Christians Beaten by Atheists, Jews and Mormons on Biblical Knowledge

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life just published an interesting new survey about how much Americans really know about religions. Much to everyone's surprise, the atheists and agnostics came out on top!

The headlines are filled with stuff like Atheists Outdo Some Believers (NY Times) or Atheists and Agnostics Know More About the Bible than Religious (National Public Radio).

But not so fast! It turns out that Atheists didn't really win, it was more like Christians lost. The atheist/agnostic category got the best score at 20.9 out of 32 questions. But look at how it really went down:

Gay Marriage and Mormon Hypocrisy: canadianjohnson's Funny Chart

Here's a really amusing chart of Mormon hypocrisy about marriage by canadianjohnson over at reddit.com. If you want to use this, please link to the original, http://i.imgur.com/UJKCH.jpg, so that the author gets proper credit. Enjoy!

Glenn Beck is Not a Christian?!? Another Liar's Club Nomination!

Don't you just love it when Christians start fighting about who is really a Christian? I particularly like to see the typical hair-splitting, like where the Church of Christ only sings a capella because "Jesus didn't use musical instruments" so anyone who brings a piano or organ into their church is going to be rejected by God and Jesus on judgement day. Seriously, they believe that.

But today's story is much bigger than hair splitting, because apparently Glenn Beck, the Fox News comedian, er, I mean news commentator and ultra-right-wing religious fanatic, is *gasp* a Mormon! Can you imagine that?? I mean, he's been passing himself off as a Christian!

But Bill Keller explained that:

"... the beliefs of the satanic Mormon cult are totally inconsistent with Biblical Christianity ... a person who believes in the lies of the Mormon cult is no more a Christian than a Muslim is."

And who, you might ask, is Bill Keller?

Aquatic Apes and Mormonism

One of the most fascinating proposals in anthropology is called the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, the idea that at some point in the evolution of homo sapiens our ancestors spent a great deal of time in the water. The theory makes a certain amount of sense, and would explain our hairlessness and the fact that human children, unlike all other great apes, love to play in the water. Just go for a walk on the beach, as I do two or three times each week, and it's striking to see kids running into the water chased by parents trying to keep them from drowning. No other primate species does this; they're all instinctively averse to swimming.

This Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (AAH) hasn't been embraced by the anthropology community, but it's not down and out either.

Either way, it illustrates one of the big differences between religion and science. In science, when there's an outlandish hypothesis (that is, outlandish compared to the accepted science), the advocates of that hypothesis are expected to provide extraordinary evidence to support their claims. It's not sufficient for them to just say, "It could be true, you can't prove it's not." The strength of a hypothesis rests on its explanatory power and on direct evidence that supports it.

The AAH has a great deal of explanatory power, but little direct evidence to support it. For example, if archaeologists discovered human remains by a sea shore with great piles of sea-urchin shells and other marine species that could only be gathered by swimming and diving, that would be strong direct evidence. Lacking such direct evidence, the proponents of the AAH can only offer indirect evidence, such as the fact that we're mostly hairless, we're good swimmers, and we love water even as babies.

The debate about AAH started in earnest in the 1960's and has continued ever since, but it's fair to say that AAH proponents have not met the standard of providing unusually strong evidence for their "outlandish" theory. Even Dawkins chimed in to say that the theory deserves some respect, but the mainstream anthropology community isn't convinced.

What does this have to do with religion? Well, I was really frustrated this week by a long and convoluted discussion in the comments section of my blog, a quasi-debate between me and several other atheists versus several Mormons. I say "quasi-debate" because it quickly devolved into mild-to-medium strength insults and a lot of smoke and mirrors, with little real substance.

Mormonism is Wrong

There's a persistent Mormon named Seth Rogers who is well known to atheists bloggers. Criticize the Mormon religion in an atheist blog, and Seth is right there to set you right. Three months ago I wrote a blog about the Mormon Church's immoral stance on homosexuality, and the debate is still going on.

