Mormon Duo in Australia Hits Passer-By Just For Fun, Puts Him in a Coma

Remember that story the next time you hear that only a belief in God will tell you what’s right and what’s wrong.

I feel pretty sure they knew it was wrong and their religion was not a factor in their misdeed.

Unless they thought the victim was an Amalekite. Or a Midianite. Or an Amorite. Or a Bashanite. Or any other of the numerous peoples God wants his followers to ruthlessly destroy.

My question is, where is the proof that this was religiously motivated? The driver stated that he wanted to “hit someone” and that he would “hit the next person he sees”. Also, they were intoxicated.

This news reminded of an Eddie Izzard sketch…

“You crazy bugger! You can’t do all this, what are you a Mormon? It’s illegal. What have you been reading? The gospel according to St. Bastard?”

*sigh*
That’s not the point of the story.

“Remember that story the next time you hear that only a belief in God will tell you what’s right and what’s wrong.”
-That- is the point of the story, that religion is supposed to make you a living saint, that no religious person could -possibly- do something bad, amiright?

He didn’t say it was religiously motivated but rather the morals, that according to their religion only believers can have, were not heeded.

This is the exact sort of thing we rail against. If this was a christian article where the author wrote about the “atheists” doing this despicable act we would be quick to point out it’s not the “atheism” that caused him/her/them to do this. Let’s be consistent; otherwise we lose credibility.

We generally do not claim that atheism makes you a better (i.e. more moral) person. That is a claim often made by religions. That asymmetry seems to be tripping everyone up on this.

They are 18 and 21 years old, not kids.
They are adults, and apparently self-identify as Mormons.
They signed up to a Mormon conference, presumably voluntarily.
Until some new information arrives, I will say that it is not unfair to assume these young men, not kids, are religious.

And your comparison with atheists fails, since atheism says that there are no gods, not that those who don’t believe in any gods are, by virtue of that alone, good people.

I doubt they’re Mormons if for no other reason than the Mormon prohibition on drinking. It’s called Word of Wisdom or somesuch. And from my own experience, no matter how much you wind them up, the last thing Mormons will do is punch on with you.

And the fact that they were in Surfers tells me a lot. It’s a rite of passage for young blokes here to go there, get on the piss and then cause trouble. Search on the term “Schoolies Week Gold Coast”. Surfers isn’t Salt Lake City.

Kinghits are a big problem here, and very newsworthy at the moment.

One other thing – the Courier Mail is not the most reliable newspaper you’ll ever read. It’s one of Citizen Rupert’s rags.

Do you know any Mormons? They backslide constantly. There’s a string of jokes about it; Why do you always take 2 Mormons fishing with you? A: If you take only one, he’ll drink all your beer.

It did, but you overlooked it

“…had signed up to attend a Latter-Day Saints conference in Tallebudgera (Queensland‎)”

So yes, they believe in God and more importantly take their religious beliefs seriously enough to attend a conference to discuss such things.

But they and other religious believers feel that the difference between right and wrong only comes from divine direction. Without God, they can’t tell the difference. It is constantly repeated by people trying to denigrate atheists.

They make the phony claim, “Religion forms the basis of our moral thinking. How can you be moral if you don’t believe in God?”

Its psychopath logic. Because they also arguing that they would do evil, wrong things if not for the fear of divine punishment. Not very moral.

“Latter-day Saints State President Asa Smibert said the men were not
pre-registered at the camp and may have been visiting friends.” – From the Article, note that it should be Stake President not State.

This combined with them being drunk should cast serious doubts on the claim that they are Mormon.

Did anyone read the article and notice this: “Latter-day Saints State President Asa Smibert said the men were not pre-registered at the camp and may have been visiting friends.”

The point is that christians constantly declare that no one can be moral without god. They declare that atheists deny god for the sole purpose of living a self-centered immoral life. And on and on and on.

The fact is that christians do not have a corner on the market of morality. Religion is bogus, and does not do one thing to make a person more or less moral than they would be without religion. At times, it gives otherwise moral people a pass at being cruel and judgmental. But it doesn’t make anyone better.

