Thoughts on Mormonism?

[Snigger]

Okay guys but wait, hear me out, funeral potatos.

 

[The Magnificence]

For a heretic religion based entirely on one pedophile's burning need to get jiggy with a 13 year old, I suppose it's exactly what one would expect.

 

[MarkofdaBOOG]

Mormons get alot of hate isn't because they beleive that they can have as many wives as they want? I personally don't see a problem with that allah says we get 100 wives if we suicide bomb.

 

[ForgedBlades]

After I watched the South Park episode I thought, "This can't be real." I eventually fell down a rabbit hole and spent a summer reading every Wikipedia article on the subject, two biographies of Smith, the actual Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and various other books both sympathetic and critical of Mormonism. It turns out the South Park episode is real.

The entirety of the movement is bat shit insane and the most engrossing topic I have ever studied in the field of history. I could go on for hours. Don't get me wrong, Mormonism is absurd and incorrect in every sense of the word, but everything about it is fascinating. Especially the founding and Smith himself, but their continuous persecution and travels west, plural marriage, Smith's obsession with Freemasons, his eventual martyrdom and their exile to Utah, the rise of the FLDS, and the shady workings of the modern church are also captivating.

 

[Joe Swanson]

Nothing against people who believe it, but at the same time for the reasons listed here:

They're decent people, but what I understand about their theology sounds ass-backwards:

• The Garden of Eden was located where Kansas City is today;
• God is not a transcendent, eternal Supreme Being, but a mortal who has ascended to godhood;
• When you die (or at least this is true of the men), you become a god of your own realm with a harem of waifus.

Along with the fact it was founded by a Japhetite gentile who wasn't even the descendant of Abraham means there is even less legitimate then Islam, as at least Muhammad was descended from Abraham through Ishmael. But that's just (((my))) opinion

 

[Apochrypha]

Personally I have nothing against them but I've heard nothing positive either, mostly about them being major grifters with too many wives.

 

[Kramer on the phone]

mormons chose Mitt Romney as their king, you can say whatever you want about them, but if they believe he is the person that is best fit to represent them that just proves they're retards who want to destroy this country. Also says something about the US government when such a high amount of the glowies literally take an oath to destroy the US and despite that were still hired.

 

[Manul Otocolobus]

Cultists that believe in some really ridiculous shit, which is a high bar given what people generally believe in regarding most religions.

 

[bucolic]

The Book of Mormon is basically New Testament fanfic.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Any religion that forbids caffeine is on my list of religions to never convert to. I have no issue with Mormonism otherwise.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Any religion that forbids caffeine is on my list of religions to never convert to.

Caffeine has never been officially stated by the leaders to be completely forbidden, it was blown out of proportion due to coffee and tea (the hot drinks) being stated to be not good for regular consumption. Most members still choose to abstain from it, my family abstained for years until Mom learned caffeinated drinks actually calmed down my little brother and it made her migraines go down, including herbal teas. "Wine" is still written down on the sacrament prayer, but wine can only be used when a member can provide for it from their own vineyard, or if the water's contaminated/scarce and there's no other substitutes.

 

[Manul Otocolobus]

Caffeine has never been officially stated by the leaders to be completely forbidden, it was blown out of proportion due to coffee and tea (the hot drinks) being stated to be not good for regular consumption. Most members still choose to abstain from it, my family abstained for years until Mom learned caffeinated drinks actually calmed down my little brother and it made her migraines go down, including herbal teas. "Wine" is still written down on the sacrament prayer, but wine can only be used when a member can provide for it from their own vineyard, or if the water's contaminated/scarce and there's no other substitutes.

The funny thing is, recent science regarding head and neck cancer supports not consuming hot beverages. Cumulative hot beverage consumption is directly correlated with risk of head and neck cancer rates. So, maybe they were on to something (even though their reasoning was not based on actual science).

