The official LDS church maybe notorious among the Hellenisticly monogamous Western World for having promoted and practiced polygamy over a century ago. However, among those who believe in “doing no harm to a neighbor” that is irrelevant. They are notorious as strict persecutors of their own true believers in Mormonism.

Mormons in the late 1800s had just enough political power to influence major political elections. Joseph Smith bartered the Mormon vote for political favors even before he ran for president in 1844. The mainstream politicians didn’t like Mormons taking a piece of the political pie and so decided to prosecute polygamy as a way to stop them. The Mormon elite had a choice. They could sell out their doctrines and destroy their families and regain political privilege, or they could suffer through the persecution of the tyrannical American government. They chose the former.

Consider this:

Much less clear is the church’s position on polygamy in the eternal hereafter. When a Mormon man and woman are married in the Temple, they are “sealed,” which means they and their children will be bound together forever in heaven—what Mormons call the celestial kingdom. If a Mormon man becomes a widower, or if he is divorced, he can remarry in the Temple—and thus be sealed to more than one woman. (Mormon women, on the other hand, need to have their previous sealings canceled before they can be sealed again.) Doesn’t this mean, in effect, that men can have multiple wives in heaven? LDS Church officials decline to answer specifically, saying only that “the Lord has not given answers to all the details of life after death. There are some things we simply don’t know.”

How deceptive can they get? They say “we simply don’t know” when the issue is whether 1+1=2 simultaneously sealed wives, and thus “afterlife polygamy.” Do they disbelieve in math? It isn’t a debate about what constitutes a “sealed marriage” because this uses their own beliefs to define it. Why not admit that they believe in polygamy in the afterlife? Remember that the US law only prohibits freedom of religious practices, but claims to allow freedom of religious belief only. Are they worried that US law will be binding in the afterlife?

But the answer to why they do such is pretty obvious. Such an admission fuels the arguments of fundamentalist Mormons. Since the LDS claims polygamy was required once but forbidden today, they are on the morally weak ground of being flip-floppers, and to make up for it, they have become the biggest persecutors of those who didn’t believe the Mormon elite could overrule doctrines and destroy formerly approved families. Now they may claim that it is the state that prosecutes polygamy, but especially in Utah, the LDS is the state. The state does anything only by the approval of the LDS voters.

This brings an essential lesson of “divide and conquer” in religious persecution. The state demands it be accepted as sovereign. A religion refuses. It gets persecuted. The state makes “an offer that can’t be refused” to some leaders of the religion to accept and praise/worship the state as sovereign. Some give in. Those leaders become the wealthy, and powerful by the privilege of the state, and the only ones free to speak their side of the argument. The followers of the original religious beliefs refuse to follow the new leaders or their new direction and beliefs. The new leaders become the new persecutors of their original religion. They even claim that the old believers are ungrateful for their “religious freedom” now provided by the state. The original part of the state that persecuted the religion no longer has to persecute the religion. because the new version of the old religion becomes the most intent on exterminating the old religion, and becomes the real persecutor.

The paragraph above doesn’t refer just to LDS persecution of polygamists, but to most religions in history, including mine. The exceptions are mainly the Anabaptists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I’d be interested in other examples. The state requires the praise of the religions and when they give it, they become de facto state religions.

So for a hundred years, the LDS has been continuously persecuting those who followed older LDS beliefs. Is that all? No. Now we have Mitt Romney, a totalitarian neocon who is trying to force his real religion (statism) on the entire world, killing those who want to be free to live in peace.

Also, I find it odd how so many of the crooks of SCO are Mormons. Did the LDS sell what was left of their souls to Microsoft? Just a quick description. SCO (a Microsoft spin-off) bought some rights (but not copyrights) to license Unix. It then claimed (falsely) to own Unix in total, that Linux contained over 1 million lines of proprietary Unix code (still not finding a single one), claimed that IBM added Unix code to Linux (without evidence), tried to threaten all Linux users to pay it $699 per computer or risk lawsuit, sued companies that used Linux, etc.

