WillWybrow.com

Mormons, Mormons, everywhere but not a drop to… think? I don’t know, ignore this opening sentence if you want. It’s optional.

All dressed up in pinstripe suits and ties, the sparsely distributed occupants of seats in the first official part of the day’s inquest into the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (what we call “Mormonism” because we are verbally conservative (read: lazy)) were sharing in-jokes, singing hymns and letting children make up prayers. All without any women in the room to be distractions (that’s not the reason they gave; more on this later). It didn’t feel like a cult, even if everyone was uniformed and had their own little language; it was too friendly an atmosphere for the underlying evil inherent in this twisted and contrived Christianity spin-off.

First thing is first, though; I arrived (at special request) early so the “sisters” — what they call “people who are part of the church who happen to have two X chromosomes” — could give me a tour and prime me for what usually happens during the day. We then adjourned to a small classroom so they could ask me if I’d prayed for guidance like they told me to when we met before. I hadn’t. I said I had, though, since everyone knows prayer does fuck all. I’ll submit some prayers to the Mormon God later. God’s all powerful so He can make them apply retroactively, don’t worry. I said I had prayed and that it was foolish and nothing happened. As before, I wasn’t doing it quite right.

We then talked about how last time I demanded something miraculous to happen to prove god’s existence and I suffered the inevitable “I know someone who knows someone who prayed after the doctors gave her days to live and got better” anecdote — I’ve heard them all before. If they had any ring of plausibility to them they’d have at least made the news, right? Anyway, I asked about all the people who god didn’t heal and she said “maybe god needed them in heaven. God has a plan for everyone.” So I asked them if Healed Anecdote Woman would have become well even without prayer and she said no. Then I asked her if her prayers had changed god’s plan and she evaded the question.

I was very intrigued by the idea of god needing someone in heaven, so I pushed it. I absolutely got her to admit that god makes people get hit by cars and die if he needs them in heaven. Fucking ace, you guys. God murders kids. That little girl from the “hit me at 40 miles per hour” advert? God killed her because he needed a little blonde child to take care of some stuff in heaven so don’t sweat it.

I truthfully told them how I actually would love for there to be an actual god that you could pray to for stuff; I have been raised on fantasy books with panthea of deities (and dragons and magic, fuck yeah, fantasy novels). But just because I’d like it to be true, doesn’t make it so, otherwise I’d be a flying superhero who is invulnerable to harm and shoots lightning or eye lasers. She kept insisting that she knew that god was real and he spoke to her, and before I could really get into why that was exactly wrong (I am pretty sure we consider something to be knowledge only if the person is certain of it and it is true), we had to go into this first meeting.

All the men filed into the big room that was partitioned off for this small gathering. The women went around the back to some other, probably less nice, room. When I asked why, I was told that “women learn differently from men.” I was like WUT TEH FUCK??! in civilised words and she said “we are more, you know, girly!” Fuck sake. Left to my own imagination I just presumed that the women’s meeting was parallel to the men’s only with way more jokes about menstruation.

I got to hear about how even when everything is going wrong, we should just pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get on with life. Which I agreed with; no use bemoaning the shit going on that you can’t do anything about. They somehow managed to worm eternal life in there, though. “Don’t worry about this life, we’ve got a kickass spot in heaven reserved for us [paraphrased].” Then after hearing about Mormon Conferences, where prophets gather to discuss doctrine in what I imagine to be a cross between the Pope’s Cardinals and the UN, the man doing the talk drew a circle on the whiteboard and some arrows on it. This was meant to indicate the brain and how when doubt comes in, it pushes faith out, and when faith comes in, it pushes doubt out. This was an alright analogy, I decided. At least it is sort of intelligible. There was a catch, however: they kept saying how faith pushing doubt out was the good scenario, and doubt destroying faith was the bad one. Scepticism, bad? DON’T THINK SO GUYS. How offensive.

On to the second segment of the proceedings: learning the teachings of the gospels. Today’s focus was families. The sexist gender segregation was the first hint of the sinister foundation of this church. The praise of excessive breeding was the second warning sign. Of course! Have lots of children and raise them in the Mormon faith. This is how a little sect from Utah, USA could have grown large enough to make it all the way to little Basingstoke, population 100,000. We heard a story about a man who didn’t feel like he had achieved anything in his life until his church pointed out that he had eight children. This gives you an almost legendary status amongst your peers in Mormonism. Really, why aren’t they recruiting from the pool of working-class teenage mothers? If anyone knows about excessive breeding, it’s the school dropouts who have two children before their 20th birthdays.

Argumenta ad hominem against the low-information demographic aside, I slowly realised during these first two meetings that the veneer of smiles, warm greetings and excessive handshakes did not stand up to even remotely minimal scrutiny. Smiling chatty missionaries and a clean, presentable church interior were merely components of the flimsy skin stretched over the dark heart of the insipid plot to grow the LDS movement to huge numbers at any cost.

