Religion Reductio ad Absurdum

Science can’t beat faith. We’ve heard that again and again, that science simply cannot disprove religion because religion is based on more than just data and hard facts. It’s a whole mindset, a whole way of looking at the world and answering that eternal question: why? And Mormonism is the definitive counterexample to this presumption.

For those of you unfamiliar with the religion, here’s the very, very short version of its history from someone who’s certainly no authority on the subject. If you want something closer to the full version, try Wikipedia or just Google “Mormonism”. So here it goes. One day in 1829 near what is now Salt Lake City, Utah, a guy name Joseph Smith was visited by an angel named Moroni who told him to go to a hill and look for some golden plates. The angel told Joseph that through the power of God he would be able to translate the texts on the golden plates, which were originally written in some ancient, unreadable language. So with the power of God as well as with some pretty neat-looking spectacles called Urim and Thummim, Joseph translated the ancient words on the plates and dictated his translations to people who helped write them down into what would become the Book of Mormon. He got some followers, declared himself a Prophet, decided polygamy was a great idea, and the rest of history. This is a very poor version of the story, but it gives you an idea of what happened.

There are a million problems with this new religion. An entire list of them can be found at the Wikipedia article “Controversies Regarding the Church of Latter-day Saints” (the Church of Latter-day Saints is colloquially known as “Mormonism”). I’ll touch on some of the big problems here.

Firstly, Joseph Smith did not have the ability to translate ancient texts. One day, some Egyptian articles were being toured through town and included Egyptian hieroglyphics. At that time, nobody could decipher these hieroglyphics, except of course Joseph Smith who claimed he had the God-given ability to translate any ancient language. So we went about and proved it by translating the hieroglyphics and people thought he was really something. He declared his translation the Book of Abraham. And then came the Rosetta Stone. This was the stone that allowed historians and archaeologists to finally decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, which was once thought to be a language forever lost to mankind. So some guy sent some of the same hieroglyphics that Joseph supposedly translated to some Egyptologists who could truly translate them. Turns out, Joseph’s translations were completely false, and Egyptologists declared: “Joseph Smith’s interpretation of these cuts is a farrago of nonsense from beginning to end.” And when they said “farrago” they really meant it. That’s strike one against Mormonism. You can read more about it in this book that's online called By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus.

Secondly, one of the key beliefs of Mormonism is that Native Americans were originally Israelis who had come across the Atlantic Ocean thousands of years ago. Definitive DNA testing proved that this was absolutely impossible and was corroborated by evidence against such a vast voyage so long ago. Strike two. Here’s a USA Today article for the short version and an article from the Institute for Religious Research for the long version.

Thirdly, there’s tons of linguistic and archaeological inconsistencies with pretty everything imaginable from the Bible (he mistakenly referred to Lucifer when he meant Satan) to outrageous anachronisms like talking about horses and chariots in South American civilizations long before they existed there. That would be strike three. I'll cite another Wikipedia article titled "Archeology and the Book of Mormon" here to support this.

You can go ahead and do some fact-finding for yourself and I’m sure you’ll come to the same conclusion: Mormonism is wrong. You might argue that the Bible is wrong in many ways, but science has failed to truly disprove it. However, the crazy thing about Mormonism is that it’s so recent. Not even the text, but the very foundation of the entire religion can be disproved. No one can go back in time and say that the Prophets of the Bible just made up everything and could be proven as fakes, but Joseph Smith could definitely be shown to be a phony and he was.

According to the BBC, Mormonism has over 12 million followers. That’s over 12 million people who knowingly refuse the truth even though it’s been handed to them many times by scientists, historians, archaeologists, etc. Basically, everyone but Mormons use common sense and realize that Mormonism is one of the world’s greatest hoaxes. This is really a testament to the power of brainwashing and religion turned, well, religious. How could our species degrade itself to such a level as to reject the greatest gifts we’ve been given -- our brains -- and instead blindly follow something that’s as wrong as the idea of a geocentric universe or the idea that the Earth is flat.

Something as crazy as the acceptance of Mormonism by millions of people gets you wondering: How easy would it be to create another one of these absurd religions? What if you scraped together some bizarre science fiction ideas, said that we’re all aliens brought to Earth on a spaceship sent by the ruler of some Galactic Confederation, and told people they could be healed through E-meters that measure electrical resistance through the human body? Oh wait, that’s already been done. It’s called Scientology.