 

[Niggolash]

I was born into the religion. I was disappointed because the more I questioned the teachings the less they made any sense to me, and I felt literally nothing when I was baptized (except the pressure to lie about how "profound" it was).

I admire the followers for their sense of morals and community (not to mention being serious preppers and genealogists), but you can always sense their silent judgement behind their creepy Stepford smiles. They'll always tell you otherwise, but they view impoverished and divorced families as inferior burdens, and will always find passive aggressive ways to shun you and make you feel excluded.

I was honestly shocked that they started pandering so hard to the LGBWTFBBQ crowd recently. They claim to be the fastest growing religion in the world, so why the sudden desperation to bring degeneracy in? It kind of pisses me off, after being psychologically tortured for years because of how even a minor thing like masturbation is treated like a sin as serious as murder.

TL;DR: Basically I tried pretty hard to get something out of it, but it just felt like a dead end to me, both socially and spiritually. I like to think there's a bit of truth to every belief system, but I never felt like I belonged, so I left.

</powerleveling>

 

[Krystal]

Never met any but know a church that let sophomores and juniors from my Catholic High school use their parking lot. So no opinion or thoughts other than thank you.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

The funny thing is, recent science regarding head and neck cancer supports not consuming hot beverages. Cumulative hot beverage consumption is directly correlated with risk of head and neck cancer rates.

That's real interesting. Which brings me to this:

So, maybe they were on to something (even though their reasoning was not based on actual science).

I know it's not a jab, but you gotta keep in mind majority of the church's teachings and revelations that were written down were from before various (miraculous) medical inventions and foundings like penicillin, X-rays, and cancer treatments came to be, so a lot of this is hindsight. It's a part of faith to put trust in the Lord that He knows what's up when He says "Don't do this", even though we won't know why unless we ask. And for the vast majority of people, no one asked why, they just nodded and went "Okay, God, whatever you say" and left it at that.

That it took this long to discover there's correlation between regular consumption of hot drinks and cancer is super interesting to me. For the longest time I just thought it was related to the constant need (addiction and overreliance) for coffee and tea to even function for the day, didn't think it would've built up to be cancerous.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Hoo boy, get ready for the ULTIMATE power level.

I have a big interest in Mormonism, "investigated" it (that's what they call converts who haven't fully joined, similar to not being finished with catechism), still have an interest in it and study it occasionally. I'll split this up into some categories.

Spoiler: MORMONISM AS TEACHINGS

Mormonism basically, in its current form, has four scriptures (Holy Bible, Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, Doctrine and Covenants), the last of which is like Joseph Smith's hadiths. Ironically, the Book of Mormon is the least important part even though it's what they emphasize the most, because the juicy exciting revelations mostly came later. The TLDR of the Book of Mormon is that a family of Israelites built an ark with God's help and fled to the New World to escape some other family they were feuding with. They established civilization and multiplied and had internal wars (between good Nephites and pagan Lamanites) and eventually the Lamanites won and wiped out the Nephites and reverted to savagery.

What all that shit is is basically an attempt by Americans to shift the spiritual core of Christianity from the Old World to the New World. There were lots of other (way less successful) denominations in those days which attempted to convince people the British were kangz prophetz and the Indians were Israelites and so on and so forth. Mormonism also taught that God had a specific interest in the United States, the Garden of Eden was in Missouri, some other stupid shit like that. Basically it's Joseph Smith telling Jacksonian America that we can all LARP like ancient Hebrews too.

