So the sister missionaries introduced themselves over the weekend and challenged me to read the Book of Mormon. Seriously, there are dozens of books on my queue and I don't want to waste a minute on the BOM.... However, it might be an interesting experiment:

The BOM was discussed in church, seminary and Institute through most of my life, so it could be an interesting walk down memory lane (although most of it is gag worthy). It is what my Mormon friends believe. It is what my relatives including my nieces and nephews are reading.

So far I've read 1/3 of 1st Nephi. It's as vile as I thought it would be. It says Nephi would only record whatever [God?] thinks is important. I immediately smirked-- so murder is important to God then?! Smh.

I was rereading mine again, about a few months ago, along with the course book for BOM that we read the year our Sunday School is doing BOM.
Now I notice it looks like kid wrote it, or it's written for older kids.
Half of it is( like some of Lehi's, Nephi's visions , etc)many of other things he said/ saw that I can't speak of now, because there isn't any.
Parts of it skip hundreds of years in just one sentence because someone's " not allowed or forbidden to speak of it)

Fascinating. I might look for my old booklets from institute and Sunday school. I already find my notes from seminary and institute interesting.

If you're a believer and you have insomnia, the Book of Mormon is an excellent cure.

If you're a nonbeliever and you have really, really bad insomnia, the Book of Mormon is an excellent cure.

Seriously: put in a grueling week at the office, then have a sumptuous Friday dinner with an extra slice of pie for dessert, then curl up alone on the sofa while rain softly patters against the window panes and a fire crackles in the fireplace. Open the Book of Mormon, anywhere, and start to read.

I'll give you 10 minutes--15, tops. At 25 you'll practically be in a coma.

Mark Twain, a non-believer, said it best:

"Chloroform in print."

Sleep-inducing quasi-Elizabethan English, with a God-commanded murder in the first few pages; that's as far as I could get without thinking "Oh my God, how can I possibly slog through the rest of this crap?"

I remember this better than Joseph Smith remembered the First Vision....

My thoughts exactly.

Probably even more boring than when you were a member.

I wonder what it's like to read it and believe it.

The single B of M I still have (in my dear late parent's Quad) sits on my bookshelf, unread. That will not change.

RB

I, a nevermo, read the entire BOM and entire D&C and I wasn't taking the lessons.

I just did it to see if I could.

I did run out of steam when I got to the Pearl of Great Price, though.

Kind of seemed like monks chanting to me.

I agree with the non-believer Mark Twain when he called it "chloroform in print."

Let's see.....if you like wars and rumors of wars, lots and lots AND LOTS of it came to passes, and people getting in and out of god's graces because of their righteousness and not so righteousness messes you'll love it.

That's the man jist of it and it just goes on and on and on in this vein.

Well, Mark Twain also said that if you removed "it came to pass", all you'd have left is a pamphlet.

Reading the Book of Mormon is a wondrous thing. Its the first step to gaining a super strong testimony of Mormonism and getting yourself, all your relatives, all your friends, and all of your posterity tightly assimilated into the church :) Here is how to do it. It's especially important for you to come to a sure knowledge that it is the most correct and true book on earth.

1. Read the book
2. Ponder the book. This includes studying everything about the book's background and all you can learn about the great Moroni.
3. Pray to know for certainty that it is the most correct and true book on earth.
4. Come to know with surety that the Mormon church is the most honest and transparent church in the history of the world. There are so many marvelous teachings in the church that you can learn about to help you getting on the path to knowing everything. How long shall the earth's temporal existence be? Where was the Garden of Eden? What does the Lord think about Monogamy or interracial marriage? How can we be certain that everything a Mormon prophet, such as Brigham Young, teaches in a sermon is the true word of God? What about other marvelous ancient works like the Abraham papyri or the Kinderhook Plates? Oh its marvelous :)

Now beware of those pesky anti-Mormons and others who may oppose the Book of Mormon as Moroni presented it to Joseph Smith. They generally come in 3 flavors:
1. There are some people who think the Book of Mormon people never actually existed.
2. There are some people who push the "Limited Geography" ideas. This is rubbish because it is in direct opposition to what Moroni taught.
3. There are some people who push the "mixing" ideas. This is rubbish because it is in direct opposition to what Moroni taught.

Good luck.

The Kinderhook plates contained all the fullness of the gospel scam.

My non-member Dad read it when I was still active, trying to figure out exactly what his daughter was involved with. His only comment was, "Violent little book, isn't it?"

I was so startled. I thought the Spirit was supposed to witness the truth of the book to anyone who read it and I don't know what I expected - for him to be miraculously converted?

