Richard Dawkins on the Mars Rover and the Mormons

Recently Richard Dawkins tweeted about the Mars Rover landing:

Yes, America STILL manages to reach Mars, despite half the country preparing to elect a man who believes he'll get a planet when he dies

For anyone not sure of what he meant by getting a planet when you die, he was referring to the Mormon belief in "exaltation". I was unaware of this myself until fairly recently, when I came across the YouTube video copied below, that explains it in an entertaining cartoon. I have it on good authority that this is a fair representation of Orthodox Mormon teaching, and is therefore part of what good Mormons are expected to believe.


Now really, I had thought Scientology pioneered way-out beliefs in life on other planets as a religious teaching, but turns out that Mormons preceded them by a good part of a century. Note the very unsubtle justification for racism based on the idea that skin colour is a marker of "spiritual purity". One thing I have to wonder about is Elohim's countless Goddess wives. Elohim was supposed to have been a mortal who became one of countless Gods, so presumably his Goddess wives were once mortal women. What strikes me is the extreme gender imbalance of one male god apparently having billions of wives. Does this mean that there are billions of male gods without wives? Or does it mean that for every billion women who are exalted, only one man will have the same honour? Seems a bit unfair to the male gender to have what seems like a "winner takes all" system. Or is it the case that basic mathematics do not apply in Heaven, and that for every male who becomes exalted into godhood, billions of goddess wives will be supplied for him in some miraculous way? Maybe that's one of the benefits of being a god,  mortal conceptions of "common sense" or logic simply do not apply...

Just an addendum, according to an informal poll, 50% of Mormons do not believe that men have ever been to the moon...