Finally, we were ready to enter the main service where bread and water were blessed and then consumed. I didn’t get a chance to ask if this was a rip-off of the zombie vampire pagan derivative the Catholics call holy communion because a deathly hush had descended over the now-solemn Mormons.

After hymns were sung, we heard two talks from self-important church speakers. They were rambling and didn’t have a whole lot of point to them, but I picked up on some important matters. Both speakers admitted to going into primary schools and their confidence that the children they preached at accepted their word about god with very little argument. I forcefully kept myself from shouting out that children are genetically predisposed to accept what authority figures tell them, enabling them to learn more easily (and drawing the bog standard parallels with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy), choking down my rage and letting it filter out slowly in the form of a level, icy stare of death into the eyes of the speaker. The second guy also briefly touched on how children were so accepting of what he had to say, as though tricking a child into believing nonsense is some badge of credibility. He also very quickly touched on widespread science that conflicts with the views of religion. “I’ve talked to my friends at work, who tell me about all this science, and I accept that science answers some questions that religion can’t.” Stop there, please, I thought to myself. He ploughed on regardless of my silent wishes: “But religion also answers questions that science can’t even begin to find an explanation for.” *FACEPALM* Ruined.

It was after the end of this service that I finally got to talk to the sister who is my unofficial Mormon guide about the perils of breeding too much, how having new children when so many desperately need adopting and how overpopulation is going to really fuck us over (I didn’t say ‘fuck,’ I was actually uncharacteristically well-mannered all day). Later on she said she would definitely adopt when she has children. If she means it, victory: Will.

As it was, I didn’t really get enough one-on-one time with the missionaries who pulled me in off the streets. I didn’t get to ask my questions about the Mormon stance on polygamy, homosexuality, abortion, contraception, evolution, stoning heretics to death and so on. I did, however, get to take home my own copy of the Book of Mormon to scour for racism that I am told is present, to pick up all the unverified claims about the fictional shenanigans of the Nephites and to try and find out why it took god nearly two thousand years to get this little addendum to the New Testament published. On each page of the book is, helpfully, a date or approximate date during which the events supposedly took place. Those idiots, at least with the Bible they have that little extra layer of deniability of there being few dates at all mentioned. I don’t know if they were using the Julian calendar in the Americas during 0th century AD and 0th century BC, where and when this poorly penned fiction novel is set, but having recently read about it for unrelated reasons, I found out that most common people of the Roman empire didn’t know the date, since the number of days in the year was fiddled so often (it took the Romans a little while to get the hang of leap years — check it out).

After the service I spoke to a big black guy named David Ogle. He said I had a cool name too, so relax. I told him how even though I was a member of the Warwick Atheists (plug plug pluggity plug), hearing that a chapter of the American-founded Mormon church had opened in little Basingstoke meant that a visit was just too tempting to pass up. He said that a lot of the founders of the Mormon church actually emigrated from Britain anyway. I haven’t fact-checked this yet so correct it if it is wrong. He also said that there were as many LDS adherents as there were Jews, which is true, but he also said this number was thirty million (when it is actually thirteen million says Wikipedia) so he’s only 50% reliable. He and the sister I’ve been discussing then made it a point to tell me that having a large family is not a commandment. Could have fooled me with all the talk about how the true path to happiness was through family, the most rewarding experience being raising children and how families could all meet up together in heaven if they went through a special rite in church. This matter will require further investigation and some excellent arguments that are more convincing and less evil-sounding than “material possessions are the ultimate source of happiness, actually: good food and good stuff, with good people to talk about the stuff with.”

Sexism, irresponsible breeding and childhood indoctrination are the first three issues raised from this first encounter with the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. Armed now with their flawed holy scriptures, I can begin to write up a list of more things wrong with their devious religion and return in a few weeks in the early morning to get some quiet question time in with the missionaries where getting a word in doesn’t mean speaking out a dissenting opinion in front of fifty people and interrupting what must be long-prepared speeches. Even if I can get them to re-iterate that god hits people with traffic when he feels like it, I’ll take it as another victory for me.

When I was a child in school, I was not the paragon of popularity you see before you today. I was a lowly peon of social interaction and as such, the sentiment that “beggars can’t be choosers” was the unspoken slogan that accompanied my friend-making sub-quest that ran parallel to those other, more significant ones like “do well in school.”

A guy moved into my primary school class. Let’s call him “Boris.” Boris was a really troubled kid who’d allegedly been expelled from his previous primary school, although the line we were fed is that he was forced to leave because he’d been overwhelmingly bullied. Though I can’t remember the exact steps that led up to us being friends, they happened for whatever reason, and I’m sure child-Will was happy for the company.