Now, that's not the stuff I actually liked. I was more interested in Mormonism as a historical phenomenon, the culture around it, and the teachings on the afterlife and its Christology. See, in Mormonism it all works like this. There is an endless cycle, potentially infinitely recursive, of deities creating worlds, breeding (in a very literal sense) people to populate them, and then elevating those people up to deities to continue the cycle. Souls are created through sexual reproduction (not necessarily penetrative physical sex, but like, you do have to have a man and a woman combine to make a new soul). As the King Follett Discourse goes, "As man now is, God once was; as God now is, man may become.” Your soul is born, you go through a pre-mortal existence, you are born into the world, and when you die you return. The afterlife goes in two stages: before Christ returns, there is spirit paradise and spirit prison, basically a good Purgatory (good Mormons) and bad Purgatory (bad Mormons and non-Mormons). Then, when the new Earth is created, you get sorted into one of four places: Celestial Kingdom (good married Mormons, become a god), Terrestrial Kingdom (normals?), Telestial Kingdom (everybody else), and Outer Darkness (people who don't repent). A big point here is that all of these are good outcomes besides Outer Darkness, and you literally have to reject Christ after meeting him to go to Outer Darkness (as I understand). Joseph Smith once described it as that if people could see the Telestial Kingdom they'd want to kill themselves to get there sooner, and the same being true of the Terrestrial compared to Telestial, and so on, like orders of magnitude. Temple marriage carries over into the afterlife, keeps the family unit united. These different afterlifes are 100% physical, like Muslim afterlife.

As for the Christology part, Mormonism is Arian, Jesus is considered a completely separate entity from God the Father and the Holy Spirit is a separate entity too. That is, the Trinity are just three deities. Jesus was just another one of us soul-siblings, but a sort of leader among them. God gave us all the option of choosing how the world would work, put it to a vote kind of deal, and Jesus wanted us to go through life as we know it, with free will and sin and such. Satan wanted us to go through life without free will or sin so everybody could go to Heaven. When Jesus' plan was to be implemented, Satan revolted, and as punishment he and his followers were permanently banned from the afterlife and mortal existence, which is where demons come from, basically sore losers trying to pull everybody else down to their level. The most valiant of Jesus' followers in the War of Heaven were born Mormon. Oh, I mentioned women too; God has wives, and our world is all the offspring of one specific Heavenly Mother. Early Mormons prayed to and had worship songs about her, but the theology never really got developed and it's sort of just become a footnote of the religion, like those random demons you see in the Bible. I like to think of her as Asherah from Canaanite paganism.

For me, this was a huge deal, because it seemed like a very rare case of a religion being genuinely fair, where nobody gets punished just for not believing in the right God, but if you did you still get more of a bonus. The concept of the soul coming from sexual reproduction matches my own convictions, and the whole idea of families continuing to perpetuate an ever-expanding range of universes struck a chord with me as being beautiful and true. Other problems, too: why are some people given the advantage of being born Mormon? Because it's a reward to them. Why is life hard? Because it needs to be so you can be prepared for what's beyond, and you chose it. There's a great uplifting message to it. There is a great aesthetic to Mormonism's teachings that's beautiful in a way other religions aren't to me. (A lot of Buddhism rings true in my ears, but is ugly and pessimistic; Pentecostalism is a beautiful religion as experience, but it has no sway over me intellectually.)

That all said, there are some big issues I have with it now. Firstly, the Book of Mormon is obviously bullshit, we all know that. Mormons nowadays play the same game that Evangelicals do with Young Earth Creationism by claiming that the events described in the book were supposed to have played out over a very small area and population, but if you look into what the original church founders said, they very clearly intended that American Indians IN GENERAL came from the Nephites and Lamanites, so any Mesoamerican ziggurat or Mississippian snake-mound you see was ACKSHUALLY built by Bronze Age Hebrews.

Other than the big elephant in the room, well... for one, only Mormon families stay together in the afterlife. Sure, Smith said even the shitty heaven was still heaven, but if you convert, there's still going to be a disconnect there where you stay together with your wife, but also . And I guess you can't remarry in the temple? What if you have multiple loves over your life, like a man who remarries after being widowed at a young age? And it makes sense for being born Mormon to be a reward, but then that also implies that non-Mormons are sort of shitty inherently, whereas I feel like converting to something is a much more meaningful thing than being born into it and just swallowing it hook-line-and-sinker because it's what your family does.

