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Notes -
Thanks to @TheBookOfAllan, I decided maybe Twitter slapfights about fantasy authors might not be Too Online to talk about here. I mean, let's face it, the nerd quotient here is pretty damn high. On the rare occasions I write a top-level post, it's usually about the intersection of Culture War squabbles and hobby drama. So -
First They Came for the Fantasy Authors
Brandon Sanderson, in case you don't recognize the name, is a best-selling fantasy author. In impact on the genre today, he's probably second only to George R. R. Martin. He famously finished Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, and he churns out new books at a rate that makes Stephen King look lazy.
(I have read quite a few of his books, and find them reliably entertaining, but Sanderson is a mediocre writer whose schtick is rigorously-defined magic systems and world-building, to the point that his books sometimes read like LitRPGs, and a big overarching cosmology called the "Cosmere" that unites every one of his series into his own personal MCU.)
Sanderson is also a Mormon. If you've noticed we're in the Culture War thread, you might have an inkling where this is going.
From time to time over the years, some LGBT folks have taken a run at Sanderson over his religion. In 2007 or so, he wrote a blog post offering a sort of milquetoast apologetic, basically saying he was totally cool with The Gays but he also believed in the divine revelations of his church so gay marriage is still a no-go, mmkay? He's been under continual pressure by fans to "update" his views, and he kind of has, saying he continues to "learn and grow." He's tossed a few gay and trans characters into his stories, and he's even written a FAQ: How Do You Feel About Gay Characters?. However, he remains a practicing Mormon, continues to tithe to the LDS, and has very carefully never actually walked back the belief that homosexuality is a sin.
So how has he avoided getting the Orson Scott Card/JK Rowling treatment? Well, for one thing, Sanderson is a genuinely nice guy who is affable with everyone, loves his fans, is very encouraging of new authors, and most importantly, generally avoids any kind of culture war and does not get into Twitter fights. He's got legions of defenders, and most of them accept his bland statements of tolerance and acceptance. It's pretty obvious that he does not personally dislike gay people, and I'm sure he would be thrilled if the LDS elders announced tomorrow that they just received a new revelation from God that He's totally cool with The Gays.
For most people, this is sufficient. There are people who are zealous and dogmatic about everything their church teaches, and there are those who clearly struggle sometimes with a religious doctrine that conflicts with their personal feelings. Most people recognize that everyone wrestles with cognitive dissonance, think "live and let live" is good enough, and if they like Brandon Sanderson despite disagreeing with his religious beliefs, they'll recite "no ethical consumption under capitalism" or "how to be a fan of problematic things."
Most people, but not Gretchen Felker-Martin.
Gretchen Felker-Martin is a transwoman with a single published book: Manhunt. If you wanted to create a hostile caricature of an unpleasant leftist conflict theorist who checks every stereotype, you'd have a hard time finding a better archetype. Think trans Arthur Chu with a foothold in SFF.
Manhunt is about (caveat - I haven't read it, this is what I gathered from reviews) a plague that turns all cis men into feral zombies, and in the post-apocalypse, brave stunning transfolx battle for survival against cismen and TERF hordes. (Yes, seriously.) They also harvest testicles for hormones or something, there's a ton of graphic rape and murder, and also apparently there's a throw-away line about JK Rowling being burned alive in her mansion.
Manhunt was published by Tor, which also, incidentally, publishes Brandon Sanderson.
So, a few days ago, Felker-Martin posted this tweet. (ETA: Hilariously, Twitter's new "added context by readers" feature is now defending Sanderson. I wonder how enraging that is to Felker-Martin?)
In itself, this would be hardly a skirmish in the Culture War. Trans woman doesn't like a Mormon author, wants to cancel him, writes stupid Tweet. It looks an obvious move to try to kneecap a rival, but Felker-Martin probably bit off too much to chew this time and has mostly been mocked for presuming to have some sort of gatekeeping role in deciding who SFF will "tolerate."
But - the reason I wrote this is because I've seen the Sanderson criticism take off a little bit, more than in previous attempts. His haters are really trying to give it legs. The Midnight Society, for example, is a woke satirist who is actually, pretty funny most of the time with really on-point skewerings of SFF and horror authors (except when taking obligatory swipes at JK Rowling by portraying her as a slithering snake hissing about Jewssss and transsss), and this tweet started out great (a completely deserved send-up of Sanderson's tropes) before shifting to an unsubtle signal-boost of the discourse started by Felker-Martin.
