I was surfing around today and stumbled upon the web site of an exMormon from Canada. He claims to have been a lifelong member of the Church, served a mission, and was a bishop at age 35 or so. I have no reason to doubt his story, but I’m always wary of how these guys tend to inflate their importance. As I read some of his story, I was struck how his tale is just the same old song I’ve heard a zillion times. It amazes me that, for all the demands that they have their story heard, it’s always the same old story.

I have no reason to doubt his story, but I doubt it anyway! Witness how he inflates himself to God-like proportions by asserting that he served as both a missionary AND a bishop! His pretensions to grandeur know no bounds! And imagine the brazen audacity necessary to desire that others hear his story! Such arrogance! Let us continue!

Universities seem to be the place where the proud begin to succumb to the temptation to be smarter than everyone else. I don’t know if it’s competitiveness so much as it is the desire to be accepted by those one looks up to. I’ve heard many times of a LDS member who was humiliated because all he could do was bear a simple testimony in the face of a direct intellectual assault on his faith by an esteemed professor. Determined to never be humiliated again, his pride sets him off on a quest to know more than anyone else.

Translation:

Universities seem to be the place where the proud those who are eager to learn begin to succumb to the temptation to be smarter than everyone else learn. I don’t know if it’s competitiveness so much as it is the desire to be accepted by those one looks up to learn. I’ve heard many times of a LDS member who was humiliated because all he could do was bear a simple testimony appeal to his own emotions in the face of a direct intellectual assault on his faith actual evidence by an esteemed professor someone possessing even the most rudimentary of critical thinking skills. Determined to never be humiliated again, his pride desire to learn the truth sets him off on a quest to know more than anyone else learn something. Anything. At all.

Fixed! Next:

…the gospel is intentionally designed to not be “provable” by man’s sciences.

Translation:

Jesus was sitting around one day, trying to make up a religion. He thought “If I provide proper evidence for Mormonism, then everyone will believe in it, and then who exactly will I send to these Terrestrial and Telestial Kingdoms? I put a lot of fucking God-hours into these things and I’ll be Me-damned if they’re going to go to waste!

“I have an idea! I’ll make sure that tangible evidence for Mormonism is so difficult to find that no one in their right mind will believe in it, and those Kingdoms will fill up faster than a paper sacrament cup in a hurricane!”

Sure, Jesus could save everyone. But, like Syndrome once said:  “When everyone is special, no one is.” Why not create billions of offspring, claim to love each and every one enough to die for them, and then exclude as many of them as you can for not finding the invisible plastic eggs in your cosmic Easter egg hunt.

There’s even more:

There is real power in faith. Evidence doesn’t have that transformative essence.

Translation:

There is real power in faith, provided it’s faith in the religion I already believe to be true – faith in any of the other thousands of religions is BAD. Evidence doesn’t have that transformative essence isn’t favorable to the myriad unsupportable assertions that comprise my belief system, so I have no qualms about rejecting it. I do however reserve the right to change my position and accept evidence should any in support of my belief system miraculously materialize somewhere.

Fixed. Again. More:

The brother about whom I write apparently wrote to Elder Holland of the Twelve and didn’t get a satisfactory reply. His next step was to write an open letter on the Internet to Elder Holland. Still not receiving a reply that satisfied him, he wrote again–this time an 80-page rant–wherein he listed all his grievances, his critiques, his unanswered questions, and posted it as a PDF file.

A PDF file?! On the INTERNET?! Why not just FAX the letter to SATAN himself! Everyone knows PDF is the Devil’s Format!

Still more:

As I perused the document, I was stunned to see that almost every single page of it contained a “carbon copy” of every other anti-Mormon’s rants. It had obviously been a long time since this brother had read the Book of Mormon with any regularity, but it was apparent that he had studied every single anti-Mormon treatise available. It was like a catalog, every page plagiarized, cut-and-pasted from anti-Mormon books and web sites.

He used arguments that were presented elsewhere! No solid case can ever be built upon precedence! ‘Tis madness! And just because Joseph Smith plagiarized large chunks of the Book of Mormon from the King James Bible doesn’t mean that some filthy exMormon is allowed to do the same! Joseph Smith was a prophet. God told him to plagiarize those passages. And He even made sure that Joseph Smith repeated the errors made by the King James scribes, just to test our faith!