In short, multiple Mormon leaders of SCO were and are intimately involved in the fraud and extortion, and their own actions show they knew it was a fraud to begin with. Groklaw shows hundreds of unanswered details. Here is an example of a Mormon who admits SCO has no case and reflects poorly on the LDS church. Ah, but here’s the thing. If some rich and powerful Mormons are acting crookedly and embarrass the whole LDS church, shouldn’t the LDS church publicly rebuke them and/or make them stop? …But as far as anyone knows, they don’t.  The LDS can’t claim people like SCO CEO Darl McBride are so insignificant they’ve never heard of him either. It seems they are quite proud of him.

If the LDS had any morals it would renounce the forced destruction of families and persecution of polygamists. It would renounce totalitarian politicians, both in Utah and national, and crooked abuse and falsification of claims through courts such as by SCO. Since it does not, just like in the SCO case, the LDS as an institution can be dismissed through “summary judgement” without ever needing to consider which of its religious claims might be true or false, because its actions are opposite of both natural moral standards and its own claimed moral standards.

Such is the result of having an extremely centralized religion. Contrary to anti-SCO Mormons, you can judge a centralized body by how it ignores the sins of its own rich and powerful and refuses to discipline them.

 Note: Since someone’s bound to ask: No, I don’t desire to practice polygamy, but I don’t see anything wrong with it, only with destroying families.  A Nigerian friend grew up in a family where his father had five wives.  (Hey J.O.  Are you reading this!  I even referenced you!)

 UPDATE: Yes, the LDS is officially aware of Darl McBride, and seems to be very tolerant to his brand of extortion.

Since the lawsuits were filed, you personally have been criticized and ridiculed in various blogs and publications. How do you view the comments of your critics? It’s a little bit of a strange twist to the story how I’ve become the most hated man in the industry. I was speaking at Brigham Young University last year, and I held up the Fortune magazine that had me on the cover that said, “He’s corporate enemy No. 1, and his name’s Darl McBride.” I said it must have been a slow year for corporate enemies.

I’ve been too busy to keep this blog updated regularly.  Nevertheless, I’ve got a new essay published that, like many others, may rile some feathers.  Check it out over at www.strike-the-root.com.  I take an overdue axe to C.S. Lewis’ position as patron saint of modern Christianity.

I am in the process of attempting to change my articles referencing my name to my new pen name: Lysander’s Ghost.  I was warned independently by a recruiter and a hiring manager that my difficulty in actually getting jobs I apply for (even though they say I’m well qualified and they really like me) is that they Google my name and get scared off by my radical essays.  (I didn’t mention to either one that I had any radical essays, they just got curious that there may be something about me on the internet limiting my marketability.)  So now I must retreat to having a superhero’s secret identity.

So besides writing more, I need to find a better job, with a more respectable employer, until I can eventually follow this long term goal.  When our Sr. department manager admits we’ve become the Walmart of our industry, [understood as the lowest quality provider] when we used to be a top quality service provider, its just proof of all my warnings that our management’s philosophy would make us so.

Bill Barnwell has a good critique of militarist premillennialism that expands on an excellent one by Gary North. I am personally somewhat a postmillennialist. “Somewhat” because I don’t find the issue dogmatically important, and ironically because my understanding of it could be partly called secular postmillenialism like Rothbard identified Marxism and other Social Gospel beliefs.So why hold such a belief when it has been identified with the American elitist Puritans and their secular followers from Harvard, Yale, etc. and even with Marxism? I believe the answer lies in 1 Samuel 8.

A quick explanation, postmillennialism believes that Christ will return after a period (at least metaphorically 1000 years) of success by Christians in bringing about the spread of Christianity and peace where Christ reigns on earth without physically being here. As a Jehovah’s Witness coworker asked, “How could Jesus reign for 1000 years without first coming back to earth for that reign?” Ah, that’s the key question, and 1 Samuel 8 is the key answer. According to that passage, God reigned on earth until his reign was rejected by creating a centralized nation-state. So God can again reign on earth without Jesus having to be here physically, and that can be accomplished by eliminating nation-states and empires.

