Yeah... right.
Two years into Bill Clinton's presidency, when America elected an overwhelming number of Republicans for the 1994 Congressional election as a result of his wife Hillary's push for healthcare reform to a near-Communism level, Newt Gingrich spearheaded the Contract With America, promoting lower taxes, high levels of economic growth, welfare reform, and limited government. Of course, Bill Clinton took credit for much of the success this brought America (although all he did was sign the stuff with his approval), and the '90s was a good decade (despite how music sucked and how the Dot Com economic bubble was a total fluke that defied all economic reasoning). As it is, even with setting Osama Bin Laden free from custody, giving tons of money to North Korea and selling nukes to them, looking the other way while defense contractors sold military secrets to China, and a long list of other terrible crap like fraud and scandals, I would much rather have Bill Clinton as president than Obama any day.
Anyhow, Newt has a proven record for getting stuff done. He is very knowledgeable, an expert historian, an intellectual, and a great debater. But NO, everyone cares about how many times he's been married, etc. I don't care if he cheated on his wife. I just want him to fix America. But now, it looks like the two top contenders are Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney. Holy crap, we are doomed. This will be a repeat of 1996, when the one elected to defeat Clinton was grumpy old Bob Dole. In 2008, the economy was like a crippled dog. Obama proceeded to whack the dog on the head with a hammer until the dog stopped moving. Everyone is outraged with Obama, and many people are assuming that he doesn't have a chance at ever getting re-elected. However, Obama's biggest ally now is apathy. All he needs is to have a moron put up as his opponent, and many won't even bother to show up to vote.
Rick Santorum is a dink.
I'm sure Santorum would be a great guy to organize a church potluck lunch, but I really am not fond of having him be my President. I am a Conservative Christian and registered Republican. I do not care for porn. That said, Santorum's positions on morality are scary. A true Republican should be opposed to government intrusion, not expanding it. A true Repulican should be opposed to censorship and opposed to the government telling people how to live their lives. Rick "let's ban porn" Santorum and Michelle "masturbation is evil" Bachmann are complete loons. If hard-core porn is banned, how the heck can that even be enforced? It would be Prohibition all over again, giving strength to the black market and those who commit truly illegal activities. I am glad that he opposes the manifestation of Shariah law in North America. But it is very hypocritical for him to oppose that sort of religious rule while trying to impose his own version of a religious rule.
Hey Rick, so you don't like porn? Don't watch it! Sure, the USA is in a real state of moral decay. But porn is a symptom, not the true problem.
Hey Rick, you want something to concentrate on? Focus on fixing the economy. We want to see headlines that you are serious about fixing the major problems and rampant, insane amounts of government spending. If you're focusing on crap like porn, it just shows that you really aren't focused on fixing the country and that you have bad judgment.
Mormomney... oh boy.
 Caucasian Mormon Jesus says, "Surf's up, dude! But only if you're 'white and delightsome' like ME! |
Mor(m)onism.
Whether people believe in God, there really should be no reasonable person who denies that Christ, Mohammed, and Buddha were actual people who lived. History confirms that these were real people who lived and taught and affected people's lives. Whether or not people believe that the Bible is true, archaeological evidence shows that the Hittites did indeed exist and the walls of Jericho indeed fell. There is a real historical context in which the events detailed in the Old and New Testaments are written. We know that there was the ancient Egyptian culture and that the Pharaoh was ruler because of ample archaeological evidence. We know for sure that Xerxes was indeed ruler of Persia. Yes, the main badguy of the movie 300 who the Spartans were fighting against was not only mentioned in the Bible, but his queen was Esther, of which a book of the Old Testament was written about and named after. When Jesus held up a Roman coin and said "render unto Caesar," we know that Caesar was the name of the emperor of the Roman Empire, and we definitely know that the Roman Empire existed. Moreover, we know from historical evidence that the Romans occupied not only Israel, but much of the entire Mediterranean area and well beyond.
