The throat-slitting gesture: Did EASTWOOD know it's part of Mormon ritual?

In the BBC's "The Mormon Candidate," featured for a month on Current TV, it's described that in the swearing into Mormonism ceremony, one of the rituals is a throat-slitting gesture to signify doing that before divulging church secrets.


Secrecy. It's Mittens/church m.o. A few years ago they had a commercial on t.v. offering a very beautifully produced DVD about Easter/Jesus, very authentic looking costumes, acting, whatever. The deal was it was free but with an agreement to let missionaries visit once.

Besides being enticed by the DVD, I was curious in a very non-biased way about what they believed, as much as about whatever other meditative system (Taoism, Buddhism, whatever). So these two polite young dudes arrived, inquired about my intentions a bit, asked me to lead a prayer for them, which I in my 50 or so years of secular humanism did an unimpressive job of and they were clearly unimpressed. So I asked them what they believed. They went into an automatic babble about Jesus Jesus Jesus. I said that, O.K., I was familiar with that topic so what ELSE did their system consist of, what was DIFFERENT. They did a vague verbal tap dance and changed the subject. I said that if there was nothing different I might as well stay as I am.

I posted this story before and somebody replied that this is known as the "milk before meat" strategy, that an infant can only process milk and can't do the meat thing until later, that the Mormons are trained on this.

So, Mittens keeps being expected to tell about his finances and his religion and his agenda, and he does this vague verbal tap dance and most of us think of this in secular terms like "flip flopping" but it's a deeply engrained feature of his belief system.

In "The Mormon Candidate" Mittens' second cousin who left the church and says he is "alienated" (shunned) from his family says that they "don't realize the degree to which they engage in brain washing" and that they are "masters of mendacity."

Secrecy. Mendacity.