Twitter and Reddit seem to have an awful lot of "Hey, did you know Brandon Sanderson is a Mormon?" threads. (It is amazing to me that there are people who've been reading his books for years and had no idea - he does not make it a secret, and also I guessed by the end of the first Mistborn trilogy that the author was a Mormon without knowing anything about him.)
You can see all the usual arguments being recycled: "Should we cancel all Mormon/Catholic/Christian authors then?" (Felker-Martin: "Unironically, yes.") "It's just his personal belief, has nothing to do with how he treats gay people." ("But he TITHES and that means he is funding the LDS's Anti-Gay Death Camps!")
So woke fandom tried to take a scalp and overreached (this time), because while Tor is pretty darn woke, they're still not going to drop one of their biggest cash cows. Yet.
Can You Cancel a Bestseller?
Not literally, no. But can you hurt even a big name? Yes.
JK Rowling is still mega-rich, still a best-selling author, still beloved in most of the world. Yet I'm sure it does sting, even if she never says so publicly, that she and her books will never be celebrated again without an asterisk, that Harry Potter fandom tries to put her name in small print if at all, that she will never be reunited with the stars who she saw grow up and considered friends, until they were forced to denounce her. (Though in Emma Watson's case, it doesn't seem like much forcing was needed.)
They might not be able to Voldemort Brandon Sanderson, but being turned into a homophobic villain who is reviled by fandom and no longer invited to conventions would definitely hurt him. More cynically, Felker-Martin might know that Sanderson was too big a target, but that much smaller Mormon (and Catholic and Baptist, etc.) authors might be intimidated.
(Which makes me tempted to say, "Okay, now do Muslims," but there are only a handful of Muslim SFF authors I know of. The most famous is probably Gwendolyn Willow Wilson, an American Karen who converted to Islam and writes the Ms. Marvel comic book series. Saladin Ahmed wrote a few fantasy novels and also the Miles Morales Spider Man. Amal El-Mohtar is very in with the woke Hugos crowd. All of them apparently believe that Mohammad was totally cool with The Gays. It will be interesting to see if an actual tradcon Muslim ever tries to break into the industry.)
Is this an acceptable conversation to be having in the mainstream culture? If and when the consensus shifts to "yes", what should happen then? We both agree that it's not camps, but it is religious discrimination being cemented as a cultural norm, right?
...How is this different than (((Triple Parentheses)))?
This conversation from back in the day seems relevant, and particularly this part:
Is the problem that Sanderson expressed his views poorly, or that he has them at all? Pretty clearly the latter, for GFM, and for many, perhaps most of those populating that thread. As you note, the social consensus evidently isn't there to secure her tribal preferences, quite, yet. Of course, the consensus is there to allow her to make this attack without personal consequence, and it's there to protect her from any symmetrical attack from the other side, and there's no reason to think where we are now is where we'll be in five years, or ten. And it does no good to appeal to the broad consensus of public opinion, when we have Quiet Diplomacy to shape the options presented to the public such that they don't realize what the choices available actually were.
I guess my question is, why is she wrong, really? In five years, or ten, when the social consensus has ratcheted forward another few notches and she or someone like her tries again, what will the objection be? And it's not like I'm better. I personally don't have an answer to the observation that there are some practices that I am not willing to tolerate, even though they are obviously deeply significant to their adherents. I cannot actually make an argument for universal toleration that would put me in a position to condemn GFM on principles. I don't think anyone else can either. This is why values-drift inspires such despair: because it seems obvious that it can, in fact, make people mutually intolerable to each other, that it can remove the possibility of peace from our future.
As you said way back then:
...The thing is, what does it take for her "religion" to be seen as the threat to "public harmony"? Or is that a conclusion reserved for actual religions?
The answers seem to be (1) yes, after all didn't we have for years the struggle to take religion out of schools and your rosaries off my ovaries? You are not permitted to impose your morals or your beliefs on the public square, and if the law protects minority groups and punishes hate speech, then engaging in hate speech about minority groups means you should be prosecuted; religious belief is something to do in private, not out in public where everyone can see (2) because they're Christians, silly! And Christianity is the dominant religion, so it's in the place of power and is the oppressor. Punching Christians is both punching Nazis and punching up, which gives the nice warm glow of virtue when you do it.
