There were a whole lot of good ideas and rich religious struggle in Joseph's time.

And there are some parts of the Book of Mormon which I really love and with which I agree. I can judge the principles individually based on merit.

I think it's likely that Joseph drew from his family's stories, from the Bible, from books that influenced him in his youth and even from revivalist preachers of the time, to write the Book of Mormon.

It's the magic hat trick that is troubling...presenting it as a translation of a real record. The people in Joseph's time believed the American Indians were Israelites, they were ripe to believe Joseph's claim.

It's not reasonable to use the goodness in the BoM as if it were evidence of Joseph having divine authority or any of his other claims.

The Church tells us that the good in the Book of Mormon is proof that Joseph was a prophet, that he restored the church, that with the passage of divine keys we have prophets leading the church today.

But that is a sleight of hand, be it intentionally so or be it sincere. Now at age forty, having been emotionally detached from the church because of certain circumstances, I can say to the magician, "I see what you did there."

The *good* in the book of mormon? You'd have to ask old headless Laban about that.

Many researchers believe that it was Sidney Rigdon who wrote the thing in his old Cambellite preacher-y style. Then he handed it over to charismatic Smith to get some better sales out of it--the same way historian, Martin Dugard's books ended up getting passed off (sold) as Bill O'Reilly's.

The two were con-men with poor Martin Harris as their mark.

I think you aptly described it as "Magical Thinking."

also ask trampled Korihor about it.

Sure...good. I can dig faith as belief in unseen things which are true, even without theism.

For example.

But as I said...everything judged individually on its merits....like other books.

windyway Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Sure...good. I can dig faith as belief in unseen
> things which are true, even without theism.

Actually, faith is pretending to know things you don't actually know. It's like a small child standing on a chair and declaring they are as tall as you.

Passing off huge whopping lies as truth could somehow be a good thing. I could Joseph a pass on the creative showmanship if he did some good with it. Living large off of his lies, marrying other men's wives, and living out a serious Napoleon complex don't count as good results.

The Church will never be led astray - unless it's been led astray from day one. In that case, coming clean would be a betrayal of itself. A crooked branch cannot be made straight.

Babyloncansuckit Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Passing off huge whopping lies as truth could
> somehow be a good thing. I could Joseph a pass on
> the creative showmanship if he did some good with
> it. Living large off of his lies, marrying other
> men's wives, and living out a serious Napoleon
> complex don't count as good results.
>
> The Church will never be led astray - unless it's
> been led astray from day one. In that case, coming
> clean would be a betrayal of itself. A crooked
> branch cannot be made straight.


And that's why we can't trust Joseph. But it doesn't make all his products bad. He mostly recycled a bunch of ideas in his environment.

The Church tries to sell the opposite of as hominem on steroids in favor of everything Joseph Smith did. I reject that and ad hominem.

What exactly is the "goodness" in the BOM?

And by that I mean what "goodness" is in the there that can't be found elsewhere?

What is in the BOM that is unique as far as "goodness" goes?

Well, Nephi had "goodly' parents. I think that's about it.

Fair enough. Now what the heck is a "goodly" parent? Is "goodly" better than just "good"?

I'm going to start saying "goodly for you" from now on because it must be really special if it come from the BOM.

No doubt, sound principles and moral and ethical examples can be related by works of fiction. But creating fiction and claiming it is non-fiction casts suspicion and cynicism not only for the presentation of a work, but for the work itself. Someone who would misrepresent the nature of a work of fiction could and probably would also misrepresent the principles contained in it. From my perspective, we have too many other sources to draw from to need to decipher what is decent in the BOM and want isn't. Easier and less taxing to trash the whole thing and look elsewhere for good reading material.

The thing is, a LOT of people want to believe in a magical world. They want impossible things done for them. They want wishing to make it so. Magical stories at least make things more interesting to them, the same way people like magical fiction. When someone comes around and says a magical thing is real, some people get all excited because it means other magical things could be real. Besides, JS's market was made up of the same people who believed not only that pirate and Roman treasure was buried in New York, but also that it moved around underground and you could find it with a magical rock or a dowsing stick.

