No More Mr. Nice Guy!

That's mormonic!

A story in the Arizona Repulsive describes how Mormon tourists are swarming around pre-Columbian ruins in Mexico and Central America, "strengthening their faith" by walking in what they believe are the footsteps of the lost tribes of Israel who sailed to America and founded the Mayan culture.

Needless to say, mainstream archaeologists state categorically that there is no connection between the Mayans and any putative lost tribes of Israel, whatever Joseph Smith may have claimed. But that doesn't deter the Mormon tourists who smugly "nod knowingly" and "chime in with scripture references" as they are herded around the sacred sites of a civilization they know nothing about and have no intention of learning anything about - they just want to shoehorn it into their narrow religious world view.

Mormonism is such a Mickey Mouse, self-evidently false religion, that only in America could it thrive and become a multi-billion-dollar industry. I visited the temple in Salt Lake City several years ago, and the experience could be summed up as "Jesus in Disneyland." What I remember most vividly amidst all the kitsch and schmaltz is a huge spiral ramp that you walk up while viewing murals showing scenes from Mormon mythology. As you get to the top, you ascend into Heaven and see JHC and God standing on a cloud, joined by the hordes of people who were baptized posthumously. And don't get me started on the magic underpants thing.

The whole Mormon religion is such a crock, I don't know how anyone takes it seriously. I mean, come on! Some uneducated peasant crawls out of the woodwork and announces that he has discovered a set of golden plates carved in a strange language which only he can read, and the plates say he is God's prophet and can have as many women as he wants. Oh, and you'll just have to take his word that the plates even exist. Anyone with the IQ of a sea cucumber would reply, "Nice try, Joe. Still no luck getting laid, huh?"

Instead, Smith finds himself the head of a new religion, with thousands of people willing to give up everything and follow him into some gawd-forsaken desert. Smith's successors continue to lord it over their flock as divinely-appointed messengers with a hotline to the almighty. So when Utah wants to join the Union and is told it has to stop practicing polygamy, the celestial prophet gets a celestial message saying, ix-nay on the celestial marriage. How convenient! But sometimes God is a little tardy getting the celestial message across - like when he revealed to the faithful that black people do have souls after all, years after everyone else figured out that African-Americans should be treated as equals. Good friggin' grief, could it be any more blatantly obvious that Mormonism is a gigantic con?

But of course Mormons don't have a monopoly on stupidity by any means. Those tourists gallivanting around Meso-American ruins in search of some Disneyfied rewriting of history remind me of the silly fundies who go to Turkey in search of Noah's ark, or the cretinist tour groups who go into Science museums and loudly and obnoxiously proclaim that the exhibits are just evil Satanic propaganda, and the real science is that goddidit. (Hmmm, I wonder how the cretins would respond if some scientists turned up at the Creation Museum and started pointing out the lies, distortions, ignorance, stupidity and abysmal intellectual dishonesty that underpin this bloated boondoggle of dumbassery. I'm sure we'd never hear an end to all the whining about religious persecution and what nasty, impolite people those reality-based types are.)

Anyway, I know that as an uppity atheist I'm not the best authority on the subject, but it seems to me that religion shouldn't be about believing in some foolish just-so stories - it should be about trying to be a better person. If you "strengthen" your faith by cherry-picking isolated facts, ripping them out of context and shoving them willy-nilly into some childish fairy tale, while ignoring huge masses of countervailing facts, then your faith is shallow and stunted, both morally and intellectually.

I've always believed that it's not which ancient scroll you believe in that determines whether you are a virtuous person, it's how you act towards your fellow creatures - a point that seems utterly lost on holy-roller tourists of all stripes.