No, see, she is on the right side of history. Remember that? Also, remember: slopes are never slippery and all those conservative doom-mongers were just silly-billies complaining about nothing!
This helpful article from Wikipedia may explain it all to you, it certainly opened my eyes:
If Sanderson believes his church's teachings, and his church teaches that gay acts are sinful, then his church is homophobic. And being homophobic means you are far-right, which means you're the same thing as a Nazi. Doesn't matter if he never personally burned a gay or trans person at the stake, until and unless he denounces Mormonism and acknowledges his guilt and accepts he was wrong all along, he's a Nazi. And you don't tolerate Nazis, now do you?
You are drawing so much conclusions from a factual wikipedia article.
It is a fact that the nazis were homophobic. It is also a fact that the nazis were far right, and also a fact that homophobia is a view held by a lot of far-right people. Are you challenging any one of these facts? It does not mean that if you are homophobic you are far right or a nazi. You know, most people have two legs but birds aren't people. By the way, you should have noted the "and/or" in the list, which suggests that far right people hold several of those views, not just one.
"Doesn't matter if he never personally burned a gay or trans person at the stake, [...] he's a Nazi." When you do this comment, it seems to me you are saying that anyone who did not personally burned anyone cannot be a Nazi. In this case, there have been very few nazis. Hitler, for example, did not burn anyone "personally", as far as I know. At the end, the holocaust was organized in such a way that almost no one had to kill anyone directly. Not every nazi is a war criminal. Most nazis were just people like you and me that lived their lives peacefully. They just happened to vote for some nazi guy once, and to help the regime once in a while.
you don't need to quote four paragraphs of a parent's post in a reply, FYI - if you want to reference a big block concisely, add a ... between the first and last sentence or something lke that
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Lumping in "homophobic" as a signifier of "far right" is doing a lot of reaching. If the Mormons don't teach that the sin of Sodom was really lack of hospitality and Jesus Himself was probably fucking at least a couple of the apostles, then they're homophobic. And that means they're Nazis.
Do they subscribe to the principles of National Socialism? Are they building concentration camps there in Utah? Don't be silly, that's not what we mean, we mean "they're Nazis because they don't say what we want them to say".
Hmmm - Hitler didn't personally burn anyone, Brandon Sanderson didn't personally burn anyone - my Harvey Milk, do you realise what this means? Sanderson is Hitler, alive and well and writing schlocky fantasy!!!!
Don't do that, if you don't have a retort just don't reply please.
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Then either downvote and move on, or if you feel mod action is warranted, report and move on. Comments that are merely a brief statement of agreement or disagreement are officially discouraged by the local ruleset.
I will comply, but should I really report someone that is arguing like that? It seems to me that he broke no rule apart from those of logic.
It's not an explicit report option, but we do have a catch-all rule against being "egregiously obnoxious". That post did lean a little hard into the sarcasm, so "antagonistic" might also have fit.
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Then if you want to criticize the logic, you need to actually criticize it (meaning, point out the logical flaw), not just say "It's bad."
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I'll dispute that. There's a reason PoliticalCompassMemes classes them as AuthCenter. Nazism is weird, and very clearly a mutation off of socialism. There is definitely a reasonable argument that they shed core elementals of socialist thought (like class abolition) during that mutation, but they kept others (like the framework of being a revolutionary ideology to remake all society in their own image), and that leaves in them a weird position compared to other types of "right-wing" ideologies. If just being racist and homophobic is enough, then Marx, Engels and Guevera are "far-right". If we're going to ignore the distinctions and categories enough to group Brandon Sanderson with the Nazis, then everyone to the left of Joe Manchin is Stalinist - and apparently it doesn't matter if they never sent anyone to the gulag.
They sort of had class abolition. There was volksgemeinschaft, no class divisions here we're all Germans! But they weren't in favor of class struggle, which is a key Marxist concept.
It depends upon how you interpret the meaning of class abolition I suppose, whether it's killing enough kulaks that the class is liquidated or whether you just remove the category of kulak and consider them to be farmers.
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I'm happy to join in disputing the "fact that the nazis were far right" but I would emphasize the worthlessness of the left/right spectrum.
