On Pharyngula, I found this video: “Biblically Correct” Tour Guides For Jesus!!. The video speaks for itself. People’s beliefs are all too often determined by what they want to believe instead of by what they have reason to believe. This is especially true for those people who follow more “conservative” forms of Christianity or other religions. The curator in that video is an exception as he was, ironically, raised to be a Creationist.
However, choosing to believe something simply because you want to believe it doesn’t have to be as extreme as believing God created the Universe in 6 days and rested on the 7th (even God needs a rest every now and then!) and ignoring overwhelming evidence to the contrary. For example, today I was doing my U.S. history homework in my high school’s library, while sitting next to my friend who is a Mormon. I was doing the homework when I noticed it mentioned the Mormons moving Westward, so I showed it to my friend. Her class is a bit behind ours, so she said she can’t wait until her class gets to where we are so she can point out where the history teacher is wrong. I wasn’t sure what she would correct the teacher on exactly, but I guessed it would some sort of historical revisionism based on the dogma of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
I found out one example of what she might “correct” the teacher on when I asked her to look at the passage on the Mormons to see if she saw anything wrong with it when I was done reading the section and answering the questions at the end. Her criticisms were that Joseph Smith was not the founder of the LDS church, but merely reorganized it and that the section skipped over some things, but was accurate for the most part. For a second or two I had no idea who the founder was if not Joseph Smith, but then I realized it. Jesus, of course, was the founder! I asked her and she said I was right. This was only obvious to me because I remember reading that many Christian groups—notably the Catholic Church—claim Jesus to be their founder. With a little bit of critical thinking, that claim is easy to see through. Why would a Christian group claim Christ as their founder? Hm… I wonder. Perhaps to make other churches with different doctrines look illegitimate? It’s surprising (and disturbing) how smart people can’t see through what are obviously falsehoods simply because they happened to be raised with a particular belief system.
On an unrelated note, this article from Catholic Answers, “The Gods of the Mormon Church,” is very ironic. I only looked at it for about ten seconds, and I noticed perhaps two of the most stupid things I’ve seen in the past few days:
- The article says George Orwell did Catholic apologists a “great favor” by coining the term doublethink in the book 1984 (Popularizing the concept of doublethink a favor for those who seek to defend Catholicism? Hahahah!)
- Their criticism of Mormons for having multiple gods, while this has been something Trinitarians have been criticized for time and time again by other monotheists.
I’ve got to get back to my homework; see if you can spot anymore!
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