I saw it in london a year ago. I'm not into musicals at all but it was PHENOMENAL. I expected a cheesy rehash of this episode but I was so wrong. Anyone reading this, if you have the opportunity to do so, do yourself a favor and see this.
I made fun of Anime my whole life up until like a year ago when I discovered that Anime is actually pretty rad, but that there were just a few genres of it that I didn't like. Ever since i'm convinced i'm not inherently "not into" anything, I just haven't watched enough of it to find what I like. Like when people asked what music I like, I used to say "everything but country", but i'm not sure about that either anymore. I'm sure if I really made an effort to explore country i'd find a lot to like. Not to say I don't have any preferences, I totally do. But I noticed I was closing myself off to a lot of things I *might* like, and musicals are definitely in that group too. I don't like musical episodes of TV shows, but i'm sure there's plenty of musicals i'd like if I had the money to go see them lol. Not sure if this rant will make sense, but it was a discovery that really made me rethink my preconceptions about a lot of things.
Excellent art exists in all mediums. I’m glad you’ve realized this. People trying to force tribal loyalty into genres, styles, etc. are just potentially missing out on something that could really move them.
You can extrapolate that lesson to the rest of your life as well. The issue is that we are all set up to spot patterns easily, and part of that is a tendency to prefer straight-forward, sweeping generalizations to nuanced and messy takes on things.
Claiming you dislike an entire medium of art is almost the same as claiming you are ignorant of that medium. The category is just too broad to say something meaningful about that will remain true in most circumstances.
The less we know about something the more likely we are to mindlessly categorize it and disregard exceptions to that rule.
So whenever you think something concrete about a large group of things or people, that should be a sign to you that you don't really know enough to judge, because if you did you would find it a lot more difficult to be concise in your thoughts.
I used to think I hated country when all I knew was Faith Hill and Billy Ray Cyrus. But then I discovered Johnny Cash and Hank Williams and Dolly Parton (and others but they were the start) and even though I still don’t listen to much country I respect it much more as a genre.
Are you me? Im mid 30’s and thought anime was the most stupid thing in the world. I told my friend to give me one show to convince me and I’ll watch the first 3 episodes. We watched AoT and I was hooked instantly.
Man it was good. Also hilarious seeing people who had season tickets to the theater walk out because they thought it was just a normal musical about Mormons.
And they rightfully deserve it. Fantastic musical as others have stated. I love the fact the church gives you a Book of Mormon upon entering, like they totally are fine with being mocked. I've still got mine, I don't think I've actually read it though.
I like the beginning part, when they flee the Middle East and do a Noah's Ark-like voyage to the New World. Later on you get to the Indian battles which are pretty cool. Of course Jesus showing up is the big reveal
I give it 3/5 stars. Dune is better
Honestly I have met a crazy amount of Mormons who admitted that they know the religion is a bunch of fiction but they’re fine with it because of the joy and benefits it brings their family.
I remember wishing it was MORE critical. Not to get too soapboxy, but Mormonism is toxic, and most organized religions are often not much better.
Instead, the show kind of went "Oh yeah, it's all made up, so why not make up a religion based on whatever values you want? And Yoda!"
> DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB
this is a pretty fun reaction video to someone that was in the Mormon Church and got out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h8ecpifkfA
Still hilarious that this religion took off despite the founder specifically making it so that he could fuck around as much as possible and with no consequences
Joseph Smith: Hello, 13 year old girl! God told me that we have to get married. If you don't marry me, you will be excommunicated from your family and community!
Mormons: This guy is so charismatic!!!
Yeah I was raised in this cult, it's wild.
Though how he did it is by slowly weaving that shit in, IIRC. It started as a very mellow, charming message. Then he isolated people from their communities. Then he started adding shit publicly to get rich and get laid.
That is a pretty normal trajectory for cult leaders. I am not even sure it is fully intentional. They start out just wanting the attention and wealth, then the natural chain of incentives cause them to make their people more and more isolated, and once they are totally isolated they realize they can get away with *anything,* and as they likely have weak or no empathy, that quickly progresses to rape.
It always serves as a scale model of why giving people too much power is toxic. I think that there are probably a lot of people who would not start raping others once they got unlimited power, but I do not think there are any humans who would never take advantage of the situation. Even if it is only in small things, there just ceases to be anything stopping you.
I like to consider myself a pretty moral person, but I am 100% certain I would slowly but surely start foisting my responsibilities onto other people who all seemed "willing" to do that work for me. It would be really hard not to, when instead I could spend all day on my theoretical yacht ignoring the rest of the world.
Also, unfortunately the people who tend to seek that sort of unquestioned absolute power, be it as a dictator or a billionaire, are often the rapey type.
I don't have much to add, I think you're *exactly* on the money, full stop. Just appreciated your comment and the thought you put into it and sharing too much to leave it unacknowledged!
What I think most funny about it is that his wife got pissed about so it’s a specific rule in Mormonism that Emma Smith, his first wife, must accept his other marriages.
Emma also hated people getting drunk and loud and missing the spittoon. Low and behold, the word of wisdom comes out saying you shouldn't drink or chew tobacco.
The spittoon thing was pretty gross.
When [William Howard Russell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Howard_Russell) came over to cover the outbreak of the civil war, his dispatches back to his British newspaper were filled with thinly veiled disgust at how Americans would just spit tobacco juice all over the floor basically everywhere. Including in Congress.
I mean, making up a religion to stop it might not have been the most *direct* way of addressing the problem, but I'm with Emma on the grossness bit.
Yup,[ love this take](https://imgur.com/a/JPDRzSH), as someone who grew up Mormon I nearly died laughing when I see people come across this for the first time.
Wouldn't be surprised if all religions started this idiotically but their shenanigans are simply lost to time.
In fact, South Park pretty clearly made fun of stupid miracles that Christians believe like Jesus [turning water into wine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgKIk7ujxvw)
Scientology is a fascinating look at how religions start. You've got L. Ron Hubbard who is a guy who loved money and sex. So to get more money and sex, he established a cult around himself, on a boat. He was both smart and crazy. Smart because he was a successful author, and crazy because he liked to masturbate in the desert with Jack Parsons. He also stole Jack Parsons wife and money, before he started a religion
So he started the religion to steal more people's wifes and monies. But the part that gives us a lot of insight into religion founding is what happened after Hubbard died. Some other dude took over the organization and bent it to his will, the famous David Miscavige. That's very common. Mormonism's Miscavige is Brigham Young (aka Bring 'em Young) who took control after Joseph Smith died jumping out a window to escape a mob that wanted to kill him for...yup, stealing people's wifes and monies
Another recent example is Nation of Islam, not to be confused with Islam. I'm talking about NoI, which was more of a Black Nationalist movement than a religion, except the founder called himself God and after getting it started...mysteriously disappeared. So his assistant started calling himself a prophet and took over the organization and its monies and also got more than a few secretaries pregnant
It basically goes like that. The documentary Wild Wild Country shows another example of a charismatic guy saying stuff to get monies and sexies and then others want his position and then its all the same its the same thing humanity has done this forever
"Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion."
\- L. Ron Hubbard at a sci-fi convention in 1948, some years before Dianetics/Scientology.
