Christopher Hitchens takes a moment to highlight the weird and sinister beliefs of the Mormons.
I have no clear idea whether Pastor Robert Jeffress is correct in referring to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more colloquially known as the Mormons, as “a cult.” There do seem to be one or two points of similarity. The Mormons have a supreme leader, known as the prophet or the president, whose word is allegedly supreme. They can be ordered to turn upon and shun any members who show any signs of backsliding. They have distinctive little practices, such as the famous underwear, to mark them off from other mortals, and they are said to be highly disciplined and continent when it comes to sex, booze, nicotine, and coffee. Word is that the church can be harder to leave than it was to join. Hefty donations and tithes are apparently appreciated from the membership.
Whether this makes it a cult, or just another of the born-in-America Christian sects, I am not sure. In any case what interests me more is the weird and sinister belief system of the LDS, discussion of which it is currently hoping to inhibit by crying that criticism of Mormonism amounts to bigotry.
He makes the point that the LDS church is certifiable lunacy of undeniably fraudulent origin, and that “I don’t think I would want to vote for a Scientologist or a Moonie for high office” — and there’s a dilemma. I don’t want to vote for a Catholic or Lutheran or Baptist for any office, either. Mormonism and Scientology and the Moonies are simply one other kind of religion, the only difference being that those strange recent cults are snuggling nicely in the uncanny valley of faith — we’re accustomed to the absurdity of Christianity, it no longer makes most of us blink in astonishment that someone actually believes that, but Mormons? Alien crazy ideas, instead of Grandma’s comfortable crazy ideas.
The dilemma is that Hitch’s preference would mean that none of us could actually vote for any candidate who has a chance of winning. At least not until we achieve our majority in the future.
I have a resolution, though. We acknowledge that everyone has some weird ideas in their heads, and that we can’t practically exclude people from office for thinking crazy thoughts. What we can do, though, is refuse to vote for the ones who are proud of their insanity, who brag about believing in space ghosts, and who think their dotty dogma actually provides useful policy advice.
I know, there goes the entire Republican slate, and Obama is skating on awfully thin ice himself.
Leaving aside the whole “doesn’t exist” issue, why do politicians think it is anything other than laughable to claim they take policy advice from an entity that doesn’t directly communicate with them?
Would they accept that from a cabinet member?
“The Secretary for Defense doesn’t actually use words,I’ve never actually seen him at meetings, I’ve never even seen or heard from him in any concrete way, but based on what the guy who insists he speaks for him says, I’m going to invade Iraq”
If you think that the LDS is bad then check out the FLDS (Fundementalist church of Latter Day Saints).
It’s a verifiable cornucopia of lunacy, incest, racism, child abuse, wife beating and polygamy.
“
The Secretary for DefenseCurveball doesn’t actually use words, I’ve never actually seen [anyone who knows him] at meetings, I’ve never even seen or heard from him in any concrete way, but based on what the guy who insists he speaks for him says, I’m going to invade Iraq”Just a few minor edits, and–voila!–the sad reality.
If you think that the LDS is bad then check out the FLDS (Fundementalist church of Latter Day Saints).
Uh–dude. We’re well familiar with it:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/08/09/warren-jeffs-is-going-away/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/08/04/experienced-the-heavenly-session-she-felt-the-all-consuming-fire-of-heaven/
The FLDS is a lot closer to the original Mormons. They are what the Mormons were before the feds made them give up polygamy.
The FLDS seems to be an organized pedophile ring being paid for by various criminal enterprises.
blockquote fail.
Three quarters, 75% of US pastors say the Mormons aren’t Real Christians.
More to the point, roughly half of all fundie xians claim they would have a hard time voting for a Mormon for president.
Romney does have a Mormon problem among the Tea Party base.
IMO, they will just close their eyes and vote for him anyway. Fundies are nothing if not hypocrites.
It is odd how the wild eyed religious kooks who make up the Tea Party are likely to end up with a nonXian nominee. Their god isns’t just working in mysterious ways, it seems to be drunk or asleep.
Isn’t the difference between Xians who accept evolution and those who don’t rather meaningful? That is, the former might believe some meaningless nonsense, but not in entirely demonstrably false BS.
Seems to be the same with Mormons. Oddly, many of them are in fact not creationists, and yet they’re clinging to a faith that makes as stupid and obviously false claims, like that American Natives descended from Israelites (and I don’t care about the weaseling to get around the genetics that shows differently).
I certainly don’t mind those who accept reasonable empirical standards for most things while adding in some superfluous supernatural nonsense as much as those who throw out all of science in any area that disagrees with their tripe, even as they hold others to the standards of science anywhere else.
A Mormon certainly is supposed to believe more demonstrably false things than a Catholic or mainline Protestant is.
Glen Davidson
FLDS is interchangeable with RCC?
