Art

Aw, man. I suspected when we were reading Ender’s Game for my book club that mormon Orson Scott Card was a conservative nutjob. Turns out he is indeed: he actually writes an article attempting to rehabilitate the Sith and the dark side, claiming that the Jedis are the force of evil, not Darth Vader. That sucks majorly.

Check out more on the rehabilitation of Darth Sidious and other Right-winger’s attempts to trash the Jedi.

D’oh! After reading on, I gather that Card has written several homophobic articles and essays — googling found me some of them. Fuck. Crap, I wish I hadn’t actually purchased his stupid paperback now. That’s seven bucks I inadvertently gave to a bigotted moron.

Now I don’t feel so bad for making fun of the fucking Mormons and their sideshow religion. If you read “Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith” by Jon Krakauer, you’ll discover a history of Mormonism and of the fundamentalist aspects of the religion — and you discover how easily “mainstream” Mormons slip over into radicalism because of the nature of the religion.

Part of what you learn of their history is that the “founder” of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, was basically a P. T. Barnum character; a shyster con man of a sort that was common in the 1800’s. Like many other snake oil salesmen and salvation show types traveling around, (think of the HBO series Carnivale and you get an idea of the type) he made up his own religion that was part entertainment carnival and part self-serving graft. Smith was actually convicted of running con jobs at one point. He concocted a story about an Angel (named MORONI, no less!) burying golden tablets under a rock, wrote his own side-show version of the bible, and took his story on the road, collecting heaps of cash along the way.

Unlike other con men, though, he accidentally became successful. Unfortunately before he could get out with the cash, he started believing his own hype. In a brazen move, he decided that a young girl he was lusting after should be his second wife, and re-wrote his own religion to allow him to have multiple spouses. Needless to say that was popular with the guys, and he ended up with a bunch of people following him around; people who kept getting into trouble with people over land and territory. Nothing to do but move them out west. And thus from one guy’s wayward penis, an entire nutjob religion was born. And you thought Clinton’s inability to keep it zipped was a problem.

All this makes Card’s criticism of the “Jedi religion” extremely funny:

It’s one thing to put your faith in a religion founded by a real person who claimed divine revelation, but it’s something else entirely to have, as the scripture of your religion, a storyline that you know was made up by a very nonprophetic human being.