Sunday, June 14, 2009

Illicit's Guide to Famous Snowboarding Mormons

 





I was dredging the Internet for my next snowboarding scoop when I can across an odd site that had a page dedicated to Famous Snowboarding Mormons. I’ve since learned two things.
  1. To call yourself a half decent Mormon snowboarder you have to star in an X-BOX computer game.
  2. The Mormon religion is as bonkers as they come
Illicit’s guide to Famous Mormon Snowboarders…



Torah Bright



















  • Oddly named after the Jewish religious book. I guess ‘Book of Mormon’ Bright would have been a silly name.
  • According to her site her brother is a ‘snow manager’. Must be pretty handy to have someone who can control the weather in your team.
  • Starred in Amped 2 & Amped 3

Mitch Nelson
























  • Was a Mormon missionary for 2 years
  • Starred in Amped 2
  • He has never played Amped 2. Which shows a truly amazing lack of curiosity

Jeremy Jones




















  • The freestyle one not the freeride one, and he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder about that.
  • Owns a Backstreet Boys fridge magnet
  • Starred in Amped 2

Jordan Mendenhall























  • His favourite drink is water
  • Thinks stretching is ‘pretty awesome’
  • Starred in Amped

Brandon Babee






















  • A founder of Blank snowboards - the EasyJet of snowboards
  • Extremely camera shy for a pro snowboarder. As a result this is not an actual photo of him.
  • Starred in Amped 3


Jason Murphy
























  • Drank alcohol once by accident and can’t remember when he last swore
  • First snowboarder to appear on both the front and back cover of a snowboard magazine
  • Also a founder of Blank snowboards
  • Starred in Amped & Amped 2 (that’s him on the cover of Amped)

Joseph Smith, Jr.



















  • Invented the Mormon religion in 1830
  • Married 28 women
  • Clearly a poor snowboarder he has not starred in any of the Amped series. He does however star in an episode of South Park (more of that later)

Illicit’s guide to the Mormon religion…
Being British I only had a vague idea what Mormons were all about. Pretty much all I knew is that there are a hell of a lot of them in Utah. I was intrigued that anyone would bother to make this list so I decided that now was a good time learn and this is what I found.
It turns out I’m not a convert. Essentially their religion is probably the most batty religion I’ve heard of since I heard about the Cargo Cults of the Pacific Islands last week.
Here’s a bunch of people who worship our very own racist royal - Prince Phillip
But back to the Mormons. Here is a brief history of Mormonism
A lad called Joe Smith found some magic gold plates apparently covered in ancient Egyptian writing. Apparently, because rather conveniently Mr Smith was the only person allowed to see the plates before some magic cloud fairy whisked them back to heaven.
Needing to translate them he did not use the well established method of finding some one who could read ancient Egyptian. Instead he used the more novel method of translating using a couple of magic stones in a hat. Why he needed the plates in the first place is not that clear as he could have done this without them surely.
Strangely I failed my GCSE French when I used this method

He translated the ancient Egyptian into Medieval English. Why he chose medieval English in the 1830s is a bit beyond me but I guess that’s why I’m not a prophet.
The basic story in his new book was that Jesus, after the resurrection, pottered over to America where he found some stray Israelites who look to have beaten Columbus to the Americas by some 1,500 odd years.
Jesus hangs with the beardy Native American folk

Jesus, after recently suffering from a bit of good old fashioned murder, seems to be a bit angrier now and turns into a pretty pissed off chap who went around smiting people rather a lot.
Anyway some people started to believe in this new religion. Soon Joseph had introduced those classic mainstays of any cult, the multiple marriages and the expectation that every follower pay the church 10% of their income. That might explain why they have managed to build hundreds of gawdy up temples all round the place:
Mormon Temple - Jazzy

From then on Joe seemed to run about the US picking up a lot of enemies and getting into a lot of fights before he was eventually shot as he tried to escape from prison.
Today there are about 13 million people that believe in this. 13 million!

Three beardy guys sneak up behind an unsuspecting Joseph Smith and pour snow down his back

That’s about all I’m going to write. The full story makes a great read in Wikipedia. It’s a great game to see how just many holes you can find in this holy story
Or alternatively just watch the South Park version:

And here ends this week’s sermon.
If you want more and want to learn about another famous snowboarder try our article on Marco Siffredi for size

8 comments:

  1. Kay seriously, do your research in a more credible place than Wikipedia. Then you might not find so many holes. To be honest, why does it matter, the specifics of what people believe? As long as they're good people trying to do the best they can, then what does it hurt?

    I'm just saying, if you want to know more about a religion, try looking at the source, not at poorly written second-hand articles and South Park.

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  2. haha so glade i stumbled across this... gave me a giggle.
    firstly...you have to be pretty board to spend time writing something like this to start with.
    If you handed this in as a year five project, i would not even give you a mark. 10 year old kids know how to go to the source and research creditable sources when reporting on something.
    If you went to the lds.org website and did a little reading there, you may realize it's a christen religion and is quite simple at that. Sure there maybe things you wont believe could be true. but really when it comes down to it, its how it makes you feel when you look into things for yourself. some people like Buddhism others like religion with priests as child molesters.
    The point is. there are wackey things about every religion mostly because of the wackey people that are in them, not because of what they teach. If you are looking for religion you will find one that sits right and makes sense to you. if your not, we then you'll watch episodes of south park to educate yourself on religion.
    The British dont only have bad teeth, they have poor research skills.

    good work.

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  3. Oddly it appears that your presumably thorough research into the teeth of the British may not hold up under scrutiny...

    http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=7933596&story_id=15060097

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  4. If you actually read the standard bible you will see why we build temples or pay 10% tithe to the lord..

    IGNORANT.

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  5. Late on this but Todd Richards sums it up pretty well: "The history of X-men was more thought out than the mormon religion."

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  6. Ok. You should have done just a little more research on wikipedia. FACT ONE: ELEVEN witnesses saw the gold plates and left behind sworn witness statements to that affect, statements that they never recanted to their death beds. THREE witnesses saw the gold plates and an ANGEL to boot. EIGHT witnesses just saw the gold plates. FACT TWO: the Book of Mormon was in Old English because the King James Bible was in Old English, so it was the language of scripture for the vast majority of Americans. Also, for a Brit, you sound pretty ignorant of history. Didn't they teach you in British history that America was originally a British colony and that early Americans spoke King's English? It has taken hundreds of years for the English language to be bastardized to its present gutturalized form. Just read the letters and books of the time period, and you'll see that most educated Americans in colonial America spoke in a very stilted English not much different from King's English. Men also wore wigs back then, gasp! FACT THREE: three major world religions are children of Abraham who was a polygamous! OMG! Would you call Judaism, Christianity, and Islam 'cults'? Islam still practices polygamy. Many of the most famous Jews in the Old Testament were unreformed polygamists (Jacob/Israel, David). Jesus was a descendant of polygamy. The New Testament says a Bishop must have at least one wife and have children (1 Timothy 3; Hebrews 13.4). Oops Catholics made a boo boo! But nowhere in the whole Bible does God forbid polygamy. In fact, God in the Bible sanctions polygamy in no uncertain terms (Deuteronomy 21.15; 2 Samuel 12.7-8; 2 Chronicles 24.2-3). I guess God is not politically correct! Stop embarrassing yourself Illicit, if that is your real name:p

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