According to the babble, basically all you need to be christians is to gather in the name of you-know-who.
The Mormons are formally (as in, written on the walls and/or signage of all their major buildings) “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints”.*
Ergo, Christians™! (The abuse of women & children cinches it.)
Has no one told our esteemed host that he needs to study sophisticated theologyⓇ before presuming to criticize?
*Which also makes a nice percussion riff: Da Dump Da Dump Da Dump Da Da-Da-Da-Dump!
Over on Camels with Hammers there’s an illuminating examination of The Noble Lie; this would seem to apply to LDS nicely.
Mitt Romney will gladly admit that he believes in evolution when asked. The trouble is no one thinks to ask the follow up question – “Evolution for Humans?”.
To that he must answer no (or equivocate his brains out)because the LDS church believes in the literal Garden of Eden which requires a fully formed Adam created in Gods image.
Will someone Please ask the follow up question?
@theophontes- I thought the RCC just raped children then made them live a life of shame whilst covering up for the abusers. The Mormons actually *marry* them, no?
I’m not religious, and I don’t consider them Christians either. They’re a Christian derivitive sect given the Book of Mormon and The Pearl of Great Price, religious texts not recognised by the various Christian churches.
Writing as someone who has looked more deeply into Mormonism than most people.
1. Yes, it’s a cult, unquestionably. In the early days of the WWW, I stumbled across one of the cult checklists. Out of curiosity, I tabulated just how closely the Mormon church corresponded to it. They scored, iirc, 8/10. IOW, they are a cult. Maybe not quite as bad as some others, but a cult nonetheless.
2. No, they are not Christian in the usual sense of the word. The touchstone is the Nicaean creed, which virtually all “normal” Christian sects accept. The Mormon belief system includes elements at odds with that creed. Interestingly, Mormonism has a distinctly gnostic flavor, what with its “As man is, God once was; as God is, man will be” theology.
Mormon theology can be extremely difficult to pin down, because their prophet, seer and revelator has historically refrained (unlike the Pope) from defining dogma very often. And the Book of Mormon itself is largely devoid of theological matters, being primarily a fantasy of the pre-Columbian Americas. There is an extensive folk belief system which has plausible deniability when the Mormon authorities are pressed on such matters.
According to the Cult Awareness and Information Program, CAIP, Mormonism is an abusive, mind control cult.
One of the key features of such is how easy it is to get out of them.
You can leave the Mormon church if,
1. You can overcome early, relentless brainwashing and,
2. You are able to leave your entire life, family, and friends behind. It can be a steep price for many of them.
Nevertheless, some estimates are that up to 1/2 of US Mormons are either apathetic, inactive, or…gone.
Liz B.
Phayngula.org has been defunct since ages. What made you try an email addy for that domain? :D
If you want to mail PZ, have a look under his profile photograph on the right.
Excellent article in the New York Times about mormonism, and about Mitt Romney’s place in that tradition: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/will-this-election-be-the-mormon-breakthrough.html?_r=2&ref=opinion
Excerpt:
Romney’s economic record is discussed here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/us/politics/after-mitt-romney-deal-company-showed-profits-and-then-layoffs.html?src=me&ref=general
Romney’s record fits nicely with the LD$ Church’s more-money-for-us-and-less-for-you principles.
I’m with Hitch on this one. Mormonism is the next level of stupid. If I have to vote for a religious nutjob, I can at least exclude the totally insane.
In reference to comment #18: Bloom did well in his article until he came to the subject of education. He drank the mormon koolaid there. Mormon PR about their “passion for education” has been all too effective.
Someone needs to pierce the false front, needs to reveal the check-the-boxes style of mormon education, and send that information to Mr. Bloom. Their check-the-boxes style even extends to the Boy Scouts program. It’s systemic.
Mormons in my area are distressingly anti-intellectual. Education is supported up to a point, and then considered a waste of time and effort after that. Advanced education for women is still discouraged (by overt and covert means).
If you get too smart, you won’t be fooled by FAIR (Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research) and FARMS (Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies). And we know the LDS Church can’t tolerate that, that the Church especially doesn’t want that sort of independent thinking going on in the morridor.
Mormons are two-faced about education for both men and women, pointing proudly to successful scientists (for example), but putting roadblocks in the way as a mormon tries to balance church demands (and demands for large families and for money) with education. I think what they really value is mediocrity in education, a sort of mid-level, just good enough education. They don’t want to tip education into the danger zone of thinking for oneself, and of valuing evidence-based learning over what-the-prophet-says.
I think that the best option is to vote for the better, if not great (or all that good, even) candidate. If that means voting for someone who has some beliefs/policies that you think are nuts but shares some of your policy positions, that’s better than not voting and increasing the chance of electing someone you think would be a disaster. Sometimes you have to accept that there is no good choice, but there are choices that are better than the alternative.