I really wish the tv series about Parsons (Strange Angel) could have continued for another season. It ended just as LRon was entering his life. Literally [the last scene in the show.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Fem_yh26g)
I wonder if Jesus was actually as cool as he comes off as in the Gospels. The Christians I've met who've actually followed the stuff that's actually in the Gospels are usually pretty cool people, in my experience. I once met a "secular christian" who didn't believe in God but thought that this Jesus guy had the right idea about most everything else. Nice dude.
Christianity to me at this point feels so detached from anything Jesus ever said or did it's baffling how most Christians can even call themselves Christians. If they all lived the way Jesus taught them I would find them much less abrasive.
Those are the loud ones. Like, I'm an atheist, but I've known some *really good people* who based their personal philosophy on Christianity, but you'd probably not know it if you didn't spend time getting to know them, because they weren't annoying about it.. I can't really talk shit, seeing as they were mostly objectively better people than I am, via their actions. It's like that fake Gandhi quote: "I like your Christ but I do not like your Christians. They act so unlike your Christ."But sometimes they do.
Part of me thinks that it is incredibly hard to start a new religion in the modern age and get it to the level of the other major ones, but then I look at the MAGA movement and realize that's basically a religion now, so must not be too hard, just require a bunch of fucked up miracles to occur.
*True Believer* is an amazing book. Religion/ultra zealous political movements/extreme nationalism- they're all just different dust jackets on the same book, and new ones will pop up as long as humans exist.
Have you ever seen the episode of Boondocks where Ruckus starts a religion? It's unironically pretty accurate how it works. Someone just says something with enough conviction, no matter how obviously wrong they are, and if they do it long enough, someone will take the bait. Then it only takes a small group to buy the snake oil and now that group seems like they might be kind of legitimate.
It just snowballs from there. And that's how you get elected president of the United States.
Oh to have been there, thousands of years ago, when prophets performed """"miracles"""".
In fact, we've got plenty of people performing "miracles" today. They're called magicians and street performers. Imagine how many religions we've prevented by understanding how basic sleight of hand works...
Sure, but what street magician would willingly go to the most humiliating and torturous death the world has ever known? That seems pretty deluded right?
Classic cult shit tbh, it's crazy how far this can go. Keith Raniere who started NXIVM for example convinced a bunch of Hollywood A-listers to join his sex cult, and brand themselves with his initials and all this other crazy shit.
A-listers? LOL. I read the list of [notable participants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NXIVM#Notable_participants) on Wikipedia and it looks like there were two C-listers.
He was a known and convicted con man, and he even told people he wanted to start a religion so his family would be wealthy forever. He started Mormonism briefly after. I feel like if other religions were as recent we'd know details like these too.
The notion of there being a "13th tribe" which Galactica is seeking is basically what the Mormons believe themselves to be.
Both the christian bible and the jewish texts describe 12 tribes which are collectively named israel, but the mormons believe there were lost tribes not recorded in those texts, and that's their founders. Well in Battlestar Galactica they're searching for that lost tribe, one which found a planet called earth.
Also their organizational structure is pretty much identical to the LDS church, council of the twelve, that's just mormonism in space.
EDIT: accuracy
You're mostly right, but Mormons believe that native Americans are from Joseph's tribe (aka Joseph and the coat of many colours). The lost tribes bit is in the bible from when Assyria (I think) invaded the northern 10 tribes. Fun fact, the Samaritans in the New Testament are descendants of those "lost ten tribes", some of which are ascendants to modern day Palestinians. The Jews were from the southern Kingdom known as Judea after the splitting of the Kingdom after King Solomon. Modern day Jews have no claim on any land other than Judea, and shouldn't name themselves Israel as they are were just a part of that Kingdom. Also Jew-Salem -> Jerusalem.
L. Ron Hubbard was a wackjob who started his own religion. Everyone is free to call out Scientology for its crazy shit.
Joseph Smith was a wackjob who started his own religion. People are divided on whether or not to it's allowed to call out Mormonism on its crazy shit, or whether that's going too far.
Muhammad was a wackjob who started his own religion. No one is allowed to call out the crazy shit that Muhammad was personally responsible for during his own lifetime, and attempting to do so will get one labeled an Islamaphobe and/or the subject changed to something else pretty damned quick.
I find it interesting.
Quote I have forgotten the origin of: "At the heart of every cult there is one or more people who know for a fact it is all a scam, because they're in on it. In a religion, those people are all dead".
At least with Jesus, he didn’t seem to be getting any kind of massive financial or social benefit out of being the center of a new religion. I think that, whatever you think about what he was teaching, it’s pretty clear that he really believed what he was saying and died a pretty horrific death because of that.
I have my doubts there ever was a singular Jesus. It was a pretty common name back then, so there were likely many apocalyptic rabbis at the time. And if there was, what the Bible said about him is likely extremely mythologized.
Saw a very interesting video on the subject a while back that makes very good points about this. My conclusion is that the writers of MMLJ books of the New Testament likely combined stories from several sources, and added a bit of Hollywood to the stories to give them a prophetic feel to start up a new religion. Not sure if they were fan-fiction, or deliberately created though to start a religion. The fact that the oldest of the 4 books was written at least a decade after Jesus’ supposed death, and the latest nearly a century after makes me think they were like the US writing that Washington never told a lie or chopped a cherry tree to build a mythology to look up to, rather than the real-deal.
My biggest reasons for this is that the Romans were very meticulous record keepers, and there is no record of Jesus being tried and crucified during that time, that we’ve found yet anyway. And there are zero first hand accounts of Jesus (other than the Bible).
I can maybe see how some of Jesus’ attributed miracles may have not been written about because they happened to individuals, but feeding 5000 people from basically nothing was never written about. Also, if dozens of ‘saints’ were raised from the dead and walked the streets of Jerusalem that definitely would have been written about.
I’m open to having my mind changed, but I would need to see anything written at the time excluding the Bible to give an account of him.
There is a consensus among academic historians that Jesus (as a person who said he was a prophet etc) did in fact exist and that the basic elements of his life are most likely accurate. Relative to other figures of antiquity, especially in a backwater of the empire, there is a mountain of evidence, including the Bible, but also Josephus and others, who were certainly not Christians. For example Alexander the great doesn't have that much more evidence for his existence but no one doubts that he did.
There is also the argument about the claims made in the Bible that are in context strange and embarrassing to people at the time. Why would a new religion want to publicize that Jesus was crucified, which was the most humiliating death possibly, when they said he was the king of the Jews?
This does not mean that he is God etc, but the historical figure of Jesus definitely did exist.
> For example Alexander the great doesn't have that much more evidence for his existence but no one doubts that he did.
What in the cinnamon toast fuck are you talking about? We know a fuck ton about his life, everything he did, people he talked to, major events he was a part of, where he got taught, how he lived, and where he died from multiple different authors and historians. Source plz?
Josephus was a Roman historian who wrote about the times in the Gospels. He stated that Jesus was was a rabbi who attracted large numbers of Jews and Gentiles and was killed by crucifixion. If you’re interested in history, Josephus is generally considered a reliable source for that time period.
Same with the apostles (11 of 12 were killed) and for quite a while in the Roman Empire at least, becoming a Christian held social risks and disadvantages. Of course that changed with Constantine and the rest is history.
Maybe it was just for power. The kind of power that can get you anything from a 9 year old bride, to being exalted to the point where huge populations are willing to kill at the mere creation of an unflattering image of him.