I thought it was pretty good that he had a Sega Megadrive. I had one too, so this was ideal. He even let me borrow Streets of Rage 2 for a couple of weeks, and let me tell you, that was awesome. He also was willing to play the Pokémon card game (as opposed to just swapping them, like the other kids all did). And when our school went to Stubbington Study Centre, Boris was the other person in my bunk bed.

At some point, circumstances dictated that I was forced to share Dark Will Wybrow Secret #1 with him, making Boris one of fewer than ten people who knew it (five of whom are family members) and one of two members of the list whom I’ve actually had to tell. I didn’t mind all too much. Child-Will managed to reason that, as much of a social outcast I was, Boris was even more so. It’s fine to tell secrets to those you trust completely, but it’s also fine to tell secrets to those who don’t have anyone else to share them with.

I lied to a woman on his behalf, once. When I told you he was a troubled kid, this was before they invented ADHD to let bad parents off the hook. Maybe he had that; I don’t know. His mother seemed genuinely nice but for all I know his father could have regularly beaten him and molested him so we can’t really be sure of the reasons. Regardless, one time he went down some steps to a lady’s front door and gathered up six empty milk bottles. I was waiting nearby but most insistently out of sight. He then rolled them down the lady’s stone steps and they came to rest in glistening pieces outside her door. We then walked the fifty metres to his front door, outside which we were talking when the woman whose house it was came outside to confront us.

“Did you break my milk bottles?” she asked. She was a young woman and had a nice voice. He denied it. I said to her, “he’s just directing me home,” which was true (it was the first time I’d been to his house), but there was definitely an implicit lie there. At least partially satisfied, she turned and went back inside. I was frightened out of my skin, I’ll be honest. I fucking hate getting in trouble — even now — and being a nervous, awkward child amplified it. I was too young to have ever considered “what’s the worst that could happen?” as a response to doing something naughty or irresponsible, which is why I was such a well-behaved and nice boy in school.

One lazy weekend when I was at home, probably blowing all my time on my computer (some things never change, right?), some police officers came to my door. No, nothing to do with the milk bottles, we’re on a new story now (and besides, I was hiding out of sight when they were broken, remember?). There had apparently been reports of a burglary at my house. Someone had dialled 999 and given my name and my full address to the police as the victim of a break-in, so the police showed up. My parents didn’t know what to think. On the one had was their bright, clever, nice, well-behaved son (that’s how I was, honestly) saying he didn’t know anything about it, and on the other there was some irrefutable evidence that someone who knew my name and full address had telephoned the emergency line.

Boris and I had a mutual friend. Let’s call him “Corbett.” Corbett came to me in confidence one day to basically rat out Boris as the guy who’d prank called the police, pretending to be me. I was so grateful that he had the integrity to tell me, and I thanked him a bunch. But I was also so fucking angry. This unprecedented fury rose up inside me and I actually wanted to hurt him. I remember finding him at school and kicking him. There wasn’t a fight but man I was ready for one. I’m sure I yelled a lot, probably used more swear words than I’d ever done before.

Eventually, Boris came to my house bearing a greeting card with a handwritten apology inside. Nice, lovely Will would accept an apology, right? That’d make everything all better. Well, it meant nothing. I was still burning with a merciless, unforgiving hatred that someone had done something so calculated to damage my perfect reputation. I wanted to tear it up, refuse the gesture. Bin it. Burn it. Go back to hitting him. But I couldn’t. He read it aloud to me and my parents were there. I think his mother was there as well. I had to shake his hand and say “it’s ok.” It was not ok.

I couldn’t be friends with him any more after that. But it was nearly the end of my time at that primary school. I’d be off to bigger and better things soon enough, and I never had to deal with any more shit from Boris again. He went to the same secondary school as I did, but he left very soon after we started. And I never saw him ever again after that.

But there you go, a true story about betrayal and an example of when I started to learn how to be so angry at things.

In the news there are two stories about pictures getting removed. The milder of these is Spanish prime minister Zapatero’s family snap with the Obamas getting removed because Zapatero wants to hide his daughters for whatever reason. Which is fair enough, but reporting its removal isn’t very wise, really.

The second, and much worse one, is the police raid on the Tate Modern to remove a picture of Brooke Shields when she was ten.

The police get to say what we’re allowed to see now? Well, I call bullshit. I think this is a massive infringement on freedom of expression. Nobody’s getting hurt by the picture on display. Looking at the picture won’t abuse a child. Even if it happens to be contravening “obscenity laws,” it’s not morally wrong to have the picture up. If the picture is illegal, the law is wrong. Simple as that. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it; nobody’s forcing you to look at it.

Both the images can be found online using Google Images, though, so if you feel like contravening the will of the Spanish prime minister or the Metropolitan police, the internet will, as ever, be the excellent tool it always has been for the free exchange of ideas and information.