There's some good stuff in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, too.
Tales of courage, bravery, selflessness, etc.

Just sayin'.

Also some good stuff in "The Happy Hooker"

I was always puzzled by the predictions that there would come a time when peoples' possessions would inexplicably disappear. Apparently it was going to happen around the time when secret combinations would run rampant. Thanks to this sub and similar sites it all makes sense now. That was the MO of JS when he was doing his glass looking without actually finding anything- he simply told his marks that the buried treasure magically slipped deeper into the earth. In the BoM he was simply adding in his own deceptive practices.

Responding to everyone...

I'm new at this perspective. I haven't fully formed my values independent of the church in which I was raised, married, and raised my children.

The central point of this thread is that I see that drawing a conclusion about everything Joseph did based on Moroni's promise for the Book of Mormon is unreasonable.

So, come on, give me points for that ;)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/10/2017 01:16AM by windyway.

You get points for that.
Bonus points when you figure out that "Moroni's promise" is itself unreasonable :)

Oh, I do see that Moroni's promise is unreasonable. It's much more vague than the principle of faith in Alma 32.

Thanks for the points :D



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/10/2017 09:07AM by windyway.

AFAICS the only "good" stuff in the BOM is the "be kind to
others" admonitions scattered among all the death and mayhem to
anyone who differs with the heroes.

I understand what you mean but I do also see value in taking inventory, now, of which values I've learned in Mormonism to be worth keeping. I have worked to grow and learn and be happy before jumping the gap, and I don't see a need to forget that.

Some of those values might be stuff as articulated there in the BoM.

What it comes down to is that, for me, it was principles in Mormonism that, when lived, led to actually leaving. And I was pretty stubborn about having my own identity through it. So thinking about it this way may work for me, only because of the way I practiced Mormonism.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/10/2017 09:18AM by windyway.

I did much the same thing when I left Catholicism and eventually became whatever I am now...definitely non-religious.

Everything that I was taught to believe by my parents and religious leaders had to be reassessed through a secular prism. If I could see a secular reason to continue believing or behaving in a certain way, I kept it; if I couldn't, I dropped it.

The upshot is that I still behave much as I did before, but without any of the meaningless ceremony and magical baggage...and especially without the shame and guilt that was meant to keep me in line.

I didn't really change who I was at my core, but simply revealed it as MY core and of my own conscious thought, and not as something that was defined for me.

GregS Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I didn't really change who I was at my core, but
> simply revealed it as MY core and of my own
> conscious thought, and not as something that was
> defined for me.

That's an "inspired" observation :)

Religions (mormonism is great at this) often present themselves, or their "scriptures," as the ONLY true source of morality and good.

They're wrong.

People, like you did, can and do decide who they are and what is "moral" without having to have a religion tell them. And without the baggage that comes with their proclamations. It's not that hard, either -- act in the world the way you'd want others to act towards you. Give them the "rights" you want for yourself. Make the world the way you want the world to be.

Glad you figured that out. :)

Precisely what I was about to write, both of you, Greg and hie.

Windyway, I understand what you are saying. And you do get points for coming so far! It's just that your post has brought up some thoughts that others feel strongly about, so they are mentioning them. It's not that there's anything wrong with where you are right now.

It's just that so many of us now see the truth in the old observation:

There's nothing good in Mormonism that is unique to Mormonism.

And there is nothing unique to Mormonism that is good.

I think that you realize this, or else are on the brink of it. Good people will find goodness all around them. The Mormon church would have us believe that the goodness comes from something unique to that church. However, our life experience has taught us what a terrible lie that is.

Thanks for understanding and explaining!

I really appreciate this board and the more matured opinions even if I'm not quite there yet.

In my youth I was an avid reader of Mad Magazine. I can testify that there is also "good" in that magazine because of the two spy guys, one white and one bad. Usually the good white spy would win by blowing the other bad black spy to smithereens with a round bomb.

