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?

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.

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