Maybe you're a former Mormon. A foreman. And maybe you saw the South Park episode about Joseph Smith or saw The Book of Mormon musical. Let me share with you, though, a few things you still may not know about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Mormons are creationists, sort of. They have temple ceremonies in which they act out the creation story. And it features Adam and Eve and the idea of God creating the universe in 6 days.
However, they interpret 6 days as 6 large amounts of time. Six creative periods. And hey! Those periods may have been billions of years long each. That is how most Mormons think.
That said, some of them still believe Adam and Eve emerged from the Garden of Eden several thousand years ago. That's when normal mortal humans began living on Earth.
And I should point out that canonized Mormon scripture clearly says the Earth is only 7000 years old. But most practicing Mormons don't actually believe that. Mormons believe there were seven major prophets.
In other words, God revealed his perfect gospel to a man seven separate times. To Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and finally Joseph Smith. And since Jesus was awesome, Joseph Smith is super awesome.
In fact, Smith said he was better than Jesus because Jesus couldn't keep a church together. Mormons know exactly where the Garden of Eden was located. It was in Missouri, obviously.
And when Jesus returns, he's going to build a new city there called New Jerusalem. And it will be his capital. Mormons believe we're as old as God. Forget the idea that God is eternal and created us several thousand years ago.
And forget the idea that we evolved over the course of millions of years. Mormons believe we have always existed for all of eternity.
God was just nice enough recently to give us physical bodies. Mormons believe that we can be gods. If you're a faithful servant of God, and you do anything he says, anything, then after you die, you get to level up.
You'll be resurrected. The universe will obey you. You get to create your own world. And you basically get to be your own God.
But that offer only applies if you're baptized as a Mormon, tithe regularly, and don't do anything gay. Oh, and women, this only applies to you if you're married.
And since more women are going to get to heaven than men, it just makes sense that men are allowed to have more than one wife in the afterlife.
And if you don't make it to the celestial kingdom, which is one of the three heavens, then you lose your genitals. Only people who make it to the top-level heaven get to stay married and make spirit babies. Mormons believe God lives near the planet Kolob.
Yeah. Kolob is the name of the star nearest to the planet God actually lives on. After all, God is someone who just leveled up a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
And, by the way, if you read Mormon scripture, it says that God determines time-based on how quickly Kolob rotates. Mormons may have to baptize you by proxy just to be safe.
Since baptism is a prerequisite of getting into heaven, sometimes Mormons will baptize you even after you die. I mean, it's for your own good, you know, because you can't become a god if you're not baptized.
Now, this is actually caused some horrible PR for the church in recent years, because a few years ago they actually tried to baptize the body of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who died in the holocaust.
Actually, they tried to baptize tens of thousands of Holocaust victims. People were not very happy with that idea. The church kind of apologized and said they didn't really mean to do that, and you're only supposed to baptize your dead relatives.
And some Mormons actually think the whole baptizing-the-dead thing is okay because, you know, the dead person has a choice of whether or not to accept your baptism.
Okay, about the special underwear. Here's the deal with that: Mormon underwear actually has special symbols on it that signify God is taking care of you.
Because, apparently, when Adam and Eve came out of the Garden of Eden, God made clothes for them. So, the church owns a company that makes these special undergarments, and members of the church are supposed to buy their underwear through the church that way.
That's where that whole thing comes from. There is a nasty racist past to the Mormon Church. Until 1978, black people weren't allowed into church leadership.
Sure, they could be members of the church and hand over their money, that's totally fine, but they couldn't be leaders. It wasn't until 2013 that the church said, "Yeah, we were totally wrong about that one".
And finally, Mormons were into hardcore polygamy. Joseph Smith had up to 33 wives. Some of whom were as young as 14.
Brigham Young, the second LDS prophet, had over 50 wives. We tend to think of Mormonism and polygamy today as something that's really confined just to like super fundamentalist sex.
But most Mormons still believe polygamy will be practiced in the afterlife. It's called Celestial Polygamy. Look it up.
