Seriously, though, what the fuck is wrong with Mormons. Their religion is based on the idea that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and he so obviously wasn’t a prophet that it’s an offense to the intelligence of any decent person to suggest that he was. That people are willing to herald Smith as a prophet, knowing the facts of his life is downright terrifying.
Joseph Smith got his initial fame as a treasure seeker. He claimed to have occult visions, and people would pay him to use his powers to help them locate treasure. For some reason, people kept hiring Smith, until eventually customers began to sour on him. One theory is that they could not accept his unorthodox beliefs and controversial theology, although it may have been because he had never once succeeded in locating treasure. Basically, Smith was the 19th Century Miss Cleo, down to the prosecution for fraud that came after he failed to locate a large deposit of silver. He clearly had a history of making false claims of divine ability in order to exploit people for material gains. There is a term for that kind of shenanigans: false prophet.
For the rest of his life, he never performed one act that proved him to be divine. He never turned water into wine, healed sick, or even pulled a rabbit out of a hat. He didn’t find significant flaws with the current church, he just proposed a new religion whose highlight was an extremely racist and historically inaccurate account of God turning an evil tribe black because they disappointed him. It can’t be proven that Smith never spoke with God, just as it can’t be proven that Uncle Cletus was never abducted by aliens. Still, it’s a matter of simple courtesy that the burden of proof lies with the guy claiming that everyone in the world worships the wrong religion.
While Smith was almost certainly was not an actual prophet with divine visions, what cannot be denied, even by his harshest critics, was that he was an insatiable sexual deviant. Most of Smith’s revelations, in fact, involved women who God mandated must marry him. This is how he wooed his original wife, as well as more than thirty more women he married, many of them already married to his followers, many more as young as fourteen. To be a Mormon is to believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet, which is to believe that the message God felt most necessary to convey to mankind was that a lot of women were going to Hell if they didn’t sleep with Joseph Smith. Either God is the greatest wingman ever, or Smith was a horny scumbag who invented a fake religion in order to get laid.
The Mormon religion is perhaps the sickest joke in the history of mankind. A group of mostly good-natured, moral individuals is going around worshiping and trying to force the rest of us to worship a lying, drunk, philanderer. Some one with a WWJD bracelet might try to emulate their prophet’s actions and go volunteer at a homeless shelter, donate money to those less fortunate, or barefoot water ski, all harmless acts. Some one with a WWJSD bracelet true to literal interpretation would most likely drink two Steel Reserves, hit on girls walking out of underage club, and threaten them with eternal damnation if they resisted.
The next time some one tries to argue that millions of people can’t be wrong in an attempt to justify listening to Fallout Boy, reading US Weekly, or defending the UN, remind him that there are almost fourteen million Mormons.
