On the topic of Christian apologetics,
something strikes me as odd.

One of the arguments in favor of the
resurection as truth is that the Christian
movement took off too soon, and too close
to the events (geographically) for it to
have been false. They seem to want to argue
that people are too smart to fooled by simply
claims.

And yet in the face of this, we have a
perfect modern example of just that happening.

The Mormons (or Latter Day Saints). Here we
have a man (a reputed con) who made extra-
ordinary claims, and founded a new branch
of a religion, which has amassed a huge
following. And it seems to me that the
history of it all is well documented.
And still people continue to believe.

How can the Christians not see that it would
have been even easier to attain such a thing
in a relatively uneducated and lo-tech world?

Comments?

Exactly. Look at the history of many cults.

Mormonism
Christian Science
Moonism
Scientology

Christian Science teaches that the external world is one big hallucination and that disease can be cured by convincing oneself that one does not really have it. Yet it had acquired a lot of followers, despite its founder's taste for morphine and more recent Christian Scientists' willingness to build air conditioners into their houses of worship.

Moonism revolves around a self-styled messiah, Sun Myung Moon, who believes that he has come to do what Jesus Christ had failed to do: build the perfect family. And he proposes to do so by making everybody a part of his "family", more specifically, an autocratic cult headed by him.

Scientology started off as Dianetics, a "therapy" invented by L. Ron Hubbard, a mediocre science-fiction writer. This "therapy" featured the belief that we acquire all sorts of misunderstandings and fixations as embryos, which become "engrams", and that a Dianetics therapist can uncomer and eliminate these engrams and make one a "clear": a very superior being. This was later turned into the "Church" of Scientology, since it is easier to get away with having a weird religion than a quack therapy; Scientology pushed the engram-acquisition time back to past reincarnations.

And even in Jesus Christ's time, there were lots of interesting characters who had gotten big followings:

http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...ier/kooks.html

Especially consider the case of Alexander of Abonutichus, which is really hilarious.

Kosh- good question. I am trying to find some apologetic sites that refute Mormonism, because if I recall correctly, many can be used against Christianity. For instance their stance against the "unbiblical" book of Mormon sounds pretty funny when it took hundreds of years for them to decide on the cannon of scripture. Even now, catholics and protestants disagree on what belongs in there.

The best anti-Mormon site I know of is http://www.exmormon.org -- it has a good list of articles and other sites at http://www.exmormon.org/goodsite.htm

A good summary page on the origins of Mormonism is:

http://www.exmormon.org/tract2.htm

Joseph Smith was as big a faker as L. Ron Hubbard.

Funny, they don't mention that Mary Baker Eddy was a junkie at the offical home page.

Virginia Harris, Chairman of the Christian Science Board of Directors was on Larry King last night.

Unfortunately, she didn't take any phone calls. I was hoping some fundies would call in to excoriate her. Or better yet, James Randi.

This cult sounds even more pointless than regular christianinanity.