[irrelig]The guest we had lined up for this week apparently skipped town, but have no fear! We had a meeting with the Salt City Skeptics, a group of people who emerged from the local cult of Mormonism with intact psyches and a skeptical perspective on life. Check out the unique outlook of a distinctly rational minority subculture forced to live inside a larger culture that is clearly insane.

[irrelig]After a long wait due entirely to Leighton’s laziness, we release our latest podcast episode, a treatise exploring with great sobriety our 3 favorite Chick tracts. The first is called “The Visitors,” about some unfortunate Mormon missionaries who meet their match in a True Christian little girl. The second is the story of an aborted fetus named Clarice, although why you would name a fetus whose ears are destined to be sold on the black market, I’ll never know. The last and final tract is called “Boo!” and it’s the glorious True Story of Lucifer’s birthday, Halloween, filled with “documented facts.”

Get the Truth right here!

This week’s podcast resulted from a listener’s suggestion, so if you have any ideas for future shows, send them in!

We discuss various methods of stumping and/or embarrassing those eager young LDS missionaries who knock on your door in a futile attempt to get their hands on 10% of your income. Foil even the most persistent among them by listening here.

Last week a gay couple was physically restrained in handcuffs for an inappropriate public display of lewdness at the LDS Temple grounds by LDS security guards until Salt Lake City Police arrived and issued citations for criminal trespass. The grounds for handcuffing? A peck on the cheek.

We discuss the hypocrisy of LDS temple authorities in this week’s ANN.

[chuck]So it looks like July will be another Mormon month for us here at Irreligiosophy. This week we discuss two articles given by Mormon leaders about the evils of masturbation and how to avoid hairy palms and blindness. Hilarity ensues when these old geezers strain their vocabulary trying to come up with polite euphemisms for choking the chicken, use metaphors like “little factories” to explain the function of testicles and why we have wet dreams, and even suggest wearing tight clothes to bed to avoid rubbing one out in a “semi-sleep condition.” Who even knew you could sin in a semi-sleep condition!

We discuss the strangeness of a couple of doddering old men whose testosterone levels likely barely register giving advice to hormonally charged youth right here.

[chuck]Another entry delving into Mormonism! This time, we dissect a speech given by Boyd K. Packer in August of 1981 to church educators. It is a concise guide to Packer’s view of how historical research ought to be performed, both in general and most specifically for the history of Mormonism and its leaders. The speech highlights the dangers of scholarship to LDS faith (a refrain we’ve heard before from other religions), is remarkably oblivious to its own internal contradictions, and even makes an ugly call to refrain from disseminating things that are “true, but not useful.”

Leighton and I make our commentary on this bald appeal to lie by omission here.