Have you ever noticed that all of the Abrahamic religions get creepier and more far fetched the later in time they were conceived of? It started, of course, with Judaism. Its adherents beliefs were fairly simple: There was just one god who had no real name that anyone could pronounce, but Yaweh was close enough. There were lots of do's and don'ts, most of which sound rather bizarre or silly and many centered around what you can and can't eat. But there was no heaven or hell and everybody was pretty much just going to go to an afterlife where they would be cold and thirsty for eternity. The weirdest part of the religion is that God created the earth and universe in six days and he then allowed his first human creation to be tempted by a talking snake. Mostly, however, the Jews believed this to be symbolic.
Then came the Christians. Their god was actually a Jew on Earth, but he came to bring a new contract with the people, since the original one wasn't working out so well. It's called the New Covenant. Christians believe in three separate gods, but they are all connected somehow to make just one. It's something like three different colors of Play Doh that you squish together to make one clay horse. They also believe in the talking snake and the six days of Creation that the Jews told in their holy book. But whereas Jews knew is was metaphorical, some Christians decided it must be literal. The bottom line is, if you don't believe that Eve was tempted by a talking snake, ate a forbidden fruit, and thus sent sin spewing out over the entire human race that was to come, and if you don't believe that God sent himself to Earth so he could have himself killed as a human sacrifice to himself to erase the sin that he allowed to be spewn, then you're going to the hell that he created for you.
A few hundred years later a guy named Muhammed came along and decided that the Christians got it wrong, because they chose the wrong Abrahamic descendant to base their religion on. Muhammad picked another one of the original 12 and called his new religion Islam and its followers Muslims. So he married a young girl of six and had sex with her when she was nine. Then he married several other women but told his followers they could only marry four at a time. He also said that God's name was Allah, but you can't draw a picture of him. You also can't draw a picture of Mohammed, or else a fellow Muslim can kill you. Women don't have rights and they must cover themselves from head to toe in public so that the men can't lust after them and rape them. But if you kill yourself while also killing a blasphemer you will go to heaven where you'll be greeted by 72 virgins - no mention of where they virgins came from or if they are consenting now.
But if that wasn't strange enough for a religion, in the 1800s a shyster named Joseph Smith told everyone that he had found some gold plates in a cave. He translated them with God's help into the Book of Mormon, which tells of the adventures of Jesus Christ in America! Mormons believe things like magic underwear is all you need to keep yourself protected from, well, everything sinful. They used to believe that you could marry many women, but now they don't believe that anymore because the U.S. government scolded them over taxes and morality - so U.S. Government: 1, God: 0. Speaking of God, they believe he lives on a planet orbiting a star named Kolob. They also believe that people of a different species live on the moon, but they are similar to our Quakers. And they believe that all non-Mormons will go to hell unless a Mormon prays them out. Beyond that, they just believe pretty much what their predecessors, the Christians and Jews believe.
So it appears that each religion sort of builds on the ones that came before it and adds as much silly nonsense as they can think of to the beliefs that already existed. I can't wait to see what comes next. Oh yeah, the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Praise be his noodly appendages.
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