Blog Archives

Utah is #7 in Ashley Madison accounts

8/22/2015

At least polygamists don’t
pretend not to be polygamists

Remember the state that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court to defend the sanctity of marriage? Said state ranks #7 in Ashley Madison accounts.

And in older news, said state ranks #1 in online porn consumption.

Utahns, it seems, are less committed to the sanctity of marriage when they’re alone with a computer.

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Video: Bill Maher on Christians “under attack”

8/18/2015

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In 6 minutes, Bill Maher suggests
Christians aren’t all that persecuted

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Joseph Smith’s seer stone revealed

8/4/2015

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For religion humor writers everywhere,
this is like a gift from heaven.

Just not in the way the Mormon church claims.

We’d open with “you can’t make this stuff up” were it not for the fact that somebody obviously made this stuff up.

For years, the official origin story of the Book of Mormon was that it was an ancient text engraved on gold-like plates, and that Joseph Smith translated it under divine guidance and by use of a sacred device called the urim and thummim.

But the official story has been morphing of late. It had to. That Internet thing has made available a number of inconvenient accounts from newspapers and personal journals of Smith’s day. And they tell rather a different story.

The updated official story is that Smith rarely used the urim and thummin to translate the gold plates after all. In fact, he rarely used even the plates. During most of the translation process, neither the urim and thummim nor the gold plates were anywhere near him.

How, you may wonder, did Smith translate from plates that were in absentia?

By use of a seer stone.

And a hat.

Here’s how the translation process worked:

1) Smith would drop the stone in the hat.
2) Smith would plant his face in the hat.
3) The stone would glow and display the translated word.
4) Smith would read the word aloud for a scribe to take down.

Oddly enough, the finicky stone refused to work for anyone else.

Really.

At least, that’s what old journals, newspapers, and now the Mormon church claim.

The Mormon church had been hanging on to Smith’s seer stone all along, even throughout the years they never talked about it.

Yesterday the church released a photo of the stone. That’s it on the right. Do you feel anything as you gaze upon it? We kind of feel like chuckling.

How the LDS church has typically portrayed the Book of Mormon translation process.

Now the LDS church says that translation was effected by use of a “seer stone.” A hat was also required equipment.

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SRO at Joanne Hanks’s Sunstone presentation

8/2/2015

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Joanne has too much class to tell you she
rocked at this year’s Sunstone Symposium.

I, having no such compunction, will
flat-out tell you. She rocked.

—Steve Cuno
Joanne’s as-told-to author

It was SRO—Standing Room Only—at Joanne Hanks’s presentation at this year’s Sunstone Symposium. The turnout surprised Joanne, who does not suffer from even the tiniest of delusions of self-importance. It is one of her many endearing traits. As for me, I am never surprised when she draws a crowd.

If you attended, thank you, and I need hardly tell you that Joanne was engaging, entertaining, and informative. If you weren’t able to attend, not to worry: we are at work on recording the presentation so that we can post it to this site.

Lousy photo from Steve’s iPhone, which was hanging upside-down from a fire sprinkler head.

The symposium’s theme, “The Mormon Mind,” was an ideal fit. While Joanne enjoys sharing crazy beliefs and practices from her polygamist past, her real goal is to expose the dangers of cults and arm people against falling prey. “If my book leaves you at once amused and outraged, and on the lookout for how we dupe ourselves,” she writes on the bio page of this website, “I will have accomplished something worthwhile.”

The title of Joanne’s presentation was This Is Your Brain on a Cult. “I’m going to discuss what cults are, why people join them, and what we can do to protect against them,” she said in her opening remarks. Accordingly, after sharing tales of her former cult’s “nutty beliefs,” Joanne took on cultism itself. “It’s not beliefs that make a cult a cult,” she said “but certain behaviors, and how strictly those behaviors are practiced or enforced.” She shared six common cultish traits, followed by 11 ways people unwittingly set themselves up to become what she called “cult bait.”

I tried recording the presentation using my iPhone. From the lack of quality in the above screen grab, you can tell it didn’t work out too well. As I mentioned above, we’re going to post the slides with her comments on this website soon.

—Steve Cuno

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