This is hilarious: a couple of atheists get some bicycles, white shirts and ties, and travel around Salt Lake City knocking on doors and bringing the good word of godlessness to the Mormons. One old guy is an LDS bishop, and thinks that’s a good enough reason for them to stop bothering him (although, of course, if someone is Catholic or atheist or Baptist, that’s not enough reason to stop proselytizing to them…besides, LDS bishops are thick on the ground out there); another feebly swings a broom at them; there is some door slamming going on. Although it’s funny, I think the Mormons would be oblivious to the irony—missionary work is a painfully intense part of the culture out there.
One other problem is that it isn’t quite fair to pull this stunt in Salt Lake. Salt Lake City is about half gentile, and especially if they were hitting up neighborhoods around the university they may have been pestering a fair number of unbelievers. They should have tried it in Price or Ogden or Provo. I suspect, though, that they probably didn’t want to risk getting shot, and more than a few people would have called the police on them…who would then have escorted them right out of town.
Sounds like shades of “Orgazmo” by the Southpark guys (Trey Parker and Matt Stone). Hysterically funny, esp. if you’re familiar with the LDS church and its teachings. Not one to show your parents, however (the NC-17 rating is definitely deserved).
Eyesoars
This is great. I love it. We certainly need more of this.
Gee, who would have thought that the religious would stoop so low as to being hypocritical. What’s next, lying, stealing, manipulation? Oh the humanity!
Remember this the next time someone refers to Dawkins or Harris as “evangelical atheists.”
I think looking enough like a Mormon will get the door slammed on you.
They should have gone door to door in a less mormon look… red adidas sweat suits perhaps?
However part of the joke is mormon looking guys trying to spread atheism.
This guy has a DVD of a series he made for Australian TV. It’s called John Safran vs God. You should be able to find another clip on YouTube of him getting a fatwa declared on one of his TV rivals by a lunatic British Imam.
Unfortunately, the last episode features him being manipulated by some preacher/exorcist called Bob Larson into accepting Christ as his saviour. It’s a nice example of pressure selling. I don’t think the poor guy knew what was happening to him.
Here’s the wiki entry for the series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Safran_vs_God
Oh, and speaking of wiki entries, did you know the entry for ‘Newtonmas’ is now deleted and protected against recreation? Apparently there aren’t enough people celebrating it for it to be considered noteworthy enough to get into wiki. Read the ‘article for deletion’ comments if this is of interest to you.
apparently it has been picking for distribution in the US and will be on the sundance channel at some point.
John Safran is quite well known here in Australia, which is his main base. We had a program her some years ago, in which young people went out making amateur documentaries on different things. Safran won, and has since made himself a career in TV. His web site gives a good insight into his weird kind of humour; three quarters focussed on John, and one quarter on topical matters. “John Safran vs God” is a common theme. Check it: Jphn Safran. The Utah mission was part of the eight part John Safran vs God series.
The John Safran stuff is good. Door knocking in Utah trying to talk about the good book – ‘Origin of the Species’ By Darwin is funny. We sent a couple of the DVD’s to American friends, they liked.
Steven Wright tells of a person in the Jehovah’s Witness Protection Program: He goes from door to door, telling people he’s somebody else.
Wow, it can’t meet the high standards of Wikipedia?
I hadn’t heard of such an entry before. But at least, on checking, I find wikipedia admits to its former existence as an entry. There’s no sign of Cephalopodmas at all.
Safran interviewed on Radio National. In fairness, we should probably quote the following:
Is that a failure, or a triumph?
“atheism as some sort of revenge.”
“Before you leave to get revenge, you must dig two graves.”
– Confucius.
Safran is a real gem – he attacks hypocrisy wherever he finds it (especially in the media; his “doorstop” interview at the home of a well known journalist known for doorstop interviews was priceless, although it got taken off-air due to mogul pressure and legal threats.
The “vs God” series was great. He spends a lot of time talking to these guys seriously, too. After that series, he had a talking heads show with a very grumpy and down to earth Catholic priest, who would tell him he was full of shit if the occasion arose.
Also, check out another Australian gem’s show: God on my side by Andrew Denton, whose interview show, Enough Rope, is the best exemplar of the genre I know.
Dr. Myers said:
Or Colorado Springs, perhaps? Seems the fundies in that burg have been through quite a trauma lately. Maybe they’d be more receptive to something new. And picking up a few of the USAF while they’re at it would just be gravy!
Drat – Too bad he din’t come to my door,so I could tell him “Why thank you, yes I have considered atheism”!
(From an Ed Brayton and John Lynch Proud Type 2-labeled atheist!)
My New Type 2 Motto:
If you believe, you make me heave!
Speaking of half gentile, the Mormons are a pretty easy target, when all is said and done. If Safran really wants to promote atheism with a bit more challenge, why doesn’t he make a similar jaunt to a Lubavitcher-heavy neighborhood of Brooklyn?
Friend of ours has a red-circle-with-slash “forbidden” sign by his front door. The inscribed iconography is a pair of man-figures wearing suits, one of whom is holding up a book with a big cross on the front. The message is, I think, fairly clear (although strictly speaking it won’t deter JWs as they don’t use the standard cross as a symbol, this being one of the persnickety ways they differentiate themselves from “Christendom”).
As an ex-Mormon, and a resident of SLC, I wish they had knocked on my door. They probably wouldn’t have gotten any good film, but I would have laughed myself silly.
It might have been more interesting (I’m not sure that’s the right word) if they had hit some of the polygamist enclaves in the city. Might have been more dangerous too. Some of those guys are just weird.
