statement that such marriages are made to gratify licentiousness, and which render poly-gamy a positive necessity. All sensuality in the married state is strictly forbidden beyond the requisite for insuring progeny–the practice, in fact, of Adam and Abraham. During the gestation and nursing of children, the strictest continence on the part of the mother is required–rather for a hygienic than for a religious reason. Spartan-like, the Faith wants a race of warriors, and it adopts the best means to obtain them.”
“Besides religious and physiological, there are social motives for the plurality. As the days of Abraham, the lands about New Jordan are broad and the people few. Of the three forms that unite the sexes, polygamy increases, while monogamy balances, and polyandry diminishes progeny. The anti-Mormons are fond of quoting Paley: `It is not the question of whether one man will have more children by five wives, but whether these five women would not have had more children if they had each a husband.’ The Mormons reply that–setting aside the altered rule of production–their colony, unlike all others, number more female than male immigrants; consequently that, without polygamy, part of the social field would remain untilled.” Read More:http://www.bunker.org/book/chp11.html
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Jewish groups were outraged to find that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun appeared on LDS “genealogical” records. Heinrich Himmler’s name was also submitted for baptism. In 1995 an agreement was made to “un-baptize” 300,000 Jewish names, many of them Holocaust victims. In 2008, after he secured the Democratic Party’s nomination, President Barack Obama’s dead mother, Stanley Ann Dunham—who passed away in 1995—was baptized posthumously.
Apparently Alexander the Great converted to Mormonism (twice) many centuries after his death in 323 BC.Read More:http://dangerousminds.net/comments/george_carlin_eazy-e_frank_zappa_were_mormons
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