Most literate people of the mid-nineteenth century would (and did) immediately recognise it as a fake.

Every generation has its gullible, fringe religious loons.

suckers

donbagley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> suckers


Thats exactly what I was going to say.
hahahhaha.

Exactly. The same as the target audience today... people who can buy into nonsense.

The BofM can have the same effect as a placebo to people who are desperate for relief.

It was *supposed* to be for American Indians...

Oo0o0o0o0o0p-s!

People who wanted to worship manifest destiny in their Western religion at the end of the initial decades of their new country.

The Book of Mormon is basically a book giving European descended peoples' a religious license to convert and steal land from Native Americans.

Edit: in other words the perfect con for the times.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2016 07:21PM by Elder Berry.

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't read the whole post at first.


Yeah, then that would be idiots (lovers of Bible fan fiction with an early-American twist).

Me, when I was eleven after mishies showed us Nephi's massive arm muscles.

I bear you my testimony that the South Park guys wrote the "Book of Mormon" for the early 21st century Broadway consumers. They may never have gotten any real Golden Plates but they certainly have found gold and living profits through this Musical of theirs.

alx71tx:

I enjoy trying to figure out screen names.

How far do you live from Bee Cave? I can see the lights from here.

Am I right?

I assume you are in Texas?

The actual "history" seems to indicate pretty clearly that Smith had no intention of starting a church. He produced the BoM with the intention of *making money.*

That didn't work out, though. Nobody wanted to buy the copyright. Nobody wanted to buy the book. A few nutcases did, though, appear to "believe" his cock-and-bull story about how he got the book and "translated" it...hmm, says old Joe, I'm not gonna make any money from the book, maybe I can start a church and charge everybody 10% "tithing."

And there you go.

He didn't misjudge what was his target audience but how to market it. Once he hit on a religious vehicle he was off to the races with money coming in but then he misjudged how successful it was and starting into land speculation.

I have seen even TBMs with a scholarly background say that the
ancient prophets of the BOM were looking forward and writing
with the people of the 1800s in mind.

If it looks like a duck, and waddles like a duck, and quacks
like a duck, it's anything but a duck.

MORONS, bored & lonely folks.

The target audience for the book is people without a sense of humor.

The target audience for the musical is people with a sense of humor.

The answer that comes to my mind is THE LAMANITES.

The Book of Mormon was to serve as "the scriptures" for the Lamanites (i.e. Native Americans).

Am I wrong about this?

JS hoped to make money off those who were vulnerable in some way, whether it was the poorly educated and ignorant, the lonely, the gullible or, probably (to him), the tastiest and most materially generous victims, the Seekers.

The mid to late 19th century was just full of Seekers, and new religious movements popped up to cater to their dissatisfaction with the mainstream understanding/hunger for novelty/desire to act contrary to accepted norms, while conveniently divesting them of money, autonomy and dignity.

One of my faves and a good example of 19th century people's Seeker-type desire to demolish and reinvent society is the Oneida Community.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community

Their free love-ish communal group marriage, eugenics practices, public criticism sessions and prevention of male ejeculation puts them up alongside Mormons on the Authoritarian-Religious Kooky Kink Scale. I bet JS would have turned himself inside out to take a crack at converting some Oneida people but, unfortunately, he got himself killed before Oneida really became a thing.

There were lots of other movements that required the adherent to completely retool their whole lifestyle into group conformity, and a seemingly endless supply of people eager to live the 'new/restored/enlightened/perfected way'.

I was a Seeker when moism snagged me. I was looking for the perfect formula for a perfectly lived life and they got me so easy. Now anytime I'm learning about something new and I feel that old Seeker excitement kicking in I take it as a warning signal and lock up my checkbook because I know it means someone out there is trying to take advantage of me. The only thing I'm really keen to keep seeking is the perfect beer.

You rang?

Wow, that's a really "out there" group.

