[tags]religion, belief, mitt romney, romney, election, politics, mormon, mormonism, LDS, [/tags]

There has been a fair amount of discussion of Mitt Romney, U.S. Republican presidential candidate, and his personal beliefs. Some argue that his personal beliefs aught to be treated by the public as, well, personal. Even many people who consider Mormonism to be strange might be defensive of an attack on it with regard to Mitt Romney. Doesn’t the U.S. constitution guarantee freedom of religion? Further, isn’t is true that there is to be no religious test for a person desiring to hold public office in the U.S.? Yes. But I would argue that discussion of Romney’s faith is very important, and it doesn’t take away his right to believe whatever he wants, nor does it take away his right to be president.

The reason a discussion of Romney’s faith is important is that his choice to believe in certain things despite a preponderance of evidence weighed against such things would be indicative of the way that he evaluates evidence and makes judgment. If he his to be the next Decider for the U.S. a discussion of his decision-making skills is critical.

As a person who was a devout Latter -Day Saint (Mormon) until recently, I can assure you that there are a few things that a LDS person chooses to believe in that would indicate a lack of critical thinking and objective evaluation skills and might be grounds for disqualification with regards to the position of the most powerful Decider in the world.

A few of the things that Mitt Romney has decided to believe, and the evidence against such claims:

The Native Americans are in large part descendants of an ancient family who left Jerusalem several hundred years BCE and traveled by ship to the Americas. Extensive DNA research shows that not a shred of Middle-Eastern DNA is to be found among Native American tribes; rather, they can be traced through DNA to Asia.

The Pearl of Great Price contains writings by Abraham and was translated by Joseph Smith after he obtained ancient scrolls from a man traveling through the U.S. with an exhibit of Egyptian mummies and artifacts. The scrolls are in the LDS church’s possession today, and have been examined extensively by Egyptian scholars, all of whom -including the LDS church’s own historians- explain that the scrolls contain nothing more than traditional funeral texts such as The Book of The Dead. Further, the funerary texts come from a time period thousands of years after Abraham supposedly lived.

The Book of Mormon was translated from golden plates by Joseph Smith and is the most true of any book on Earth, containing an accurate depiction of events on the American continent from about 600 BCE to 400CE and proclaiming that Jesus Christ visited the inhabitants of these continents after his crucifixion and resurrection. The book of Mormon describes animals (elephants and horses), types of metal armor, and various agricultural plants that did not exist on the continent at the meridian of time. The book of Mormon also extensively quotes the bible, and does so in the King James Version, which was not developed until about 1000 years after the final prophet in the book of Mormon allegedly buried the record in a hill in present day New York.

I think it is clear that the holding of such demonstrably false beliefs indicates a lack of critical thinking and unbiased reasoning skills.