After I wrote my final response in that thread, I realized it was blogworthy, not something that should be buried in a long tirade of Mormon apologetics, so here it is.

Mormon apologists make the classic mistake that's repeated over and over by religious apologists everywhere: they assert that the burden of proof is on the non-believer.

Mormonism makes a staggering number of amazing claims that defy both common sense and the historical and archaeological records.

Mormons and Animals: Denying our Deepest Instincts

A Mormon reader name Seth yesterday reminded me of one of the things I hate the most about religion: That it denies our animal nature. WE ARE ANIMALS, with very strong instincts, and our instincts dictate most of our behavior. Yet religious people, who believe God created us separately from animals, deny this, and this denial is the root of the monstrous guilt meme that is still infecting most of humanity.

Seth, who responded to this blog, was writing about homosexuality. He's apparently a Mormon, and claimed that even though homosexuality has a genetic origin, gays still have the choice of whether to act on their desires or not. In other words, if a man isn't attracted to women, he can choose to be celibate (to live without love and companionship). Seth wrote, "The very idea that mere genetics takes away a person's freedom of choice in life is one of the sickest and most dehumanizing ideas I've ever heard."

Seth is wrong, dead wrong, cruelly wrong.

Roseanne Barr: Mormon Church Caused Marie Osmond's Son's Death

Update (March 8): Reports have surfaced claiming that Michael was not gay, and Roseanne has retracted her statement. Nevertheless, the underlying sentiment remains: The Mormon Church is viciously anti-gay, in spite of their professed love for everyone. They are still damaging families across America, and while we may never know the truth about the Osmond family, I'm leaving this blog intact because the message is still important.

Leave it to Roseanne to tell it like it is.

"Marie Osmond's poor gay son killed himself because he had been told how wrong and how sick he was every day of his life by his church and the people in it. Calling that "depression" is a lie!

"Yet the Osmonds still talk lovingly about their church, saying nothing about its extremely anti-gay Crusade. Marie also has a gay daughter! ...

"G-d is trying to use you for something good and this is your opportunity! Your church is wrong and on the wrong wrong wrong side of things! Get as vocal about that as you are about your diet. G-d bless you too, Marie.

"Take a hard look at the facts now as you use this very sad time for introspection, healing growth and prayer, and become a strong symbol for loving mothers who make no apologies for hatred against their own kids!"

Right on, Roseanne!

It makes me sick too. What a brainwashing job.

LOL! Roadside Crosses Declared "Secular" by Utah Legislature

Ha, here's a good one. Apparently in Utah, the state legislature has the ability to convert the Christian cross into a purely secular symbol! Why didn't we Atheists think of that years ago? Instead of being offended every time we see a religious symbol sponsored by the government, all we have to do is have the government vote to make it non-religious, and all our worries are over. No more discrimination!

That goes for Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and everyone else, too! Now the government can put up crosses, and they're merely secular symbols. How can that offend anyone?

The cross is ... just a cross, right? An instrument of Roman torture. Say the Romans had chopped Jesus' head off in a guillotine (yeah, I know it wasn't invented yet, but go with me on this), and the Christians had made a guillotine their symbol, and Christians started marking their graves with little guillotines, so that pretty soon everyone knew that if you saw a guillotine by the side of the road, why, you'd think, "death," and you'd know someone had died there. And then the government couldn't put guillotines on public property, right? Because that would be government sponsorship of a particular religion. But hey, then we could just have the legislature declare that guillotines were secular, and that would be that!

Those Utah Mormons, so forward thinking, always one step ahead of the rest of us. Or maybe they're always good for a laugh.