Yeah… Honestly if these were atheists we’d be shouting that it wasn’t a lack of god that motivated these people’s actions based on the info provided. In this case they are a couple of Mormons who happened to do something completely sociopathic. You can tell that at least one of the Mormons isn’t devout by the fact that he was intoxicated.

Absolutely terrible for Mr. Oyoke and what happened to him.

Or just young. They were serious enough to enroll in a conference concerning the faith.

His point isn’t stating that we are trying to show that atheism makes you a better person. He’s saying that we are condemning these people’s actions that occurred because they are Mormon, when if they were atheists at an atheist conference we would say they were just assholes who happened to be atheist. We would say that their atheism has nothing to do with it.

If we are merely trying to show that Christians CAN be immoral don’t we have plenty of better evidence than this story?

I think they were born Mormon and assholes.

i Respect your belief but I’m not sure anyone will take you seriously if you claim to be a Mormon on here. my personal opinion on the christian/ Jewish / Islamic god is that he is flawed as an all loving deity because he created evil. and because evil is used as a scape goat in so many situations i feel as if the concept of evil is malevolent in its self. in human situations when someone commits murder people will jump to the conclusion that the murderer was just evil. that doesn’t fix the problem though because the only source of evil is coming from an all loving deity (with respect to the religion of the murderer). so when we say someone is evil we really mean that we are afraid to deal with the problems surrounding the issue, people are not inherently evil, people make mistakes, people are mislead, people are violent and when there isn’t enough positive emotion, and love and kindness in the feedback loop, you start to see people at their worst. In my honest opinion “evil” is just a lack of compassion

“So can something be moral independent of what God says or because God says so?”

Yes, absolutely something can be moral independent of what God says. Moses even talks about that in Deuteronomy and Paul in Romans.

We make covenants with God and with those covenants come responsibilities to us, which include moral directives that we may not otherwise choose to follow, as well as giving commands that are moral due to the covenant relationship and not necessarily otherwise.

A lot of Mormons do stuff they’re not supposed to like premarital sex, drinking coffee. I remember one Mormon in high school who dyed his hair, went to prom and openly declared he was spending the night out with his girlfriend and would take his punishment later.

What is wrong with dying his hair and going to prom?

I don’t see your third paragraph’s point in the blog post at all.

If we are trying to show that people who believe in a god can be immoral, don’t we have much better and much more prominent examples than this? These are just TWO GUYS in an entire sea of a certain type of believers (Mormons).

If there was a philosophy that showed people demonstrably living moral lives, and then two people who subscribed to that philosophy did something like this, I would be completely unconvinced. They would be outliers.

If I want to show how immoral Mormons could be, anecdotes like this would be the last place I’d turn. I’d rather talk about some tenet of their faith such as the one that states BLACK PEOPLE ARE EVIL that they only have just renounced!

What do you mean by that?

In a nutshell, deriving morality from non-religious, reality-based sources.

If they did something not-moral, they weren’t “True Mormons™” (or “True ‘insert sect name here’™”) – and that makes it somehow NEVER any religion’s fault. That’s a pretty ingenuous argument.

I wouldn’t say that at all. Morality is like light, something that we can perceive and it exists independent of our perception of it. Further, Jesus did what was necessary to be essentially the source of that light, sort of like the Astronomicon emmenating from the Golden Throne in 40K.

They paid for a day at the conference, they’ll get a seminar on criminal law.

Morality is like light, something that we can perceive and it exists independent of our perception of it.

That sounds like it could be reality-based, kinda… outside of the idea that it exists outside of minds.. that it isn’t a learned/decided set of rules/behaviors in thinking beings.

The problem is that religion is often peddled as a medicine that makes you ‘good.’ When it doesn’t work, then they keep saying that the people didn’t take enough of it. So I rather resent being told to do or believe something that refuses to take responsibility for its ineffectiveness.