I loved Mad Magazine when I was growing up! I've kept most of them and occasionally like to read them again.
Windyway, I used to think there was good in the BofM, but the "treating each other decent" admonitions can be found in our laws and the Ten Commandments. Even the ancient Inca's had 3 basic laws: Don't kill, don't steal, don't be lazy. The BofM is full of the kinds of legends that made an impact on Joseph Smith's mind: buried treasure that disappears,pirates (Gadianton Robbers),white and delightsome cowboys vs the Indians, and plenty of gore to go around (chopping off heads,arms, and javelins through the heart). It contradicts the New Testament. Religions are all man-made,and meant to keep you in line, or else.

I think the average third grader contains as much goodness and wisdom as the Book of Mormon, with substantially less verbosity.

The "magic" is just a sales tool. As my sales manager used to say, "Sell the sizzle, not the steak."

Wrong spot!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/10/2017 05:42PM by windyway.

All that actually happened- I've learned a little about it, their tragic ending etc. in perhaps dreams; it was not where many authorities say it took place, Central America. None of those pyramids have anything to do with those Israelite immigrants. Those ultimately slaughtered were very delightsome, as they wrote... Amerindians are descendants of the Trogdolytes of Atlantis; some have Lemurian ancestry, too, which skin color is not red. Possibly a few are descended from Lamanites, not bad ones. That religion- it's more likely I'd be a gnostic Christian than try to follow that BOM religion, geared towards making Warriors, powerful as hunters and to vanquish enemies; recommending harsh austerity in sexual matters (e.g.) relatedly... Hebrew semites, different from us in certain ways; their religion was not free of the Negative, the Tyrannical-the source of Judah's Israelitism,Judaism. D & C -is not from God, neither the Church keys however. Besides the BOM, and some of Smith's early teachings, none of that is true at all! Work of Illusory Fallen Angels and a gifted man who succumbed to Ameri-Scam temptation!

I don't know what you have against the Atlanteans, other than destroying their own civilization.

None of the BoM stuff actually happened. It's all a retelling of early American and Napoleonic wars, Sidney's and Joseph's ideas about religion, and direct copying of the 1769 KJV Bible.

The Earth is 13 or 14 billion years old- the Cayce teaching on Five Adam/Eve couples/Five Edens is correct- four mutations had developed, from environmental issues; on any peopled Earth this is the natural course of events! The Adam/Eves were all Avatars, Divine Incarnations- which might explain some whit of truth in the Adam-God MoChurch theory. "Black Like a Flint" as used in scripture does not mean Brown or Copper skin color. Cain became this Flint-like color.
The most profound spiritual philosophy, of the East, explains that Something has never been created out of nothing- this is the Proto-Vedanta philosophy, or Revelation. This Universe, older than the Earth, has always existed; went into a profound sleep following a dissolution, before its rebirth- there has never been a time when this Ever-Repeating process had a Beginning... nor can The Existent suddenly vanish, ever!

Mormonism Was Founded on Magical Thinking

Joseph and the witnesses believed in second sight and claimed to experience it in other matters before they ever saw the plates. He and his early believers also used seer stones and divining rods for discovery of objects they believed were hidden. Joseph was used to his parents recalling tales of treasures in the hill Cumorah, before his discovery of the plates. In other words, it is the same epistemological techniques used in treasure-hunting, second-sight and seer stones, etc..., with which Joseph saw the angel Moroni and the plates, with which the witnesses "saw and handled" the plates and the angel, with which Oliver Cowdery, Hyrum, and others entered the cave inside Cumorah containing the plates, the sword of Laban, and enormous stores of records and wealth.

Second sight, even involving whole groups, was not an isolated event at those times. There are accounts of other groups of people seeing marvelous things with their spiritual eyes and believing what they had seen until their deaths.

