Jonathan, I don’t entirely agree with you on the loss of this secret. In my mind it’s nothing like the sweet secrets of an intimate relationship–though I think the church with all its talk of marriage to Christ and whatnot would like it to be–rather it’s an unveiling of a rather profound manipulative religious right.

It also gets used as a form of social vetting. My first year at Microsoft, on an internal email alias discussing problems with Mormonism I was invited to meet some of the other guys at the temple. If you didn’t show (and I didn’t) then everyone knew where you were really coming from with your criticisms.

Didn’t this seem so beautiful? How could you ever be expected to see that what lies behind is an implicit threat against you via family? We may not always want to be with our families (as they are now) but Dawkins knows that we all want our families to be forever. Nature programmed that into us, right? We live and die to meet this end.

Mormonism is a marriage cult that asks individuals to pay perpetual ransom or else they will be cut-off from perpetuation of seed. Hell, there’s even this idea that your wife and children might be given to another man (you know, so long as they remain loyal to the church even if this means being disloyal to you).

Dude, we have to save the world from Mormonism and all cultish behavior.

BEEHIVE, where’s your curiosity?

I agree that it’s disrespectful. Sometimes I think it’s necessary to be disrespectful in the bigger scheme of things, a small price to pay to speak out about a greater harm.

I think this show (as I understand the story) illustrates pretty well how the LDS church uses it’s claim to a monopoly on salvation to keep people in line. The clip above leaves out the sister (?) begging the protagonist to leave her husband and apologize to the church to make it all OK.