Guidance only helps if the person listens to and follows the guidance. The claim is not that one becomes better simply by claiming to be Mormon, but that one becomes better by doing.

So pointing out an example of two people who may or may not actually even be Mormon, based on the statement by the stake president, doing things that are directly contrary to what the religion teaches and in a place where they shouldn’t have been in based on what they had nominally signed up for really isn’t a data point for any counterclaim.

Yes, these assholes are Mormon, and they did something horrible, but why attack the church itself over this. They obviously broke at least two major tenets of their religion. The other church members in the story got the victim medical attention and convinced the perpetrators to turn themselves in. Isn’t this how we want religious people to act when one of their own does something like this? Aren’t we fighting to separate the action of the individual from that of his group?

According to the Newcastle Herald the bloke that threw the punch is from Acacia Ridge in Brisbane, and his mate’s from Wilmot in Sydney. That makes me reconsider my view that they probably aren’t especially religious. Both areas have a fair number of evangelical/pentcostal congregations – and around Wilmot at least you see the Mormons trundling around looking for converts amongst the Islander communities.

Does your shire include a nice hobbit hole? Or do I have to go all the way to New Zealand?

They didn’t turn themselves in. They tried to do a runner and were arrested.

Try reading Roy’s post again. He is saying not that Mormonism made them bad, he is saying that their belief didn’t make them good.

That is a major tenets of the religion. It is called the Word of Wisdom and it condemns alcohol, tobacco, and “hot drinks” (coffee and tea, but often extended to caffeine in general), amongst other things.

I understand what he’s saying. Again, this is one data point that could be an outlier. There are much better examples of showing people that a Mormon’s belief does not make them good than this story which could easily be incidental.

I think we’re at cross purposes. I don’t think for a minute that religious belief equates to goodness, nor do I have any regard for the Mormon faith. I was merely skeptical at first that these blokes were in fact Mormons. But having learned a bit more about the incident I may have been wrong in thinking that.

I might say too that there’s a lot of background and context to this story that the majority of posters here, being American, are obviously unaware of. Just like I’m not aware of much of the context of stories from the US.

Now that’s an interesting topic in it’s own right, but having finished work for the night I’m about to pack up my gear and head home, so we might leave that discussion for later if you don’t mind.

So morality does not come from divine direction, but it is like light and Jesus is the source. Contradicting drivel.

“No true Scotsman,” a classic, fallacious refuge for the devout.

No.

Here in the South, the joke is the same, substitute Baptist for Mormon

Or that the church is engaging in some hasty damage control by dissassociating the Mormon church from the actions of this pair. It wouldn’t be surprising if this was the case.

I dont know any mormons but i have lived and worked with many muslims, particularly in south east asia, who tell you how they are good muslims, pray 5 times a day etc etc, but i never met a single one who didnt drink alcohol when given a chance. So these guys may identify as mormons but that doesnt mean they wouldnt possibly be drunk.

There is a thing called the No True Scotsman logical fallacy you may wish to learn about.

the evil inherent in attacking a random stranger for no reason is actually relative?

I… missed that point?
I thought that -was- my point.

I grew up in Hawaii, and as a young child found it entertaining to watch jellyfish melt on the hot sidewalk. Until a man stopped and told me that such was a very cruel act to do to a jellyfish. I asked my mother about it and she confirmed that these were living creatures and that it would probably be seen as cruel by most people. That was why I stopped. How many bugs have we maliciously killed over the course of most of our lives? Insects are relatively cruel…wouldn’t you say? And they might bite us…so smash ’em or poison them, eh? What would happen if the law against the murder of humans was removed?
In regard to the young men that decided to beat up someone for fun…it’s actually not that surprising as many would probably do the same if no such laws existed. That was my point. I wouldn’t want to live or maybe even couldn’t live in anarchy. It’s not really the beliefs in gods or religions that keep each of us at bay…it’s our agreements toward order. Else most of us wouldn’t survive, as is proven over and over again by our desires to inflict horror and absorb it through whatever means we have available.