Overall, though, the Mormon God is the only version of God I actually want to love, which makes it hurt the more that it's all made up.

Spoiler: Polygamy

I think it's still sort of a big mystery why God wanted polygamy, in Mormon thinking. The main church (LDS) traded getting rid of polygamy for getting statehood and not being harassed anymore. The real obvious reason for it was that Joseph Smith wanted lots of teen girls to fuck, and occasionally also had to marry some older hag so he could keep the thing going. In early Mormonism (like, before this stuff was revealed), women also had multiple husbands sometimes, and there was confusion about plural marriages that were and weren't temple, were and weren't earthly, etc. (This is where the hags come in, imagine a woman you don't want to fuck complaining about you not taking her on as a wife, so you promise to marry her but it's just an empty title.)

Usually when cults (and modern Mormonism isn't a cult, but early Mormonism absolutely was) get their weird sex pervert stuff blown open, it's the death of it, but Brigham Young just went whole hog on it and was like, "Yeah we're polygamists, so were the ancient Israelites, polygamy is based and God's a polygamist." Of course, it (like most polygamist societies) was mostly practiced by the elites.

Spoiler: Ugly racist stuff

Yeah, so Mormonism has some really unfortunate racial baggage.

Regarding Indians, the Book of Mormon has a very clear narrative where the worse Lamanites get, the darker they get. There's a belief, which lasted all the way into the 1970s at least, that God can purify someone's skin when taking away their sin. Modern "Lamanites" (Latinos and Polynesians) are actually a huge source of growth, the Latinos are flocking to Pentecostal/Evangelical/Mormon faith and the only Mormon-majority nation on Earth is Samoa. The church just kind of ignores this stuff now. But it's obvious the leadership had a really weird relationship with Indians where they had a real boner for them while also thinking they could redeem them.

Regarding Blacks, I don't remember Smith on it so much, but Young just straight up hated Blacks and banned them from the priesthood (Curse of Ham level stupidity), which basically means banning from doing anything other than sitting through the church service. That didn't get reversed until the Federal Government threatened to take away their tax-exempt status if they didn't obey.

Spoiler: The Word of Wisdom (Mormon kosher)

Yeah, so everybody knows how Mormons don't drink alcohol/coffee/etc.

So, this stuff is basically bullshit the Church made up long after Joseph Smith died. Smith himself (as I'll discuss in the History section) was a real boozing smoking doping poonhound, and they didn't really mind the rest of the church being either. One of the first things they built in Utah was a brewery. But, Brigham Young (the first successor, who lead them into Utah) cautioned that things like hot drinks (coffee and tea), alcohol, tobacco, meat, and other such should be avoided/consumed in moderation. Over time this became more restrictive until the Church started MANDATING it. There is absolutely no basis for the bans, but the Church also prioritizes continual revelation (newer prophets matter more than older ones), so it is what it is.

It didn't bother me when I investigated because I wasn't a coffee drinker/boozer yet, and I was giving up sweet tea and soda anyways to lose a lot of weight now. I think now I'd be way more hostile to that nonsense. And the missionaries always seemed more fussy about if you were drinking sweet tea than, say, how you were doing.

Spoiler: MORMONISM AS EXPERIENCE

My experience in Mormonism was nothing like the experience of somebody who'd been in much longer, or even been raised in it. I was also about as far away from Utah as you can get, which makes a big difference because a lot of what I admired about Mormons turned out to actually be ethno-Mormon culture rather than something specific to the faith. (Like, if you were an admirer of Jews, meeting some Beta Israel Jews from Ethiopia would probably be a letdown.)

So, Mormonism has an interesting structure where the local levels are super democratic but the upper levels are much more rigid. The prophet/President of the Church has his little college of cardinals, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. There's district poobahs and all that. Locally, the priest is called the bishop, and you've got two male-only priesthoods, Aaronic (altar boys, basically) and Melchizedek (the big men). If you're a convert you're probably gonna be Aaronic for a while. They practice that idea that all men should be in the priesthood, and they elect (I think?) their bishop, so it's a very participatory church structure.