I don't know, but it wasn't the reaction I was expecting. LOL

Nice to "see" you, Greyfort. Thanks for sharing. I agree with your dad.

ever since I stopped believing in it, I have the same reaction as your dad. I told DH that I don't feel uplifted at all, it's very disturbing.

I'm a nevermo. I tried to read the BOM, but failed because it is so BORING and poorly written in false KingJamesian English, but above all... BORING.

And violent...

I am nevermo. I started reading the BOM while I was still dating my wife because she hoped it would inspire me to convert so that we could be sealed in the temple.

It was one of the most difficult books I've ever read. Not because it's in league with classics like "The Sound and Fury" and "Ulysses", but because it was so poorly written.

It was so obvious to me that it was written by somebody trying to emulate a "biblical" style. It angered me because I saw it as an insult to my intelligence and I could not for the life of me see how anybody could fall for it.

Written on metal plates? Seriously? With all of the meaningless repetition ("And it came to pass..."), tortured explanations, irrelevant vignettes, and gratuitous battle descriptions, who in their right mind would waste the time and effort needed to carve or etch it into metal plates.

Some of the phrases were just silly and clearly the result of somebody who lacked sophistication trying to fake it.

Considering the "biblical" style: my wife insisted that Urim and Thummim allowed Joseph Smith to translate the plates into the modern English so that it would be understood by a broader audience. I called BS. I, being a writer myself, pointed out that that was not how 19th Century Americans spoke or wrote. The BOM was written in a poor substitute 17th century Middle English that only managed to exist for as long as it did because of the King James bible.

No, if the BOM were truly translated into the common language of the time, it would have been more like the writings of Mark Twain (a contemporary of Smith's) or Benjamin Franklin (a generation before Smith).

And don't even get me started on all of the crazy scientific and sociological theories that were the fad for a short time in 19th Century America and somehow managed to find themselves in an "ancient" manuscript.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/03/2016 07:58AM by surprenant.

This was exactly my reaction whenever I've tried to read it. It's like a bad parody of itself. Obviously, what an uneducated person thinks an educated person sounds like. It screams fake. Twain says its chloroform in print, yes, but he also points out that one needs a tin ear to read it. Whenever a passage demands that the author make the point, JS simply can't deliver. It's LOL.

A TBM challenged me to read a passage. I did. What I couldn't explain to her was that it illustrated just how hard it is to write scripture. It's hard to fake scripture. Not that I think scripture is written by God, just that you need to have some wisdom to convey and you need to be a very insightful writer in order to write scripture.

The passage I was supposed to read talked all about a prophet who taught many wonderful things but was rejected by the people--who were punished for rejecting him. What was so obviously missing was what the wonderful teachings actually were, and why, specifically, the people rejected them. Without that, it's drivel. Futile. It was so clear that when the story reached the point where JS had to actually convey a wonderful teaching, he couldn't make the sale. He couldn't do it. He simply didn't know what he was talking about.

When I started doing more research, I learned that the parts that were lifted directly from the Bible included the same errors that were corrected in later versions of the KJV Bible.

My wife had told me in a previous conversation that the Urim and Thummim (i.e.; his rock) would not reveal the next word until the previous word had been correctly recorded. I had also confirmed that with testimony of at least one of the early members who witnessed the process.

The look on my wife's face was priceless...like a deer in the headlights...when I pointed out that God had transmitted incorrect information to Joe.

She recovered quite quickly, and suggested that maybe it was the corrections to the KJV bible that were wrong. It was my turn to be dumbfounded.

This is where a question comes in handy. Your wife says, "Well, maybe the corrections to the KJV are wrong."

And you say, "What do you mean by that?"

Denying someone else's statement is easy. You say "black," they simply respond, "white." Done. Explaining oneself, affirmatively, though, is another thing entirely. When you ask, "Really? how does that look white to you?" Now they're the persuader, you're the denier. Much harder position for them. Now they've got to know what they're talking about.

It's hard to parrot nonsense when someone's sincerely asking what it's supposed to mean, and how, exactly, it's supposed to work.

That was a couple years ago; early in our marriage. A lot has happened since then. My wife is no longer TBM, though she is still a member; albeit, not very active.

We haven't discussed Mormonism much in recent months, so I've been keeping my mouth shut and letting her sort out the truth on her own. I've led her to water, so to speak; it's up to her now to drink.

You nailed one aspect of the Book of Mormon that always bugged me -- namely, saying that the character said marvelous and very moving words but did not record what the character said!

