I once hired a squeaky clean kid from Palmdale. A few weeks into his employment I discovered he was Mormon. What I knew of Mormons was that they had mostly Christian beliefs and stayed in tight enclaves. What I now know is that Mormons, more than any other religion, are a dangerously crazy cult whose belief system threatens to usurp democracy in this country and whose members subscribe to a history that is in absolute defiance to reason, evidence, and logic.

One could argue that this can be said of all religions. It’s preposterous to think that two thousand years ago a man cured people by the laying of hands, walked on water, raised the dead, then himself raised from the dead and ascended to heaven to absolve mankind of sin. The belief system based on this myth forgets that if this man was truly omniscient then he was a cheat – he didn’t actually die so his death and resurrection was meaningless. At best he endured pain he knew would end and then transcended his agony – you can do that in a marathon. $cientology is even more looney tunes, going so far as to believe that our bodies are possessed by space aliens, killed by an evil galactic space lord.

Joseph Smith was born in 1805 in Palmyra, New York. A failure at “treasure hunting” who used techniques like divining rods and other charlatan’s tools, Smith was surrounded by people who discovered forming religions was much more profitable than working as a freelancer. The region itself was called the “burned over district”, a term describing the jaded view of the populace who had seen their share of fire and brimstone preachers come and go. But Smith’s force of personality, much like L. Ron Hubbard, David Koresh, or Charles Manson, proved strong enough to convince others of his preposterous visions. What he produced was a mythology that only made sense in the narrow view of his day. First, Smith continually lost the golden plates upon which the great new Book of Mormon were engraved. Second, when finally recovered, no one could look at them except Joseph – who was barely literate – and a transcriber had to be used to record the information. Third, because the mystical plates were written in an ancient language none could understand, Smith had to put a rock (a “peep stone”) into a hat and shove his face in to read the plates. This gives new meaning to talking out of one’s hat. And yet, due to sheer force of personality and lack of DSM-IV or antipsychotics, Smith was able to convince others of his prophetic powers. His ludicrous revelations include a history of peoples who came from Israel thousands of years ago and became two warring tribes – the Lamanites and Nephites. The Lamanites eventually destroyed the Nephites, and the Lamanites became the ancestors of the Native Americans.

To delve any further into the rantings of a madman is to continue to substantiate it. But the Mormon Church STILL BELIEVES THESE ARE FACTS. It is understandable that Christians have been split over a two thousand year old book – its inception predates reliable written history. But it’s incomprehensible that any modern organization would be so attached to its mysticism that it rejects all scientific discovery from its inception point forward. Smith was a poorly educated, racist yokel who cribbed myths from other street preachers and spewed the rest from his possibly schizophrenic mind. And yet, what makes Mormons truly dangerous is not their belief in the rantings of a maniac.

They believe that the rules of God are more important than the rules of Man.

Even after Smith was tragically gunned down by an angry lynch mob (ostensibly for the crime of the destruction of a free press – how poetically tyrannical), his successor, Brigham Young, moved his people outside the United States in order to establish Joseph’s dream of a Mormon theocracy. But because Smith was a megalomaniac narcissist, like all prophets who claim they speak to God (i.e. bin Laden, George Bush, and Ted Haggart), the church doesn’t answer to God. It answers to its leader, who is still a man. Our country rejected rule by God when it rejected the monarchy – we chose secular society. Smith, and later Young, knew this when they moved their zealots into the wasteland of Utah. When Utah was annexed shortly after their migration, the Church and the United States came into continual conflict, including massacres of settlers by Mormons and the persecution of Mormons by Presidents, including Lincoln. These conflicts continue, such as the brutal 1984 murder of a woman and her infant child by a pair of brothers who believed they were acting on the word of God. Though these men were members of the Fundamentalist LDS church, what separates them from their mainstream brethren is not whether or not God speaks to them, but the issue of polygamy.

The only way a pluralist, democratic country can survive is if we stop allowing crazy people to define the argument.