Is Mormonism any less true or sillier than other religions?

[dylan2001]

Please elaborate on the assumptions I have made?

 

[Alan]

Please quote the people you are responding to.

 

[godless dave]

Well as I said earlier, some people think not feel that the unequal distribution of beauty, plfeasure and pain to be highly relevant.

Relevant to us humans, sure. That doesn't mean that the existence of those things is in any way related to our feelings about their existence.

The fact that contact with fire will damage my skin, which I will experience as pain, tells me nothing about why fire exists, or why my skin exists for that matter.

The ideas of justice and evil are reasons for many to question the ability of any god being to exist at all.

Only a god that shares our conceptions of justice and evil.

 

[dylan2001]

I would agree with your obsetrvation about the lack of concrete data supplied but that does not mean the questions are invalid

 

[slingblade]

Its just really pathetic to sit back in judgment of earlier times and people who were not afraid to ask the questions of life. You have benefited from the best educations in world history and you bury your heads in the sand indtead of asking the real questions.

Hey there, noobie! Seems like in less than 40 posts, you have all of us figured out! Damn, you must be good. Or something.

So, is this your first account here at JREF?

 

[dylan2001]

Well yes actually I have never had the pleasure of talking with you people before.

 

[DC]

Well yes actually I have never had the pleasure of talking with you people before.

hit

in the post you answering to.

 

[slingblade]

Well yes actually I have never had the pleasure of talking with you people before.

That's interesting. I'm pretty sure most of us have had lots of experience talking to you people before.

 

[dylan2001]

whatever

 

[slingblade]

indeed

 

[Pup]

The person who dictated the Koran may have had a similarly shady background, and he claimed to have recited it after a visit from an angel.

We don't know much at all about the people who made up Christianity; their details are lost to time.

Ditto Judaism (I suspect an obsessive-compulsive, controlling father was involved but we'll never know).

Mormon only seems sillier because it is recent enough that we have access to more records about its genesis.

I think that's it. It gives a first-hand look at what the founding of a religion was like, before it gets all lost in the mists of time.

To say that it's sillier than other religions is merely to acknowledge that we've become culturally acclimated to the other religions.

 

[godless dave]

I would agree with your obsetrvation about the lack of concrete data supplied but that does not mean the questions are invalid

I'm not talking about the questions, I'm talking about the answers.

No matter how valid the question, if there are no credible answers forthcoming, it doesn't make sense to just invent an answer.

 

[Trent Wray]

Its just really pathetic to sit back in judgment of earlier times and people who were not afraid to ask the questions of life. You have benefited from the best educations in world history and you bury your heads in the sand indtead of asking the real questions.

What are the real questions? Can you list them all?

 

[Ausmerican]

I am gonna go with sillier for one reason. Mormonism posits that the Garden of Eden is here in the U.S. If you cant sell 'Murrikin Jesus over Jewish Jesus to the South, you are silly.

Oh and magic underoos as well. Try getting anyone rational over the age of 8 to buy that.

 

[PixyMisa]

I admit, as someone who was raised in the LDS church, that it strikes me as weird that so many people regard Mormonism as more weird than other religions.

The big difference is that we know Mormonism was a scam, just like Scientology. The origins of many other religions are less clear.

I just don't see it. I really don't get why the garments are something to snicker about but transubstantiation, special facial hair grooming requirements or reincarnation are not.

Underwear is intrinsically funny.

Am I insane? What is your opinion?

Mormonism is so blatantly stupid that it makes me wonder about the mental faculties of any adult adherent. While it's by no means unique in that, it is objectively funnier than most other faiths.

 

[Pixel42]

Mormonism is so blatantly stupid that it makes me wonder about the mental faculties of any adult adherent. While it's by no means unique in that, it is objectively funnier than most other faiths.

Absolutely. The Book of Mormon is such an obvious, very clumsy, fake it beggars belief that anyone could accept it as genuine, and as for the Book of Abraham ...

Other religions make absurd claims, but enough time has passed that disproving them is no longer possible. Smith's claims in the BoM are, for the most part, easily disprovable via archeology, DNA analysis etc.

 

[Travis]

I never saw any racism when I was in the church. I should get that out now.

 

[Zep]

http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_dna.html#pub_881830034

...many of the basic historical notions found in the Book of Mormon had appeared in print already in 1825, just two years before Smith began producing the Book of Mormon, in a book called View of the Hebrews, by Ethan Smith (no relation) and published just a few miles from where Joseph Smith lived. A careful study of this obscure book led B. H. Roberts, a General Authority and Church historian for many years who was known as the foremost authority on the Book of Mormon, to conclude that the evidence showed that the Book of Mormon was not an ancient record, but concocted by Joseph Smith himself, based on ideas he had read in the earlier book.

I don't know how obvious it has to be but considering all of these factors in their totality, there is only one reasonable conclusion -- Joseph Smith made the whole thing up.

 

[Joey McGee]

From my perspective, Mormonism has three very bad things that make it seem far kookier than anything else out there.

1. The door-to-door elders. These people are creepy, they aren't like other people, they aren't mentally challenged, but there is something very weird and inhuman about their demeanor. Creeped me as a kid, still creeps me to this day (I'm approached about twice a week in summer)

2. The revelation story. Buried golden plates in New York? Killed by an angry mob? Doesn't come off as a martyr story when you look it up, that's for sure. And this all happened in the last few hundred years? And he rewrote his own bible? Aw, man, obvious troll is obvious! People have a cognitive bias about older things and place more value on them. There aren't very many "new" religions either.

3. Underwear is hilarious.

 

[Kopji]

To be a good Mormon you must believe in modern revelatory experience. People not only talk to God, but God talks back. There is no such thing as critical scriptural examination. Belief in the fantastic is mandatory or the religion would crumble. If Joseph Smith did not actually have the experiences he said, and translate real plates - to construct and believe in an allegorical view is to just promote a slowly dying lie.

Christians at least, have some wiggle room in what they believe about Jesus Christ. Maybe he was a historical person, or a good teacher. Maybe the lessons are meant to be allegorical. Maybe Christians could borrow from some eastern thought, and think of Christ as more like a Budda. Lots of options.

There is no such abstract thing in Mormonism. A great star appeared when Jesus was born, the sky lit up like day. He is the Christ who descended in undeniable power in the new world. The teachings of the Book of Mormon directly assault the mid 1800 'Age of Enlightenment' liberal religious thinking in which it was written.

It is what it does.

So by way of it's fantastic teachings - Mormonism is far more fragile than liberal Christianity, and when belief in it shatters - it is potentially a far more destructive event than a loss of Mere Christianity (to borrow from CS Lewis).