I’m not exactly sure what is going on, but apparently the LDS Church is increasingly worried about this whole atheism thing. Russell M. Nelson just gave a talk to young adults in Massachusetts in which he railed against atheism. This combines with a talk from the October 2009 conference (I didn’t listen to it, but caught mention of it in this Mormon Expression podcast) that decried atheism as well. While the entire text of his talk is missing, I get the distinct impression he is saying that everything about atheism is bad and it will lead to the downfall of the U.S.

So, here’s my guess why this is popping up these days: The LDS Church is losing even more people these days than it did in the early oughts (2000-2009), and people today are telling their bishops (or writing in their resignation letters) that the reason for their decision to leave is that they don’t believe in a god anymore, particularly the Mormon god (you know, Elohim, the embodied, hyper-sexual, uber-polygamist, misogynistic, genocidal maniac who supposedly listens to prayers, but never seems to do anything except cause natural disasters, probably because he’s too busy having sex with his billions of wives). What do you think? What’s with the recent spate of anti-atheist rants by Mormon GAs?

(On a side note, I’m clearly really far out of Mormonism at this point as I have a hard time even understanding why the LDS Newsroom would be proud of something like Nelson’s talk and post it on their blog. If someone I knew spoke this unintelligently about atheism, I’d do my very best to distance myself from him/her. It seems like damage control is more in order than advertising, though they are the ones who broke the news about Bruce Hafen’s gay bashing, and they seemed to think that was good news as well. Someone in the PR department needs to be fired…)