Of course it is. Hitler in probability believed himself to be righteous, etc. Those young men wanted to beat the hell out of someone…so it’s relative to their feelings, their emotions. They or he perhaps even felt a sense of relief once they beat up that man. That may sound totally insane, and it sure as heck could have been detrimental to any one of us if it was us…so we generally see it as “evil”. It’s relatively evil. Detriment in that sense is evil…and benefit or the benefit of say…the relief or feelings of happiness to that young man or men…is experienced as “good” to them…not us…but to them…yes. It’s relative to the person…as each of us can experience good and evil relative to our array of emotions.

I’m glad to hear they’re likely to take it seriously. I’m tired of people getting off because of a variety of reasons that had nothing to do with the crime: religion, sports star, affluenza, victim blaming, etc.

The problem is that then pretty much nobody actually is Christian then.

This argument was anticipated and well answered by the illustration of the wheat and the weeds. There have always been true Christians, however they were overwhelmed and completely obscured by by the false and would not be discernible again until the time of the harvest by their fruitage.

http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/l/r1/lp-e?q=matt+13%3A24-30
http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/l/r1/lp-e?q=matt+13%3A36-43

Jesus said many will claim him as Lord, yet be told he never knew them because of their lawless actions.
http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/l/r1/lp-e?q=matt+7%3A21-27

This argument was anticipated and well answered by the illustration of the wheat and the weeds. There have always been true Christians, however they were overwhelmed and completely obscured by by the false and would not be discernible again until the time of the harvest by their fruitage.

http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/l/r1/lp-e?q=matt+13%3A24-30
http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/l/r1/lp-e?q=matt+13%3A36-43

Jesus said many will claim him as Lord, yet be told he never knew them because of their lawless actions.
http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/l/r1/lp-e?q=matt+7%3A21-27

In this thread I think we’ve agreed that Terry isn’t calling out these men’s actions as a result of their Mormonism or belief in a god. So we are not criticizing the Mormon faith when we are criticizing their actions.

My big deal is that it seems to me that these guys did something deplorable, and they only happen to be Mormon. We have an absolute arsenal of deplorable things that people who believe in a god have done, and the religion seems completely unrelated/incidental.

I don’t think I have much further to add. I’m not going to act as a policeman and say how related to their religion it has to be to be noteworthy enough to blog here. I mostly think someone (like me) may misunderstand the message Terry has done. And if it’s a religious person, we will seem hypocritical.

A couple of nice Mormon boys came to my door recently. This neighbourhood seems to get lots of people touting this or that religion, so I was getting a bit sick of them, it’s like talking to robots, programmed to respond in a particular manner. I was a bit errr…honest with the Mormons, calling their prophet a crook and their belief system a nonsense and stating that their temple buildings look like over the top wedding cakes. They were very upset! The bigger one came up to me close and threatened hell or some other nonsense. I felt like he was trying to restrain himself and I felt quite threatened. I’m sure the bulk of them are that sort of crossed eyed deluded and quite harmless. I did locate an address in the state capital and sent off a short note with their names and requesting no further visits. No response yet, maybe I should’ve included 10% of something.

Onyekachi Okoye is a Nigerian name. I wonder if race was involved?

“This story is about the image of religious people, in this case Mormons, as paragons of virtue, that a religious person could never do something like this.”

Yes.

Please point out to me where I say this was “religiously motivated.” What a useless (and untrue) way to frame the discussion.

Also, what “driver”?

I am sorry Terry Firma. I did not mean to imply that you had attacked them in your article, though it is easy to get that impression given that I didn’t post it as a reply. I had meant that for some of the commenters.

Sorry folks, WH40K references in religious conversations always get an upvote.

I’m not here to defend Christians but any serious Christian making the argument “you need the bible to be moral” would presumably argue that (a) something in the nature of the bible’s teachings, or example of Jesus, GENERALLY makes followers moral or (b) the fear of god GENERALLY makes them moral. Or something like that.

