Posted on 08/18/2007 11:25:10 AM PDT by tantiboh
Thanks for the clarification.
Your post was too long and rambled quite a bit about things I didn't bring up, so I only read the first paragraph. As for expelling people, which was your original point, the LDS did none of that. Noone was living in the Wasatch valley when Brigham Young settled Utah. The Saints only developed into an autonomous people because intolerant people such as yourself would not allow them to practice their religion. So get your facts straight.
Everyone agrees that the Massacre should never have happened, so to come here and attack the church for something that has never been proven to have happened is troubling and disruptive. Please take your religion-bating elsewhere.
I think it will be shown in theaters, though not widely.
I use IMDB.com for a lot of my movie info. One feature it has is that you can rate a film. This film has been rated by quite a few people who have screened it, and a lot of preliminary user reviews have been written. Here are the applicable links, if you’re interested:
Movie page:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0473700/
Ratings:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0473700/ratings
User reviews:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0473700/usercomments
Generally speaking, it appears the Mormons gave it 1’s, the anti-Mormons gave it 10’s, and the thinking public gave it 5’s.
Personally, I’ve found that any movie on IMDB that doesn’t make a rating of 7 is not worth my time to watch. It appears that, solely from the perspective of the art of filmmaking, that audiences are already beginning to reject “September Dawn.”
What I did find interesting were the particularly polarized user reviews. Everything from “This was a POWERFUL cinematic experience!!!” to “One of the worst movies I have ever seen”
~”Now - I don’t know you, and you may very well be a very honorable, conservative, and honest upstanding person. I just suggest that a Mormon might not be the most reliable source for information on the MMM.”~
I never claimed to be the most reliable source. I claimed to be LDS in the interest of full disclosure. Make your own determination.
Me either.
If you try hard enough, you can make anything 'seem' similar to anything else. I've had people on FR point to Inquisition and/or Crusades and say that proves Christians are terrorists just as much as Islamics. Do you believe that to be true?
You also don’t have any evidence that directly implicates Brigham Young or the General Authorities of the Church in planning or sanctionning this massacre. It seems as if you are asking to prove a negative. Prove to me that Brigham Young was not involved. Rush loved to say “its precisely because there is no evidence that we must investigate”. Surely you can see this argument is specious, and most of the people that cling to this have axes to grind (see left wing kook fringe).
(syncretist, love that!) Islam is an evangelical faith as well, isn’t it?
Huh?
Actually, this fits a pattern of Hollywood. Everyone’s a terrorist except the actual Islamist Jihadists. Only 24 managed to portray muslims as terrorists in post-9-11 tv/movies.
The movie was shot mostly in 05, with pre-production and planning usually starting two or more years before that.
It doesn't seem likely that anybody could have foreseen in 2002 or 2003 that an anti-Mormon movie released in 2007 would be helpful to Hilary's candidacy.
I don't doubt Hollywood would do anything it could to help her, I just doubt this movie's timing is an example.
Possibly correct, if you limit the "LDS church as an organization" to Brigham Young and the supreme leadership in SLC. Even there, they used rhetoric in the weeks before the massacre that can easily be interpreted as a call to do exactly what the Mormons in SW Utah did.
Those who committed the massacre were not "renegades," although the Church turned J.D. Lee into one after the massacre as a scapegoat. It was performed by the local militia in their formed groups, amd was organized by the local authorities, who combined religious and secular authority.
Indeed, the Mormon leadership at the time did what they could to prevent it. Those who think that Brigham Young condoned or ordered the massacre are wide of the mark.
Nope. "Mormon leadership," in any reasonable sense of the term, would include the local authorities in SW Utah, who not only did not attempt to prevent, but were actually the ones who organized and perpetrated it.
BY probably tried to stop it at the last moment. Given his rhetoric in the preceding weeks, this may have been a case of chickening out, or he may have indeed had a change of heart, but too late. In any case, he certainly shares some responsibility for creating the climate of fear and vengeance that led up to the massacre.
There are extenuating circumstances which may serve to -explain- why the perpetrators committed this act, and these circumstances may be explored to some profit; but they should not be used to -excuse- the act.
Thanks for saying this. I have had some discussions with Mormons who attempt to excuse the massacre as self-defense. I'm glad you're not among them.
It is also only fair to point out that similar extenuating circumstances explain much of the hostility to Mormon in MO and IL that led to their persecution and expulsion, but these extenuating circumstances should similarly not be used to excuse the persecution.
The Church should have worked harder to punish the perpetrators. I think this failed responsibility was an impetus behind the construction of the memorial at Church expense a few years ago.
I think a reasonable person would conclude that the Church, for many decades after the MMM, was involved in a conspiracy to obstruct justice and cover up the atrocity. Why exactly they did so is not and probably never will be clear, as the coverup and destruction of evidence was largely successful, but a not unreasonable conclusion is that "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" would have been damaging, possibly fatal, to the church and its leadership.
All that said, what I've learned about the movie "September Dawn" has convinced me that it is essentially a hit piece on Mormonism.
MMM was the most horrifying atrocity ever to take place on American soil, and was worse in some ways than any of the Nazi atrocities such as Lidice. I think it is odd that such a movie hasn't been made before. After all, we've had something like a dozen movies about the "shootout at the OK corral," which had something like five people killed, all of them armed.
***You haven’t read your Bible then, because He (as God) told the Israelites to kill all the Canaanites in the Promised Land and leave none alive. Oh, wait. That was the Old Testment.***
And why was that? Because of the sins of the Canaanites. God even warned the Israelites not to do as the Cannanites had sone sest the land spew them out also! They did, it did.
sone sest==done lest
Oh please there were rumblings in those days when Mitt was Gov about running for president I even heard him way before he announced on the Monica Crowley they hoped that he would run and many knew there would be a good chance.
BTW it took a long time to release this movie being from 05!
IMHO
Yup. As a convenient scapegoat. If about 200 Americans were murdered today in cold blood by a conspiracy of well over a hundred people, would you consider trial and execution of the onsite leader to constitute adequate justice, or would you want all participants and conspirators punished?
~”MMM was the most horrifying atrocity ever to take place on American soil, and was worse in some ways than any of the Nazi atrocities such as Lidice.”~
The rest of your post is fairly reasonable, though I disagree. This sentence is undiluted histrionics and places your ability to discuss the topic rationally in severe doubt.
~”The movie was shot mostly in 05, with pre-production and planning usually starting two or more years before that.”~
Fine, it was shot in ‘05. Why couldn’t it have been released in ‘06, or perhaps last winter? Why wait until the nomination race gets hot?
It appears to me that the movie was not produced in response to Romney’s run; but it is very suspicious that it was held in reserve for at least a year so that its release happened to coincide with Romney’s run.
This leads me to conclude that its release is intended partly to cast aspersions on Romney as a candidate.
That's a tempting conclusion to draw, but was it widely known that Mitt Romney was going to be a presidential candidate when the movie was greenlighted?
Not really. About average. Movies take a very long time to shoot and release today as compared to the old days. I'm not really sure why.
It is probable that when planning for this movie started Romney was a fairly recently elected governor of MA, with no other political experience whatsoever. It would have taken a psychic to see him as being successful enough as a Republican governor in a Democratic-dominated state to be a credible candidate for President in '08.
If you think this assumption isn't reasonable, why don't you look around right now and tell us which governors elected in '06 with no previous political experience will be leading candidates for President in 2012?
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