How Do You View You?

Growing up Adventist, I was taught that all other Christian sects were either deluded or vaguely evil. This was not merely an academic point: people who didn't know of God's true word - as percolated through the innards of Ellen G. White - deserved the eternal torment they'd soon be facing. The Catholics were damned because they'd essentially deified Jesus' mom and because they thought people went to heaven when they died; the Episcopalians believed that gay folks were, like the rest of us, the children of God; the Methodists allowed dancing. To make matters worse, the whole lot of them worshiped on Sunday, which, as any upstanding Adventist will tell you, was set aside by God specifically for NFL football. Go check Genesis, you'll see: "...and on Sunday God did create Steve Largent, football widows and baked beans."

Religions are odd this way: no matter how moonstruck - or patently delusional - their ideas may be, the members seldom fail to gasp in horror at what some other sect has cooked up.

To wit:

For the first time, a Mormon has a legitimate shot at being the next president of the United States. At first glance, this would seem to indicate that America has opened its collective mind, become more tolerant and decided to give these latter-day saints a shot at the White House. And I suppose it is all that, but the candidacy of Mitt Romney has also given American Christians further occasion to play pot to the proverbial kettle, never once stepping back to consider the applesauce of their own views.

By all indications, and however politically slippery he may be, Romney seems like a decent fellow and a competent executive. To the best of my knowledge, he's not in the slave trade, addicted to crank, or running guns for the Janjaweed. He just happens to think that the Son of God, when he returns, will be arriving in Missouri.¹ Jesus, by the by, is rightly pissed that TWA went belly up, because that St. Louis hub sure would have made his second coming a helluva lot easier, logistically speaking.²

The big gripe against Mormons - as made by other sects - seems to be that the LDS church has taken traditional scripture and riffed it out of all recognition, rather like a Grateful Dead cover band. Most Christians will tell you that Mormonism, as a faith, isn't to be trusted because it was founded by some crazy fellow who went around making shit up to fit his whim and fancy. Objectively speaking, of course, they're right: Joseph Smith was a certified loon, but no more or less so than whoever cooked up the other doctrines and tenets that we have come to associate with the Great Religions.

So the Mormons have a history of polygamy? Well, the Bible says that I can own slaves from neighboring countries,³ but like the Mormons and their plural marriages, most Christians got shut of their bondsmen a long time ago. No one's railing against the other Christian candidates because their religion backed bondage in the distant past.

The Mormons have magic underwear? Leviticus says I can't approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight,⁴ and I know a lot of people who attend church regularly with their spectacles. For my part, I have to wear a suit and tie everyday, usually with underwear. Dress codes, as you've no doubt learned by now, abound. So what?

For outright, comic dottiness it's hard to top the Holy Bible - particularly the elder testament - though I'll admit the Book of Mormon takes a fair stab at it. Point is, even Joseph Smith had to start somewhere and he didn't cook up his religion in a vacuum. Rather, he was indeed riffing on a centuries-old canon of specious dogma, the entirety of which looks awfully goofy to anyone who bothers to step outside the fray for even a moment and look at religion with any distance.

I don't expect that any religion or sect will perk up and recognize the jive of their own convictions anytime soon, no more, at least, than I expect the Shiites and Sunnis to lay down their small arms and have a beer together in Diyala next week. Religion, unlike journalism, doesn't even strive for objectivity and it's hard to tell a person who believes that woman was created from Adam's rib that God will, in fact, be turning up in the Midwest at some time in the future. Once a person is locked into a notion, no matter how askew, it's hard to talk them off the ledge.





_________________
¹ The LDS' 10^th article of faith, in case you wondered, which states that Zion will be built in the American continent

² I'm not a religious person but it'd be doubly hard for me to get behind a God who chose as his place of reemergence - of all places on His own green earth - Missouri. I'd like to think that my god had better taste. After all, if Missouri is His idea of a good time, imagine Heaven, which is probably like southern Iowa. Given the choice, I'd take sinful mortality.

³ "Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids." - Leviticus 25:44 (KJV)

⁴ "...or a crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken..." - Leviticus 21:7 (KJV)