In my religious perspective, we might say that God was rejected as king even by his own people from 1 Samuel 8 until the Reformation and the rejection of the Pope as king of the church-state. More accurately, this wasn’t complete because the Reformation still accepted centralized states just as Israel did not return to God by separating into Northern and Southern Kingdoms. The Anabaptists were first, at least among groups still in existence, in the Western World to reject the nation-state as a societal system, But they have been persecuted ever since, and just yesterday I read of Mennonites having to leave Missouri because of laws that would require them to violate their beliefs. Another characteristic of the beginning of the millennium is that Christians will be able to live and practice freely, and not the fake Christianity that lives in symbiosis with the nation-state. They rarely get persecuted because they are the persecutors. No one should feel sympathy when one dynasty replaces another and these pseudo-Christians are punished.

Unlike some Presbyterian postmillennialists, I’m not assuming that the world will be almost entirely Christian. My opinion is that the only requirement for the millennium will be an almost entirely anarchist world. In this sense, even atheists, if at least morally anarchists, have God as their king. Don’t read too much into that, as I don’t intend or try to find a deeper meaning in it. I expect that Christian judges will be respected throughout the world for fair judgement and possibly be sought after even by non-Christians, and Christians will not need to find judges outside the church to obtain justice. This is the opposite of the world of today.

Postmillennialism implies that we have a part in changing the world, and can eventually be successful in making a long lasting utopia like world, even if it won’t last forever. If postmillennialism implies a near utopia where God reigns without being present on earth, why did the secularized Puritans who control the USA think that a centralized nation state was the proper means to get to this utopia?

I think they got caught up on the idea of utopia more than the morals required to create it. Blinded by the power they had already attained, they justified using violence (the nation-state) to try to force people to be like they thought they should in utopia. Ironic that people call anarchism utopian when it is the nation-states that try to mold people as if they were God.

Statism did not begin with 1 Samuel 8. That was just when Israel adopted it. In the Bible, the creator of the first state is Nimrod in Genesis 10. (The beginning of his state was Babel. Babel is the same Hebrew word as Babylon, and is the symbol of the enemy of the people of God from Genesis 10 to Revelation 19.) We might say that these mistakes must be reversed out in reverse order. First, the people of God must eliminate support for the nation-state from our churches. Only then can we work on removing the state, the dynasty of Nimrod from the world to try to start a Biblical millennium of Revelation 20.

[Arrrgg! When editing, WordPress keeps deleting paragraph markers.  I re-add some, and then it deletes others.  I give up... for now.] 

Essays to write, and in approximate order. I am very busy with over-time, job hunting, and family to create these quickly. Though perhaps comments or encouragement might spur a few sleepless nights of creative writing.

Unfermented fraud

Have you noticed that every Christian sect outside of American Evangelical influence has used wine for the Christian Communion/Eucharist practice? Do you wonder how this happened? It is an amazing example of history how and why Protestant Americans invented the belief that Jesus used “unfermented wine” in the seder. No other fraud is so provincial and clearly a case of intentional deception and violent utopian revisionism. It is time to let the Billy Sundays know their fate in the afterlife.

The Guitar Market as a Lesson in Markets

I’ve wasted far too much time window shopping and bargain hunting with an excessive love of the guitar market. I’m probably knowledgeable on 10,000 products. This is a market where, if someone has the talent and knowledge, they can start from a hobby and build it into a full-time business. This is quite unlike, say, the beer market. There are massive governmental barriers so a homebrewer cannot take steps toward an income in brewing. As a result, the guitar market shows massive quality, creativity, customization, craft-as-art, and direct contact, feedback, and real customer service directly with the creator. That’s not all. This isn’t only cottage industry, these small businesses compete directly with big corporate competitors, and both can and do make out well. The major difference is approach. The corporate giants attract by advertising, classic brands, market saturation, universal availability, cheap imports and high end vintage reproductions. The small businesses manage by word of mouth, internet forums of guitar connoisseurs, exceptional quality, internet video and sound samples, and value for the mid and high end market.  I think this example provides lessons beyond tautological free market truths to meta-market general truths, especially relating to asymmetrical knowledge in markets.  

Anarchist IP: A Thought Experiment

Anarchists debate whether Intellectual Property is legitimate, and to what degree. These debates often leave out the essential challenge: How will they be enforced? By reconstructing the debate as if happening within an imaginary or future decentralized anarchist world where pro-IP and anti-IP anarchists might defend their “rights” with guns in hand and no centralized authority, we will see that IP rights would be very limited. It will also be an exploration on the grey border area of natural rights, contract rights, and conventions.