Church doesn't really have a sermon. Instead, their "sacrament meeting" (church service) consists of some singing (Lutheran-style hymns, very... dull), bread and water Eucharist, and then three different members will give a speech on something. Testimony, I think they call it. Basically, the more established men of the congregation may speak more often, but everybody is expected to go eventually. I kind of liked it because of how participatory it was, very nice hearing from a variety of people. I did not like that it meant that, without a professional preacher, the sermons were usually shitty. After the sacrament meeting (1 hour) there's an hour of age-segregated meeting (so, for example, all the "young single adults" together) and then an hour of gender-segregated meeting (men vs women), which is really the meat of the church service. The youth group met once a week, mostly doing things like playing board agmes

The Mormon adults I knew were all really nice, friendly people, very sweet temperaments and welcoming. The Mormon youth were way more aloof and I didn't fit in. Mind you, half of them were converts too, and converts to anything tend to be weird; if they felt right with society, they wouuldn't be converting, would they?

Mormons seem to view their church (meetinghouse) as more of a utility and their cathedral (temple) as the real spiritual center of their lives. You have to be a good boy to go to temple and there's various rituals there; the important one is temple marriage, but they also do things like baptize the dead, where you have somebody take the name of a person who was never baptized and be baptized in their place; then, their spirit can, in purgatory, choose whether or not to accept the ritual. This is, despite what a lot of ignorant people think, something ancient Christians did frequently. And the "magic underwear" refers to temple garments. To me a garment is way less of a burden than wearing some stupid turban/hat on your head, but I can also see why people mock it since the garment is not something other people see, so it's meaningless as a symbol of belief. In my own temple experience - which only happened once - I... did not like it. I showed up with a list of my ancestors, not realizing they had a whole procedure to go through, and for some reason I was really gungho that I needed to do it soon. I was then distressed about that, but they had me do it for some other people, but it was like an assembly line, say the name and dunk you, say the name and dunk you. It didn't feel spiritual at all and I left with a real funk about the place, but I think I got rushed into it way too soon.

A big part of the whole conversion experience was the missionaries. Funny enough, despite that being the most famous image of Mormons - a goofball in a suit and tie on a bicycle - that was the one part of it I didn't know about until I encountered them. They have female missionaries too. My Pa didn't like them, felt like they used the women to lure men in. I don't think that's true, but I know it lured me in, because to a lonely young man having future tradwives (dressed old-fashioned) girls meeting with you and giving you phone calls and asking how you're doing and all that, especially when you haven't made friends yet, is intoxicating. Problem is, besides it all being fake, they have to finish their mission at some point. I've read that a lot of people have a sudden feeling of being cut off when that happens, because they feel like they're really a part of things in the church when the missionaries are around, but then find that the missionaries were the ONLY part of the church they were engaged in.

Something kind of odd about Mormons? So yeah, the whole religion kind of revolves around marriage and family formation, so its natural that they'd marry fast, but... they marry FAST. There's this idea that pretty much as soon as you're an adult you need to go be courting, and then you need to be breeding. Still in college? Not too late. We may have problems nowadays with people not valuing families, but I think they really go overboard on it because they push their kids so hard that they settle down without really getting to choose, you know?

Mormon church is, overall, a very boring experience. If you've ever done a shitty Protestant denomination like Presbyterianism or Lutheranism or whatever, it's like that. I drifted away from it mostly over a girl, but what really got me was when I wandered into a Pentecostal church and it made me feel way better than Mormonism ever did. I told myself I'd stay Mormon and go to the Pentecostal church, but things don't work like that; you end up with one or the other.