SometimesAlmost always you have to accept that there is no good choice, but there are choices that are better than the alternative.Fixed, LOL.
It always seems to be a choice between the lesser and greater evils. I do vote in every election, the theory being that, the way things are going, someday there might not even be any elections.
On the question of Native Americans as immigrants from ancient Israel, some Mormon apologists now claim that the Book of Mormon refers to some small area and not the whole continent.
Not only is there no genetic support for the original Mormon hypothesis, it’s linguistically implausible — Native American languages are too different from Hebrew, and they are different enough from each other to make their overall relations a very murky subject. They can be grouped into families like Na-Dene and Algic and Penutian and Uto-Aztecan and Andean and Tupi-Cariban and the like, but beyond that it’s difficult and many linguists don’t think that one can go much further.
If the Mormon view was correct, the Native Americans would all be speaking Hebrew-ish languages, just like how many people living in the Roman Empire’s territory still speak Latin-ish languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and lots of regional languages and dialects.
Except if God decided to punish those wicked Nephites by making them speak different languages in Tower-of-Babel fashion.
A bunch of mormons are chartering a nuclear-powered ice breaker ship to search for the opening that will reveal the Hollow Earth theory to be correct.
http://www.phoenixsciencefoundation.org/APEX.htm
The expedition is called “North Pole Inner Earth Expedition.”
They claim that, “The science is real.”
They are all mixed up and have added some notes about global warming.
The entire Hollow Earth theory and its connection to mormon theology can be suffered through here:
http://ldsanarchy.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/the-hollow-earth-theory-the-plasma-model-and-mormon-theology/
Excerpt:
Apparently, God showed Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon that all worlds were created to be inhabited. If you find the surface of Saturn, Jupiter or Mars to be inhospitable, maybe you’ll like the interior better.
I vote that we send Mitt Romney on the expedition.
Bugnuts mormon dude who is touting the Hollow Earth theory and pimping the expedition showed up to comment on exmormon.org.http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,339578,340938#msg-340938
Excerpt:
I would definitely define the LDS church as a cult, but then again I tend to define all religions as cults. And, frankly they all believe a bunch of bizarre things, so how do you judge which beliefs are more bizarre? Somewhere in the history of all major religions you are bound to find a history of racism, child abuse and misogyny. Frankly these are some of reasons we have all left religion behind.
WOW, bugnuts is right. I would be a bit skeptical here.
1. They are most likely trying to charter a nuclear-powered ice breaker, which the Russians have. These cost money and I don’t see how Hollow Earthers are going to get any.
2. How is a ship going to find the opening? If it was in the ocean and open, water should be pouring into the hole. We should see currents and a vortex.
3. Given SLC and Utah’s history of scams, I’d be rather leary of donating empty bottles much less money to such a venture.
Why a ship anyway? With modern aerial photos and satellites, the resolution is between a car and a person. I can see my house from space.
Just priceless.
The only reason that Mormonism is seen as crazier than Christianity is that it’s a fairly recent invention, as opposed to the religions invented in the Stone Age, whose fairy tales people somehow take for granted much more readily.
LMAO. Word travels fast, huh? Shall I put down some “priceless” gems here, too, so people on another site can say I visited this site, too? Maybe we can make some kind of linking game out of this to find out all the sites I’ve left comments at and in what order they were left…
“Bugnuts.” Who thinks these words up? Am I leaving comments in places where thirteen year olds frequent? LMAO again. At least you “sane” guys are good for a laugh. Keep up the humor. Us “crazies” appreciate it. And keep talking about “crazy” me and my “crazy” blog. ‘Cause that’s what “sane” people do, right? They talk about “crazy” people and “crazy” ideas, right?
I literally felt sick recently when Obama said “I trust in God, and God wants us to focus on getting jobs for the American people…” So Obama not only believes in God but knows what that entity wants of the government of the US. If these words came from… wait i’ve forgotten his name… ah yes, Rick Perry, we’d rightly point to it as evidence of his religious lunacy. Obama is such a disappointment.
Who fucking cares?
Whoever is voted in will just be under the influence of who-ever-the-denomination-it-is that controls Obama now (and who-ever-it-was that assinated JFK, same group, obviously)
Dammit. I have to go to bed. Can’t stay up and make some popcorn.
LDS Anarchist, the word “bugnuts” was invented *just for you*.
You need to get out more.
PZ :
To which I add : Perhaps more to the point, that we not vote for those who would mandate their brand of crazy by law. Me, I don’t care if you believe that Horus died in the name of Ra to save mankind from damnation, I just don’t want you trying to enforce that nutty belief on me by way of the legislature.
