Taco wrote: ↑August 13th, 2021, 4:05 pm
It's highly unlikely Brigham Young gave the order to attack people in the Mountain Meadows Massacre since Mormons follow the Judeo-Christian ethic of "Thou shalt not kill". You can be excommunicated for it. However, it is allowed for self defense.
Polygamy was practiced by about 1% of the Mormon Church. Some Mormons continued to practice polygamy after the law ending it was passed and were promptly excommunicated.
Like Joseph Smith, many prophets and apostles in the bible were also killed for their beliefs. it is true that Joseph Smith was a Freemason. However, Freemason's were the ones who killed him. There are different kinds of Freemasons, some are violent and some are not.
The Book of Mormon talks about 2 groups of people (Nephites, Jaredites) that lived in North America 2000 years ago. These people were destroyed due to secret combinations (freemasonry). The Book of Mormon serves as a warning to modern day Gentiles (Americans) of what will happen if they do not repent and serve god.
You forget that the Mormons in the 1950s had a doctrine called "Blood Atonement" which Brigham Young came up with. He was very fanatical about it. It states that the Mormons have a right to kill sinners, both inside their church and outside their church. Did you watch the lecture above by Will Bagley? He gives some good reasons why Brigham Young must have been involved.
1. During the commemoration of the burial of the 120 victims of the massacre, he said "Vengeance is mine saith the Lord, and I have taken a little" indicating that he saw the massacre as a form of revenge.
2. White Christian men are unlikely to murder a lot of white women and children like that, unless they were ordered to, and in Mormonism of the 1850s, everyone there was required to follow orders. It was a theocracy and dictatorship. Normal men don't massacre a group full of women and children. Think about it. Also the local leaders were unlikely to do that on their own unless they had orders from the highest level.
3. Eyewitness testimonies based on hard to find documents, have people saying that Brigham Young ordered the massacre and tried to cover it up. Authors like Will Bagley and Juanita Brooks also claim that the Mormon Church destroyed and suppressed a lot of their documents from the 1850s. Obviously if the Church destroyed documents then it has something to hide that it doesn't want you to see.
4. John D. Lee, the only man executed for the massacre and made a scapegoat, wrote in his autobiography "Mormonism Unveiled" written before his execution, that he believes Brigham Young ordered the massacre. Since he was thrown under the bus by him, he had nothing to do and came out with the truth. You can read his autobiography online for free. There are many copies of it online, including Kindle versions on Amazon. He was an insider of course who was scapegoated, so he had nothing to lose by telling the truth.
5. You can't organize an attacking militia and group of Indians in 1 or 2 days, as Will Bagley explained in the lecture above. It takes weeks to organize. This means that the massacre was likely planned in advance, perhaps right when the Arkansas wagon train arrived in Utah. That's why they were lead out into the meadows by the Mormons where they would be a sitting duck for any attack.
6. Brigham Young taught the doctrine of "Blood Atonement" which means they had the right to kill any sinner to save their soul, including people outside the church. And revenge was justified in this as well. This is based on his publicized lectures. This doctrine may not be practiced by Mormons today, but in the 1850s it definitely was a literal doctrine, especially in the violent and wild west.
So you see, there are many good reasons to believe that Brigham Young ordered the massacre. Here is the Will Bagley lecture again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSv_pDIpAd0