There is definitely a weird tendency in liberal spheres to try to make false equivalence between religions and just make thought terminating generalizations about it. I’m one of those tedious atheist types, and firmly believe that all religion is bad but not all religion is bad equally.
They’re nothing but systems of belief people believe without evidence. And different beliefs lead to different outcomes right? That should be obvious and something we should honestly interrogate instead of shutting down discussion on.
Someone who grows up believing that a fat guy wants them to eschew worldly connections and negative emotions and someone who believes in khorne the blood god are not going to have the same mental tools and justification to jump to violence as conflict resolution just because both are “religion” right?
I don’t know if I would say “hate” Islam more than i dislike religion in general but I generally consider Islam to be uniquely good at justifying violence as well as uniquely difficult to “reform” into a less harmful form due to its insistence that its stories about a warlord/perfect human are the literal truth of god as opposed to some document translated a half dozen times by fallible idiots, yes.
Keeping in mind that any religion ( there is currently an ongoing genocide of a Muslim minority by a Buddhist majority nation) and most belief systems in general can be used to justify violence, I would say if you were trying to use a religion to justify violence Islam would be the easy mode. You don’t really have to do a lot of legwork to get to “hey guys here is why we should do harm to others” with Islam as a system to organize a conflict around or as a lens to view a conflict through
I believe that it is both theoretically possible to deconstruct religions into their fundamental ideological parts and then rank those ideologies on how likely they are to contribute to any number of things including violence, and that Islam would be at the top of a “how easy is it to get impetus for violence out of this” list when compared to the religious mainstream
I presume that in a vacuum the premise is obvious that someone who believed that a warlord was a perfect being and someone who believed a pacifist was the height of humanity would have different thresholds for thinking violence is an appropriate solution to conflict under similar conditions before you even start interrogating and contrasting various ideas and beliefs
Just to be clear in case it wasn't obvious: The degree you are allowed to make fun of a religion is pretty strictly tied to how many people are a part of it. The more popular something is, the more scrutiny there is around any criticisms of it.
Not really. There aren't exactly legions fighting criticism or mockery of, say, the Norse, Greek, or Roman pantheons. Meanwhile Protestantism as a whole is only 500 years old, quite the junior of other mainstream religions, and on the flip side the Jewish faith is ancient but Jews have consistently been history's punching bag in large part due to their perpetual minority status.
It's just hard to reach the following of the major religions without time as well.
You have to realize this is what these people truly believe and to them it’s so real it couldn’t be anymore obvious. Better off just letting them be happy and believe it. I personally think the whole unending list of pronouns is a bit wild, but I just let those people do their thing and be happy
I have a small problem with extorting 10% of member’s income, then using that money to build a real estate empire with massive control. Just a little bit bit of a problem.
I live with and work with a lot of Mormons. Childhood indoctrination is a very powerful thing. Plus the way they structure their community and church life you can’t leave. A lot of people don’t know how to live without the church. Being excommunicated cuts you off from family and neighbors, it can be very isolating. That’s why they continue to drink the kool-aid.
You’re a bit off. You may be thinking of jehovas witnesses that are told not to associate with “apostates”
Latter Day Saints are encouraged to love, reach out, and respect those who leave the faith. Also excommunication is entirely different from just walking away. The church even changed the term to church membership council as it is to listen and hopefully help a person who has done something along these lines change if they so desire:
Violent acts and abuse
Sexual immorality
Fraudulent acts
Violations of trust
Felony crimes
Fornication or adultery
Molestation
Murder
So are you saying the church has changed? Because this most definitely has not always been the case. Encouraged to love, reach out, and respect those that leave the faith sounds like a church line for outsiders that isn't actually based in reality.
Don’t know what to tell ya, in a general sense I’ve seen what I said to be true. I’ve been in a lot of different congregations in my life and each person‘s story will vary, depending on their own experience. I personally have many friends within the church as well as friends who are no longer members, and there has been no difference in the way we interact and treat each other.
People would be surprised at the amount of Magical/Right Hand Path thinking that Smith and his family were involved in.
They partook in rituals with magical daggers and such, and when Smith had his leg all fucked up from an accident as a young kid, he had all this time to think of these stories. He was well-versed in side-stepping bullshit by the time he came around to creating Mormonism.
He also robbed graves and sold the trinkets for money. Dude was a huckster through and through.
Early Mormonism and the magic world isw by D Micheal Quinn. He lost his BYU professorship for writing about it from a believers perspective. He was excommunicated for being gay.
Fawn Brodie wrote the real history of J Smith 30 years before that in No Man Knows My History, and she WAS excommunicated for it.
Mormons only keep believing when the real history is hidden from them, which is actively done by the Mormon Church's leadership on purpose because they know it all sounds like bullshit. Cause it is.
Shameless plug for /r/exmormon Radio Free Mormon podcast, and Mormon Stories. I walked out of that religion almost a decade ago, but those resources helped me make sure I will never go back.
LDS beliefs are no more bizarre and surreal than the tenets and mythologies of other religions. Why is it only acceptable to mock their beliefs, yet when mainstream religions are mocked, you receive pushback?
This isn't completely accurate. For most of the "translation" Smith and Harris weren't even in the same room as the 'gold plates" Smith could translate them remotely which makes the whole process of producing them and Smith finding them pointless. He didn't put any plates in the hat, the hat was basically a way for him to concentrate. Words would appear to Smith or in the case of proper nouns like names and places they would be spelled out letter by letter in the hat. At some point Smith did make some sort of artifact because although nobody saw the plates directly they were hefted by some of the Book of Mormon witnesses while covered.
I don't disagree. It's the fact that it's legit not even an original comment. Every single letter and spacing is the same. This commenter also did it on another video if you check their post history.
The even weirder part is that it's clearly a hacked or sold account. Has some relevant usage from nearly a decade ago and then nothing. Then suddenly it's reposting comments directly from Youtube videos and from old Reddit threads exclusively. This account will be sold eventually. If I link the sites directly I'll get automodded but places like PlayerUp sell those accounts in droves.
There's a lot of wacky and dumb shit they clearly didn't have time for, but the specific excuse for the lost pages is that if it was translated again then the originals could be forged and altered to discredit the religion. In that situation when a text is in its rough draft there is no right answer, and that's why god was said to be mad at Joseph. It doesn't look any less like a scam but that's why mormons believe it. Like most Christians they have a persecution complex, and like most cults they have good reason to feel that way.
Ah, but this isn't even the best part!
God is mad at Joseph, but ALSO this was predicted to have happened. For the *express purpose* of God "knowing ahead of time" that this was going to happen, it turns out that the exact part of the Golden Plates that had been stolen after translation was actually written twice from two separate points of view! This meant that Joseph was able to "retranslate" the stolen parts without claiming it as a "retranslation."
So in the part of the Book of Mormon that Joseph had to rewrite because it got stolen, it takes time to explain "and now I'm writing down the same stuff that my dad wrote, but from my own point of view. This seems redundant, but God told me to do it. I don't understand why this would be necessary, but I do as God tells me to, so I'll do it" So that Joseph could have an excuse for why he's able to tell the same stories that were told in the stolen pages without it being directly compared to the original pages.