Criminals at the Heart of Mormonism: Under the Banner of Heaven

I'm only three disks into the five-disk audio book, Under the Banner of Heaven, about the Mormon Church, and already I'm shocked beyond belief at the sordid history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS Church, aka Mormons). The crimes committed by the LDS church founders are horrifying, and well documented. Forget, for a moment, about Joseph Smith's obvious fraud that became the Book of Mormon. Even if you can swallow that unbelievable bit of hocus pocus, the crimes committed by the Mormon "prophets" are beyond what any decent person can accept.

Polygamous marriages don't bother me, if it's all between consenting adults, who cares? But that's not what the "apostles" of the church did. No, they received "revelations" from God that they should rape girls as young as twelve, under the guise of "marriage." Except that these marriages were not voluntary, and were not between adults.

The crime that practically knocked my off my chair was the Mountain Meadow Massacre, in which a wagon train of pioneers – roughly 120 men, women and children – were mercilessly slaughtered by the Mormons. Only children under the age of eight, "two young to be reliable witnesses," were spared. The story is complex and accounts vary, but there is no doubt that Brigham Young was directly involved and at least partly responsible for the massacre.

Whether Young directly ordered the attack (which would make him a mass murdered) or not is in dispute. But his actions after the fact are still despicable: He desecrated the grave site of the dead. When he visited the Mountain Meadow and saw the stone monument that covered the grave of the victims, Brigham Young had the monument destroyed, saying, "Vengeance is mine, and I have had a little."

These were not evil people, or even enemies of the Mormon Church. They were simply Arkansas people passing through Utah at an unfortunate time, who happened to have a lot of money, valuable cattle, and a top racehorse, in their possession. The Mormons were nothing more than murders and thieves.

How anyone can worship at a church that has this criminal, evil man as one of its prophets is beyond understanding.

Tags: mormon lds christian religion atheist atheism

An Atheist in the Land of Mormons, part 3: Becoming God

Did you know that Mormons believe – this is no joke – that if you're married in the Temple, you follow certain laws, YOU BECOME A GOD when you die. Not just an angel or a magician, a real god, with your OWN PLANET. You get to create all the creatures and people, plants, rocks, mountains, whatever you like. And when all is said and done, your creation, your people, will worship you, just like good Mormons worship Yahweh from this planet.

As we finish our stories of Utah and the Red Rock Film Festival, some of my readers might be very surprised to learn that my wife, who is Jewish, was a Mormon for several years. Of all the things I learned about her when we were dating, this probably surprised me the most. She even attended Brigham Young University for a semester.

The way she joined the church is pretty ordinary: a fiance' who converted her to Mormonism (much to her parents' dismay, I'm sure).

The Mormon missionaries have a very carefully crafted bag of tricks they use to attract and keep new converts, stories that are selected with two criteria: First, the introductory preaching resonates with "mainstream" Christianity and Judaism. The initial messages make Mormonism sound very pleasant and ordinary, much like just another branch of the mainstream religions, one with a special place for family and community.

Second, potential converts are told of the promise of the Mormon heaven, where peace, love, forgiveness, and happiness, reign, a paradise even more appealing than the typical Christain heaven.

But certain parts of Mormonism are carefully concealed from potential converts. They sound so outrageous to Christians, Jews, and Muslims that most people would reject them immediately. They're only revealed in bits and pieces, slowly so as not to scare the convert away, and only when the convert has become committed and integrated into the Mormon community and way of life.

(Check out The Mormon Curtain if you want to learn more about Mormon excesses, absurdities and abuses.)

Unfortunately for the Mormons, and fortunately for my wife, their indoctrination didn't succeed. Brigham Young University requires all students to take one religion class every semester, and for her introduction, my wife selected "Mormonism and Modern Science," which is essentially Creationism, somewhat repackaged. She now says, "I didn't know enough about science at that time to be alarmed by what they were teaching. But when they got to the part about polytheism – that when a good person dies, he becomes a god and gets his own planet &ndash my limited Jewish upbringing set off an alarm. Jews believe there is just one God. This was very important Jews, and Rabbit Ott, who was a powerful speaker and very well known [with the Sephardic Temple in Los Angeles], would read from the Torah, 'I am your God, the one God, and there are no other gods before me.'"

