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Both are long dead but they have a base of people who see these guys as the perfect men.
Trust me my personal list of conmen is a lot longer but these two come to mind near the top really.
| Joseph smith | 7 | |
| Muhammad | 12 |
If you tell someone a bunch of nonsense and they believe it, that's not really conning them.
The willfully stupid would just glom onto some other bullshit.
That's a difficult choice and I can think of many other conmen and conwomen just as bad.
WARNING: I'm about to vent about something which has nothing to do with the original post
I'd have to choose Joseph Smith out of those two. I've never been particularly bothered about mormons except when they're being annoying at my front door, but I recently discovered my strange landlord is a convert to mor(m)onism. I've been wondering for years why he doesn't pay for repairs on the property, given that he could claim them as a tax deduction, but now it makes sense: one tenth of his income (including my rent, which feels weird) goes to the church.
At least I have an explanation of why he's done nothing about repairs after a kitchen fire more than 3 months ago; repairs to the tv antenna which blew down in a storm resulting in me losing all tv reception for the last 3 months; fixed a security light and a phone line which he damaged when he actually started one repair back in May or agreed to pay for an investigation into what caused the fire. He probably reckons it was one of those invisible satanic demons mor(m)ons believe inhabit the earth.
Please, no suggestions of what I could do legally: I'm scared that if I go that route he won't renew my lease next year, the rental situation here being out of control for people on low incomes.
I'm also aware from googling that one of the important tenets of the mor(m)on church is that they're supposed to abide by the laws of the land they live in, but I haven't yet worked out a way of pointing out to him that he's contravening the tenancy laws.
Thanks if you've read this far: I really needed to get that off my chest!
It's a toss-up, but I'd give the title to Smith on a technicality.
I'm sure Mohammed believed that the stuff coming out of his mouth when he was doing his freestyle rap was from Allah. (Interestingly, the Koran says that the first time he saw a vision of an angel and starting spewing stuff, he thought he might be going insane, but his wife convinced him he wasn't. She was wrong; he was right.)
As for Joseph Smith, in 1826 he was found guilty of "glass-looking" for the purpose of deceiving, so he was a convicted con man. (He claimed to be able to find buried treasure - for a fee - by putting a rock with mystical powers in his hat then sticking his face into the hat and seeing visions.) His pathetic defence was that he wasn't defrauding anyone, since he had real powers, although there's never been any evidence that he actually found anything.
This trial happened after Smith's first claimed vision of Moroni, and before he claimed to have found the gold plates which disappeared just as mysteriously as they appeared. There's clear evidence that he plagiarised chunks of the Book of Mormon from previously published books, and he must have known he was reworking the words of others when he wrote down his "translation" of the "golden tablets".
So, one was deluded, and the other deliberately set out to deceive. Smith clearly was a con man, but can someone be a con man when he's deranged enough to believe that the crap he spews comes directly from God?
Joseph Smith, but just because out all the silly stories that religious idols tell, his is by far the most ridiculous.
I'd say L Ron Hubbard is worse, and I do clarify him as a con man, because he made people pay to learn his bullshit. Sure, Church members in other faiths tithe, but he sold ridiculous books and tapes.
Hubbard got so lost in his own psychosis that he started to believe his own BS, but there's clear evidence Scientology has been a profit-making project from the very start. Hubbard dressed it up in a load of "save yourself, save the world" guff, but he knew he was making shit up as he went along.
Hubbard was a crap junior naval officer, a crap husband and father, a crap pulp science fiction writer, a huckster of crap cod-psychology, and just generally a crappy excuse for a human being.
I was just choosing between the ones in the example, I didn't really think about anyone else.
Hubbard would be up there though, I agree that his nonsense was extra ridiculous
Mary Kay is an American "multi-level marketing" scheme selling cosmetics.
In other words, it's a pyramid scam where the people at the top get incredibly rich by promising that new recruits can make a lot of money by recruiting new sales people and taking a cut of what they sell.