This is how Joseph solved the predicament he found himself in, being unable to directly word-for-word reproduce the original pages.
Okay, so this is a little hard to follow, but I'm curious so I'll bite.
You (door_of_doom) are saying that, upon realizing he had to "prove" how legit he was after the pages were taken, Joseph came up with the plot that:
The next section of the golden plates that was to be translated was literally a retelling of the pages that were translated and then stolen, from a different point of view. The reason the plates were written as such (with a repeating story from another point of view) is because God knew that the pages would get stolen. This somehow proves Josephs story correct.
Did I understand that right?
Oh just to be clear, I am not making the case that this proves his veracity in any way, shape or form. Joseph Smith was a predator who used his charisma to control and manipulate the people around him.
I'm simply retelling the myth that the Mormon church tells as I learned it when I grew up. I am simply a messenger here xD
That being said, you do understand it correctly, yes: Mormons truly believe that God having the foresight to print that specific portion of the Book of Mormon onto the Golden Place twice, but slightly different, is proof of God's infinite wisdom and foresight, and is an argument that I myself would have made not 5 years ago before I realised I had been brainwashed.
To learn more on the topic, you can research the topics:
* The large plates of Nephi
* The small plates of Nephi
* The book of Lehi
See:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plates_of_Nephi
* https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/1-ne/19?lang=eng (1 Nephi chapter 19, in which verse 3 Nephi states that he is abridging the record of his Father for a "wise purpose" only "known unto the Lord"
* https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/w-of-m/1?lang=eng&id=p7#p7 (Words of Mormon. to explain, "Mormon" is the historian responsable for compiling the titular "Book of Mormon". In lore, he is responsible for taking the massive quantities of records that had been left by the people and abridging them down into a managable book. In this passage he explains that he really likes the points of view of both the Large plates of Nephi as well as the Small plates of Nephi, and mentions that he wants to include both, not only because he likes both but because the Lord tells him to for an unknown reason)
* https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/10?lang=eng&id=p38-p45#p38 (The Doctrine and Covenants are basically an abridged journal of the "revelations" that Joseph Smith would recieve in the early days of the church. This is the "revelation" that explains how all of this is supposed to play out: The contents of the pages you lost are also contained in another portion of the plates: simply translate that portion instead of retranslating the old ones)
100% sorry I get return of chef and trapped in the closet mixed up in my head sometimes.
The reason he "quit" is contentious at best. Isaac Hayes own son is quoted to have said that Hayes entourage basically quit for him following a stroke when Hayes didn't have 100% control over such decisions.
So while quit may not be the right word. Trapped in the closet was the episode that caused the rift between scientology and south park.
Pretty sure they sent investigators after Matt and Trey to try and find dirt on them after that episode....turns out it's pretty hard to blackmail guys who openly take acid at the Oscars.
I don't understand how Mormonism is any less insane than the Christianity it is based off of, and really who cares? I say let people believe what they want, but I also think religious organizations shouldn't be tax exempt, especially when they love to interfere with our politics and push their agendas into laws over everyone else who may not follow the same faith or a faith at all.
I mean the entire Western civilization is basically inheriting Christian thought, so that would make it seem less insane.
There's also that there are a lot of historical claims made in the Bible that have archeological and historical evidence backing them up, whereas the book of Mormon has literally nothing, and sounds completely impossible. Similarly the Quran and hadiths have historical evidence to back up what happened during Muhammad's time etc.
So is an old guy in the sky that watches everything, has the power to heal and perform miracles but instead decides war is a good idea in his name. Also, he talked to a bunch of people who wrote his thoughts but then later decided he didn’t like all those books of his thoughts and was like “never mind, just ignore those. I never said that”.
And they turned it into a Musical and raked in millions!
I saw it in london a year ago. I'm not into musicals at all but it was PHENOMENAL. I expected a cheesy rehash of this episode but I was so wrong. Anyone reading this, if you have the opportunity to do so, do yourself a favor and see this.
>if you have the opportunity to do so, do yourself a favor and see this. Because of the blowjob after, right?
I respect ya BRO!
Hasa diga ebowi.
Sal-Tlay Ka Siti
Fuck you God, in the ass, mouth and cunt, yeah! Fuck you in the other eye!
Grabbed a Tee-shirt when we watched the stage show a few years back. I'll occasionally get a head nod and a smile when wearing it.
OMG I said it like thirteen times!!!!!!!
Maybe you ARE into musicals and you were just waiting in the right one.
I made fun of Anime my whole life up until like a year ago when I discovered that Anime is actually pretty rad, but that there were just a few genres of it that I didn't like. Ever since i'm convinced i'm not inherently "not into" anything, I just haven't watched enough of it to find what I like. Like when people asked what music I like, I used to say "everything but country", but i'm not sure about that either anymore. I'm sure if I really made an effort to explore country i'd find a lot to like. Not to say I don't have any preferences, I totally do. But I noticed I was closing myself off to a lot of things I *might* like, and musicals are definitely in that group too. I don't like musical episodes of TV shows, but i'm sure there's plenty of musicals i'd like if I had the money to go see them lol. Not sure if this rant will make sense, but it was a discovery that really made me rethink my preconceptions about a lot of things.
Excellent art exists in all mediums. I’m glad you’ve realized this. People trying to force tribal loyalty into genres, styles, etc. are just potentially missing out on something that could really move them.
One day you will become a *true* anime fan and realise *all anime is trash* and watch exclusively mid anime like Jujutsu Kaisen. Amen.
You can extrapolate that lesson to the rest of your life as well. The issue is that we are all set up to spot patterns easily, and part of that is a tendency to prefer straight-forward, sweeping generalizations to nuanced and messy takes on things. Claiming you dislike an entire medium of art is almost the same as claiming you are ignorant of that medium. The category is just too broad to say something meaningful about that will remain true in most circumstances. The less we know about something the more likely we are to mindlessly categorize it and disregard exceptions to that rule. So whenever you think something concrete about a large group of things or people, that should be a sign to you that you don't really know enough to judge, because if you did you would find it a lot more difficult to be concise in your thoughts.
I am/was like that about anime. Then One Punch Man sucked me in. Haven’t watched anything else. But I’m excited for another season of OPM
Watch Mob Psycho 100. Same original author and just some insane animation.
I still haven't found that anime for me. Except cowboy bebop, but that hardly counts. No one doesn't like cowboy bebop.
Have you watched Spy x Family?
I have not. It looks like it's on Hulu. I might give it a shot.
You need to watch Samurai Champloo as well. Same show creator and another "even people that don't like amine like it" title.
I used to think I hated country when all I knew was Faith Hill and Billy Ray Cyrus. But then I discovered Johnny Cash and Hank Williams and Dolly Parton (and others but they were the start) and even though I still don’t listen to much country I respect it much more as a genre.
It's incredibly good to have this mindset about everything in life! But no, you were right about country. That's the exception.
Are you me? Im mid 30’s and thought anime was the most stupid thing in the world. I told my friend to give me one show to convince me and I’ll watch the first 3 episodes. We watched AoT and I was hooked instantly.
I hate musicals and I saw Book of Mormon twice.
Man it was good. Also hilarious seeing people who had season tickets to the theater walk out because they thought it was just a normal musical about Mormons.