Reactionaries, those throne and altar guys like the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs, are right wing. Florian Geyer had "no crown, no cross" scratched on his sword, the sword that he used to fight for peasants during the Peasants Revolt; not right wing. Hitler thought Florian Geyer a hero and was happy to have an SS regiment named after him. I'm thinking that Hitler and Stalin had rival takes on how to stick it to the Kings and Priests, but both thought of themselves as acting on behalf of the workers and the common man.
If one really wants to have Hilter->right and Stalin->left, then one gets into trouble with reactionaries, monarchists, and integralists. All the classic right-wing positions have to be kicked off the spectrum to make room for Hitler. You even have to horse-shoe Florian Geyer and get him to the right to have Hitler think him a hero.
and I would disagree, as much as the terms get abused these days I think that the underlying ideas about human nature being bound vs unbound and "on which side would one fall in the French Revolution" is still very relevant and useful no matter how much blue-tribe academics like to assert otherwise. Heck I would go so far as to say that half the reason academic left keep asserting that it's worthless is precisely because they don't want to bite the bullet on the implications.
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Some of the difficulty is probably also due to political views not truly being one-dimensional, even though people often treat it like it is.
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Nazis were textbook socially right-wing. Anschluss, lebensraum, ethnic nationalism is categorically opposed to cosmopolitan liberalism. (Cue jokes about modern woke racial grievances…) I’ve definitely seen Stalin up there on authcenter, too, when the poster correctly observed Soviets placing party over ideology.
I think it’s more clear in the old-school political compass where the two axes are “social” and “fiscal.” The “auth” axis leaves it hard to separate different varieties of statism.
*presses X to doubt* Magic A is Magic A, and socialist infused Id-Pol is socialist infused Id-Pol.
If the Nazis were right wing, so where the Bolsheviks, Benito Mussolini, Margaret Sanger, and Woodrow Wilson and I'm not buying it.
Edit: see my earlier comment about "implications"
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The libertarians are the same, so they are some kind of socialists?
Racism and homophobia weren't particularly important in their politics. That is what matters.
I never said you should group Brandon Sanderson with the nazis because I don't know him and I'm not interested in fantasy authors anyway. That is not my point, and that is certainly not the point of the wikipedia article either.
There is no similarity there. Let me know if you ever find a self-professed libertarian group that wants to forcibly split children from their families to indoctrinate them into a new Year Zero totalizing ideology, so I can start repudiating them.
That seems like a very isolated standard that I have never seen applied to anyone before, and doesn't hold besides. Guevara had gay men sent to camps to work the gay out of them; that seems like a much more central example of political ideology and power than waffling about gay marriage.
What did you think the point of the wiki article was, if not offering institutional support to a wildly expansive definition of "far right"?
The fact that you have seen it applied or not is not very relevant. You can write an abstract of Marx writings without ever mentionning race or homosexuality and you wouldn't miss much. The same cannot be said about far right leaders or thinkers. On guevara, you are probably right, I don't know. Anyway as I stated before those things cannot be taken in isolation. Just because you are homophobic does not mean you are far right. For example, I don't think the distinction between gender and sex makes any sense (at least not as it is applied in liberal ideology). Some people would call me transphobic. But as I'm not racist and homophobic, I don't think I would qualify as far right by any reasonable standard.
As it is an article about the far right, I'd say its purpose is to inform people about what is called far right by most people in our society. I'd be very interested to read your version of a definition of the far right...
I think it's difficult to give a coherent answer. The right/left dichotomy is an imprecise arrangement at the best of times, and the right side is harder to define than the left side, especially if we're defining the right as anything other than "not leftist". The article in question seems like an absolute dumpster fire written for partisan purposes, focusing narrowly on certain social topics. Compare it to the page for far-left politics, which exclusively mentions economic topics, and doesn't even pretend to explain anything about the ideology-space, while trying to flatter their image where it can. If you dig into the talk page, you can even see editors acknowledging that "far right" is a propaganda term in use by leftist academics, while there is no comparable "wiki appropriate" propaganda source for "far left".
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Factual does not mean true, nor accurate, nor representative or illuminating. I do not trust wikipedia and neither should you, certainly not for an article created in 2019, certainly not for anything remotely political, certainly not without searching the talk and history pages first.
Then explain me what's wrong in those lines.
They were written by propagandists with a slant. Their purpose is not to convey truth but to color perception. I thought that was obvious from my prior comment.
Is there anything false?
