is headed for No. 1 on the bestseller list.
I don't think it means much. Right wing think tanks buy up these protofascist publications in bulk and distribute them free or at cost--although I can see where his audience, whom I suspect are not voracious readers, might make an exception to their rule of thumb that books are "tools of the devil" (Thank you, Max Shulman, circa 1961).
Once it's free at the library or a giveaway at a Half-Price Book sale, I might skim through it...(I know it's quite morbid--it's the intellectual equivalent of fascination with the grislier sequences of CSI or Bones)
Interestingly, skeptic Martin Gardner wrote a book comparing Mormonism to the Urantia book. I skimmed through Gardner's book & it seemed pretty convincing--but I'm a lot more tolerant of high weirdness than Gardner. Harold Bloom's book, Omens at the Millenium (something like that) proposed that the U.S. was a gnostic country, founded on gnostic beliefs. I think you have to stretch the meaning of gnostic beyond recognition to make the case, but Bloom's account was--well, interesting. Claims that Mormonism and Southern Baptist fundamentalism are the two paradigmatic American gnostic religions. Scholars of ancient Christianisty have long debated whether or not gnosticism was even a useful term to describe the welter of beliefs in the 1st & 2nd century A.D.
Y'all probably know, but I should have mentioned that Beck is a Mormon.
It will be interesting to see if Beck throughs his support to Mitt Romney in 2012.
I don't think I've ever met an individual Mormon that I disliked on a personal level, but if that happens, I'm opting for full-throated paranoia about the Mormon hierarchy.
R.
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