Just a reminder for y'all, the BOM plot, for 1000 years of history, is based on this premise:

1) people with dark skin used to have white skin, but god turned their skin dark because they were "bad.".
2) god will happily turn dark skinned peoples' skin white again if they're "good "

This is a racist and bigoted of a story line. Worthy of open challenge as to what it says about those who claim that it is of divine origin.

Sometimes folks get caught up in DNA, steel, horses, Spaulding Manuscript stuff and overlook this central premise that clearly shows it is pure and unadulterated bullsh*t.

RG

Good point. I was also always bothered by the narrative treating an entire civilization as if it was populated with identical twins. The entire population became evil or good in a matter of months, ridiculous. And then they became uniformly wicked after two years got uniformly punished and became uniformly good again e.t.c. Stupid! That is not how history works. Politics was just as messy and complicated 2000 years ago as it is today. Real conversions of entire populations took decades even under absolute rule , massive missionary campaigns and brute force. In the BoM it's just about an annual occurence. Perhaps they just mistook the tan from the summer with evil!

And then of course there is the story of Nephi, which teaches us that, when the voices in your head tell you to kill the right thing to do is whip out the nearest knife or sword and hack somebody's head off. How could that possibly go wrong?

Right. He was passed out drunk too. Why couldn't he just leave him there? I know why...God's ways are higher than our ways...NONE of it makes sense, some is offensive, but it must be true and we'll understand it in the next life. Why didn't God kill him if he really needed him dead.

Not to mention that we have quotes from early leaders that say that their skin would turn light if baptized...that in fact they had seen their skin turn a shade lighter. We can know with a surety that all these converts in Africa and South America aren't truely converted...if they were, they would be white.

If you are good, you will be wealthy. If you are bad, you will be technologically disadvantaged, and may very well die in a huge earthquake. But if you don' t die in an early gruesome death, you will prevail anyway because the good people eventually go bad as well.

This.

I told you guys about being at a Youth Conference, right before I left, where the bishops of the stake got up on stage in suits and recited parts of a pre-written speech. One of them said, then repeated, the following "If you are righteous, you will prosper in the land - If you are righteous, you WILL prosper in the land." At the time, it struck me how profoundly Mormons equate prosperity with righteousness and that is due to the Book of Mormon. In fact, the theme of the conference was Lehi's Journey. If you aren't rich, if you aren't prospering, if you can't even give the appearance of prosperity - you must be wicked, like unto the Lamanites.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/26/2013 09:36AM by CA girl.

...that material goods unimportant, to give away all you had and follow him, and that it was difficult for the rich to get into heaven.

If the BoM is supposed to be a second witness of Jesus, then why does the doctrine disagree?

Oh, because the Smiths believed there was a magical way to force God to make you rich. Because escaping poverty was one of the family's major concerns. Because JS knew getting rich quick appealed to many of the struggling people he knew.

To me, the light skins/dark skins thing was just a variation on white hats/black hats. It was an easy way to label the good and bad guys -- and to fit Indians into the story.

I am curious about the brief change in 1840 from "white and delightsome" to "pure and delightsome". What was the motivation for this change? Were there any early native American converts whose skin had not lightened in the several years following their conversion? Alternatively, when were the first black converts made?


http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Mormon/Textual_changes/%22white%22_changed_to_%22pure%22

P.S. It is interesting that FAIR can only say that it was "probably" Joseph Smith that made the change from "white" to "pure" in 1840.

Joseph Smith's younger brother Don Carlos Smith and his associate Ebenezer Robinson were the printers for the 1840 edition. Smith's own brother Don Carlos disapproved of polygamy.

Perhaps Robinson and Don Carlos were the culprits who changed the word from white to pure. If Joseph had initially based polygamy on marrying Indians and turning them white through their mixed race children, what better way to strike out against that Indian polygamy revelation and Joe's sexcapades that followed from it than by changing the words of the Book of Mormon from white to pure?

Good info...thanks!

Oh, c'mon, we ALL know that the BoM doesn't literally mean they were cursed with a dark skin, even though it literally says they were cursed with a dark skin.

You guys need to prayerfully study the BoM with a careful reading of the text, so that you can read between the lines and understand these easily understood plain and simple literal non-literal Eternal Truths...

While this is certainly a disturbing aspect of the BoM, I don't think it qualifies as a central premise. To me, a central premise of a book is one that is repeated over and over again.

