This method has seen great use for good: for example, have you ever seen a call to action with just the right phrasing to reach your heart and your mind, and thus convince you to donate money or time to a worthy cause? It has also been used to devastating effect by the selfish, tyrannical, and downright evil…ever read 1984? Or examples of totalitarian propaganda? Or the ways narcissists and sociopaths manipulate the people around them?

It’s all “just” words, but if you can influence the words people use and the meanings they give them, you can change the way they think, the way they feel, and the way they act. Again, this can be for purposes anywhere on the good <—> evil spectrum.

Mormon leaders have been masterful word-users from the very beginning, and the successors of Joseph Smith are still at it today.

To take an early example: sometimes, when God tells you to practice secret, illegal polygamy, and angels and swords are involved, and rumors start to spread and it’s causing you all kinds of grief…you’re going to need some carefully worded denials. Not only were Joseph Smith’s denials phrased in such a careful way that modern apologists can claim he wasn’t technically lying, but the very phrase “carefully worded denials” is a masterful piece of verbal engineering. You hear the word “lie”, and what do you think? Nothing good, that’s for sure! But “carefully worded denials” is completely different.

In our modern times, we hear many similarly impressive displays. For example: do you ever hear leaders and members talk about “giving” tithing? “Donating” tithing? Of course not! That suggests that it’s a choice, which simply will not do. Instead, people pay tithing —yes, “pay”, because you are meant to think of it as an obligation on the same level as fines, fees, or bills. You can be “caught up” or “behind” on paying bills or tithing; it’s, like, the same thing. Some people even don’t pay tithing at all (gasp!) — you can sometimes witness even bitter defectors and fierce critics of mormonism who still use this word when they’re talking about giving money to the mormon church.

“You can leave the church,” one saying begins…but it’s damned hard to overcome mormonism’s deeply-rooted control over your vocabulary. It’s not the kind of thing you’re likely to notice in the first place, and changing the words and meanings you use is an arduous process.

Way to go, mormonism. That’s an amazingly effective method of (controlling) thought.

2 — Faith is the Foundation

A normal, rational thought process can be compared to building a physical structure. Both an idea and a structure need support, or they’ll get knocked over pretty quick. That can be a challenge for a system of religious belief where a lot of ideas are supposed to come from God or the Leaders without an explanation — are all these ideas doomed to collapse without a factual, rational support?

Not in mormonism! You see, to maintain this set of evidence-free religious beliefs, there’s a simple solution: base your beliefs on other beliefs. It’s like discovering that you can build magnificent temples on foundations of cloud!*