Do we really need to rehash Mormons' animosity towards the federal government and racist views of blacks?
Yes, Bundy's religion explained a lot to me about his outlook and stubbornness. He views himself as an altruistic patriot on a noble mission. In reality, he's a selfish cheap *** who doesn't want to pay his bills. There's a reason why people hate working in restaurants in utah county. Many Mormons are frugal cheap asses. They have large families so they try to save money with using excessive coupons and weak tips. At least once a week a fellow coworker would get a note written on a receipt saying something along the lines of, "10 percent is good enough for The Lord so why should i pay you more?"
In salt lake? Servers average a good 10-15 percent more on tips. That's literally $50-150 bucks more per day.
Every day I worked in the restaurant business in utah county we had folks thing to combine several coupons (even though they specifically state you cannot). When I worked up in salt lake? Never once did someone try to pull one on me by combining coupons.
I don't know what it's like in a "big city" like salt lake, but here in utah county people still talk about "Cain's sin" and how blacks weren't "ready" for the priesthood. I've even heard in some meetings that the holocaust was the Jews' punishment for rejecting Christ while American slavery was Cain's descendents punishment and Native American extinction/removal was their punishment for being lamanites.
The things said by that BYU professor being fired a few years ago weren't surprising to any familiar with utah county or BYU. He was merely repeating what had been said or insinuated during conference, sacrament meetings, and Sunday school countless times.
I'm not mudslinging I'm being serious here. Bundy's religious background sheds some light onto this. There's a lot of perverse thinking in rural Mormon places.
Trout, isn't your mom or grandma an ultra conservative weirdo who spews out racist vitriol? Where do you think she got that from?
Want to know what Bundy was 150 years ago? One of the MM massacre fellas. A backwards thinking hick who thought he was on some sort of altruistic mission against a foreign enemy.
Elder uchtdorf gave a talk last spring during conference about how past leaders have made mistakes. I think, in part, because of the closed-mindedness and rural nature of what was the home base of the LDS church. However, in just the past 50 years you've seen a surge in being an international church and expanding out of its rural and obscure borders.
Sometimes I think we can't solve problems in real time unless we understand the past; sometimes I wonder if we don't just get mired down in yesterday's problems when we try to put now in that context.
I don't think we're better than folks used to be, I think we're pretty much the same. We have new prejudices, new conceits, new hatreds, new wars. . . . and we think those former people were ignoramuses because they had theirs.