Yes.
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Contemporary definitions of false include slanderous, misleading, deceptive, context-dependent, and/or manipulative statements.
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I'm not quoting Wikipedia on this to claim that they're right, I'm quoting that article to show the disease of language that political partisanship has infested us with, and by "political" I do mean the progressive sexual elements as well.
I would classify that article as cow dung, save that dung is a useful thing. But the attitude on display is the one I want to emphasise, because it's very clearly biased but biased in the way that is acceptable to liberals, not just lefties and tankies. Racists are far-right, homophobes are far-right, and homophobia means not being enthusiastic about everything you are told to be enthusiastic about. If you're not waving the new flags, being an ally, and cheering on the idea of ten year old trans models, then you're a homophobe/transphobe. And that means you're alt-right. And that means you're a Nazi. Even the liberals and lefties who ten years ago would have been unremarkable for going "yeah, I dunno about putting a guy with a working dick in a women's prison" are, by this metric, Nazis because how dare you refuse to acknowledge that this is a real, beautiful, vulnerable, sensitive woman? Who just happens to have very much practically demonstrated functional male biology.
I am a Nazi for not weeping at the horrible injustice done to this poor meth dealer whose hopes and dreams of being a Real Girl were ruthlessly crushed by the brutal incarceral system:
Well, that's nice, but what about the women inmates? This person is big as a guy, built like a guy, and apparently still has their guy parts. I don't know if they're on hormones or not. How much of a threat will they be to the cis women there? This is not to say that they should be subject to abuse while in prison, but unless every woman in Shakopee is as big and strong as this person, we're talking about a genuine element of risk that they'll be violent or abusive. It honestly might be a solution to start building units for transgender (male-to-female and female-to-male) prisoners to be segregated from cis offenders; if we can do this for low-security offenders, maybe we can do it for the trans.
I'm sorry, where do you read this in the wikipedia article? Especially the part in bold?
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Mormons would probably say it isn't, but Mormons have long reveled in their status as a Persecuted Minority.
If you're asking if I think woke conflict theorists like Gretchen Felker-Martin, who seems to unironically want to purge Christians, are really different from Neo-Nazis who want to unironically purge Jews, no, I don't think they are.
Well, there was that time not too long ago when they found themselves in a shooting war with state governments... But more to the point, are they wrong? Sooner or later, one must look at the decisions being made, both by individuals and collectives.
GFM is an individual. My two best guesses at why they do what they do would be Ideological zeal, or status games hustle; probably it's a mix of the two.
On the ideological zeal end, either they're conforming to their ideology, or diverging from it. If they were diverging from it, I'd expect to see their community turn on them, the way it frequently turns on others who stray from community norms; there's hardly a shortage of examples of what that looks like. If they're conforming to it, then their actions give us evidence of how that ideological community actually thinks. It seems clear to me from this and numerous other examples that to the extent GFM is acting ideologically, they are conforming, and their actions are representative of the collective LGBTQ+ zeitgeist. This is where the movement is going.
On the status hustle end, they're doing what they're doing because they think it will be popular and will gain them status. In this way, the action is a test of broader social norms and attitudes, a way of betting, with skin in the game, on the nature of our society. From where I'm sitting, it looks like a reasonable bet. Not a million-to-one jackpot, but a limited win with negligible downside and solid gains secured. They were a nobody, and now their name is out in a (for them) net-positive context, with the name of their book attached. The campaign against Sanderson is back on, and wherever it goes, GFM will be riding it. Reddit normies and twitter folk are playing along. TOR isn't, yet, in this case, but the effort costs the attackers nothing, and gains them much, so it will happen again. It costs them nothing, because this sort of behavior is, in fact, popular, norm-affirming, in step with the spirit of the age.
If GFM is roughly equivalent to a neo-nazi, one must observe that this variant of neo-naziism is actually quite popular, growing more so by the day, and is in a position to secure dominance of our social, political and economic systems.
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I find this a bit uncharitable. Just about every group has their Founding Myths. Americans sailed across the sea for freedom, Jews left Egypt, Mormons left the East, black Americans escaped slavery, and so on. Are there any cultures without these culturally-valued histories of persecution?. Christianity in general is (to an extent) based on the whole "the world will hate you" thing, and even when the world doesn't hate Christians they want to pattern-match that onto everything. So I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd disagree that Mormons in particular feel this way; I think it's basically normal for all such groups (especially Christian groups) to shout about their persecuted pasts as much as possible.