Culturally, Mormons are interesting people because they're super organized. They have one of the best poor relief systems in the world, the best genealogical records in the (White) world, their cities out West are laid out with good road plans, they expect members to prep (several months of supplies stored up for disasters). If the nukes fell the Mormons would emerge to rule the world. They're like worker bees, and they use that as a symbol (Deseret, the honey hive). They invented their own phonemic alphabet (every sound has its own letter, so no need to spell), which didn't catch on but there are still people out there who read and write in it. They're a bizarre mishmash of New England efficiency, Old West independence, and ancient/Dark Age desert person zeal wrapped up in an American flag.

Spoiler: MORMONISM AS HISTORY: SEX, DRUGS, MAGIC, PIONEERS, AND INSURGENCY

Okay, so Mormonism started when this kid named Joseph Smith, up in Jacksonian New York/Vermont, had some visions telling him to go dig for some tablets that had another testament on it. He did that, translated it, wrote the Book of Mormon, started a church. His family relocated to Ohio, pissed everybody off there royally (while also gaining converts), moved on to Missouri. In Missouri, they pissed off the locals again and had a shooting war with the Missouri people, resulting in the state government issuing an order to literally murder all of them. They then fled to Illinois, built a fine capital (Nauvoo), and the same shit started. Joseph Smith gets killed by a lynch mob, and his successors start a scramble for the Church, with the main winner being Brigham Young who took them to the Great Salt Lake. While not declaring independence from the US, they basically functioned as an unrecognized state, fought another shooting war against the US government, and finally came to a sort of uneasy truce where they weren't sovereign over the land but WERE still the powerbrokers in the Rocky Mountains.

Now, Joseph Smith was, by all accounts, a giant conman. In those days it was really common for Americans, even respectable ones, to be into magic and occultism and stuff like that. People would go dowsing for treasure, for example: hold out a tree branch of the right species, or poles of the right metal, and it would point you to buried gold. Say the right spell and your musket will never misfire. Plant your corn according to the Zodiac so it grows faster. Dumb peasant shit like that. This is an aspect of history that's really neglected, but when I say this stuff was common and respected, I mean people like doctors and lawyers dabbled in it.

Well, Smith's family were huge occultists and stoners, knew all about herbalism and basically just coasted through life farming, scamming their neighbors, and constantly staying high/tripping on natural psychedelics. For Smith he mostly jerked people around with the occultist treasure hunting shit, and made a lot of enemies when people realized he was full of it. I wish I could say Smith sincerely believed in what he was doing, but you get to reading about it and it's just obvious he was deliberately conning people. But anyways, Christian occultism was also a thing, and the district they lived in (Burned-Over District) was a very religious, wild place, so it was natural that he'd end up going the prophet route. Where the drugs gets really important is because Smith was probably using psychedelics as entheogens; a good old datura roofie to get the congregation seeing God. And obviously you don't just start a church for fun and money, you also do it for sex; he'd pick out girls he wanted for "wives" and if they weren't comfortable with it he'd pressure them. So Smith is basically a Victorian version of any given 20th Century hippie cult, with shades of Victorian Scientology and Islam thrown in too.

And Smith was fancying himself a new Muhammad (there's a quote to that effect from him). He ran for the President and had an idea called "theodemocracy" which would have been like a Mormon version of Iran's Islamic Republic. The Danites were militias that may have acted like a secret police assassinating internal dissidents. Whatever the case, when Mormons would show up in a place their financial chicanery and bloc voting would make them a nuisance and soon the locals would hate them and want them dead, but being 19th Century America, the Mormons could stand and have a badass Far Cry 5 shootout before having to run for it.

Yeah, a lot of my teenage/college interest in it was like my teenage interest in the Confederacy, I just kind of thought it was super badass that this group of people tried to have their own country in the US, especially cowboy Hebrew LARPers with their own Moses. In my youth I only knew the Mormon side of the story, where Joseph Smith is assumed to have been doing things sincerely and it's evil bigots picking fights with them. You read more, and you realize they fucking had it coming.

