Poor Mormons

I hate being Devil's Advocate sometimes, but...

I was recently visited by door-to-door Mormons. And while I realize they prefer to be called Latter Day Saints or Saints, I prefer to call them Mormons because calling them "Saints" sounds like they're a street gang in a karate movie from the 1980s.

Anyway, we had a nice, long chat wherein I got to use phrases like 'intrinsically self-assigned' and 'geologic column' and 'principle of falsifiability' and feel very smart and proud of myself. And I updated my Facebook status accordingly, mentioning that I felt bad for Mormons. Twelve people liked that post, as opposed to the normal one or two whenever I post anything negative about any other subject.

Here's what I don't understand, and also why I feel bad for LDS's: At least some of the people that liked that post about Mormon missionaries are Christians. Or claim to be. Or just really like lower-case 't's and falling for logical fallacies. Now, I've read the book of Mormon. And the Bible. Repeatedly. And I can definitively say that the claims made in the Book of Mormon and the claims made in the Bible are statistically identical, since they agree with and reinforce each other like 99% of the time. Particularly about the general depiction of the Almighty as a capricious, cruel, genocidal, vindictive, racist, sexist, insecure, psychotic monster that tortures his children to fulfill unknowable perversions. It's a new New Testament. Written by and for 'mericans. So from my perspective these Protestants mocking the LDS church is like arguing over what color dragon poop is in August during a drought. Until somebody establishes the existence of a dragon you're only going to succeed in looking ridiculous.

Oh, but those poor, misguided Mormons for believing that Ghost Jesus visited the Americas and turned some of them white, when everyone knows he didn't make any pit-stops on his way back to an invisible paradise that used to be a real place until telescopes turned it into a metaphor. Can anyone prove either of those accounts are accurate? Or at least offer a compelling case in favor of one or the other? Considering all of our current understanding indicates that neither bodily resurrection nor eternal, extra-dimensional paradises exist, I'm inclined to believe both parties are just arguing in favor of different kinds of wrong.

Oh, those poor Mormons and their corrupt church that robs them blind to build shopping malls and wage political campaigns. Isn't it nice that all other Christian pastors preach in the wilderness, wear rags, and eat bugs? Especially since they don't claim that they're in the metaphorical wilderness of upper-middle class income brackets. I'm pretty sure "Go and sell all that you have" and "you cannot serve both God and Mammon" are meant to be applied to the entire hierarchy, not just the parishioners. I have never, ever, ever, in my entire life, met a Christian that chose to give his or her fortune to the poor and mooch off the goodwill of strangers in exchange for vapid platitudes and groundbreaking insights into the human condition like "Don't kill people." I sure have met a fuckload of Christians that think that kind of thinking is socialism, though. Well, what idiots think socialism is, anyway.

Oh, those poor Mormons and their widely publicized sex crimes. Which church, then, is blameless? If the metric to be used is gender equality and lack of child rape, then I would imagine that Scientology is clearly the least worst choice, if only for its relative newness and exclusivity. And having been invented in an age and place that has largely figured out that human sacrifice, infant genital mutilation, slave trafficking, murdering dissenters, stoning disobedient children, arranged marriages, and outlawing blended fabrics are not, all things considered, wholesome activities.

And I'm not saying this out of anger towards the people that liked that status, so please don't take it that way. They can believe an albino goblin wants them to build a house out of prosthetic limbs so long as they don't hurt anyone and recognize that not everyone will share that belief.

I just wish that occasionally one of them would read a few webpages on cognitive bias, perform a few experiments, and do some opposition-research on what they believe before they point out that, yes, sometimes people get together in groups to believe different insane fairy tales than themselves. I mean, obviously they have functioning bullshit detectors. It would be so great if they would just point those detectors at their own belief systems.

But they don't.