And there are A LOT. This is one very strange religion.
Sitting in church today, I started taking some mental notes out of sheer boredom. Please feel free to contribute. Here are just a few, and I'm just scratching the surface:
Bigfoot is Cain
The immortal 3 Nephites
Book of Abraham Facsimiles (I remember as a youth looking at the Facsimiles and pondering the mysteries of the universe. Little did I know it was just a picture of some guy with a boner)
Handshakes to get into heaven
Kolob
Dressing in a space age baker costume while sitting through one of the worst films ever created
Sacred rock in a hat
Polygamy
Garden of Eden in Jackson County, Missouri
TK Smoothies
Jaredite submarines
The Lost Tribes are patiently waiting under the Arctic ice pack for their opportunity to return
"I'm on paid sabbatical from BYU in exchange for my promise to use this time to finish two books."
Oh yeah? Well, how could Joseph have known about submarines with corks at the top and the bottom and no propulsion or air filtration systems?!!!
Yes, how could a farm boy with little or no education have possibly known about submarines with corks at the top and the bottom with no propulsion or air filtration systems? How could Joseph possibly know about these submarines and their ability to carry livestock and thousands of honey bees on a transoceanic voyage?
Either Joseph Smith is the world's best guesser or the Book of Mormon really is true.
"I'm on paid sabbatical from BYU in exchange for my promise to use this time to finish two books."
"Eternity is full of thrones, upon which dwell thousands of children reigning on thrones of glory, with not one cubit added to their stature."
-- Joseph Smith
Yes, how could I forget that one. According to Joseph, the universe is filled with infants on thrones.
"I'm on paid sabbatical from BYU in exchange for my promise to use this time to finish two books."
Most religions and subcultures in general have features that will seem weird to outsiders. Mormonism was launched by self-consciously uneducated people, however, and I think this created a tradition of defiantly declaring weird things as facts. It’s a kind of doubling down. Those high and mighty city folks think we’re dumb hicks for believing this and that hokey notion? Well, then, they’re really going to flip over these even hokier notions! And they’re all true, darn it, all of them!
One item you've got to appreciate is singing the song Shenandoah on that transoceanic submarine voyage and longing for the wide Missouri and their ancestral abode at Adam-ondi-Ahman. Not bad for a group of Jerusalem Jews fluent in Reformed Egyptian.
One trick TBMs could teach us is the ability to suspend our disbelief.
-- Book of Abraham Facsimiles (I remember as a youth looking at the Facsimiles and pondering the mysteries of the universe. Little did I know it was just a picture of some guy with a boner)
That’s the exact sort of absurdity some zen masters would get a real kick out of. I knew someone who would have an extensive conversation about the nature of consciousness and reality, then just say ‘but in the end, enlightenment is just urinating, so there you go.’
I guess I forget sometimes that my interest in astronomy and science fiction came from the good Mr. Smith
I would add to the list:
People living on the North Star
The multi galactic/universe MLM
Heavenly caste system
And like a beehive only the highest caste can have babies
Jesus was for sure born on April 6th
Obviously since dinosaur bones are older than the ~6,000 years the earth has been around, they came from a different destroyed planet
- the constitution will hang by a thread and the boys from the mountain will save it.
- a great highway will be cast from the north for the ten tribes to cross
- the ten tribes upon returning will perform animal sacrifices in the rebuilt Nauvoo Temple.
- ward members will be expected to clean the Nauvoo Temple for free after the sacrifices.
We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have. They get rid of some of the people who have been there for 25 years and they work great and then you throw them out and they're replaced by criminals.
