The Mormon Question: Mitt Romney edition

Looking back on my days as a Mormon, and this was something I knew even back then, there are some things that are just strange about that faith. That said, the underlying premise, that a Jewish rabbi was nailed to a tree, died, woke up three days later, then partied with his followers, and was all-knowing but got basic geography and physics wrong, is pretty fucking weird. That's where Mormons agree with their fellow Christians. If you really think of it, though, all religion is weird. The Trinitarian Christians, who form the solid majority, believe that God talked about His Son, but His Son was actually Him, and then the Holy Spirit was still just God all along. They also believe that the God who preached love but had an anger management problem in the New Testament was all about smiting enemies and committing genocide in the Old Testament. Oh, and they think he'll rise up from the dead again, even though his last spurious sighting was just shy of two millennia ago. Let's not even get into the Zoroastrian influences on early Christianity and Islam. I won't get into what Muslims believe because, frankly, my knowledge is sorely lacking. Still, I'm pretty sure that it's as weird as Christianity. Buddhists believe you keep being reincarnated as various animals until you reach enlightenment, and if you suffer in this life, it's payback for something that happened in your previous life, so fuck sympathy. Jews believe some Neolithic fiction writers are the be-all and end-all of wisdom, as interpreted over the millennia by those poor souls tasked with making sense out of laws that were written when the first civilizations were being formed.

All of this still makes more sense than Scientology, who believe the souls of aliens were dumped from space ships resembling DC-8s into volcanoes that didn't even exist 75 million years ago, and those souls are the source of all human suffering, examples of which are every Tom Cruise movie since Rain Man. They also think human trafficking and enslavement, torture (Lisa McPherson), and child labor law violations (Daniel Montalvo lawsuit) are just a-okay. At least with Catholicism, critics are not subjected to torment from their intelligence department as Scientology did in Operation Snow White, which remains the largest infiltration of the United States government in our nation's history.

This post was initially about Mitt Romney, and I will bring it back to him. There are those here in Alabama who will not vote for him because he's a Mormon, no matter if they agree with whatever he's being paid to believe this week. They hate his religion, and that's wrong. They should hate him for being a job-destroying douchebag and moderately functioning sociopath who likes to fire people and strap dogs to the roofs of cars. He's also the de facto head of a party who believes the proper punishment for being poor is death through preventable and easily treated illnesses and injuries. That's why I would hate him, if I cared enough about him to do so.

Finally, I leave you with this, just for teh lulz.

In the name of Raptor Jesus, rAmen.