The idea that every good Mormon would become a god is polytheism, plain and simple. It is probably the single most important difference between Mormonism and the other three Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam), and most people raised in an Abrahamic religion would never convert to Mormonism if they knew the truth about the Mormon's polytheism beforehand.

My wife goes on to say that when the class got to the part about becoming a god when you die, she was astounded, not by this teaching, but by her fellow classmates. Looking around the room, she realized not a single other person objected. They were all fully indoctrinated.

She completed the semester, but never returned to BYU. Although she'd become skeptical about Mormonism, she continued to attend the LDS Church for a few years, but finally a friend gave her a copy of "The Godmakers" by David Hunt and Ed Becker. The book totally broke the spell, and she never went back to the LDS church again.

But she has some good stories to tell!

Tags: utah mormon lds atheist atheism god christian jew religion

An Atheist in the Land of Mormons, part 2

Breakfast today was a really bad dream come to life!

In the nine film festivals where we've shown our film, we had the pleasure of discovering that filmmakers are, as a group, one of the most congenial, open-minded group of people you'll ever meet. We became friends with filmmakers who made documentaries about Autism, Zen meditation, travel, war, about our veterans, about the environment, films showing the virtues of religions, exposing the abuses of religion, silly films, fun films, serious films, masterpieces, and awful films. But the common thread is that these are people who care, and even more important, people who are open minded and love to hear one another's ideas.

That's why I was really looking forward to the filmmaker's breakfast and awards ceremony this morning. We piled into our little RV, headed west from the beautiful Zion National Park, and enjoyed a lovely drive in the morning sun down to Virgin, Utah, where breakfast was to be served at the Buffalo Trails Trading Company. As we walked into the restaurant, I saw a table with an older couple, both dressed very nicely in their Sunday best. He looked like a man with some stories to tell, not the usual fire-breathing young filmmaker. So we sat down, introduced ourselves, and started asking questions.

What a mistake. First, his main claim to fame was that he produce a documentary about the Shroud of Turin. Not an objective documentary, but rather, the worst sort of pseudo-scientific religious BS. And even worse, the man was completely oblivious to his audience – he didn't even bother to ask us about our religious beliefs, but like a typical religious zealot, just assumed that his point of view is self-evident and shared by all. He was oblivious to the fact that I know a bit about the shroud's sordid history, that it has been thoroughly discredited, that no major church accepts its authenticity, and on and on. Once he got started, the man couldn't shut up, and started spewing the faux science that plagues real scientific progress. He went on and on about how many different ways they'd proved the shroud's authenticity, how its miraculous nature was irrefutable, how hundreds and hundreds of the worlds best scientists had confirmed its authenticity.

Within two minutes of him launching into this, my wife was squeezing my knee under the table with a clear message: Keep your mouth shut! But it wasn't necessary – arguing with this guy would have been a hopeless waste of time, and would have embarassed everyone. His claims were so outrageous I couldn't even look the guy in the eye, I had to stare at his hands, the wall, other people in the room, and deliberately ignore him. He went on – I kid you not – for forty five minutes nonstop, without even once asking us about our film.

But it gets worse! One of the finest films at the Red Rock Film Festival, which in fact won "Best Documentary," was David Lebrun's amazing film, Breaking the Maya Code, inspired by the book of the same name. Eleven years in the making, it documents the two hundred year battle to rediscover the meaning of the Mayan hieroglyphs, knowledge that was lost when the Catholic priest Landa (later Bishop Landa) carried out a one-man Inquisition in the Yucatan and destroyed all knowledge of Mayan writing (the subject of an upcoming blog).

