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I had my third encounter with the Mormons of the Bridge.
For the second time running, two bubbly blonde girls intercepted me as I was hustling my exhausted ass back to my apartment. I wasn't paying attention, had earphones in, and assumed I was being asked for directions. I popped out a bud, made the mildly inconvenienced face one gives lost tourists, and was instead asked if I would like to find God and attend church on Sunday.
What I really, really wanted to be doing was lying in bed, dissociating, queueing up another dose of stimulants, and grinding my nose against my exam notes. But I wanted to be polite. So I told them the main thing God could help me with this weekend was exam prep.
The two of them looked at each other and communicated telepathically (as Mormons do), then informed me, with the cheerful assurance of customer service reps reading from a flowchart, that this was no problem at all. God wears many hats, and is a first-line service worker for the academically distressed.
I considered asking whether He might sit the exam for me, reconsidered on grounds of basic civility, and told them I'd be spending the weekend at the altar of an entirely different kind of book.
By this point the exchange had run unusually long. Normally I dispatch them inside fifteen seconds with a polite "thanks, but I'm not interested." It seems my willingness to engage past the standard cutoff registered as encouragement, because they then asked for my number, so they could send a friendly reminder once exams were behind me.
It pained me to decline such requests from reasonably attractive young women, particularly the taller one. But academics come first. I told them this. I didn't tell them that God has nothing if not time, because that would prompt them to argue that I'm the one with limited time under the sun, with the stakes being my immortal soul. However, I plan, eventually, to outlast Him from inside a Matrioshka Brain, at which point the sun has finite time under me. None of which I said aloud, on the grounds that what I was facing was, functionally, a sales pitch, and they'd been rather polite so far. Nor was a windy, windy bridge the best place for a debate about applied transhumanism.
They took non-disinterest as a green light and pressed further. They volunteered the address of their church and helpfully clarified that they belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Yeah. Couldn't have inferred that from physiognomy alone, let alone the badge. I'm genuinely impressed by how they mass-produce these people from a single template perfected somewhere in Utah: clean shaven, soberly dressed young men; clean skinned, soberly dressed young women, big honkers as standard issue. The willingness to press without quite tipping into overbearing serves them well in respectable sales careers and at the CIA. I'm less impressed by their theology, though I've seen worse from people far less well-groomed.
In fairness, the operation is well-oiled. The median LDS missionary baptizes 3 to 5 converts a year, which is more impressive than I'd thought.
Why do they keep approaching me? On 2/3 of these encounters I've been the only human on the bridge, so it was me or the seagulls, who are Anglican and not open to conversion. Maybe I look like a particularly lost lamb. Maybe I look like a lost lamb because I am undercaffeinated, in which case they are correctly identifying a state I'm authentically in and misattributing it to spiritual rather than circadian causes. In fact, becoming a Mormon would probably make the coffee-problem worse. Maybe a brown Indian man scores well on diversity-funnel metrics. I'm sorely tempted to attend one Sunday just to see what happens, which is, of course, exactly how they get you.
I told them I'd keep it in mind, and that I knew where to find them. Which I do.
I kept walking.
Hm interesting, never heard anyone claim that being well-endowed is standard issue among LDS women. Not when compared to the buxom jewesses in any case. Facially they're very cute, which is what matters most in my book. I'm glad to have such smokin' hot coreligionists as prospective wives and it strengthens my testimony that we are truly members of God's church on Earth.
Do let me know if you have any theological questions about my faith and I would love to be of assistance as I consider myself to be decently read in apologetics.
Good at apologetics? You just told me that it's not common for Mormon ladies to have massive mammaries. That is the biggest downsell you could hand me, though I appreciate the honesty.
(This is mostly a joke. Mostly. I'm fond of beautiful women.)
I suppose that missionaries are explicitly or implicitly sorted for charisma/looks. I wouldn't want to have uggos repping me if I can help it, though I have little choice in the matter. Thank goodness I mostly communicate through text.
