Turns out the people who'll believe a 19th-century conman's story about reading magic plates from a magic bag using a magic rock are likely to believe other pitches.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've been breaking the site guidelines by repeatedly posting unsubstantive, snarky comments. We've asked you multiple times to stop. Please fix this.
I'm not aware of any mystical properties ascribed to the plates. They're just ordinary plates of gold.
> from a magic bag
I'm not aware of any bag, especially one with mystical properties. Joseph says the plates were retrieved from an ordinary stone box buried in an ordinary hill, not a "magic" bag.
You're welcome to be critical, but this is just disingenuous.
Likewise, I think you would be more forthcoming in admitting that while LDS does not believe there are any "mystical properties" ascribed to the plates, there were indeed "mystical properties" ascribed to the glasses, the Urim and Thummim, used by Joseph Smith to translate them.
But now that other people have flagged the comment it's not obvious what I selectively replied to.
But yes, if you're the sort of person who consciously joins a niche religion in adulthood, you're probably the same sort of person who will believe other pitches.
Edit: A few times in my life someone has given me a pitch, someone I knew, but it never seemed to use "position" as leverage, and there are policies against such things I've heard announced at various times, like an ongoing policy against using membership lists for marketing, buildings for business ventures, etc. But it's not surprising that if someone joins such a business they are asked to pitch to those they know.
You might counter that religious beliefs shift more easily than sexual orientation. The prevailing narrative used to be that sexual orientation is totally static. It was useful and effective to frame things this way in the fight for gay rights; it asked, "Why punish someone for something they can't control?" But now that we're at a point in history where every brand under the sun is comfortable running Pride marketing campaigns, what was once an open secret is now more out in the open. LGBT folks have become more comfortable acknowledging that there is indeed fluidity and spectrum when it comes to sexual preferences, orientation, and gender identity. That doesn't mean that a person's orientation can be forcibly changed, but there is an acknowledgement that preferences can sometimes change organically, and we see that with religion as well.
That said, hitching one's identity to unfalsifiable beliefs ("there is nothing science can't understand", "this book is the word of god", etc.) is immature and stunting. It's human nature, but that doesn't make it worthy of respect or celebration. We should strive to get comfortable with the frightening uncertainty in our mental models of the world.
Therefore, insulting religion or irreligion isn't inherently problematic in my book. (Coincidentally, offending people is a terrible way of encouraging them to be more open-minded, but that's a different question.)
(Hint: after thoroughly ripping on Mormons for almost the whole episode, almost as effectively as they ripped on Scientology and Tom Cruise in the earlier episode "Trapped in the Closet", the episode takes a 90 degree turn and ends up being essentially a rebuttal to your comment).
The turn at the end was saying that all that doesn’t matter. They went off perpendicular to where they had been going, not opposite of where they had been heading.