DiscussMormonism.com

But it appears that his wife who knew him best concluded he was easily fooled, and his finances needed to be watched closely. As the South Park version repeatedly put it: "Joseph Smith was called a prophet - (dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb!)" But when it came to Mrs. Harris's (shall we say) skeptical att...

How anyone would believe ... just boggles the mind. The key to all this nonsense taking on a permanent existence is that it lasted long enough to be passed on to the children of the first believers. A religion taught to you by your parents is a much more permanent feature of the mind than a religio...

Excuse me? Companies that extract coal, oil and gas from US soil and rocks can leave "and take their wealth with them"? How can they do that? It would be extremely easy to ensure that anybody who extracted fossil fuel resources in the US had to pay tax on what they extracted, wherever their corpora...

To many atheists, the idea of not existing after death is just as peaceful as not existing before birth. You and I were in oblivion for billions of years. It caused none of us one bit of inconvenience or pain. It’s a natural thing to want the end to dovetail nicely into that beginning. Didn't Mark ...

He was probably pretty desperate to get off the farm. I think a lot of people were in those days. Most of them sighed and got on with the miserable job, but maybe that was as much because they lacked Smith's talent as because he lacked their virtue. Maybe Smith wasn't really more unscrupulous than ...

Physics Guy wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 06, 2024 10:11 am

Maybe Smith would have done more constructive things, too, if he had had Faraday's kinds of chances.

Indeed he might. But he did not, so he turned to glass-looking, treasure seeking and religious fantasy.

Why, for example, are fossil fuel companies, some of the most profitable companies in history, getting massive government subsidies? Because they would simply leave the country and take their wealth with them. [...] Excuse me? Companies that extract coal, oil and gas from US soil and rocks can leav...

Well, exactly. You try not to go ad hominem on Smith and dismiss him just for living when and where he did. Great ideas can appear anywhere, at least sometimes. Michael Faraday was a contemporary of Smith who was mostly self-educated but the list of his scientific discoveries is ridiculous. Smith’s...

Physics Guy wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 03, 2024 5:18 pm

Spirit as tenuous matter, God having a body—that all just sounds like 19th-century hick thought, I'm afraid.

As one might have expected?

The idea of an atheist minister going around death row just seems silly to me, even as an atheist. Really? As an atheist myself, if I imagine the possibility of facing judicially inflicted death in prison, and assuming I had the right to be accompanied by somebody other than a close relation or spo...