I was raised by Catholics Our parrish regularly sent out sets of weekly collection envelopes. If I remember right they were serially numbered (so they could track each family's contributions?). Most of these religions seem to have *some* fiscal component (like giving your neighborhood Tibetan monk a flaming chicken or something).

Beyond the financial scam, my test for heinousness, cultishness comes down to: how much does the organization do to hide its actual beliefs from outsiders and newcomers; how much effort do they expend to use front organizations to obscure their activities; do they love bomb newcomers but then persecute defectors when they spit out the hook?

For large, well-known organizations, Scientology and the Moonies win the prize. If you are at this moment eating sushi, stop and ask the restaurant where they got it. The Moonies, most likely; sushi keeps deceitful front organizations like CARP alive.

I invite any Mormons who are listening to baptize me and then report back on my progress. I will say that if I was somebody who had any sort of religious feeling, having somebody presume to baptize me would really tick me off. Despicable. How much more insulting and hurtful could some virtuous true believer get?

Jon Krakauer's book _Under the Banner of Heaven_ was nominally about *fundamentalist* Mormons, but I found the long historical sections quite illuminating, quite entertaining.

I guess I find all this stuff weird, puzzling and somewhat creepy now. But one thing I find remarkable is that Mormonism seems to take as many digs and hits from more traditional religionists as from unbelieving no-hopers such as myself. I am thinking it is because Mormonism makes them nervous. Sure, the Catholic Church, for example has all of this strange stuff going on -- resurrections from the dead, Ascensions, water-into-wine scenes, but all of that weirdness is blessed with the patina of age, gilt illuminated manuscripts, awesome cathedrals, jewel-encrusted reliquaries, Swiss Guards, et cetera. And it could be argued that the Catholics had decent script writers.

Mormonism, by contrast, suffers from a certain gauche newness. Nice, big cathedrals, but obviously "new money". And then you have, what, "Moroni"? Was there a writer's strike???

So I think all this makes mainstream religionists nervous because of the sense that, were it not for a certain patina that bestows a respectability of antiquity, all of their sacred happenings would be adjudged 100 percent as strange by the casual observer.

Now the Catholic Church no longer tortures defectors, nor am I aware of them baptizing unwilling Mormons in absentia or setting up sushi front companies. They just spend their time shuffling priests around to parishes with fresh altar boys.