Spoiler: MORMONISM IN THE MODERN WORLD

This is a real small section, but as far as their modern role? There's kind of two types of Mormons i've seen. One is the cowboy/farmer types from out in the desert. I approve of them. They have all the good traits of the American Heartland (ruggedness, independence, love of liberty) combined with the more intellectual nature of Yankees. On the other hand, it seems like the Mormon eladership is especially eaten up with neocons (like Romney), and the Church itself prioritizes conversions and money above all else, when there's a conflict between their image to the world and authenticity to their culture they choose their image. This ends up just screwing them over when converts learn about doctrines that weren't hidden from them as such, but weren't offered up, so they feel used.

A lot of Mormons are in the FBI and CIA due to networking and having some really good traits (like foreign language skills, not drinking) that make them attractive employees. So, I think you get a lot of overlap between Globohomo and Mormonism there. I think that because it's a small faith, the leadership also has more control; they're not as fagged up as Catholicism, but when they do make a decision the followers fall in line, whereas Catholics just kind of do whatever they want to do independently of the Pope.

The Boy Scouts? Until it disbanded, was majority Mormon. See, Boy Scout troops are organized at a church level, and in the LDS Church they have EVERY church have a troop.

This kind of goes in with "Mormonism as Experience," but one of the big selling points of the religion (along with keeping your family forever) is how they have a lIvInG pRoPhEt oooooooooh. The idea of "the Church" was something that appealed to me back then, but now its repugnant to me. Something I have come to find is that there are many different ways for people to worship and different ways people feel spiritual. I'm very susceptible to music, and so music-heavy denominations like Pentecostalism work on me strongly. I'm not expressive myself but I'm stirred by watching other people do the hands-in-the-airs babbling thing, the wonderful improvisational style of sermons and testimonies that resemble the movements of jazz music, the joyous sound of their music. But other people are shrinking violets and can't take the noise and social pressure of that. A girl I knew at Mormon church converted from Pentecostalism for that reason. Ironic, isn't it? And then there's other people who don't like the improvisational feeling and instead get off to having some ritual, some set of formulas to do (pray your rosaries, follow your advent calendar, light a candle at the real time, yadda yadda yadda) and like the rich architecture and vestments and icons and all of that of something like Orthodoxy or Catholicism. And some people find all of those things to be so put on and so distracting, they prefer the stark and contemplative nature of a thing like Presbyterianism.

But what they have in common is that they all appeal to different kinds of people with different needs, even as their teachings differ little in a meaningful way. Then why force these people into a single formula? Now, there is variety in denominations; Catholicism, for example, does allow charismatic practice now. But in general they've got a thing they're all about. I couldn't share my Elvis gospel with the missionaries, because they were only allowed to listen to pre-approved music. Isn't that shitty?

And then you've got the corruption of the Big Church. Little churches are not less corrupt, probably they tend to be MORE corrupt (less oversight, less professionalism), but when the little church screws up people can leave, because nowhere does it say that Jesus gave the Church to one person to hand down like a crown and lord over the Earth like a king. Nobody has that authority. Those bishops with their councils didn't have that authority, and all of it is such a corruption of the spirit of Christianity, a subversion of a (nonviolent) revolutionary ideology into a tool of oppression, and so far from the spirit of America. But Mormonism, ironically, tries to recreate that. That's another reason I don't think I could ever go back, I have come to love the idea of the independent small church competing against the other churches on its own merits, all contributing to a rich culture, too much to want to see the world paved over by one big company, whether based out of Rome or Moscow or Salt Lake City.

Dont' know what else to say. Don't like their leaders, but neither do I like much of anybody's leaders at this point. Wish I could be a believer, but can't.

Spoiler: SELECTED READINGS

Mormonism for Dummies. No joking, it's a really good summary of the religion and early history.

