Some religious beliefs are demonstrably false, while others strain credulity or are just plain implausible even if they can’t be completely disproven. But we’ve never argued that these beliefs can be put to some rational test to see if they amount to fraud. Somehow, a court in Britain is contemplating a change to our tradition of tolerating religious foolishness.
A disgruntled former Mormon has convinced an English court to file two summonses to appear against Thomas S. Monson, the current president of the Mormon Church.
Tom Phillips based his complaint on the Fraud Act of 2006, a British law that outlaws making a profit off of false representations. According to Phillips, this is precisely what the Mormon Church does — it uses statements it knows to be factually untrue in order to secure tithes from members of the Church.
The facts in question, court records show, are tenets of the Mormon faith, including that Joseph Smith translated The Book of Mormon from ancient gold plates, that Native Americans are descendants of a family of Israelites, and that death didn’t exist on this planet until 6,000 years ago.
“These are not statements of mere ‘beliefs’ or opinions or theories,” Phillips wrote. “They are made as actual facts and their truthfulness can be objectively tested with evidence.”
At a similar point in the development of Christianity, Celsus applied a rational test to the Church’s beliefs and found them wanting. It didn’t prevent the religion from spreading and eventually dominating all of Europe. But that’s not really the important thing. America is basically an answer to Europe’s inability to stop fighting over doctrinal differences. The solution was to allow people to believe whatever they want to, and to leave their congregations unmolested by the state. Are some simpletons separated from their money in a transaction that amounts to fraud?
Yes, of course. But, much more significantly, we stopped a cycle of religious violence that had lasted two hundred and fifty years. That the Book of Mormon was composed comparatively recently doesn’t really detract from its worth or truthfulness when compared to much older holy texts, it just seems that way. We tend to venerate things that last, so we marvel at the ruins of Greek and Roman civilization, but that doesn’t mean that their buildings were more real or more true than those built in the mid-19th Century.
It’s a mistake to single out one religion among many for making fraudulent claims. Policing that stuff has always turned out badly.
The role of the court is perhaps not to adjudicate on the truthfulness of the Mormon faith per se, but to decide whether it is entitled to charitable status and various other exemptions from tax and regulation often given to religious institutions.
Not a significant distinction in my view.
In any case, sometimes I feel like this should be illegal.
Those people gave me a sudden chill and reminded me of Jeffrey Dahmer, who many point to as a person who ‘looked normal’ until you looked into his refrigerator. It would be helpful if the people in your link carried those signs around with them in life so one could steer very very clear. Wow
It is, in public schools anyway. Of course creationists get around that by vouchers and charter schools:
Link
Stay away from LA and TN.
Of course, if we didn’t give these exemptions in the first place, there wouldn’t be an issue. Frankly, I think it’s high time we got rid of them.
There are always going to be Elmer Gantrys in this world. Trying to distinguish what is and what is not a religion is foolish.
Let people (aka: rubes) believe whatever I it that they want to believe – just no human sacrifice, sex with minors, sterilization, or, mutilation of sex organs.
But, they have to leave the rest of us the hell alone in return!
Especially, by staying out of politics.
We don’t need Alph rubes leading a representative democracy.
We have enough rubes voting in representative democracy.
As I’ve said before – but not here – imo, we’ll have a Gay President, before we have on who’s an Atheist!
By acknowledging that the Book of Mormon was “composed recently”, you have already pointed up that its provenance is categorically unlike that of the Christian scriptures. This is an important distinction and we can only hope that it may become the subject of a discovery process.
That would apply even more so to the “church” of Scientology. Less so to the other “millenial” Christian sects as their special writings seem not to displace the Bible as the center of their religion as the Book of Mormon does.
“America is basically an answer to Europe’s inability to stop fighting over doctrinal differences.”
Except that America fights over a whole variety of doctrinal differences and shows no sign of being able to stop or resolve its chronic differences of how reality is understood – which suggests that as answers go it is pretty obviously inadequate.
But usually the fight is not with swords or cannon.