No, thanks just the same. I wull add you to our prayer list. Take care of yourself, and hang in there my friend.

unfortunately his other cook conspiracy theories and obvious bias got him booted. I do know that his ratings were much better than most other cnn programming.

There are no tablets to confirm young Joseph Smith, unfortunately for your cult.

We should be talking about conversion from mormonism to Christianity, and by the way … the “angel” moroni if broken down appropriately, indicates “moron i”.

Does that help?

Let’s say that Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Washington, and Adams watched the Obama/McCain get together this evening; what might be their impression?

They might well have stared at each other upon realizing that after almost 250 years, the best this Nation could produce was McCain selected by almost one half of the citizenry as their choice for President. Seeing McCain stumble, mustering only a malevalant sneer, jutting chin, steely eyes and a blink rate that hit warp speed when Obama brought upFirst Amendment rights would rightly cause bewilderment at what Man, the USA Man, could achieve..

How pathetic a showing this might have seemed to the visionaries and founders of the Nation to see that the Common Man does live… he is very Common and it is very, very pathetic.

best,
bob

Dear XXXXX,

Re. Glenn Beck’s Mormon Conversion Story

Unless you want an analytical response, don’t send me things like this. If you don’t want to read an analytical response to Beck’s sincere, uninformed, deceptive pap, stop reading here.

Every religious organization is populated by sincere people who have important social needs met by the organization, and who confuse the strong feelings that come from that experience with a divine encounter that justifies belief that their organization has “the truth”. So, you find one of those people who perceives the institution to be particularly important for him (“Without Mormonism, I would be a drunk with no family and no job”, says Beck), get him to tell his story using the usual, formulaic salvation narrative – “Things were going really bad in my life; then I fell into a crisis of some kind; then I found [insert name of religion]; then I had a powerful emotion experience [insert tears]; then some really great things started to happen in my life that are a sign from God; and now things are wonderful for me and my family”, and you have poster boy that is highly useful for marketing purposes. The more high profile the individual, the better this works.

A large part of LDS inspiration these days comes from a marketing firm named Edelman on Madison Avenue in NYC. Seriously. The Mormons are trying to catch up with the Evangelicals who for years have been using relatively sophisticated marketing tools, and largely as a result far outperform the Mormons in terms of conversions. Richard Bushman explained, in part, how this works to a crowd of well heeled Mormons at a dinner in Calgary recently. He did not name Edelman, but laid out the LDS marketing strategy in some detail. I know from other sources that this information is provided to LDS leaders, at high cost using tithing money of course, by Edelman. A Mormon who was at the Busman meeting summarized it for me. With typically naïve Mormon hubris, he was thrilled that his church was getting more sophisticated in terms of marketing and communications. That is prophetic inspiration for you. Call the gurus on Madison Avenue when you need to find out what to do. God must be leading each and every major business in North America, because they all use this strategy too. My acquaintance somehow missed this irony.

With a few minutes of goggling I could find you this kind of written or video presentation on behalf of many different religious groups. These are made with greater or lesser degrees of consciousness re. their manipulative, perspective distorting nature.

No religious (or other) group has a corner on this experience. It is a human universal.

While wishing Glenn Beck and his family well, I found his video repugnant. It presents a false picture of Mormonism, and will be used to dupe innocent people. The “true love” Beck talks about is at the root of countless religious and secular movements. That fact that this is a revelation to him says something about him, but not about how Mormonism is special or different from other religious groups. Members of Jim Jones’ and other cults say the same kind of thing about their groups as Beck does about Mormonism.

Beck’s favorites day of week is Sunday because that is a family day. That is the case at my house too, and only since leaving Mormonism. While Mormon, I was seldom at home with my kids on Sunday, and when I was I tended to be exhausted and hence far less of a father than I could have been. You, I know, were in the same position. You and I gave our energy to the Mormon institution instead of our families. Glenn Beck has not yet experienced that side of his new faith.

Beck’s fear based claim that he would be on the human trash heap without Mormonism is a pathetic, but unfortunately well-used religious claim. It is designed to scare people into the fold, and into staying in the fold. I reject life lived on the basis of fear, and want nothing to do with organizations that promote that point of view. This is a virus that weakens human beings, and makes them dependant on manmade authority.

I could break Beck’s presentation down and tear it apart sentence by sentence. It is nonsense. I have better things to do with my time today.

But in any event, Beck does not address the most important question about religious groups. That is, “How reliable is the authority of the institution that asks for our allegiance, and how much do they ask of us?” The more the institution asks, the more reliable its authority should be proven to be before we go along for the ride.

We know how much Mormonism asks. Ultimately, it wants full commitment. It is designed to push us as far in that direction as we will go. But perhaps Glenn Beck does not know that yet. This is because Mormonism uses sales pitches like his to get people in the door and on the train on the basis of attractive “milk”. Then the train starts to move, social commitments are, the forces of cognitive dissonance kick in, and the faster the train is going the harder it is to get off. The Moonies, Hare Krishna and many other cults explicitly recruit on this basis. So do the Mormons. The “hard doctrines”, the “meat”, the commitments required of those who attend the temple and become Mormon leaders, and a host of other aspects of Mormonism, are kept purposefully hidden until the convert gradually becomes “ready”, because by that time the train will be moving so fast that it will be very hard for him to get off.

There is no need to review the reliability of Mormon authority with you. You should be as familiar as I am with that. “Lying for the Lord”, “Faithful History” and other well established Mormon leadership traditions clearly indicate that the Mormon brand of authority should not be trusted as an accurate guide to reality. It is designed to further the interest of the Mormon institution at the expense of its members, or whomever else must be sacrificed in this regard. John D. Lee is a good example. Once Brigham Young needed a scapegoat to re. the Mountain Meadows Massacre, his faithful foot soldier and adopted son John was sold down the river in a heart beat. But the plight of gays, intellectuals and anyone else who stands in the Mormon way and is against its interest is the best example.

This is a bad video. If you are going to share garbage like this, keep it within your tribe. You embarrass yourself when you show things like this to well informed people who do not already share your beliefs, and you potentially abuse the less well informed. This is therefore both unwise and immoral.

My response to this video explains why you and other fine Mormons I know have had virtually no missionary success after a lifetime of trying. You have been dealing with well informed people who had enough perspective that it was easily predictable that they would not find naive tripe of this kind attractive.

You were trying to do Mormon missionary work in Canada in a mostly university community. The charts at http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org (a U. of Michigan project) as well as other sources, predict that Mormon missionary work will only be successful where magic thinking is at or above the average US level. Your community is far better than the Mormon in terms of magical thinking.

Ironically, the same youtube page I brought up to see Beck features Oprah as well. While I am not one of her fans, I agree with her on this one.

I hope you enjoy your Sabbath. I am about to start enjoying mine.

best,
bob

 THE CLYDE