>> ^thepinky:
Every Mormon I have ever come into contact with has been extremely kind, happy, and helpful. I think that the media and other ignorant people choose to focus on the most unusual elements of the religion, take them out of context, and call them crazy. It is incredibly bigoted, intolerant, ignorant, and unkind. I think it is EXTREMELY unfair to compare the LDS church with Scientology. Ridiculous, in fact. For goodness' sake, they're good people. They're just misunderstood.


If you ever get a chance, read the biography of Howard Hughes.. particularly the last few chapters (if you don't have time to read the whole thing)... he hired only mormons to attend to his needs near the end of his life (you see only a glimpse of them in the DiCaprio movie near the end). He hired them because of their "principles", because they never drank, never smoked and were supposedly saintly people. This couldn't have been anything further from the truth. They ended up keeping him bed-ridden with sores from such treatment, kept him constantly deleriously drugged up, they drained his checking account quite often, forced him to sign a will that they wrote and these are only the documented parts. This was a group of them that actually conspired to defraud, degrade his health and deceive those that had previously interacted with him.

This isn't to say that Mormons are more prone to this type of behavior than any other set of people, from any other set of religious beliefs.

The fact is - they are people. People are flawed. Religion is flawed. From what I've seen, religion cannot truly alter the basic primal instincts that people have. I cannot trust someone merely because they are a member of a specific religion. In fact.. from my experience investigating many churches in my youth I find all religious members suspect to potentially unpredictable and damaging behavior.