So this article

http://www.ldsmag.com/article/1/13624

gets under my skin for a lot of reasons.

First off, the Lucy Mack Smith story about 8 men showing up to kill thousands of Mormons made all my BS alarms go off. This story appears in the Melchizedek Priesthood Lesson manual, but the correlation committee had the good sense to edit out some of the more unbelievable parts.

The phrase "Even the New York Times" always irritates me. I know too many people who think the "paper of record" is some sort of conspiracy against truth justice and the American way. BTW the NYTimes was founded in 1851 so it must be a miracle they published this quote in 1843. (I tracked it down to a 1933 Joseph Smith biography that attributed it to an unnamed New York paper.)

The man's name was Schmucker not Smucker. He edited and wrote the preface to a history of Joseph Smith and Mormonism in 1858. Samuel Schmucker's very first sentence is, "Joseph Smith, the American imposter and visionary, was certainly no ordinary man."

The Tolstoy quote (imagine ironic quote marks being made in the air) has been part of LDS folklore since 1939 when Thomas J. Yates published it in the "Improvement Era". (Wikipedia says he is the first seminary teacher.) His version is a second hand account. Tolstoy told Andrew D. White who told Yates. The conversations originally happened in 1894 over several "Walks and Talks" that White took with Tolstoy in Moscow. White later published his accounts of them in McClure's and in his autobiography. THOSE accounts don't match up with the Yates' version.

White died in 1918, Tolstoy in 1910, so no one was around to contradict Yates.

The non LDS published version:

"He [Tolstoy] went on to say that in every religion there are two main elements, one of deception and one of devotion, and he asked me about the Mormons some of whose books had interested him. He thought two thirds of their religion deception, but said on the whole he preferred a religion that professed to have dug its sacred books out of the earth to one which pretended that they were let down from heaven. On learning that I had visited Salt Lake City two years before, he spoke of the good reputation of the Mormons for chastity, and asked me to explain the hold of their religion on women."

Dialogue published a nice paper on this issue.

http://66.147.244.190/~dialogu5/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Dialogue_V06N01_15.pdf

The author kindly suggests that Yates' memory was playing him false.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/06/2013 03:33PM by crom.

The LDSMag article inspires one sentiment in me.

LOL.

I love how the LDS Magazine picks and chooses pieces of history to form their own narrative.

This excerpt from Dialogue says it all:

"During the course of the next few weeks he [Tolstoy] also found time to read in part at least the two books which Susa Young Gates had sent to him, the Book of Mormon, and George Q. Cannon's Life of Joseph Smith, and in the privacy of his diary describe his reaction to them under the date of January
23, 1889:

I wrote down a few things. I read both the Mormon Bible and
the life of Smith and I was horrified. Yes, religion, religion proper, is the product of deception, lies for a good purpose. An illustration of this is obvious, extreme in the deception: The Life of Smith; but also other religions, religions proper, only in differing degrees.11

This passage is written in rather hasty and awkward Russian, but Tolstoy's highly negative reaction to the reading of these Mormon classics is undeniable."



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/06/2013 02:33PM by Senoritalamanita.