For what it's worth, I have met a total of 7 Mormons in-person, at least that I knew were Mormon. 6 of them were missionaries. 1 of them was my driving instructor, who was a genuinely nice person. I'm an atheist, and an anti-theist, except I don't have the time or energy to get it into those debates these days. The pragmatic reason for it is that religious debate rarely achieves anything - the expected value calculation is poor, for me. I suppose that if you must know, I think Mormonism is particularly suspect as a religion because of the well-documented nature of its founding, which makes the implausible historical claims particularly jarring to me. Other, more established religions have the minor fig leaf of being founded so far back in the past that the truth is murkier, even if I still don't believe in them.
Otherwise? Uh, I have no real reason to dislike you guys. No Mormon has ever bothered me beyond asking me for a few seconds of my time. I just don't think I'm a good candidate for conversion, and I don't want to be converted. I like alcohol, nicotine through vapes, and "drugs", the last category apparently inclusive of coffee. I think I'm reasonably familiar with your religious tenets, but if you still want to explain after I've said everything above, be my guest. I genuinely don't mind.
Well hey, it all depends on your frame of reference, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to pursue JAPs prior to my conversion and pivot to courting BYU blondes. I don't think LDS mammaries are any bigger or smaller than the national average, you simply have to know where to look to find the size that works best for you.
I respect your disinterest in litigating a theological debate here and as such I will not actively proselytize, but I want to briefly clarify that as a rule of thumb, every theological debate is more nuanced than a 10 minute video essay or an /r/exmormon post, they don't have the last word on the founding of the church, far from it. Joseph Smith had eleven witnesses affirming that he did have the ancient records he claimed to possess, who stood by that testimony even after apostatizing following a feud and believing that Joseph Smith lost his divine authority in the restoration of the gospel. Disproved anachronisms, authentic Mesoamerican and Ancient Near East correspondences, the war strategies delineated in the Book of Mormon that weren't just poetic accounts of Napoleonic warfare contemporaneous to the time of translation, the duration of the translation process and use of Hebraic poetry all convinced me of the veracity of the Church's supernatural claims. If you are interested in critically engaging with LDS truth claims, anthropologist John L. Sorenson's Mormon's Codex is a fascinating read, my irreligious acquaintances who were not looking to be persuaded share this sentiment.
I don't think one's religious affiliation (or lack thereof) should be contingent on how compatible it is with one's priors. On the contrary, the entire purpose of religion is to instill humility and charity into people through their awareness of a higher power's existence, altering their calculus to one that is not aligned with the irrational and egoistic human nature. God is viewed as an entity possessing eternal intelligence, an asymptote we won't reach at this juncture if you will, and as such we believe our worldly intuition will inevitably serve us wrong and that we are meant to be inconvenienced at times, because ultimately that is what will maximize our well-being in the long term. In my experience, most Christian churches offer doctrines, services, etc. as ancillaries to entice people to join, i.e., you're Catholic because mass is cool. If you're looking for a good community, they fit the bill. Our church by contrast, emphasizes that one joins it because they believe it is truly the very church that Jesus Christ established during his earthly ministry, and has been restored through Joseph Smith.
We do not view coffee as a biohazard. I myself love drinking mock coffee made from barley and chicory and popping some caffeine pills, twice as potent as real coffee 😉 Tiramisu and coffee ice cream are superlative. We believe that upon our baptism, we have covenanted with God to abstain from coffee and tea as a sacrifice, similar to the Jewish abstention to shellfish which is not rooted in health grounds. I don't think it's a coincidence that tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco are all "rituals" served by hosts to guests in hospitality, transcending cultural barriers. There are obvious benefits to not partaking in substances like alcohol, but by refusing them and making ourselves stick out like sore thumbs in the crowd, it's a way of subliminally attracting publicity to our gospel.