As a dual citizen of both England and Australia, I am constantly gob-smacked by the retarded idea that a citizen of the (still) most powerful nation on earth could NOT be elected to high office if he or she DIDN’T claim convincingly to believe fervently in some stripe or other of supernatural woo. Even in the general debate about the cult-ness or xtian-ness of Romney’s religion, it doesn’t even seem to matter all that much what supernatural fantasy US candidates worship and think they are being guided by, as long they don’t claim to be driven in their decision-making by reason and logic and simple human decency, without any supernatural assistance. This looks like such a weird obsession to an outsider to the US. As a comparison, it was noted in our media when the current Prime Minister of Australia first took office that she is a declared atheist, and that she would continue to live in a de facto relationship with her male lover in ‘The Lodge’, our sort of equivalent of the White House, the residence of the Chief Executive – but in the year and a bit since then, I haven’t heard either fact mentioned again publicly. Recent media criticism is not about her decision to ‘live godlessly in sin’, it’s about her actual performance in doing the job.
I think that Mormonism has one of the basic, defining characteristics of a cult, which is that there is secret doctrine that only an inner circle is taught. A regular religion has tenets, principles, or scriptures that are available to anyone who wants to seek them out; the articles of faith, etc. A cult, such as Mormonism or Scientology, has secrets that are revealed only to the well-and-truly-hooked faithful, usually because the ‘secrets’ are so looney-tunes that they would repel normal people from joining if they heard about them first.
PZ still has a “pharyngula.org” site e-mail in his contact info on this site. I tried it the other day and, sure enough, it bounced. pzmyers on gmail ought to work.
Hollow earth? Didn’t that idea die out in the 30s?
About “all Christians believe in the Trinity”–wasn’t the big split with the Eastern Orthodox church over the fact that they wouldn’t shoehorn ‘and son’ into the primacy of God the Father, as the Roman church wanted to do, and they reject the Nicene Creed?
Lynna, perhaps you could supply the correction about education–you probably have all the links.
Britain’s last PM but one, Tony Blair didn’t evangelise during his campaign or term in office. He didn’t extol Jesus or suggest he was the better person for office for his beliefs. People picked him and his party for his policies. Turns out he was a closet Roman Catholic but during his term his leadership was relatively rational and secular. And that’s the way it should be. Keep your beliefs to yourself and let people judge you on your platform.
I find it amazing that US politicians should pander to religion to the extent that you do not stand a chance of being president unless you openly profess your faith every chance you get.
I wonder why he’d find this logic convincing for the Hollow Earth theory given that most of the Earth’s surface and in fact an enormous majority of the universe is inhospitable to humans, the creature it exists solely to contain (according to humans). So yeah, the records confirm that his god is stupid by his standards.
@ #30:
Has your ass fallen off yet? (You seem caught up in an approach-avoidance conflict with idioms.) And who cares which sites you may or may not have left comments on when all you can do is tangle yourself in reverse name-calling?
When someone can with even a tiny bit of seriousness can post, in part:
“The science is real. The story is more than 5,000 years old. All the planets in the solar system are warming, but with enough public awareness, there may be something we can do to stop the Earth from cycling into an ice age.”
In Freshman English, one fundamental error is the run-on sentence; in the case of the ice breaker expedition we have run-on fantasies and that provides some iron-clad crazy to brighten our day.
Okay. Education for women in mormon-dominated Utah, let’s look at the facts.
Here’s a link:
http://www.higheredutah.org/utah-groups-work-to-combat-low-female-graduation-numbers/
Excerpts:
And what happens to women in Utah if they do get an education, say as a Lawyer for example? Discrimination in the work place and absolutely shocking disparity in wages is the norm.
Here’s what the Wall Street Journal has to say about the situation.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/11/02/survey-female-lawyers-in-utah-dont-have-it-easy/
Excerpt:
As far as the hollow earth theory goes, it is as alive in the morridor as are Glenn Beck’s theories about communism. Debunked theories don’t die, they just retire and live on in Utah, Arizona and Idaho (minor infections are found in Nevada, Wyoming, and other states).
Five things you don’t know about Romney’s religion – and why Romney will sweep the Casserole Belt.
http://brettcottrell.blogspot.com/2011/11/five-things-you-didnt-know-about-mitt.html
Hollow Earth? F*ck that 19th Century sh*t – Hans Horbiger’s World Ice Theory FTW!
Re ‘cult’ vs ‘religion’, I’ve always been very partial to the distinction made by (I think) L. Sprague deCamp:
“A religion is a belief system you are born into. A cult is one you decide to join”.
For me, the beauty of this formulation is that given suitable historical perspective, they ALL start out as cults – Christianity (which was indeed one of the many “mystery cults” plagueing Rome), Islam are the two biggies – and with enough time and longevity, you get people born into systems like Mormonism and Scientology.