Further Light and Knowledge

http://www.westword.com/2011-11-03/news/mormons-a-shallow-yet-helpful-guide-to-see-if-you-should-hate-them-or-not/

This link was on the yahoo home page. I just thought it was interesting how the comment section is playing out, from "yeah mormons are bad news" to "if you really want to know about mormonism read our book!"

Thoughts?

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"We shouldn't be mad at Chef for leaving us, We should be mad at that fruity little club for scrambling his brains"

Dang it -- you beat me to it!

My thoughts, when I read that, were these:

1. funny
2. The "I'm a Mormon" campaign has backfired.

Brilliant! I found that article to be very balanced and fair. Satire it may be, but there's not a falsehood in there, which is what makes it all the funnier.

Mormons aren't dangerous, but their doctrine is full of ca-ca.

Yeah, reading through it, I didn't find anything inherently false, but this is just from my own memory- which after I made the decision to leave the church I just purged a lot of that data. There is one commenter that keeps INSISTING how the history presented is false in an "I'm an authority and I should know" type manner. I want to respond, but I don't want to do all the fact-checking and legwork to prove them wrong. Mostly because it is exhausting and they usually find a way to just not listen in the end anyway.

Mrs. D- I am thinking that the "I'm a Mormon" campaign is really all about keeping the sheeple in line versus getting converts. So many of the people I know on facebook keep posting links to new ones OR posting their own personal story. What kills me is how all the other mormons practically jizz in their pants about how "spiritual" they are or "what a great message!" Meh, maybe I'm just irked today

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"We shouldn't be mad at Chef for leaving us, We should be mad at that fruity little club for scrambling his brains"

I think you're onto something there. It's like it's a campaign to convince the members of their diverse-but-same-as-everyone-else position. Forget about ever being a peculiar people...now, the Latter-latter-day-saint tries really hard to convince themselves that they are in the world AND now of the world (but not really of the world) and they are just like every other Christian but a bit more special, but not really cos hey, I don't think we believe/teach THAT...

I would have loved to have been in the meeting that GBH will have had just before he did all of the interviews (I'm thinking the PBS one or the CBS one?) and having to confront, on paper, the doctrinal anomalies that exist in LDS history and what position he was advised to take if eternal families/being gods/Jesus and Satan as brothers/Adam-god/anything in the PGP came up in the interview. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall of GBH's brain during that time. If there wasn't a flash of some sort of shame popping through his frontal lobes in perpetuating the myths for the members while lying to the public, then it's proof-positive that propping up institutions, even at the expense of honesty, is something that even god's-anointed are willing to do. Shock, horror.

I thought the article was truthful. It presented the beliefs in a way that mormons don't want to see them. I can remember the first time I realized exactly how crazy it all sounds. I was very embarrassed.

As to the idea that religion doesn't really matter in politics, I say BULLSHIT! Just look around at the war on women going on now because the politicians are trying to outChristian each other. Religion does matter very, very much because we are allowing people into office that allow a delusion to run their lives, and in turn, run our country. Scary.

I also wonder how many people outside of the mormon church are aware of "the one mighty and strong" school of thought. (I'm not really sure if it was a prophecy--I was such a good little believer that I didn't discriminate between what the prophets said and what my teachers told me--it was all "the gospel" to me.) I'm sure that it carries over to other religions, but the mormons truly believe that God will help them get to a position where they can impose the mormon religion's way of life on everyone in the country. I was taught that this is the reason a righteous man will come into power when "the constitution hangs by a thread"

My TBM DH thought it was pretty funny.

ETA: I got a kick out of the line about funny underwear "back in the 19th century, when underwear fetishes were not as common as they are today."

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Ma'am, we don't care what you do with your tractor after you purchase it.

I posted a reply to Liberal Mormon's comments on the same article before I realized that vballrh had already commented on it. As I said in that reply:
Other than that, I found it to be fairly accurate.