As far as whether Mormons are a cult or not – I think that depends on how deep into it you get. Because they don’t isolate themselves completely from the rest of the world (the way the polygamist sects do, for example), I think it’s a lot harder to get everyone into a genuine cult mentality. On the other hand, there is a concerted effort to build an ‘us’ and ‘them’ component to the Mormon identity. And it’s significantly easier to move over to the lunatic fringe when you believe that you personally can talk to God. My experience in and out of the church is that there is a wide range of behaviors – most of them are too busy dealing with day-to-day things to get too immersed, and a lot of them don’t actually know that much about what they are supposed to believe in. The ones that do get immersed can certainly sound like they are in a cult, however. And, as a general rule, public dissension with church authorities is not tolerated (leading to periodic purges at BYU).
I don’t know how well this would go over in Price, since Price is a minority Mormon town. Price was settled by Greek Orthodox immigrants who worked in the mines. It’s the one reliably blue area in the red sea that is Utah.
That’s right about Price, and Ogden is an old railroad town that may not be blue, but is kind of wild, in an old-railroad-town sort of way. They should have hit Panguitch. Or La Verkin and Virgin, the towns that declared themselves ‘UN Free Zones’. Or Kanab, which adopted a ‘natural family’ resolution. When a local high school senior wrote an editorial critical of the resolution, the mayor tried to suggest that his (the kid’s) bishop should look into the kid’s fitness for church membership.
YouTube also has a clip of John Safran’s attempt to break into Mormon cinema.
Dee:
The purges have their good side. It was the purging of various archaeologists and historians during the 1980s (and my discovery of earlier purges) that led to me realizing the Book of Mormon had no more relationship with reality than Erich Von Daniken’s _Chariots Of The Gods_.
Re: John Wilkins comment above, Safran still has Father Bob on his Sunday night show on Triple j radio. Podcasts and so on at: http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/safran/
llewelly: I picked up the Mormon bible recently. Within the first few pages it makes Chariots of the Gods look like hard peer reviewed science.
I tend to think of the LDS missionary program as a commitment mechanism for hanging onto their young men, with the secondary side benefit of gaining some converts. Once I invited them in and listened; usually I just politely decline, and they move on.
A friend of mine who grew up in Salt Lake City once told me there were two types of people there: Mormons and Mormon-haters.
Only vaguely related, but am I the only one who’s incessantly amused by the similarity between “LDS” and “LSD?” Both are habit-forming and produce bizarre behavior and hallucinations…
Elizabeth Watasin had a good episode of her “A-Girl” comic strip in which the Thai Buddhist A-Girl teases visiting missionaries and finally grabs up her Buddha statue and waves it at them crying, “Buddha eat their souls!” After they run away screaming, she apologizes to her dear gentle Buddha for misrepresenting him.
There is the late Jack Chalkers definition of a cult, from his “River of Dancing Gods” series …
A cult is red-defined as a Religion, when it converts more than 20% of the population within a (specified area/population) – from “The book of RULES”.
Erm ….
I can remember once about 10 years ago answering my door to two young men in white shirts wanting to convert me to some Christian sect (can’t remember which). The interesting thing was that they were both Pacific Islanders. My reaction was that this was a very interesting historic reversal. One hundred to 150 years before my ancestors (not literally) had gone to the Pacific islands to convert the pagans to Christianity, and now their descendants were returning the favour.
Here is a report from the NY Times on atheist militancy.
“Somewhere along the way, a forum this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., which might have been one more polite dialogue between science and religion, began to resemble the founding convention for a political party built on a single plank: in a world dangerously charged with ideology, science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.”…
“We should let the success of the religious formula guide us,” Dr. Porco said. “Let’s teach our children from a very young age about the story of the universe and its incredible richness and beauty. It is already so much more glorious and awesome — and even comforting — than anything offered by any scripture or God concept I know.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/science/21belief.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin
I saw Star Trek 4 (The Voyage Home) in a crowded theatre on its first night showing in Salt Lake City. At one point, Kirk finds himself having to make excuses (to Gillian, the marine biologist studying the whales), for Spock’s peculiar behavior. Kirk says: ‘He did a little too much LDS in the 60s’.
The audience ROARED with laughter.
Mirror:
The Book of Mormon and the Mormon bible are not the same thing; they are two distinct ‘scriptures’, the former being the work of Joseph Smith Jr, and the later being a derivative of the KJV.
My comparison of the Book of Mormon to Chariots of The Gods hearkens back to the 10-12 year old me. Today I’d be inclined to agree with you. :-)
Atheism is merely myth understood…
Pacific Islander missionaries could be LDS but more likely SDA.
Because the Lubavitchers don’t come knocking on his door in Australia before noon on Saturdays.
Because the Lubavitchers don’t come knocking on his door in Australia before noon on Saturdays.
Nice LOL, but my point was that the Lubavitchers would be even harder to convince and might react with even more aggressive neagtivity to the attempt to proselytise them. There is also the risk of being accused of being “insensitive”, but if we’re going to take the battle into the enemy camp, well, they have more than one.
There’s an older guy in our local Humanist Association who likes to button-hole people and ask if they’re interested in the Humanist discussion group (something like that — I’m not sure what his pitch is). I think he’s a bit disgusted with my wife and I because we won’t do the same thing — we just shudder and say that this feels waaaay too much like being back in the Navigators….
Atheists could proselytize in Portland, OR no problem. Especially on bicycles. They’d be a fun part of the community. We need more committed atheists here.