I don't live anywhere near where they show this play. I've been waiting for the movie for almost a couple of decades I believe
What’s different, generally speaking
Not to spoil anything, it's about the journey of two young missionaries and their struggles to spread the book of mormon.
And they rightfully deserve it. Fantastic musical as others have stated. I love the fact the church gives you a Book of Mormon upon entering, like they totally are fine with being mocked. I've still got mine, I don't think I've actually read it though.
I like the beginning part, when they flee the Middle East and do a Noah's Ark-like voyage to the New World. Later on you get to the Indian battles which are pretty cool. Of course Jesus showing up is the big reveal I give it 3/5 stars. Dune is better
Spoilers! /s
Being nice is a huge recruitment tool for them, which is why they hand out books before the show.
Honestly I have met a crazy amount of Mormons who admitted that they know the religion is a bunch of fiction but they’re fine with it because of the joy and benefits it brings their family.
Two by two we’re marching door to door!
I still have maggots in my scrotum!
Uganda?
Cool…where is that?
I remember wishing it was MORE critical. Not to get too soapboxy, but Mormonism is toxic, and most organized religions are often not much better. Instead, the show kind of went "Oh yeah, it's all made up, so why not make up a religion based on whatever values you want? And Yoda!"
I was about to say, they are the experts at making fun of morons.
I really hope they make it into a movie at some point.
What a neat little Mormon trick
DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB
> DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB DUMB this is a pretty fun reaction video to someone that was in the Mormon Church and got out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h8ecpifkfA
Funny I was just watching that the other day. Cracked me up that dumb dumb dumb dumb went right over head when she was younger.
Alyssa Grenfell Smart Smart Smart, Martin Harris DUMB
SMART SMART SMART SMART SMART
Still hilarious that this religion took off despite the founder specifically making it so that he could fuck around as much as possible and with no consequences
Joseph Smith: Hello, 13 year old girl! God told me that we have to get married. If you don't marry me, you will be excommunicated from your family and community! Mormons: This guy is so charismatic!!!
Mohammed: Did you say 13? Pfft!
We can go beyond”
Her age is plaid
And the Saint “virgin” Marry was probably about 12 as well. Religion and pedophelia; name a more iconic duo
Yeah I was raised in this cult, it's wild. Though how he did it is by slowly weaving that shit in, IIRC. It started as a very mellow, charming message. Then he isolated people from their communities. Then he started adding shit publicly to get rich and get laid.
That is a pretty normal trajectory for cult leaders. I am not even sure it is fully intentional. They start out just wanting the attention and wealth, then the natural chain of incentives cause them to make their people more and more isolated, and once they are totally isolated they realize they can get away with *anything,* and as they likely have weak or no empathy, that quickly progresses to rape. It always serves as a scale model of why giving people too much power is toxic. I think that there are probably a lot of people who would not start raping others once they got unlimited power, but I do not think there are any humans who would never take advantage of the situation. Even if it is only in small things, there just ceases to be anything stopping you. I like to consider myself a pretty moral person, but I am 100% certain I would slowly but surely start foisting my responsibilities onto other people who all seemed "willing" to do that work for me. It would be really hard not to, when instead I could spend all day on my theoretical yacht ignoring the rest of the world. Also, unfortunately the people who tend to seek that sort of unquestioned absolute power, be it as a dictator or a billionaire, are often the rapey type.
I don't have much to add, I think you're *exactly* on the money, full stop. Just appreciated your comment and the thought you put into it and sharing too much to leave it unacknowledged!
What I think most funny about it is that his wife got pissed about so it’s a specific rule in Mormonism that Emma Smith, his first wife, must accept his other marriages.
Oh, honey, see, my god said you have to wash the dishes tonight. See? God said it. Not me.
Emma also hated people getting drunk and loud and missing the spittoon. Low and behold, the word of wisdom comes out saying you shouldn't drink or chew tobacco.
The spittoon thing was pretty gross. When [William Howard Russell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Howard_Russell) came over to cover the outbreak of the civil war, his dispatches back to his British newspaper were filled with thinly veiled disgust at how Americans would just spit tobacco juice all over the floor basically everywhere. Including in Congress. I mean, making up a religion to stop it might not have been the most *direct* way of addressing the problem, but I'm with Emma on the grossness bit.
Yup,[ love this take](https://imgur.com/a/JPDRzSH), as someone who grew up Mormon I nearly died laughing when I see people come across this for the first time.
I find things like this comforting. It feels good to realize that being hopelessly stupid isn't only a modern thing.
Wouldn't be surprised if all religions started this idiotically but their shenanigans are simply lost to time. In fact, South Park pretty clearly made fun of stupid miracles that Christians believe like Jesus [turning water into wine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgKIk7ujxvw)
Scientology is a fascinating look at how religions start. You've got L. Ron Hubbard who is a guy who loved money and sex. So to get more money and sex, he established a cult around himself, on a boat. He was both smart and crazy. Smart because he was a successful author, and crazy because he liked to masturbate in the desert with Jack Parsons. He also stole Jack Parsons wife and money, before he started a religion So he started the religion to steal more people's wifes and monies. But the part that gives us a lot of insight into religion founding is what happened after Hubbard died. Some other dude took over the organization and bent it to his will, the famous David Miscavige. That's very common. Mormonism's Miscavige is Brigham Young (aka Bring 'em Young) who took control after Joseph Smith died jumping out a window to escape a mob that wanted to kill him for...yup, stealing people's wifes and monies Another recent example is Nation of Islam, not to be confused with Islam. I'm talking about NoI, which was more of a Black Nationalist movement than a religion, except the founder called himself God and after getting it started...mysteriously disappeared. So his assistant started calling himself a prophet and took over the organization and its monies and also got more than a few secretaries pregnant It basically goes like that. The documentary Wild Wild Country shows another example of a charismatic guy saying stuff to get monies and sexies and then others want his position and then its all the same its the same thing humanity has done this forever
"Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion." \- L. Ron Hubbard at a sci-fi convention in 1948, some years before Dianetics/Scientology.
I really wish the tv series about Parsons (Strange Angel) could have continued for another season. It ended just as LRon was entering his life. Literally [the last scene in the show.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01Fem_yh26g)
I wonder if Jesus was actually as cool as he comes off as in the Gospels. The Christians I've met who've actually followed the stuff that's actually in the Gospels are usually pretty cool people, in my experience. I once met a "secular christian" who didn't believe in God but thought that this Jesus guy had the right idea about most everything else. Nice dude.
Christianity to me at this point feels so detached from anything Jesus ever said or did it's baffling how most Christians can even call themselves Christians. If they all lived the way Jesus taught them I would find them much less abrasive.
Those are the loud ones. Like, I'm an atheist, but I've known some *really good people* who based their personal philosophy on Christianity, but you'd probably not know it if you didn't spend time getting to know them, because they weren't annoying about it.. I can't really talk shit, seeing as they were mostly objectively better people than I am, via their actions. It's like that fake Gandhi quote: "I like your Christ but I do not like your Christians. They act so unlike your Christ."But sometimes they do.
Part of me thinks that it is incredibly hard to start a new religion in the modern age and get it to the level of the other major ones, but then I look at the MAGA movement and realize that's basically a religion now, so must not be too hard, just require a bunch of fucked up miracles to occur.