Finally, to my great relief, the man's wife saw my discomfort, very abruptly interrupted her husband, and asked about our film. The man, having talked about his film for forty five minutes, gave my wife a full thirty seconds before he lost interest and changed the subject again to one of his other films. Then, another catastrophe: We asked if they'd seen Lebrun's Breaking the Maya Code. Alas, the man was a Mormon. We should have guessed, since we'd learned he was raised in Utah.

For those of you who don't know, the Book of the Mormon has a huge section describing how Jesus, after his resurrection, came to the New World and preached, and asserts that the Mayan hieroglyphic language is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, and many other outrageous claims about the Americas.

Unfortunately, like all religious beliefs, the Book of the Mormon is believed by Mormons to be infallable, so rather than looking at all the scientific evidence objectively, the Mormons' only goal is to find scientific "proof" that confirm their preconceived notion of truth. It's anti-science.

We had to listen to another ten minutes of anti-science, all about how the archeologists and other scientists are proving that the Book of the Mormon's account of the New World is correct. Mercifully, the awards ceremony began, and put an end to the man's unpleasant and embarassing conversation. We didn't win an award at this festival, but I almost didn't care, just getting the man silenced was reward enough for me.

After we thanked the festival organizers and headed west across the beautiful Utah desert, my wife and I both agreed: One of the worst aspects of religion is that it forces its believers to reject rational thinking and accept as truth things that are plainly false. It requires believers to put faith over logic, to accept what they're taught rather than what they can see with their own eyes.

Once they're taught to ignore rational thinking, it seems to be impossible for them to distinguish real science from pseudo science. They're able to believe (contrary to all real science) that Jesus was wrapped in the Turin Shroud, and to believe that Jesus preached in the New World, and that (contrary to overwhelming evidence to the contrary) that the Mayan script is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Tags: mormon utah maya mayan yucatan christian christianity turin shroud atheist atheism

An Atheist in the Land of Mormons

The continuing saga of my trip to Utah...

We hadn't been in Utah for a half hour when Mormonism smacked me in the face. We stopped for dinner at the Chuck-A-Rama buffet (in spite of the name, the food was fabulous), and I swear, I've never seen so many kids in my life. The family in front of us in line: 5 little girls and a pregnant mother. After I paid, I heard the guy behind me say, "One adult and five kids." Kids everywhere.

As we drove through Saint George, my wife pointed out the Mormon Temple, one of the oldest, and told me that the city doesn't allow any taller buildings near it.

I know that Utah is a Mormon state, but seeing it in real life is something of a shock to my rationalist brain.

I have a certain degree of respect for most religions, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) baffles me. Unlike Judaism, Christianity, Islam, even Baha'i, the sordid history of the LDS church's founders is modern, extensively documented, and available for anyone to read. There are hundreds of books exposing the fraud, the abusive beliefs, the racism, sexism, the power struggles, and anything else you'd care to name. There are web sites by the thousands from disillusioned former members.

With the history of the LDS church such an open book, why are there any Mormons at all?

I'm reminded of an experiment that I read about years ago, I believe it was in one of James Randi's essays. A college class saw a demonstration by a man who claimed to have paranormal powers - ESP, spoon bending, and so forth. He demonstrated about a dozen tricks, and convinced many of the students that it was for real. Then someone else came in, and loudly proclaimed, "This man is a fraud!" He proceeded to demonstrate how half of the "paranormal" feats were nothing more than ordinary magician's sleight-of-hand.

Now to my way of thinking, if a man had even one genuine paranormal power, that would be truly amazing, and he'd have no reason to resort to fraud. What did these college students think? Many of them decided that even though half the tricks were fraudulent, they still believed that the man had paranormal powers!

To me, that's like discovering that your accountant embezzled from one of your accounts, yet you still trust him with the rest of your money. After all, he didn't steal from those other accounts, right? So he's only dishonest when it comes to that one account, and the rest of our money is safe.

Does that make sense to you? No, nor to me. And that's why Mormonism is so baffling to me.

Tags: mormon lds church utah atheist atheism christian christianity randi