Controversy about the proposed McKinney Texas Temple (actually to be located in adjacent Fairview, north northeast of Dallas), appears to be bubbling up again, and critics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are, once again, accusing the Church of trying to bully and intimidate a humbly idyllic little community into rolling over and playing dead while the Mormons callously impose an enormous, triumphalist temple on innocent rural people. (For aerial views of the neighborhood immediately surrounding the proposed temple in Fairview, see here.) It’s the same bullying playbook that the Church followed in Cody, Wyoming, where a vast 9,950-square-foot monstrosity is already beginning to loom over the city, blotting out the night sky and obscuring the surrounding mountains from view. (For aerial perspectives on the densely packed but sylvan residential area into which the Cody temple is being inserted, see here.) It’s the same kind of unethical intimidation that the Church practiced with the Lone Mountain Nevada Temple in Las Vegas, which, the Associated Press has reliably informed its readers, is slated to be larger than the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. (See the latter portion of my 3 October 2024 blog entry entitled “Flawed Reporting about the New Temple Proposed For Las Vegas.” And, again, for aerial views of the surroundings of the Lone Mountain Nevada Temple, which my wife and I visited again just a week or two ago, please look here.)
Some say, “I do not like to do it, for we never began to build a temple without the bells of hell beginning to ring.” I want to hear them ring again.
We completed a temple in Kirtland and in Nauvoo; and did not the bells of hell toll all the time we were building them? They did, every week and every day. (Discourses of Brigham Young, 410).
If you would like to be better informed on the controversy in Fairview/McKinney, there are some very helpful materials online, including letters to city leaders from the Church’s attorney, a prominent native Texan who, I believe, is not a Latter-day Saint: “Latest News and Media”
Up today in Meridian Magazine: Daniel C. Peterson, “How Film Brings the Book of Mormon Witnesses to Life—Now Streaming Free” And then there is this, which I encourage you to watch and even to share: “Episode 23: Why did Martin Harris Join So Many Churches?
Witnesses of the Book of Mormon—Insights Episode 23: Martin Harris was away from the church for many years before finally returning. Critics have tried to use the fact that he joined other denominations as something that invalidates his testimony of The Book of Mormon. What’s the real story here? This is Episode 23 of a series compiled from the many interviews conducted during the course of the Witnesses film project. . . . These additional resources are hosted by Camrey Bagley Fox, who played Emma Smith in Witnesses, as she introduces and visits with a variety of experts. These individuals answer questions or address accusations against the witnesses, also helping viewers understand the context of the times in which the witnesses lived. This week we feature Daniel C. Peterson, President of the Interpreter Foundation and Executive Producer of Witnesses. For more information, go to https://witnessesofthebookofmormon.org/. Learn about the documentary movie Undaunted—Witnesses of the Book of Mormon at https://witnessesundaunted.com/.
Once again, be sure to visit The Witnesses Initiative where, for the rest of February, you and your family and your friends and your neighbors can stream Witnesses at no charge, and where you can all stream Undaunted for free into the foreseeable future. But this month of February is swiftly passing:
Our life as a dream, our time as a streamGlide swiftly away,And the fugitive moment refuses to stay;For the arrow is flown and the moments are gone.
The millennial year
Presses on to our view, and eternity’s here,
Presses on to our view, and eternity’s here.
In other film news, it’s been amusing to watch how some of my critics, who like to describe me as “whining” about the hit Netflix miniseries American Primeval, try to defend it: I’m all upset that it’s historically inaccurate, they say, but it never claimed to be anything other than fiction. Anyway, it is historically accurate. And, anyhow, it’s not historically accurate, because it’s kinder to Brigham Young and the Latter-day Saints than they deserve: The Saints and their despotic, Stalinesque ruler were even more brutally violent than the too-gentle Netflix production shows them to have been.
In the meantime, the Interpreter Foundation’s dramatic film Six Days in August, which tells the story of Brigham Young and the Twelve and the leadership crisis that ensued upon the assassination of Joseph Smith in June 1844, is streaming on numerous commercial platforms. We hope that you’ll enjoy it.
Realistically, there is simply no earthly way for any mortal to keep up with all of the depravities that are routinely visited upon humankind by theists in the name of their theism. Nonetheless, drawing upon the inexhaustible resources of the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™, I try to give my eager readers at least a taste of those evils. Here, as it were, is an ennead of recent entries:
“An Update on Meridian’s Kids in India”
“Wheelchairs Donated by the Church Enable Independence in Europe”
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