Clearly the central premise of the BoM is: "And it came to pass"

I remember being taught that the purpose of the BofM was to be witness in the latter days to the remnant seed of Lehi - in other words, the Lamanites. As you pointed out, the Lamanites were cursed with black skins and that's why all the Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Inuits, etc. are all brown.

Racism on a global scale. Yep, most correct book on Earth....

I was watching the YBU channel yesterday. Four venerable and elevated grown men, PhD's mind you in there field, white, and all with that GA like drawal down to perfection, were discussing this very issue - which can be found in 2nd Nephi.

They glowed how "marvelous" and wonderful their mormon God is in this section. I couldn't help but think how ridiculous, pretentious, racist, and robotic like they sounded as they yipped for attention amongst themselves in trying to explain pure unadulterated racism. One clown explained "Filthy" as being "oh the Lord is talking about behavior here and nothing else." It as a tip toe dance around racism that only ended w/ them all falling flat on their racist butts. What a bunch of idiots. These clowns who profess so much wisdom, yet that wisdom is based on a fantasy, whose founder was a pedophille. Nice.

Yep - this was actually the final issue for me that collapsed my shelf. I spent years going back in forth in my mind of this church must be true / this church can't be true.

The very last time I decided "this church can't be true" was because I decided that scientifically it makes no sense that the people living near the equator and need protection from the sun are cursed by god for being evil and that there was no way the BoM was true because it was dependent on this.

As I noted before, the latitude of Jerusalem is about the same as Mexico/southern Texas, and in the middle east, so how much "whiter" would Lehi & Co. have been than the lamanites anyway?

Oh, wait, there were millions of people living in the Americas already, so why were THEY dark-skinned, or are we to believe that they were white and delightsome when Lehi showed up, but turned dark because they were converted by Nephi when he put on his white shirt and name tag, but then rejected the gospel later.

The twists and turns boggle the mind; I can barely understand what I just typed.

Just a follow up, while the BOM teaches a lot of other questionable stuff, like god telling Nephi to kill Laban, most of the other stuff is consistent with the Bible.

For instance, God insisted that his peeps wipe out entire civizations in the Bible. So offing one dude in 600 BC is actually pretty mild.

And isn't there prosperity stuff in the bible too? Blessings from heaven and whatnot?

But, as I recall, the "god turned peoples' skin dark because they were bad" is unique to the BOM. Or, uniquely central, at any rate.

RG

reinventinggrace Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Just a reminder for y'all, the BOM plot, for 1000
> years of history, is based on this premise:
>
> 1) people with dark skin used to have white skin,
> but god turned their skin dark because they were
> "bad.".
> 2) god will happily turn dark skinned peoples'
> skin white again if they're "good "
>
> This is a racist and bigoted of a story line.
> Worthy of open challenge as to what it says about
> those who claim that it is of divine origin.
>
> Sometimes folks get caught up in DNA, steel,
> horses, Spaulding Manuscript stuff and overlook
> this central premise that clearly shows it is pure
> and unadulterated bullsh*t.
>
> RG


I think you have missed the central purpose of the book --
which is that the Christian gospel eventually fails, even
when entire continents embrace the religion and there are
no manner of other "items" from Alaska to Chili.

The changes skin color, curse against the Lamanites, etc.
are mere side-issues. The first Mormon missionaries tried
to preach to the Indians that they would become righteous
Israelites and join in inheriting the Land of Promise.
Part of that first Mormon message was telling the Indians
that their cursed dark skin would become white, after they
joined up with the Mormons.

But I seriously doubt that first Mormon message was on
Smith's mind back in 1827-28. I think that the dark skin
pronouncements in the Book of Mormon were simply made in
order to match up the Lamanites to what Columbus found
when he landed in 1492.

But the "Indian Removal" project of the late 1820s coincided
with the finishing up of the final draft of Smith's book
and it afforded a golden opportunity for the first Mormons
to try and use the book to co-opt the Indian tribes sent
to what is now Kansas.

I conclude that it was only after the "trail of tears" set
of events that the Book of Mormon's skin coloration took
on a special significance.

Providing a claim for creating a new, exclusive, restored"
church was the basis for the Book of Mormon -- to open up
the way for Mormonism to claim to be the seventh, final
and only successful dispensation of the One True Church.

Its racism was only a side-dish to the main course.

UD