From the mailbag

(Please don’t read further if you strongly dislike being exposed to foul language.  I’ve obscured the words used, but I haven’t tried to make them even slightly unguessable.)

Yesterday, in a blog entry titled “An amplifier for gossip,” I commented on an anecdote, pseudonymously posted on a mostly atheistic ex- and anti-Mormon message board, that reports someone’s alleged exchange with me and puts me in quite a bad light.  I questioned the accuracy of the anonymous anecdote, observing that it doesn’t reflect my actual position.  While I expect that the narrator of the anecdote honestly thinks his narrative about me entirely accurate, I’m inclined to think that it actually reflects the truth of an insight from the late Fawn M. Brodie:  “A man’s memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.”

In any event, the denizens of that message board have reacted with pleasure that, despite my denials of ever looking in on their efforts, I’ve now plainly demonstrated that I do.

Once again, though, their claims are inaccurate.  I’ve never denied that I look in on the place fairly often.  (Heck, I used to post there, until I finally decided, quite a few years ago now, that doing so was pointless and merely exasperating.)  To the contrary, I’ve repeatedly said that there are basically two anti-Mormon sites that I look at almost daily, and certainly check in on weekly.  This is one of them.  Why?  Because, as I’ve candidly said many times, I find them weirdly fascinating.  They seem to me borderline pathological.  I don’t read every thread, let alone every post, but I check in from time to time because . . . well, because I’m intrigued.  (Also because, once in a while, it’s useful to see what’s agitating the hive.)

That said, though, I really don’t need to monitor this particular board very closely, because one of the participants there keeps me apprised of much of what happens there — at least when, as it often does, it concerns me.  (Several people assured me for a long time that if I simply stopped posting there, the board’s residents would tire of commenting obsessively about me.  I was confident that their assurances were wrong.  Which has now been abundantly confirmed:  I stopped posting there roughly a decade ago, and the strange obsession with me continues unabated.)  This anonymous fellow has been sending me obscene and insulting emails — scores and scores and scores and scores of them, anonymously and by various identity-concealing routes — for a number of years now.

I didn’t need to go searching for the recent anecdote about me because my anonymous source quoted it for me in an email that he sent to me at 1:48  PM yesterday afternoon.  Then, having quoted it, he appended a bit of his signature wisdom:

Apparently, though, he realized this morning that his eloquent commentary hadn’t sufficed.  So, at 10:20 AM, he sent me an important addendum to yesterday’s message:

p.s.  i’ m   s a t a n  y o u  m i s e r a b l e  p r ** k

I’m sure that he imagines that his notes upset and wound me.  Presumably, that’s why he’s been sending them to me for so long (sometimes more than once a day).

But they don’t.  To me, they’re just further illustrations of the weird social psychological pathology that I find so oddly fascinating.  I sometimes even read them to my incredulous wife, who, I’m afraid, finds them much less amusing than I do.

I think, in such contexts, of the striking passage in Alma 14:21, when some of the less savory residents of Ammonihah visit Alma and Amulek in prison in order to revile and mock them:

And many such things did they say unto them, gnashing their teeth upon them, and spitting upon them, and saying: How shall we look when we are damned?

Alma and Amulek could, I think, have fittingly answered those who posed the question that they would look no different when they were damned than they did at that very moment.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?  Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.  (Matthew 7:15-16)