What things do you like and not like about the LDS Church and the people?
I like everything about LDS doctrine other than the fact that people actually believe it. I mean this is a GREAT religion! A con artist/treasure hunter tells his nearest and dearest that an angel named "Moroni" (I love it already!) told him where to dig for some golden plates, so he did, and they were covered with squiggles resembling no known language, but which he says is "reformed Egyptian." Of course, Egyptologists tell us it's no sort of Egyptian at all. But he magically translates them into English using his hat and two seer stones, or whatever they were, dictating the results to his friend. It turns out to be the longest, deadliest, most obviously sophomoric fake-Biblish stuff, hundreds of pages of it. And what does it tell us? That there have been waves of immigration from the Near East to America, that America was settled and populated by these people, Good Guys (white) and Bad Guys (Indian) that built huge cities, fought with swords, rode chariots, herded cattle and did all kind of fantastic things, but somehow vanished without a trace, either archeological or genetic. Yet modern Mormons somehow, and this is what I find so fascinating psychologically, manage to believe that it actually happened. Oh I nearly forgot the best part! We can't see the plates ourselves because the angel took them back! I love that part.
So then we have this quite widespread popular religion with all sorts of bizarre quasi-Masonic rituals, ingrained racial discrimination, total patriarchal system of sexual inequality, of course totally anti-gay, all based on this ridiculous, obviously made up book.
They have these leaders who are supposed to be directly tuned in to God. Obviously they're no more tuned in to God than I am, because they're regularly wrong, which doesn't seem to bother anyone. And what I love about them is that you can put political pressure on them and they'll come up with the appropriate divine revelation as needed. This is called "God's providence."
The Salamander letter is just the best, total Emperor's New Clothes stuff that the leaders fell for hook line and sinker because they themselves don't believe in the story of the founding of their religion. If they did, they would not have believed such a thing could have existed. Instead they were completely prepared to believe in this forgery, showing that they themselves know the whole thing is based on a lie.
Well, I could go on and on: how Joseph Smith used his con to get women and money, the Book of Abraham scam, the Kinderhook plates.
So all in all LDS is a constant source of hilarity to me.
The only thing that bothers me about it is that if you can get millions of people to believe that, you can get them to believe anything, which is really disturbing, and brings us to the subject of Scientology.
