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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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Wait, Mormons appropriated the term Gentiles, from... Jews?
That's incredible.
I'll be frank: Mormonism is based on the fan fiction of an easily provable, known at the time to be a serial con artist and fraudster.
... Who then went on to lead a cult of what we would now call domestic terrorists.
He specifically tried to destroy any press outlets that were critical of him.
Like, with violent armed force.
Every element of the origin story of Mormonism collapses under any serious scrutiny from anyone who isn't a Mormon, its laughable.
He also just appropriated a bunch of Masonic poses and hand signs and such, like, verbatim, without modification in a good deal of cases, and invented rituals to go make use of them.
The uh, what is it, the papyrus he picked up off of a travelling antiquities merchant, that he then declared was "The Book of Abraham"?
He was just bullshitting around his total inability to read actual hieroglyphs... the knowledge deriving from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone was quite rare at the time, so he felt comfortable making up a nonsense 'translation'.
Then, some decades later, actual Egyptologists get around to reading the original text and the "translation" and uh... welp, long story short, its a copy of a fairly common Egyptian funerary rites text, instructions on how to breathe properly when in the underworld. Has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham, bears no relationship to Smith's fabricated translated story.
Mormonism is literally a fraud.
But!
That hasn't stopped other cults and religions from... making it big time.
Oh yes, it's especially ridiculous given its relatively recent rise. The same kind of criticism can be directed at Islam, for sure. And the same for xtianity.
Plenty of people will try to tell me that the notion that Jesus having no historical evidence of an actual person is fringe and borders on conspiracy theory, but all the so-called evidence is rather...lacking. So not sure why this is considered fringe, other than it annoying believers.
That aside, I remember The Bible Geek guy (Robert M. Price) talking about how because of the belief that he was a historical figure and because of the claims about coming back - before the current generation he was speaking to passed away - that this resulted in early apologists claiming that there was still an apostle roaming the Earth somewhere....um, okay. I guess now thousands of years old?
Personally, I think it is more likely than not that somebody named Yehoshua existed, and did at least some of the things described in the Bible.
Because there were a good number of other Apocalyptical, Messianic Jewish type preachers/cults around the same time, the same area.
Getting conquered by the Romans ... yeah, makes sense this would make people think they're living in some kind of end times, a seemingly unstoppable heretical force is now in charge of near everything, forcing the Jews to endure heresies and descrations... surely God must be pissed and have something up his sleeve, to make things right.
I'm a fan of Paulogia's minimal witnesses hypothesis, basically, you more or less only need Paul and Simon Peter to have something approximating post-bereavement hallucinactions or guilt based psychotic breaks, and then word of mouth and legendary development takes care of the rest from there.
Jesus, imo, probably was a real dude, who got crucified for eventually causing too much trouble. Thats entirely believable to me.
Resurrection? Miracles? Uh no, but, its pretty believable to explain how things roughly similar to, or based on things he may have actually done, got exaggerated and reformulated into the original Gospels.
But yeah, as Price says, he very directly states that he thought he would return before all of his contemporaneous followers passed away.
So... thats why a good deal of the theology is basically based on "well he did actually, in a way, from a certain point if view."
... Because he very clearly did not do so literally, matter of factly.
It gets even more wild if you look into the 'Gnostics', the Sethians, the Valentinians, etc, the stuff that didn't uh, make the final editors cut, as it were.
To be clear, I think it is probable that there was a real person they are referencing, probably even likely. Occam's Razor and all that...but I'm talking more about people insisting that there is historical evidence for a claim on a historical Jesus. Like we are talking about Benjamin Franklin or something.
When you actively seek it out, it becomes a lot more elusive to find some real credible evidence than I think most people realize.