Discussing
The simple satire of 'The Book of Mormon'

David Brooks' uses his column in the New York Times ("Creed or Chaos," April 22, 2011) to offer a fine review of this same event.

I know a couple Christians who are fans of "South Park" (no, I don't understand) and one of them is very excited about this.

For my own part, I think that we should understand that the point is that "South Park"'s creators are mocking religion and believers. They'll turn on Mormons, Scientologists, Muslims, or Christians if that's what will get them a buck. I doubt that they care.

The racial aspect would trouble me, too ... but I guess if people are just into mocking Mormons, maybe they'll ignore it.

Thanks for the tip, bvg. Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04...

Maybe it would be "better"-received if the authors doing the parody were insiders, laughing at themselves. I hear there's a musical "Everything's Coming Up Moses" written by Jewish authors, satirizing not only Judaism, but also Cecil DeMille's movie "Ten Commandments."

I feel like David Brooks column in the NY Times reviewing Book of Mormon is very important. This is a play with no respect for the concept of truth or the relative merits of competing truth claims. No wonder the glitterati and sophisticated public are so enthusiastic. If we could just strip away all the competing truth claims of all religions and get to the warm goey center of love and acceptance for all, no matter their god or gods we would arrive at utopia. It’s kind of the John Lennon utopia, no heaven above, no hell below, no sin, no fall, no need for the blood of the cross, just good-hearted people. All you need is love. And it seems like a certain segment of the evangelical church (Rob Bell and others) is working hard to build a theological base for this new civil world religion. Hell is a place of your own making, you stay until you’ve reformed, everyone is redeemed, Jesus didn’t die to forgive us from our sins and remove the judicial penalty (Penal Substitution Atonement), He died as a moral example of love and to make a statemnent about the futility of violence. Doctrine is not important, most of it is man-made and who are we to urge a truth claim upon another? All we really have are stories and how we love to listen to stories. While I am not a fan of the Mormon folk religion, we owe them more than this. I think the concept of the play is hilarious, but it’s telling is profane, scatological and rings false. I like David Brook’s last comment, “I was once in an AIDS-ravaged village in southern Africa. The vague humanism of the outside do-gooders didn’t do much to get people to alter their risky behavior. The blunt theological talk of the church ladies — right and wrong, salvation and damnation — seemed to have a better effect..”

The author states, "[Mormonism is] not a mainstream branch of Christianity...". It would be more accurate to say that Mormonism is a different religion entirely. I realize, of course, the author is critiquing theatre and not tackling issues of theology, but such statements can't help to perpetuate the gross misrepresentation of the Mormon faith as a cousin to Christianity. It is not. Scratch just below the surface and you will find that Mormonism has more in common with Scientology than Christianity.