I opine that the whole "an angel revealed the existence of the plates to me" deal was hype so that there would be more interest in the book they were writing, compared to simply putting the names of mere mortals down as authors.

The printer's manuscript was given to the type setter, John Gilbert, as "...one solid paragraph, without a punctuation mark, from beginning to end." It was Gilbert who punctuated the book of mormon, and he did it without a peep stone.

What was ghawd thinking? What were the real authors thinking? Wouldn't the question have arisen, "Oh marvelous ghawd in heaven, shouldn't there be commas and periods in this effort?"

I wonder what the conversation was like between John Gilbert and probably Martin Harris when the printer's transcript was brought in...

John: Hey, it's a bleedin' solid block of print! There be no periods, commas or other forms of punctuation! Bugger me, but what am I do to with this?

Martin: Holy crap, dude! I've guaranteed $3,000 in payment of 5,000 copies! What more dost thou want!

John: Martin, fer ghawd's sake, man, who will want to read a book that has no periods or commas! Where's the sense, man?!

Martin: Ah, christ on a crutch, ye be right! My wife is REALLY going to blow her top this time! Look, how's about I pay you $20 to put in the missing punctuation?

John: Make it $100 and you've a deal.

Martin: $50, and call it done!

John: Split the difference, make it $75, no fairer than that can I be.

Martin: Done! Yer a good man, John Gilbert.

John: Just fork over the money...


Martin Harris mortgaged his farm to the print shop owner as a guarantee for the $3,000 printing costs, and in January of 1830 got JS to sign an agreement, that he, Martin Harris, could sell as many BofMs as it took to recoup the $3,000. But in March of 1830, a meeting between him and JS is recorded by Joseph Knight, in which Bro. Knight recounts they came across Martin Harris trying to sell copies of the BofM. Knight quotes Martin Harris as saying, “The books will not sell for no Body wants them!”
--https://history.lds.org/article/doctrine-and-covenants-martin-harris?lang=eng (at the very bottom)

Eventually Martin Harris sold off enough of his property to satisfy the mortgage on the farm.

Martin Harris, who refused to join in with Sidney and JS when the cranked up the Kirtland Safety Society and got excommunicated for this effrontery. But the big dummy just couldn't give up being one of the three witnesses.

The target audience of the BofM? Suckers. Yeah, I just liked typing and typing and typing before agreeing with many others above.

"Knight quotes Martin Harris as saying, “The books will not sell for no Body wants them!”

Yep. I vaguely recall reading---perhaps in "Mormonism Unveiled"---that the early missionaries sold the BOMs for $1.75. But sales were so slow that missionaries would leave the books in homes for people to peruse, and when the missionaries came back through, they would collect the unsold ones. I did pretty much the same thing as a missionary 40 years ago.

Dittos on "suckers" being the target audience. The western frontier in the 1830s was ripe for unorthodox religions like Mormonism. Many frontier folk didn't care for the formality and stodginess of the dominant Protestant sects. Mormon dogma resolved many of the controversies that the existing sects were arguing over at the time. Mormonism also had the selling point of providing an answer to the origin of the native Americans. Considering the lack of knowledge about such things at the time, it's not surprising that some people fell for it.

Ya know, we can call their converts suckers, gullible, or superstitious---but then again, there are popular TV shows on the air today called "Finding Bigfoot" and "Ancient Aliens." Meaning, there are enough gullible people today to keep stuff like that on the air.

OMG and I thought I had a fairly comprehensive knowledge base of all the different kinds of batspit crazy out there, this one totally evaded me. Unbelievable! How could I have missed this gem (or should I say 'femme') of whackadoodality, this estro-overload of pre-Internet raging misandric nerdette-dom?

Wow. Putting this one in its own special category in my mental collection. Thanks.

*Edit: I managed to get this into the wrong spot in the thread. Should go under the Aristasia thing.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2016 05:23PM by ptbarnum.

Just change the pronouns and it would fit as any critique of mormonism!