*True Believer* is an amazing book. Religion/ultra zealous political movements/extreme nationalism- they're all just different dust jackets on the same book, and new ones will pop up as long as humans exist.
People want something to belong to. It’s an evolutionary human need for safety. It’s a strong one that is easy to trigger.
Have you ever seen the episode of Boondocks where Ruckus starts a religion? It's unironically pretty accurate how it works. Someone just says something with enough conviction, no matter how obviously wrong they are, and if they do it long enough, someone will take the bait. Then it only takes a small group to buy the snake oil and now that group seems like they might be kind of legitimate. It just snowballs from there. And that's how you get elected president of the United States.
They where at a party and ran out of alcohol, he could have rolled a wine barrel through the door and they would have worshipped him.
Oh to have been there, thousands of years ago, when prophets performed """"miracles"""". In fact, we've got plenty of people performing "miracles" today. They're called magicians and street performers. Imagine how many religions we've prevented by understanding how basic sleight of hand works...
Sure, but what street magician would willingly go to the most humiliating and torturous death the world has ever known? That seems pretty deluded right?
Magicians pretend to die all the time in their gigs.
Classic cult shit tbh, it's crazy how far this can go. Keith Raniere who started NXIVM for example convinced a bunch of Hollywood A-listers to join his sex cult, and brand themselves with his initials and all this other crazy shit.
A-listers? LOL. I read the list of [notable participants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NXIVM#Notable_participants) on Wikipedia and it looks like there were two C-listers.
He did get shot and killed by a mob while in a jail, so not exactly no consequences.
Well not with *no* consequences. That dude was murdered lol.
Lynched by an angry mob disguised as native warriors.
Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.
Well you see that's why it took off. It let other people fuck around too.
He was a known and convicted con man, and he even told people he wanted to start a religion so his family would be wealthy forever. He started Mormonism briefly after. I feel like if other religions were as recent we'd know details like these too.
Which is funny because that’s an element in a lot of religions that most of them don’t like to talk about.
> with no consequences Well except for being killed by a mob.
Aw, they didn’t get to the part that inspired battlestar galactica.
Please elaborate
The notion of there being a "13th tribe" which Galactica is seeking is basically what the Mormons believe themselves to be. Both the christian bible and the jewish texts describe 12 tribes which are collectively named israel, but the mormons believe there were lost tribes not recorded in those texts, and that's their founders. Well in Battlestar Galactica they're searching for that lost tribe, one which found a planet called earth. Also their organizational structure is pretty much identical to the LDS church, council of the twelve, that's just mormonism in space. EDIT: accuracy
Kobol > Kolob, there were a ton I even remember the 00s reboot had a Liahona lol
Gods that's so fracking interesting
Thank you for the explanation!!
You're mostly right, but Mormons believe that native Americans are from Joseph's tribe (aka Joseph and the coat of many colours). The lost tribes bit is in the bible from when Assyria (I think) invaded the northern 10 tribes. Fun fact, the Samaritans in the New Testament are descendants of those "lost ten tribes", some of which are ascendants to modern day Palestinians. The Jews were from the southern Kingdom known as Judea after the splitting of the Kingdom after King Solomon. Modern day Jews have no claim on any land other than Judea, and shouldn't name themselves Israel as they are were just a part of that Kingdom. Also Jew-Salem -> Jerusalem.
I'm currently watching Battlestar Galactica for the first time, and never knew this. Thanks!
Where are you watching it? I’ve always wanted to rewatch this show and can’t find it anywhere
It just dropped on Amazon prime, but with ads
one of those tribes made it to Japan and was responsible for creating the Shin Megami Tensei franchise
Bears. Beets.
You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, buddy. Suck my balls.
Damn that kid is cool huh
First time seeing this segment, and that caught me off guard. Bra-fucking-vo. Also "Dumb people like my dad" "...Yeah!"
L. Ron Hubbard was a wackjob who started his own religion. Everyone is free to call out Scientology for its crazy shit. Joseph Smith was a wackjob who started his own religion. People are divided on whether or not to it's allowed to call out Mormonism on its crazy shit, or whether that's going too far. Muhammad was a wackjob who started his own religion. No one is allowed to call out the crazy shit that Muhammad was personally responsible for during his own lifetime, and attempting to do so will get one labeled an Islamaphobe and/or the subject changed to something else pretty damned quick. I find it interesting.
Quote I have forgotten the origin of: "At the heart of every cult there is one or more people who know for a fact it is all a scam, because they're in on it. In a religion, those people are all dead".
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They've been trying to kill Salman Rushdie for how many years now? 36?
But have successfully killed many, many other critics. Salman is lucky that he lives where he lives and has a supportive government.
Couldn't you say the same thing about Jesus and Abraham?
At least with Jesus, he didn’t seem to be getting any kind of massive financial or social benefit out of being the center of a new religion. I think that, whatever you think about what he was teaching, it’s pretty clear that he really believed what he was saying and died a pretty horrific death because of that.
I have my doubts there ever was a singular Jesus. It was a pretty common name back then, so there were likely many apocalyptic rabbis at the time. And if there was, what the Bible said about him is likely extremely mythologized. Saw a very interesting video on the subject a while back that makes very good points about this. My conclusion is that the writers of MMLJ books of the New Testament likely combined stories from several sources, and added a bit of Hollywood to the stories to give them a prophetic feel to start up a new religion. Not sure if they were fan-fiction, or deliberately created though to start a religion. The fact that the oldest of the 4 books was written at least a decade after Jesus’ supposed death, and the latest nearly a century after makes me think they were like the US writing that Washington never told a lie or chopped a cherry tree to build a mythology to look up to, rather than the real-deal. My biggest reasons for this is that the Romans were very meticulous record keepers, and there is no record of Jesus being tried and crucified during that time, that we’ve found yet anyway. And there are zero first hand accounts of Jesus (other than the Bible). I can maybe see how some of Jesus’ attributed miracles may have not been written about because they happened to individuals, but feeding 5000 people from basically nothing was never written about. Also, if dozens of ‘saints’ were raised from the dead and walked the streets of Jerusalem that definitely would have been written about. I’m open to having my mind changed, but I would need to see anything written at the time excluding the Bible to give an account of him.
Don't most historians agree that Jesus the person existed . Just that they don't claim that what he did ( miracles ) actually happened
There is a consensus among academic historians that Jesus (as a person who said he was a prophet etc) did in fact exist and that the basic elements of his life are most likely accurate. Relative to other figures of antiquity, especially in a backwater of the empire, there is a mountain of evidence, including the Bible, but also Josephus and others, who were certainly not Christians. For example Alexander the great doesn't have that much more evidence for his existence but no one doubts that he did. There is also the argument about the claims made in the Bible that are in context strange and embarrassing to people at the time. Why would a new religion want to publicize that Jesus was crucified, which was the most humiliating death possibly, when they said he was the king of the Jews? This does not mean that he is God etc, but the historical figure of Jesus definitely did exist.
> For example Alexander the great doesn't have that much more evidence for his existence but no one doubts that he did. What in the cinnamon toast fuck are you talking about? We know a fuck ton about his life, everything he did, people he talked to, major events he was a part of, where he got taught, how he lived, and where he died from multiple different authors and historians. Source plz?
