Mormonism

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

• Many religions have cornball rituals, for instance Catholicism, although none of theirs was ripped off from the Freemasons.

• Their founder, Joseph Smith, got lynched by an Illinois mob while he was in jail. But Jesus was murdered too. Then there's Michael Valentine Smith from Stranger in a Strange Land.

• Plenty of other faiths have secret teachings and ceremonies, such as the Unification Church, Aum Shinrikyo (a Japanese doomsday cult), and the World Church of the Creator.

• Practically every church has sent troops to shed innocent blood. So the Mountain Meadows Massacre was nothing compared to the Crusades. What's 128 dead settlers slain on orders of Brigham Young compared to hundreds of thousands because of the Pope?

• Mormonism is an edifice built atop another religion, Christianity. But Christianity builds on Judaism and Paganism, and Islam builds on both Christianity and Judaism.

• Islam practices polygamy.

Incidentally, good chunks of the Book of Mormon (purported to have been written circa 400 AD) were lifted from the King James translation of the Bible (completed in 1611). Included in these plagiarisms are the errors made by KJV's translators. Explanations of this time warp are curious and unsatisfying. Furthermore, whichever Supreme Being wrote the Book of Mormon's pseudo-KJV verses possessed an inadequate understanding of how to use Jacobean noun cases.

The Mormons are the only mainstream church to engage in retroactive, posthumous baptisms, in order that ancestors may ascend to heaven. Among those so baptised were Adolf Hitler in 1993, Josef Stalin, and Vlad the Impaler. By 1997 a coverup of the most controversial baptisms occurred, accomplished imperfectly.

The Mormons were vilified by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Study in Scarlet." It was also Mormon settlers who precipitated the war between Earth and Klendathu in the movie Starship Troopers.

Timeline