If you want to debate Christians on those points then go ahead. But two rogue Christians have nothing to do with that debate. It’s mere point scoring.

Race is often a factor in violent assaults. Alcohol removes people’s inhibitions and often uncovers racial tensions. Racism never goes away, it always lurks beneath the surface. It’s human nature. Stomping on a victims head is almost guaranteed to involve racism. But you wouldn’t know it from our politically-correct media.

Mormonism is as bad as atheism. It leads into deception in the name of their religious fallacy, as atheism would lead you in deception in the name of the atheist irreligious fallacy. The divide is not “religion vs. atheism. “The divide is “truth vs. deception,” or more specifically Jesus Christ vs. all else, religious or godless.

To quote Christ himself in John 12: “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father, except through me.” And as the apostles put it in Acts 4, “There is no other name under heaven by which we can be saved,” meaning Jesus Christ. Or a quote by apostle Paul in 1 Timothy 2: “There is only one mediator between man and God, the man Jesus Christ.”

Joseph Smith was as badly deceived as Karl Marx. Remember next time you are about to do something stupid – only belief in God through Jesus Christ will help you discern right from wrong.

Regardless of the actions of some who claim Christianity, but disown it by their actions, what would life be like if everyone strove to follow these Bible guidelines?
(Ephesians 4:25- 32) put away deceit, each one of you speak truth with his neighbor, Let the one who steals steal no more; rather, let him do hard work, doing good work with his hands, so that he may have something to share with someone in need. Let a rotten word not come out of your mouth, but only what is good for building up. Put away from yourselves every kind of malicious bitterness, anger, wrath, screaming, and abusive speech, as well as everything injurious. But become kind to one another, tenderly compassionate, freely forgiving one another just as God also by Christ freely forgave you.
(Ephesians 5:28,29) “Husbandsought to be loving their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself, for no man ever hated his own flesh; but he feeds and cherishes it, as the Christ also does the congregation. Nevertheless, also, let each one of you individually so love his wife as he does himself.”

Yes, those are rather nice. But if we thought the book as a whole was great, what would life be like if we followed Timothy’s injunction to women to sit down and shut up, Jesus’s injunction to beat slaves, Ephesian’s injunction to slaves to “obey their earthly masters”, Jesus’s injunction to love him more than our families and break up our families, Paul’s injunction towards celibacy, and other horrific verses?

No one says everything in the Bible is bad. However, if you stack the nice verses in one pile and the evil ones in another, the evil stack is much higher. Thus, on balance, it’s not a good book, and the good sayings in it are not outweighed by the bad ones.

I don’t want to debate christians. Debate assumes that both parties may have a valid position on a topic, and something worthwhile to say about it. As far as I’m concerned christians don’t have either.

Verses you present as “evil” deserve explanation. Paul said single men and women can give more focus to preaching the Good News. Rather than requiring celibacy he said “let each man have his own wife and each woman have her own husband.”

http://tinyurl.com/lcsm7m4

Suppose your spouse or relatives gave you an ultimatum to renounce atheism or they would disown you? You would likely stick to what you believe is right. Same with someone who became Christian despite opposition from Jewish, Greek or Roman family members. That is the sense in which beliefs are chosen over family. It isn’t the atheist or Christian in those cases who break up the family, but intolerant members might if they go through with their threat. In fact, a Christian is to remain with their unbelieving mate.

http://tinyurl.com/lq63pt6

My friend Luis’ wife of 3 years divorced him last month for becoming one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. He is a mild, sweet man who tried to make things work and is saddened, but keeping positive.

The slaves who are figuratively beaten are evil Christian stewards who are supposed to take care of Christ’s flock, but rather exploit and abuse them. I would think you would be happy about this. This is an illustration, not a command.

http://tinyurl.com/mdo24tm

Paul did not take it upon himself to decide whether people of the nations who became Christians should follow the requirements from the Mosaic law. He referred the matter to the Apostles and leadership in Jerusalem and was instructed along with others to relate their decision. http://tinyurl.com/lshgze2