I was just laughing to myself reading the mormon.org thread, and thinking about how the ex/post/former-mormon movement is doing quite well without using a pr firm (much less, two pr firms).

Don't the GA's get it? If your product can't be sold without wrapping it in attractive LIES, then SOMETHING must be wrong with it!

Well just think how well they'd do if they DID employ a PR firm? There are several PR firms out there who'd do the work pro bono.

That means they'll do some real 'pro' work if you throw them a bone, once in a while. Or something like that! ;o))

Joking apart, that might not be a bad idea...

taste of their own medicine

The benefits of Mormonism are imaginary, at best.

As an exmo, you don't pay 10% of your income to the LDS Church. Everytime you get a paycheck, there is no doubt that you're 10% better off financially than you would have been as a devout Mormon. A devout Mormon subtracts 10% of his/her paycheck and gives it to a guy named Tommy Monson, who claims to know better what God wants to do with it. Supposedly "blessings" will come as a result. But it's anybody's guess what those will be or if they'll be or if they'll even arrive during this lifetime.

As an exmo, you get sick. You don't get a priesthood blessing. And then, usually, you get better on your own or with the help of a doctor.

As a devout mormon, you get sick. You DO get a priesthood blessing. And then, usually, you get better on your own, or you don't, and then you have to go to a doctor. In contrast to the exmo situation, you have to think a lot about that priesthood blessing and come up with interesting theories as to how it maybe made a difference. An exmo can just concentrate on getting well.

As an exmo, you can use your Sundays productively and/or restfully. As a devout Mormon, your Sundays are always planned out for you by your church and some of the Sunday busywork is so intense that you also have to spend your Saturdays working on your pre-Sunday busywork.

As an exmo, you don't have to spend 3-5 hours a week doing janitorial service for a Church corporation that could hire full-time janitors if it didn't put first priority on investing vanity real estate projects. As a devout Mormon, you get to spend hours of your precious free time scraping other people's boogers off of pew bottoms at the local church.

As an exmo, you don't have to give yourself migraine headaches trying to understand why God would think that secret handshakes, green aprons, funky underwear and a movie whose most memorable line is "we will go down" are soooo important that special, expensive buildings must be built around the world to give special honor to those things and that a complex system of interviews and rules must be developed to ensure that only the most faithful Mormons can enter those buildings to play with the handshakes, aprons and funky underwear and watch the "we will go down" movie.

Well, I could go on. But DEFINITELY exmo-ism sells itself. Mormonism is a hard, hard sell--even with an army of 60,000 or so full-time missionaries and two extremely expensive PR firms.

Any battle between mo and exmo will end in our favor.

The Mormons have deep pockets. They have political clout. And the church has public relations firms working around the clock. They have apologists writing essays that are both printed and sent out digitally to the internet. They have hordes of people who will work for free. They can canvas vast suburban regions of semi-conservative suburbanites. They have meetings with satellite hookups for disbursing propaganda. They have armies of missionaries around the globe. They've got a huge printing business in the Deseret Press. And they have a lot of devoted members.

But we're funny.

What's not to like?

But we could wreck it with an ad campaign in which they sent a professional photographer and took glamour shots of us doing archery, looking through a telescope, petting goats and then yelling "...and I'm an Ex-Mormon."

Then we would get the same weird looks and rising weirdness stats they get. Because no one calls out on the bus "I'm not weird." Suddenly it comes to me--they must use that same PR firm that did Christine O'Donnell's campaign ad that worked so well:

"I am Christine O'Donnell, and I am not a witch."


Anagrammy

+1

...They just don't know it. Worse, they want people to take them seriously.

Imagine that, there are grown adults who travel for miles to enter into a building, just so that they can get dressed up in a costume consisting of a white polyester jumpsuit, a green apron, a floppy baker's hat tied to a funky toga-like sash thing draped on their shoulder and, under it all, they're wearing tops and bottoms of officially "sacred" underwear that can only be purchased through Church-authorized outlets. Then they spend about an hour practicing secret handshakes and watching a movie about two guys who keep saying they "will go down" ---- and they want the world to take them seriously!

Now that's seriously funny!!

But Mormons aren't funny ha ha, they're funny strange.

We are the only true board....all Gods have ordained us and we were valiant in the pre exsistence to do this work....The first shall be last ( mormons) the last shall be first (exmormons), we saw a bright light over our heads......realization we were tricked into a cult....