On Faith and Mitt Romney

Richard Dawkins, a renowned evolutionary biologist, is the guest columnist in the Washington Post's On Faith series. His contribution takes a number of controversial positions: on the ethics of lying, he says that politicians have a responsibility to lie about their personal lives. He's a bit wacky.

Dawkins goes on to excoriate Mitt Romney for his religious beliefs:

Mitt Romney, as a self-confessed Mormon, has stated his beliefs about the Second Coming as follows: "Christ appears in Jerusalem, splits the Mount of Olives and stops that war to kill the Jews. We also believe that over the 1,000 years that follow, the millennium, he will reign from two places: that the law will come from one place, Missouri; the other will be in Jerusalem." The thing about Missouri, you see, is that it is the site (I’m not joking) of the Garden of Eden. Mitt Romney apparently believes that the Book of Mormon is the dictated word of God. The fact that Joseph Smith wrote it in 16th century pseudo-biblical English although he was a 19th century man marks him out – along with much else -- as a charlatan, yet Mitt Romney apparently is gullible enough to be taken in by the scam. After Smith “translated” them, the gold tablets containing God’s words conveniently shot off to Heaven before anybody else could examine them. If a man is gullible enough to believe that, would you trust him to negotiate on your country’s behalf in the tough chancelleries of the world?

I have my misgivings about Mormon theology, but I think that equally tough questions should be asked of people like Tom Tancredo, Mike Huckabee, and other Christian conservatives. A fundamentalist and literalist interpretation of the Christian bible is equally problematic to a lot of voters, if not as mysterious to them as Mormonism.