Pleasant Grove City*, in Utah, is going to court because a crazy-ass religion wants to put up a tribute to their religion in a P.G.City park. Could the crazy-ass religion be Mormonism? Why, no: it’s the Summum faith:
In 2003, the president of the Summum church wrote to the mayor here with a proposal: the church wanted to erect a monument inscribed with the Seven Aphorisms in the city park, “similar in size and nature” to the one devoted to the Ten Commandments.
Summums believe Moses delivered the Seven Aphorisms around the same time he came out with the Ten Commandments. Here are the Seven Aphorisms:
* The Principle of Psychokinesis: Summum is mind, thought; the universe is a mental creation.
* The Principle of Correspondence: As above, so below; as below, so above.
* The Principle of Vibration: Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.
* The Principle of Opposition: Everything is dual; everything has an opposing point; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes bond; all truths are but partial truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.
* The Principle of Rhythm: Everything flows out and in; everything has its season; all things rise and fall; the pendulum swing expresses itself in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.
* The Principle of Cause and Effect: Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to Law; Chance is just a name for Law not recognized; there are many fields of causation, but nothing escapes the Law of Destiny.
* The Principle of Gender: Everything has its masculine and feminine principles; Gender manifests on all levels
That’s crazy talk, of course. How do I know? God told me so, via inscriptions on some golden plates that only I can translate. The town is arguing against the monument to Summumism thusly:
A town accepting a Sept. 11 memorial would also have to display a donated tribute to Al Qaeda, the briefs said. “Accepting a Statue of Liberty,” the city’s brief said, should not “compel a government to accept a Statue of Tyranny.”
Classy to connect the weird vibrational religion to terrorism. Speaking of Mormon classiness: Mormons keep posthumously baptizing victims of the Holocaust, even though they were supposed to have stopped doing that shit 13 years ago.
* I know, technically it’s a town in Iowa and not the Mormon Church directly, but come on. We know the Mormons love to stick their nose in matters of state.
As long as they agree to erect a monument to the core principles of the Jedi Faith, I’m cool with it.
The posthumous baptizing of Holocaust victims really irritates me. It just feels like a willful distortion of history, declaring people who were killed for being Jewish Mormon in a database of record.
The only retaliation I can figure out is posthumously baptizing Mormons as adherents of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
I would object to publicly displaying any monument that abuses the semicolon that badly – do we want our children growing up thinking it’s okay to just throw punctuation around at random?
@3 – I know! What if my kid sees two semicolons holding hands or kissing in the park. I’ll have to explain *punctuation* to him!
I had to participate in 1 baptism for the dead when I was growing up. It was creepy and I hated it.
They baptize everyone, not just holocaust survivors. The people I was “baptizing” were from the 1700’s i think. They were probably Catholic or something. Can you imagine if their actually *was* an afterlife, and some Catholic dude is chilling and then POOF the motherfucker gets sent to hell cause some 12 year old mormon “baptized” him. HAHAHA
Ok fuck, in that senario at least it’s funny
A statue of Zeus would satisfy me.
I had to participate in 1 baptism for the dead when I was growing up. It was creepy and I hated it.
They baptize everyone, not just holocaust survivors. The people I was “baptizing” were from the 1700’s i think. They were probably Catholic or something. Can you imagine if their actually *was* an afterlife, and some Catholic dude is chilling and then POOF the motherfucker gets sent to hell cause some 12 year old mormon “baptized” him. HAHAHA
Ok fuck, in that senario at least it’s funny
I knew next to nothing about the Mormons until I recently watched that South Park episode about Mormonism. Holy smokes; that’s one crazy religion. For reals.
But wait, so String Theory really is just another religion. Crap. Now I can’t be an atheist?
Wait. A hot, sexy Zeus. Nude. Throwing a bolt of lightening. Sexy lightening. Hmmmm. I need to get laid.
@2 – The Mormons are also accused in the NYT article of baptizing deceased Catholics. Probably any other people whose names appear on some birth records somewhere are at some point vulnerable to this posthumous ‘conversion’ to the Mormon faith. Is this the underlying reason for the Mormons’ obsession with preserving genealogical records?
hey, so we all are trying to run a campaign against mormons I hear. How bout jamming there “chat line”
I found on of all places Huffpost.com
http://www.mormon.org/mormonorg/eng/ask-a-question/chat-live
also, you can call them too.. oh fun!
1-888-537-6600
Those Summum aphorism sound pretty right on to me, except maybe the last one, depending how you interpret it.
I like the idea of posthumously baptizing Mormons as gay.
Can we pass a constitional ammendment banning the practice of “baptisms for the dead”????
@11
yes,yes it is. supposedly when you do genealogical research at the family level, it’s to make sure all your own ancestry gets a chance to accept mormonism in the afterlife.
I don’t really mind them baptizing the dead; if it works, then the dead have a second chance at heaven, and if it doesn’t work, no harm is done. I understand that some people feel like they have the right to speak for their ancestors, but I don’t really understand the foundation of that right.
The park thing is cut-and-dried by establishment clause case law. An Al-Qaeda monument would be upsetting, but the first amendment definitely covers upsetting speech.
Based on the reasons offered by the monument’s opposition, it’s being assumed that Summumism is the exact opposite of Christianity. How did they work that out?
Okay people, again, please get your facts straight! Seriously. If you would like to see what the church is really doing in regards to the victims of the Holocaust and this issue of these baptisms, you can read here: http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/…
Or, if you’re not interesting in taking a few moments and clicking over to get a few facts straight, then I’ll quote the article for you.
“The Church stands by its word. It has no intention of performing baptisms or other rites in its temples for Holocaust victims, except in the very rare instances where such people may have living descendants who are members of the Church. Such exceptions were noted and agreed to in 1995. The understanding reached in 1995 determined that the Church would remove Holocaust names from its public database immediately, which the Church has done. It further said that Jewish groups would provide to the Church any names that reappeared on the database so the Church could remove them. The Church cannot understand why Mr. Michel has refused now to provide those names to the Church so the Church can maintain the spirit of that 1995 understanding.
The media advisory also claimed that Church leaders had refused to meet and “broke off negotiations in July. “ This is absolutely false. Church leaders met with Mr. Michel in New York on 3 November, along with representatives of other respected Jewish community organizations. The Church’s written response to Mr. Michel and to that meeting is found here [http://newsroom.lds.org/Static%20Files/N…]. It did not receive a reply.
Church leaders and members empathize with the depth of feeling of all Jews regarding the Holocaust. Such regard and empathy have motivated the Church to remain in talks about this subject for so many years. However, with his press conference, Mr. Michel seems to have unilaterally terminated those discussions and has presumably rejected the proposals set forth in the Church’s 6 November 2008 letter. Those steps by Mr. Michel on behalf of the American Gathering were both unnecessary and unfortunate, and belie the long and valued mutual regard that has existed in the past years.”