Christianity and Libertarian compatibility: Good, Bad, and Ugly

No holds barred attack on the evils of most “Christianity” from a Christian libertarian perspective. IMO, there can be no ecumenicalism with unlibertarian “Christians” because they refuse to even try to be good people, much less good Christians. Strict (anarchist) libertarianism is a pre-condition for being a good person, and many sects, ideologies, and leaders are evaluated by this standard and found wanting, with only a few exceptions.

Speculative Theory of Value:

The Subjective Theory of Value is often presented too tautologically and doesn’t address that degrees of objectivity are gained to the degree people think alike and predictably. And despite Kevin Carson’s attempt to add marginal utility to the Labor Theory of Value, I think it better to start over. I prioritize the term speculative because its unavoidable nature, and ability to represent both good and bad. Some people try to make speculation to be an evil, but I argue this attack is too broad because all human action is speculative. It is important to address, however, areas like speculation in legal title to land created by states when in fact the land in question would be considered unused, unowned, or common property by natural law. Such speculation should be suspect.It is also shows, in a Popperian critical rationalist sense, that there can’t be a perfect reason for everything. There has to be a point where a guess is a kernel for further scientific evaluation. Subjectivists acknowledge this by the leaving reasons for entrepreneurial decisions as a black box. They don’t try to prove that the entrepreneur had to have strict rational reasons.

Natural and Positive Right Synthesis with Common and Private property:

I believe in natural rights, but I believe there are many grey areas for which it would be foolish to claim that natural law provides all the answers for a successful peaceful world. In many cases the answer is in agreed upon conventions. Natural law doesn’t say whether to drive on the right or left side of a road. Private-property-only theories would say that the private road owners would decide, but this ignores that common roads by nature predated and always predate private roads. Exclusiveness of property is something added (whether justly or not) only after the use of property. In a way, this article will be a continuation of the most influential article I’ve written, but build far beyond it. I think Rothbardian anarchists avoided this because they think it implies a centralized standard maker for each convention. However, not so. It just implies that two groups that don’t agree to some standard just don’t interact in areas where a governing standard would be required.

The Rothbardian Tightrope: Between Coase and George on Land

Rothbard uses the argument that the free-market takes care of just distribution of land regardless of relative inequities in the original distribution, but then rejects the the Coase Theorem for doing the same thing. So is there a consistent middle ground? I think “Locke’s Proviso” for leaving as much and as good land for others is essential to libertarian thought. Ignoring the original distribution effectively requires a Coasian defense that assumes no transaction costs. Here is where speculation becomes an “evil.” If you have a moral framework that assumes something cannot exist and should not matter, then when people try to maximize it and profit off its existence, the moral framework is compromised.

Overcoming the Calling to Ministry Some religious people get a desire they call a “calling to ministry.” If you strongly believe in your religious beliefs, I strongly advise you to rethink it. When people feel this calling, they don’t think how best to fulfill the root desire to educate and help people in a specific way. Instead, they think, “I would like to make this a full time career. What career paths are open, allowing me to devote myself to this fulltime?” Here is the problem. The career paths have been variously designed with or without intent so that your desire to think freely will be compromised. What if you work for a church, responsible for teaching doctrine, but then re-examine something and become uncertain or change opinion? Your career and income are then dependent on maintaining the status quo. Most people who choose a ministry career subconsciously recognize this and modify the direction of their thoughts to solidify their career.What is the problem with this? A cycle is created where the available careers are effectively funded by those with power, and success in the “calling” is dependent on those with power to support the success. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can ride this dragon without getting either your income or your open-mindedness burned to a crisp. The preachers in my religious movement in the 19th century supported their calling by fulltime work as farmers and such. When fulltime paid ministry became common in the 20th century, not just the passion and humility died, but so did separation from the worldly influences like mainstream political opinions. Even the first step of degrees in Bible from approved colleges is a step through a system designed by state accreditation and government college subsidies. Do you really think this unrelated to why American Evangelical Christianity has become the center of the push for totalitarianism. The GI Bill has played a far too unrecognized part in altering the original anti-war belief of my religious movement. All those federal war profits for colleges had its effect.