White southerners have Birth of a Nation New England wasps have seeking religious freedom on the mayflower, ethnics have escaping terrible conditions in their home country, etc.
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I feel like the lack of an assumed/densely-correlated genetic component alters the calculus a little bit.
Did I miss something? When and why did we start calling Jews "(((Triple Parentheses)))"?
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People do convert to Judaism, you know.
I guess, for that matter, Mormons have had an assumed, and do apparently have a somewhat densely-correlated, genetic component to their identity.
Among Scott Alexander's juvenilia is a piece called "Mormonism: The Control Group For Christianity?" It's an interesting bit for a number of reasons, but I suspect that it should probably be updated today to something like "Mormonism: The Control Group for Group Identity?" Or maybe "The Control Group for Unpopular Minorities?" Because America kinda hates Mormons--Republicans and Democrats alike have an overall negative view--far, far worse than America's (overall positive) feelings toward Jews and Judaism.
People don't really convert to Judaism. Judaism heavily discourages conversion, and people usually give up after waiting a couple of years. Simply put, they don't want people to join, and the law is that you should discourage anyone who tries to join. The optimal Goy doesn't convert to Judaism, they simply observe 7 commandments given to the son's of Noah.
Secular Judaism might include some highly inclusive conversion but it doesn't change anything in a meaningful sense. Assuming that the mother did some kind of inclusive conversion they are considered a danger because a couple of generations later someone might actually think they are Jewish, marry an actual jew who thinks that she's an actual jew, thus introducing non-jews who will give birth to non-jews who think their Jewish, and then their non-jewish daughters will marry jews and have more kids that they think are jews but actually aren't. Introducing this kind of faulty record keeping into the system is a big deal because it allows people to honestly make mistakes that result in the offspring of every daughter not being jewish. This is a genuine problem.
It is not the case that there are conversions into the Jewish genetic cluster in any meaningful sense.
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If you've ever read Arthur Conan Doyle's first published Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study In Scarlet, which came out in 1887 you'll know about the long digression of the second half set in America amongst the Mormons. And the Mormons don't come out of it like the nice, family-friendly version of today. He didn't have first-hand experience so he was going off reports, but the 19th century attitude does seem to have seen Mormons as the villains - after all, they were a cult at their very beginnings and cults don't tend to get good report from those around them.
It seems that the book was in trouble in one school district because it was "derogatory towards Mormons":
Is it derogatory? Here's a sample:
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This is more "America barely understands religion", isn't it? "Christianity" is rated 19 or more points higher than any subset of Christianity? Jehovah's Witnesses' "we shun people who leave" (or more likely "we knock on your door and annoy you") is rated lower than FLDS' "we kick out teen boys to reduce the competition for child brides"?
This makes sense to me. All Christians will associate their own church most strongly with Christianity and thus rate it higher than any other faction besides their own. Also, people mostly associate weak Christians with Christianity and stronger/more pushy Christians with their particular denomination.
I think the FLDS church benefits from the association with the LDS church, and the LDS church is hurt by that association, which might explain why the FLDS church is rated higher than the Witnesses and barely lower than the LDS church.
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I’m guessing recognition is a pretty big factor. Americans approve of Christianity especially because it’s a synonym for their particular sect and have reservations about that other one over their. Fundamentalist church of Latter Day Saints? If I didn’t know what it actually referred to, I’d have assumed they were a Calvinist or Pentecostal group(very few Americans use the term Latter Day Saints in ordinary conversation).
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Every devout Christian is going to say they love Christianity; they just hate those heathen apostate Baptists or papists or Eastern Orthodox. Most nations have an ethnically rooted "state" religion, even it isn't one officially, so for most places I would imagine you'd find that approval of Christianity would mirror closely the approval of whichever sect prevails in that locale. Few places have the diversity of cohabiting beliefs that the USA has, and Mormons in particular are pretty universally reviled or at least discounted by most major Christian religious institutions, since they have fundamental dogmatic disagreements that most other Christians consider fundamental tenets to true belief. Additionally LDS and its offshoots as well as JW have, in my experience, the most vituperative exbelievers of any (US at least) semi-mainstream religions. Whether that's for good cause or not is left as an exercise to the reader.
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