The problem with the Book of Mormon is that there is no real correlation to the events and locations to North America. The premise of the BOM is that despite how Christ specifically said how he would return, he actually came back to Earth in North America. There was a lost 13th tribe of Israel called the "Nephi" that was somehow never mentioned in the Old Testament, and from them there came to be a great civilization in North America. Those who opposed these "people of God" were cursed with dark skin (whom we now know as Native Americans)and they basically murdered them all. There was a final last stand, in which an incredible amount of them were all killed on some hill in New York. This is now the sight of some stupid Mormon tourist trap, and the reason why Mormon leaders refuse to excavate the area is because they know that their religion is a fraud, and that they will not find the bones of these soldiers. There were supposedly horses, chariots, cows, fields of wheat, and all sorts of stuff mentioned in the BOM, but none of these existed in North America until Europeans arrived. If there really was this great Nephi civilization in North America, wouldn't there be maybe some ruins, or at least a coin or something? If anyone uses the absurd copout, "Well, God removed all evidence because he demands faith, therefore this proves that the Book Mormon is the one true gospel," then they're an imbecile. Moreover, this supposedly lost civilization used a language called "Reformed Egyptian," which is completely fictitious. A scrap of an Egyptian scroll was passed off by Joseph Smith as the Book of Abraham, while true Egyptologists laugh at this claim, since it is actually the Egyptian Book of the Dead!
The more I study Mormonism (more like moron-ism), the more incredibly absurd I discover it to be. So what happens when a non-Mormon like me reads passages from the Journal of Discourses? I come across stuff like this! Here's a quote from Vol 13, p.316: "So it is with regard to the inhabitants of the sun. Do you think it is inhabited? I rather think it is. Do you think there is any life there? No question of it; it was not made in vain. It was made to give light to those who dwell upon it, and to other planets; and so will this earth when it is celestialized." HA! ORLY?
And get this! Joe Smith calls Mormons to preach the gospel ON THE MOON! Quoted from the Young Woman's Journal 3:263-264: "I know that he said the moon was inhabited by men and women the same as this earth, and that they lived to a greater age than we do -- that they live generally to near the age of a 1000 years. He described the men as averaging near six feet in height, and dressing quite uniformly in something near the Quaker style. ...I was told that I should preach the gospel ...to the inhabitants of the moon..." Whaaaaaa? Quakers on the moon? LOL!
When I first had a chance to read some of the Book of Mormon, to me, it sounded just like scriptures quoted in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. If Joseph Smith, a man of the 1800's, truly translated some ancient texts, he would have translated them into the standard vernacular of his time. Instead, he attempted to emulate the King James English in order to pass off his garbage as seeming genuine, since everyone knew of only the KJV bible. He copied that style of English because he wanted his counterfeit writing to seem to have authority. The King James Bible was named as such because it was translated into the English vernacular of its day and printed when King James ruled. However, people did not speak this way in New York in the 1820s when Joseph Smith supposedly translated those gold tablets. Why then did he "translate" the Book of Moron into a grammatically incorrect version of King James English? My point is that if Joseph Smith, a man of the 1800s, truly translated some ancient texts, he would have translated them into the standard vernacular of his time. Instead, he attempted to emulate the King James English in order to pass off his garbage as seeming genuine, since everyone knew of only the KJV bible. He copied that style of English because he wanted his counterfeit writing to seem to have authority.
We can argue about how many wives Joseph Smith had and how he believed people lived on the moon. But when a man directly contradicts what the bible says, that is not just a "translation error." It is a man re-shaping scriptures for his own personal power. In the end, Mormonism is an absurd, science fiction cult, and no more credible than Scientology. It was just invented a much longer time ago than Scientology.
I almost wish I could have named my website starbasekolob.net instead of after my old dead fish I wrote poems about. Oh well.
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email: greg -atsign- stevethefish -dot- net