Example:

3 Nephi Chapter 17

Jesus does say some things at the beginning of the chapter but nothing that hasn't said before in the Bible. Then in verse 15-17:

------------

15 And when he had said these words, he himself also knelt upon the earth; and behold he prayed unto the Father, and the things which he prayed cannot be written, and the multitude did bear record who heard him.

16 And after this manner do they bear record: The eye hath never seen, neither hath the ear heard, before, so great and marvelous things as we saw and heard Jesus speak unto the Father;

17 And no tongue can speak, neither can there be written by any man, neither can the hearts of men conceive so great and marvelous things as we both saw and heard Jesus; and no one can conceive of the joy which filled our souls at the time we heard him pray for us unto the Father.

------------

Jesus says some things after this section in the chapter but nothing really new.

Another example:

I Nephi 18:3
And I, Nephi, did go into the mount oft, and I did pray oft unto the Lord, wherefore the Lord showed unto me great things.

[But didn't reveal what the great things were....aside from a reference to 2 Nephi 1:24, which referred to Nephi "whose views have been glorious"]

Maybe the great things were the visions in 1 Nephi at the beginning.

Oh, well.

Exactly the same as reading it as a believer. As Mark Twain said... "Chloroform in print."

I read a good bit of it as a nevermo investigator in 1979. I was trained in chemistry, not history, but had had some undergraduate "Bible" courses at a Presbyterian-affiliated college some years before. Contradictions and inconsistencies came at me almost from the first page. I found myself thinking:

"I didn't think the native Americans coined money."

"I didn't think they had steel weapons."

"I didn't think they had cows and horses until they got them from the Spaniards."

"So they sailed from somewhere in Asia across the Pacific and landed somewhere in South America...?"

"What's all this word-for-word quotation from the King James version of Isaiah?"

"What's with all this '...and it came to pass...' over and over?"

"I thought the Hebrew name of G-d was 'YHWH,' and 'Jehovah' was a later construct."

...and on and on.

I finally bogged down about a third of the way through. The missionaries tried to explain some of the problems but were not convincing: for example, "The long passages word-for-word from the KJV old testament just prove that it's an accurate translation."

Anyway I lost my 'golden investigator' status and remain a lost soul to this day. And because I was shown the truth and rejected it, I'm really in for it.

Just hope they serve beer in the Terrestrial Kingdom.

It's was just as bad for me as it's been for you. FWIW, it sounds like you aren't super invested in your heritage so my advise is that life is way too short to waste one more minute on the BOM.

However, it might be fun to suggest to those sweet sisters that you'll match them page for page in the BOM if they'll commit to reading No Man Knows My History, the CES letter, Rough Stone Rolling, etc.

So boring you can't get to the first chapter of the book. I tried once and I found it to be ridiculous. I'll never understand how I came to believe it to be a true, inspired work from God. Oh, that's right I got that burning feeling and the Spirit revealed the truth of it to me. Too much faith is placed in heartburn!

When you read the BOM and compare it to Asian literature, like the Bhagavad Gita or the Buddhist Pali Canon, its shortcomings are immediate and powerful.

There is no profundity, no moral allegory or deep thinking. The writing style is juvenile and derivative.

The BOM is garbage.

I reread/ listened to the BOM via the "My Book Of Mormon" podcast. David Michael the nevermo host makes it very enjoyable. Drinking game is included.

Having somebody read it to me made me realize what a made up POS it is. there is nothing in it. It is nothing but biblical fan fiction. And a boring one at that.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/03/2016 02:56AM by darkshadow.

As a never-mo, the first red flag went up for me during discussions with the missionaries when they asked me if I'd started reading the Book of Mormon, and I responded that I'd finished it.

They were surprised. Even moreso when I said that I'd read the Bible in its entirety.

I thought that was really, really weird. If anyone would have read religious texts, I would have thought the missionaries trying to convert others who would have done so.

It's a horribly boring book making God out to be a third grader on the playground. "You aren't doing what I say... I'm smiting you now. These guys are my best friends." Over and over.

Well there's so many great lessons that you could apply to your daily life.

For instance, your neighbor that has that really nice car that you've admired. Well, listen for that still small voice and go next door and smite his head off. Then put on his clothes and fool his family so you can take his car.

Then there's Ammon that doesn't take criticism very well. So next time someone disses you on FB, attack them and cut their arms off. That will stop their critical posts for sure!

Pure sarcasm so everybody knows!

Kind of like watching "Ghost Adventures" on the Travel Channel when you no longer believe in spirits and such ... whole lotta eye rolling.