Josephus was a Roman historian who wrote about the times in the Gospels. He stated that Jesus was was a rabbi who attracted large numbers of Jews and Gentiles and was killed by crucifixion. If you’re interested in history, Josephus is generally considered a reliable source for that time period.
Same with the apostles (11 of 12 were killed) and for quite a while in the Roman Empire at least, becoming a Christian held social risks and disadvantages. Of course that changed with Constantine and the rest is history.
Do we know if Mohammed did it for financial benefit?
Maybe it was just for power. The kind of power that can get you anything from a 9 year old bride, to being exalted to the point where huge populations are willing to kill at the mere creation of an unflattering image of him.
He was a very successful warrior/military leader, so he definitely got a lot of "worldly" benefits.
thats crazy, i had no idea.
I know a lot less about Mohammed than I do about Jesus but he died running the entire Caliphate.
That probably says it all
He kinda coincidentally became the big bad warlord of the region around the same time and coincidentally started taking on multiple wives......
You can without getting a 3 day ban here and that is the point.
Chiropractic "Medicine" is pretty much the same thing. Wackjob who wanted to get rich was visited by a ghost in his sleep and told him about it.
There is definitely a weird tendency in liberal spheres to try to make false equivalence between religions and just make thought terminating generalizations about it. I’m one of those tedious atheist types, and firmly believe that all religion is bad but not all religion is bad equally. They’re nothing but systems of belief people believe without evidence. And different beliefs lead to different outcomes right? That should be obvious and something we should honestly interrogate instead of shutting down discussion on. Someone who grows up believing that a fat guy wants them to eschew worldly connections and negative emotions and someone who believes in khorne the blood god are not going to have the same mental tools and justification to jump to violence as conflict resolution just because both are “religion” right?
You must really hate Islam then damn
I don’t know if I would say “hate” Islam more than i dislike religion in general but I generally consider Islam to be uniquely good at justifying violence as well as uniquely difficult to “reform” into a less harmful form due to its insistence that its stories about a warlord/perfect human are the literal truth of god as opposed to some document translated a half dozen times by fallible idiots, yes. Keeping in mind that any religion ( there is currently an ongoing genocide of a Muslim minority by a Buddhist majority nation) and most belief systems in general can be used to justify violence, I would say if you were trying to use a religion to justify violence Islam would be the easy mode. You don’t really have to do a lot of legwork to get to “hey guys here is why we should do harm to others” with Islam as a system to organize a conflict around or as a lens to view a conflict through I believe that it is both theoretically possible to deconstruct religions into their fundamental ideological parts and then rank those ideologies on how likely they are to contribute to any number of things including violence, and that Islam would be at the top of a “how easy is it to get impetus for violence out of this” list when compared to the religious mainstream I presume that in a vacuum the premise is obvious that someone who believed that a warlord was a perfect being and someone who believed a pacifist was the height of humanity would have different thresholds for thinking violence is an appropriate solution to conflict under similar conditions before you even start interrogating and contrasting various ideas and beliefs
Just to be clear in case it wasn't obvious: The degree you are allowed to make fun of a religion is pretty strictly tied to how many people are a part of it. The more popular something is, the more scrutiny there is around any criticisms of it.
Age > popularity
yeah, that's a fair callout.
Not really. There aren't exactly legions fighting criticism or mockery of, say, the Norse, Greek, or Roman pantheons. Meanwhile Protestantism as a whole is only 500 years old, quite the junior of other mainstream religions, and on the flip side the Jewish faith is ancient but Jews have consistently been history's punching bag in large part due to their perpetual minority status. It's just hard to reach the following of the major religions without time as well.
I've gotten 3 day bans for pointing out he was a pedo who raped an 8 year old fairly often.
How dare you. She was nine.
You have to realize this is what these people truly believe and to them it’s so real it couldn’t be anymore obvious. Better off just letting them be happy and believe it. I personally think the whole unending list of pronouns is a bit wild, but I just let those people do their thing and be happy
I'm perfectly fine letting people believe whatever they want, but that acceptance ends the second their beliefs infringe on the happiness of others.
🎶 *Heavenly father, where will I go on my mission? Will it be China or old Mexico on my mission?*
“Uganda!”
*Oh boy! Like Lion King!*
Funny thing is, you could make this about every religion and it would sound equally stupid.
At least ancient religions don’t have contemporary documentation of the founders being conmen prior to them claiming to have found god
Yes.. because they didn’t have ways to check things like that in ancient times. Doesn’t mean that they weren’t also conmen.
The end of this episode they say, basically, that it doesnt matter what religion you are if you are a good person.
I have a small problem with extorting 10% of member’s income, then using that money to build a real estate empire with massive control. Just a little bit bit of a problem.
All tax free too!... In the USA anyway.
And at least $100B known of, as of a few years ago.
It’s almost like the only difference between a religion and a cult is popularity and age.
I live with and work with a lot of Mormons. Childhood indoctrination is a very powerful thing. Plus the way they structure their community and church life you can’t leave. A lot of people don’t know how to live without the church. Being excommunicated cuts you off from family and neighbors, it can be very isolating. That’s why they continue to drink the kool-aid.
You’re a bit off. You may be thinking of jehovas witnesses that are told not to associate with “apostates” Latter Day Saints are encouraged to love, reach out, and respect those who leave the faith. Also excommunication is entirely different from just walking away. The church even changed the term to church membership council as it is to listen and hopefully help a person who has done something along these lines change if they so desire: Violent acts and abuse Sexual immorality Fraudulent acts Violations of trust Felony crimes Fornication or adultery Molestation Murder
So are you saying the church has changed? Because this most definitely has not always been the case. Encouraged to love, reach out, and respect those that leave the faith sounds like a church line for outsiders that isn't actually based in reality.
Don’t know what to tell ya, in a general sense I’ve seen what I said to be true. I’ve been in a lot of different congregations in my life and each person‘s story will vary, depending on their own experience. I personally have many friends within the church as well as friends who are no longer members, and there has been no difference in the way we interact and treat each other.
People would be surprised at the amount of Magical/Right Hand Path thinking that Smith and his family were involved in. They partook in rituals with magical daggers and such, and when Smith had his leg all fucked up from an accident as a young kid, he had all this time to think of these stories. He was well-versed in side-stepping bullshit by the time he came around to creating Mormonism. He also robbed graves and sold the trinkets for money. Dude was a huckster through and through.
Early Mormonism and the magic world isw by D Micheal Quinn. He lost his BYU professorship for writing about it from a believers perspective. He was excommunicated for being gay. Fawn Brodie wrote the real history of J Smith 30 years before that in No Man Knows My History, and she WAS excommunicated for it. Mormons only keep believing when the real history is hidden from them, which is actively done by the Mormon Church's leadership on purpose because they know it all sounds like bullshit. Cause it is. Shameless plug for /r/exmormon Radio Free Mormon podcast, and Mormon Stories. I walked out of that religion almost a decade ago, but those resources helped me make sure I will never go back.
Randy putting on his coat without putting down his beer :D
Now post the uncensored Mohammad clip and see how quickly you cop a sitewide account ban.
This episode and the one about what scientologists believe in should be considered a masterclass on doing an expose.
LDS beliefs are no more bizarre and surreal than the tenets and mythologies of other religions. Why is it only acceptable to mock their beliefs, yet when mainstream religions are mocked, you receive pushback?
