On scenic routes

Today's Wikipedia entry is about as banal as you can get. Utah State Route 128. Wow. They couldn't have even given me a state route with a little mystique, a little mystery, a little hint of danger or some social standing that I could comment on, like a highway in California or some scenic route in the upper reaches of Oregon. I'd even have accepted Mississippi or Alabama, just for the opportunity to commentate on the combination of old American mystique and prejudices that run thicker than blood along the vein-like roads of the Deep South. But no, it has to be a highway in bloody Utah, which is an entire state that I know almost nothing about, excepting possibly that it's mostly a lot of arid plans and long stretches of very flat desert. Oh, and it has Mormons in it.

I suppose I could go into a discussion of my opinions on Mormons, but truthfully I don't know very much about them either, excepting only this very odd cartoon on Youtube - apparently from the 80's or so - warning people against the Mormons. This particular cartoon, however, painted the Mormon religion in a very...eccentric light. I can't remember a great deal of it, but it claimed that Mormons believe Elohim (a.k.a. God) travels around to inhabited planets, elevates their people to divinity through the Holy Word, and then fathers other deities with said inhabitants of those planets. His children then go to other inhabited planets to continue the cycle. Apparently, the reason that things are so bad here is because Jesus and Lucifer, both children of God, ended up getting into a war over who was to have dominion of Earth and the right to elevate the people of Earth into divinity. This war is apparently still ongoing, and sort of casts the division between God and the Devil as a disagreement over property rights.

Needless to say, I thought that the cartoon either misunderstood or misrepresented the Mormon faith in a pretty spectacular sort of way, but my friend TJ, who was born in Salt Lake City, assured me that Mormons have some pretty far out beliefs, and that the cartoon was't really as satirical as it may have initially appeared. Which sort of made me go, "Oooooooookaaaaayyyy..." I suppose I could just pick up the Book of Mormon and made my own judgments, but reading holy texts tends to make my head hurt. I could convince myself that I'm just reading a piece of mythology, but I know that there are people out there who can and do take the most literal interpretation possible of what I'm reading, and when I read something like Genesis and think about that, it kind of makes me want to lose all faith in human rationality.

Hmmmm...I'm feeling oddly muffle-headed today, like my brain were wrapped tightly in a warm, damp towel and I can't quite bring the force of it to bear. I don't think I got quite enough sleep, and I think I'm actually a teeny big hung over as well, which never does my writing any good. I'm going to call it a day for now and hope that my brain is more limber tomorrow.