The Psychedelic History of Mormonism, Magic, and Drugs. Amazing book that should be viewed with some suspicion (author is one of those pothead/acidhead guys who thinks fucking everything is proof everybody was high in ancient times), but it really does lay out a detailed description of entheogens and their properties, the history of entheogens in different religions, and the role that they and other weird shit played in Joseph Smith's church. Is an absolutely brutal takedown of Joseph Smith's character.

 

[Conan O'Barbarian]

If you have to uncanonize half of what your founder said (or outright deny he ever said them) in order to remain unostracized from civil society, you're a cult that split from an even more ridiculous cult and your faith is worth nothing. In that regard, along with misreporting (or not reporting) income, they're exactly the same as scientology.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

If you have to uncanonize half of what your founder said (or outright deny he ever said them) in order to remain unostracized from civil society, you're a cult that split from an even more ridiculous cult and your faith is worth nothing. In that regard, along with misreporting (or not reporting) income, they're exactly the same as scientology.

You have to uncanonize most of the Bible to do the same.
Fags get the stone
The punishment for raping women is you have to pay their dad a fine and marry them
God blesses you for massacring people outside the tribe
Eat shrimp? FUCK YOU

Unfortunately, I do have to agree with the Scientology comparison, not for the reason you gave, but because they teach God's living out on a star named Kolob. It didn't sound so crazy back before we started sending rockets into outer space, taking all the mystery out of the heavens...

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

After I watched the South Park episode I thought, "This can't be real." I eventually fell down a rabbit hole and spent a summer reading every Wikipedia article on the subject, two biographies of Smith, the actual Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and various other books both sympathetic and critical of Mormonism. It turns out the South Park episode is real.

The entirety of the movement is bat shit insane and the most engrossing topic I have ever studied in the field of history. I could go on for hours. Don't get me wrong, Mormonism is absurd and incorrect in every sense of the word, but everything about it is fascinating. Especially the founding and Smith himself, but their continuous persecution and travels west, plural marriage, Smith's obsession with Freemasons, his eventual martyrdom and their exile to Utah, the rise of the FLDS, and the shady workings of the modern church are also captivating.

See, I never really get why people find it absurd besides just a bias for what we already know, and Smith himself is clearly a dirtbag, but this right here is it. They're just plain fascinating. It's a wonder how such strange events could play out in the American West, but you rarely see it depicted in the Hollywood version of American history.

The funny thing is, recent science regarding head and neck cancer supports not consuming hot beverages. Cumulative hot beverage consumption is directly correlated with risk of head and neck cancer rates. So, maybe they were on to something (even though their reasoning was not based on actual science).

Mormons often point to how they abandoned tobacco long before it was proven to be unhealthy as evidence for why sometimes it's best to just shut up and listen.

I was born into the religion. I was disappointed because the more I questioned the teachings the less they made any sense to me, and I felt literally nothing when I was baptized (except the pressure to lie about how "profound" it was).

I was honestly shocked that they started pandering so hard to the LGBWTFBBQ crowd recently. They claim to be the fastest growing religion in the world, so why the sudden desperation to bring degeneracy in? It kind of pisses me off, after being psychologically tortured for years because of how even a minor thing like masturbation is treated like a sin as serious as murder.

One funny thing with Mormonism is it makes normal Christianity sound a lot more sensible, but then you read more and it starts to fall apart again. Like, I hate trinitarianism, but Adam-God Doctrine is so fucking stupid it makes trinitarianism look good.

They're pandering now? See, I didn't really spend enough time with them to really have a right to speak on it, but I just get this feeling like the LDS Church "tries too hard." Bring back the old stuff, let's all praise Heavenly Mother and drink Joseph's special wine until we hie to Kolob.

 

[XYZpdq]

Only mormons I've known irl was some mexican brothers I was buddies with in school, they were pretty cool as was their mom and dad (divorced but civil)

Also the Mormon Jesus cartoon is narrated by the same guy who narrated the Alan Smithee Dune