We finally approach the end:

If you are a woman who has a husband that is placing you in this situation, for the sake of your own salvation and that of your children, it is better to cut the apostate husband loose. As tragic as it may be, it would be more tragic for him to pull you and your children down to hell with him. If he insisted that you and your children remain inside a house that is burning down, would you stay or would you flee for your life and take your children with you?

Remember, Sistern – when you were married for Time and All Eternity^TM you didn’t just marry your husband. You married God, too. And God will not be cock-blocked. So kick your filthy freethinking apostate scoundrel husband to outer curbness! He will soon drink the dregs of the bitter cup of divorce! And God shall hold you tight unto his bosom, yea, even tight like unto a dish. For a dish thou art. Verily, God totes thinks you are teh hawtness.

Um, don’t post it on the fucking Internet then, mmkay? And if you are a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator in Apostleship to The Lord’s One True Church on Earth, and are speaking words handed down on high from Jesus H. Christ (with whom you share your middle initial, for His sake!), shouldn’t you want your words to reach as many people as possible?

Or are you embarrassed by what you are about to say, and want to make it clear that your imminent preaching really is only for the choir?

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Anyhoo, DHO goes on to say a bunch of stuff, some of it pretty reasonable and with which I can agree. He discusses the importance of religious freedom, the important role of the Constitution and Constitutional Amendments with regard to guaranteeing religious freedom, etc. That’s all fine and dandy.

But then, the stoopid:

Surely the First Amendment guarantee of free exercise of religion was intended to grant more freedom to religious action than to other kinds of action. Treating actions based on religious belief the same as actions based on other systems of belief should not be enough to satisfy the special place of religion in the United States Constitution.

The fuck? The argument that actions based on religious belief  be treated differently than any other action sounds an awful lot like special pleading to me.

Then, even more stoopid:

Atheism has always been hostile to religion, such as in its arguments that freedom of or for religion should include freedom from religion.

As random Internet commenter tsg eloquently explains:

There is no freedom of religion without freedom from religion: you can’t be free to practice your religion unless you are free from practicing mine.

Well-said, random Internet commenter tsg.

There’s some more nonsense and whining until we register a sudden and massive spike in the StoopidMeter, requiring the inevitable invocation of tbnu’s patented red pen of illumination:

A second threat to religious freedom is from those who perceive it to be in conflict with the newly alleged “civil right” of same-gender couples slaves to enjoy the privileges of marriage freedom.

…

The real issue in the Proposition 8 debate — an issue that will not go away in years to come and for whose resolution it is critical that we protect everyone’s freedom of speech and the equally important freedom to stand for religious beliefs — is whether the opponents of Proposition 8 should be allowed to change the vital institution of marriage slavery itself.

The marriage union of a man and a woman principle of owning people has been the teaching of the Judeo-Christian scriptures and the core legal definition and practice of marriage slavery in Western culture for thousands of years. Those who seek to change the foundation of marriage slavery should not be allowed to pretend that those who defend the ancient order are trampling on civil rights. The supporters of Proposition 8 were exercising their constitutional right to defend the institution of marriage slavery — an institution of transcendent importance that they, along with countless others of many persuasions, feel conscientiously obliged to protect.

Fixed that for you, DHO.

Now, for something completely different. Just kidding, it’s a bunch more stoopidity:

We must insist on our constitutional right and duty to exercise our religion, to vote our consciences on public issues and to participate in elections and debates in the public square and the halls of justice. These are the rights of all citizens and they are also the rights of religious leaders. While our church rarely speaks on public issues, it does so by exception on what the First Presidency defines as significant moral issues, which could surely include laws affecting the fundamental legal/cultural/moral environment of our communities and nations.

We must also insist on this companion condition of democratic government: when churches and their members or any other group act or speak out on public issues, win or lose, they have a right to expect freedom from retaliation.

Shorter DHO: we should be able to do whatever the fuck we want without any repercussions whatsoever.

DHO goes out with a bang. A loud, wet, spurting climax of weapons-grade stoopid:

Religious values and political realities are so interlinked in the origin and perpetuation of this nation that we cannot lose the influence of Christianity in the public square without seriously jeopardizing our freedoms. I maintain that this is a political fact, well qualified for argument in the public square by religious people whose freedom to believe and act must always be protected by what is properly called our “First Freedom,” the free exercise of religion.

DHO is a tall frosty glass of stupid juice. I maintain that this is a political fact.