As cool as it would be to boast about being a lifelong member descended from the original Scandinavian and English pioneers who migrated to Utah, I am a convert who took 8 months of my precious time to ponder over what the Church offered to me. I myself have long been beholden to coffee, booze, and cigars. After a little cost-benefit analysis, I arrived to the conclusion that if the Church is true, I should be able to find joy and purpose in life without these ephemeral niceties, but rather from the rich company and safety net I have thanks to my coreligionists. I don't think any less of people who don't share my outlook, I view it as a personal matter and they have not entered the covenants I have, there's no contract they are bound by to abstain from any of those substances. I do see benefit in alcohol at an individual level, though I believe strong social and institutional cohesion in a community is an even better alternative to the benefits alcohol does offer. Speaking of which, another reason we abstain from drinking and smoking is because we want to set the right precedents and stand in solidarity with the people who are less capable of drinking and smoking within reasonable measure, "for the weakest of saints" as we say.
I'm pleased to hear that. Our missionaries do tend to be more compassionate and less aggressive in their proselytizing tactics than the Jehovah's Witnesses, as the training programs for missionaries emphasizes not viewing prospective new members as statistics or homogeneous units, or treating their ministry as solely transactional, but rather gaining tangible experience in serving others and leaving one's comfort zone. You will have some inexperienced 18 year olds potentially ask you to get baptized 2 months after visiting with them, but they mean well. If you do decide to attend, I think your boundaries would be absolutely respected if stated clearly, as we absolutely enjoy building rapport with curious people of other backgrounds :)
Thanks for taking the time to explain! I can't productively engage with the specifics, but I appreciate the effort nonetheless.
Hmm. I understand the mindset, but it doesn't really appeal to me. Or at least I like tea and coffee too much to sacrifice it for anyone, even God. If he didn't want me to drink the stuff, he shouldn't have made extracted insecticide so delicious and compatible with my neurotransmitter receptors. Then again, he does have a tendency to make plants you're not supposed to eat, and then putting them right next to you with not so much as a chainlink fence for protection. It's in character.
I do believe that your current explanation is idiosyncratic, in the sense that the typical Mormon wouldn't see caffeine pills as an acceptable way of dodging their nominal religious obligations. I respect you for that, of course. Very Jewish coded, and I like Jews. Anyone who bases their theology around arguing with God and sometimes winning that argument (Rabbi Eliezer?) has my vote.
Out of curiosity, what would happen if someone were to get baptized, and then very conspicuously continue drinking coffee? Polite tutting? The Bishop grabbing you by the collar and throwing you out? A Dyson hand dryer (as opposed to the swarm) being used to un-baptize you? I don't know! It's an academic question, I like drugs in general, for personal consumption and as a peddler for pay. I don't know any Mormon doctors, but I wouldn't want to be one on a night shift.
The Mormon prohibition of tea and coffee is much more akin to the prohibition of Jews eating pork than a prohibition of caffeine. There is official clarification from the church that the prohibition is about hot drinks not caffeine. This was done precisely because of the reasons you state. But it's totally kosher for Mormon teens to drink monster.
Giving you the side eye plus not getting a temple recommend which would likely distress your buxom Mormon bride. Ironically if you weren't baptized but attended church people would tolerate it a lot better. As for Mormon doctors they are free to consume all manner of energy drinks, just no tea or coffee,
Reading around apparently it comes from the Mormon Words Of Wisdom "hot drinks are not for the body or belly", which gets interpreted as tea and coffee. But drinking hot herbal tea is okay, and hot chocolate is okay, and caffeine in non-coffee drinks is okay, but cold tea and coffee aren't, even though the original text doesn't mention tea, coffee or caffeine.
I couldn't find a clear answer whether you can drink cold decaffeinated coffee. Some say yes, some some say no.
The most common hot beverages consumed at the time were coffee and tea (black or green tea that comes from the camellia sinensis plant), hence the use of the term. Coffee and tea are counseled against regardless of their serving temperature as the substance remains the same. Anybody who claims drinking cold coffee is permissible, or that the Word of Wisdom prohibits caffeine or beverages that happen to be hot has poor command of the doctrine.
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