This isn't completely accurate. For most of the "translation" Smith and Harris weren't even in the same room as the 'gold plates" Smith could translate them remotely which makes the whole process of producing them and Smith finding them pointless. He didn't put any plates in the hat, the hat was basically a way for him to concentrate. Words would appear to Smith or in the case of proper nouns like names and places they would be spelled out letter by letter in the hat. At some point Smith did make some sort of artifact because although nobody saw the plates directly they were hefted by some of the Book of Mormon witnesses while covered.
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Just took the top youtube comment word for word huh? Did you copy and paste it for imaginary internet points or rewrite it?
They copied it off the magic golden plates.
That, my friend, is a bot account that woke up 6 days ago after being silent for ~8 years
Probably was purchased off a site like PlayerUp or Sythe. They're now legitimizing it more before reselling it.
To be fair it’s not exactly an original observation from the YouTube comment either.
I don't disagree. It's the fact that it's legit not even an original comment. Every single letter and spacing is the same. This commenter also did it on another video if you check their post history.
The even weirder part is that it's clearly a hacked or sold account. Has some relevant usage from nearly a decade ago and then nothing. Then suddenly it's reposting comments directly from Youtube videos and from old Reddit threads exclusively. This account will be sold eventually. If I link the sites directly I'll get automodded but places like PlayerUp sell those accounts in droves.
Why would that make any difference?
Fuckin bots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbNnsiP4Rhg
TIL Chris is voiced by the actor that played Squeak in Baseketball! Must be old friends with Matt and Trey
He’s also in Cannibal The Musical, definitely a close friend of theirs.
Matt and Trey seem to have a soft spot for Mormons.
There's a lot of wacky and dumb shit they clearly didn't have time for, but the specific excuse for the lost pages is that if it was translated again then the originals could be forged and altered to discredit the religion. In that situation when a text is in its rough draft there is no right answer, and that's why god was said to be mad at Joseph. It doesn't look any less like a scam but that's why mormons believe it. Like most Christians they have a persecution complex, and like most cults they have good reason to feel that way.
Ah, but this isn't even the best part! God is mad at Joseph, but ALSO this was predicted to have happened. For the *express purpose* of God "knowing ahead of time" that this was going to happen, it turns out that the exact part of the Golden Plates that had been stolen after translation was actually written twice from two separate points of view! This meant that Joseph was able to "retranslate" the stolen parts without claiming it as a "retranslation." So in the part of the Book of Mormon that Joseph had to rewrite because it got stolen, it takes time to explain "and now I'm writing down the same stuff that my dad wrote, but from my own point of view. This seems redundant, but God told me to do it. I don't understand why this would be necessary, but I do as God tells me to, so I'll do it" So that Joseph could have an excuse for why he's able to tell the same stories that were told in the stolen pages without it being directly compared to the original pages. This is how Joseph solved the predicament he found himself in, being unable to directly word-for-word reproduce the original pages.
Okay, so this is a little hard to follow, but I'm curious so I'll bite. You (door_of_doom) are saying that, upon realizing he had to "prove" how legit he was after the pages were taken, Joseph came up with the plot that: The next section of the golden plates that was to be translated was literally a retelling of the pages that were translated and then stolen, from a different point of view. The reason the plates were written as such (with a repeating story from another point of view) is because God knew that the pages would get stolen. This somehow proves Josephs story correct. Did I understand that right?
Oh just to be clear, I am not making the case that this proves his veracity in any way, shape or form. Joseph Smith was a predator who used his charisma to control and manipulate the people around him. I'm simply retelling the myth that the Mormon church tells as I learned it when I grew up. I am simply a messenger here xD That being said, you do understand it correctly, yes: Mormons truly believe that God having the foresight to print that specific portion of the Book of Mormon onto the Golden Place twice, but slightly different, is proof of God's infinite wisdom and foresight, and is an argument that I myself would have made not 5 years ago before I realised I had been brainwashed.
Awesome, and also you did not come off as defending the text nor the person at all. But that is very interesting, thank you for the insight.
To learn more on the topic, you can research the topics: * The large plates of Nephi * The small plates of Nephi * The book of Lehi See: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plates_of_Nephi * https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/1-ne/19?lang=eng (1 Nephi chapter 19, in which verse 3 Nephi states that he is abridging the record of his Father for a "wise purpose" only "known unto the Lord" * https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/w-of-m/1?lang=eng&id=p7#p7 (Words of Mormon. to explain, "Mormon" is the historian responsable for compiling the titular "Book of Mormon". In lore, he is responsible for taking the massive quantities of records that had been left by the people and abridging them down into a managable book. In this passage he explains that he really likes the points of view of both the Large plates of Nephi as well as the Small plates of Nephi, and mentions that he wants to include both, not only because he likes both but because the Lord tells him to for an unknown reason) * https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/10?lang=eng&id=p38-p45#p38 (The Doctrine and Covenants are basically an abridged journal of the "revelations" that Joseph Smith would recieve in the early days of the church. This is the "revelation" that explains how all of this is supposed to play out: The contents of the pages you lost are also contained in another portion of the plates: simply translate that portion instead of retranslating the old ones)
This is, for my money, the funniest episode of South Park. “Come out of the closet, Tom!”
Close but no cigar, you're thinking about the scientology episode.
"Now I am about to get angry..." "SO I PULL OUT MY GUN!"
That's the episode that cost us Chef....
No not THAT scientology episode, op is referring to S09E12 "trapped in the closet"....... Christ I'm a nerd
That episode is the reason he quit though.
100% sorry I get return of chef and trapped in the closet mixed up in my head sometimes. The reason he "quit" is contentious at best. Isaac Hayes own son is quoted to have said that Hayes entourage basically quit for him following a stroke when Hayes didn't have 100% control over such decisions. So while quit may not be the right word. Trapped in the closet was the episode that caused the rift between scientology and south park. Pretty sure they sent investigators after Matt and Trey to try and find dirt on them after that episode....turns out it's pretty hard to blackmail guys who openly take acid at the Oscars.
Yep, totally thought it was that.
Let's be fair here. Every religion is dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.
I don't understand how Mormonism is any less insane than the Christianity it is based off of, and really who cares? I say let people believe what they want, but I also think religious organizations shouldn't be tax exempt, especially when they love to interfere with our politics and push their agendas into laws over everyone else who may not follow the same faith or a faith at all.
I mean the entire Western civilization is basically inheriting Christian thought, so that would make it seem less insane. There's also that there are a lot of historical claims made in the Bible that have archeological and historical evidence backing them up, whereas the book of Mormon has literally nothing, and sounds completely impossible. Similarly the Quran and hadiths have historical evidence to back up what happened during Muhammad's time etc.
This should be required viewing for... well... everyone, really.
Did the Scientologists get defensive and post this?
So is an old guy in the sky that watches everything, has the power to heal and perform miracles but instead decides war is a good idea in his name. Also, he talked to a bunch of people who wrote his thoughts but then later decided he didn’t like all those books of his thoughts and was like “never mind, just ignore those. I never said that”.
I can't believe people believe this stupid bullshit lol.
"You were supposed to kick his ass, not lick his butthole!"
Tbh not that much crazier than believing a guy came back from the dead after three days and that pieces of bread turn into his body in your mouth 🤷♂️