This type of thinking is aptly described as magical thinking. No actual treasure was ever produced by Joseph with these powers, the same powers he says brought him the plates and the Restoration.

So this type of thinking has everything to do with Mormonism, it is at the absolute core of Mormon foundations, including the translation of The Bi's ok of Mormon.

The continued emphasis of Moroni's promise is a modern example of magical thinking still in use today in the Church. People insist that feeling good is evidence of an entire tome's entire truthfulness.

Yet the Church has shied away from its explicit magic and occult origins. In the early church, several members broke away when, upon being question, Martin Harris said the he "saw and handled" the gold plates with his second sight, not with his physical eyes or hands. This suggests to me that, even in the early beginnings, the Church was rapidly revising the narrative of its origins in fundamental ways in order to be palatable to more diverse types of believers.

No, I cannot believe in the Church under these conditions: The Book of Mormon being a work of fiction did not occur in a vacuum. It required deception and hurting others and still does, having institutionalised it. I have experienced this hurt and pain and deliberate deception of others, and I know that such work is not God's work. I believe that if the missionaries and members had always taught the unvarnished truth, the Church would have died out in the 19th century.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/18/2017 04:41AM by windyway.

My cure is no more magical thinking and I'll be well on my way.

Yup!

Oh, the instance where "magical" means STUPID !!!!

Yaaaay!! Thanks for mentioning Mad Magazine! I forgot about Mad!

well, at least on this planet anyway...


The "Book Of Mormon" was a financial enterprise from the beginning. When that failed its creators developed the Mormon religion. People who were alive back in the 1830s knew it was fake and said so.

It's the same with Nigerian e-mail scams. Just about everyone knows it's a scam. They only need one person out of a thousand to fall for it.

The whole premise if the OT was to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob by the sacrificing of animals in one of three types, burnt, sin and peace offerings.

Everything else was dependant on that, to sacrifice, first in the tabernacle of cloth until the Solomon temple was built. Solomon alone had sacrificed thousands and thousands of animals, and it HAD to be done by the Levite's.

The BofM which supposedly from 600 BC, only mentioned it a couple of times in passing. Therefore, the BofM totally missed the point.

The only ideology of the BofM is the Nephites got rich, then always turned evil, then repented, got rich again, turned evil....over and over.

Hey there WindyWay...good post and mega points.....Faulkner writes with a macabre sense of morals with a background of overt racism. Salinger,Twain and Dickens saw their worlds as an admixture of greed, violence and remarkable moral stances. If we all wrote our life stories on RFM there would be mistakes, disappointments, moral lessons learned and passed on.

Looking at the BOM or the Old Testament or even the New Testament and seeing the human dramas played out and learning from them is no different than reading Twain's Letters From the Earth....keep posting. If you can stir HIE in anyway you've got style

Gatorman
Waiting for NCAA round 2

"Faulkner writes with a macabre sense of morals with a background of overt racism. Salinger,Twain and Dickens saw their worlds as an admixture of greed, violence and remarkable moral stances. If we all wrote our life stories on RFM there would be mistakes, disappointments, moral lessons learned and passed on."

And Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley, and Zora Neale Hurston, even JK Rowling, to name a few...and many of their characters are better developed and portrayed more intimately than those in the BofM.

;)

One line I love in Persuasion by Austen is Anne describing how she distrusts Mr. Eliott because she never sees him respond to anything geuinely with "burst of feeling," rather he has a constantly curated demeanor with her. Here, Austen is talking about how we, epistemologically, learn about the true nature of a person and with better accuracy and how important it can be to know this.

And it's exactly this type of depth that began shattering my testimony of Joseph Smith. I learned about him because I met someone who lied, who lied so much that his lies impacted people's lives in major ways and he never recanted. And I knew, I know, that such a man cannot be a prophet.

I spoke about that on my first post here:
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1939464,1939464#msg-1939464

This is my experience in my life: my parents came out of dysfunctional families and produced their family that functioned better. They are always trying to draw themselves closer to Christ and His goodness. We kids, even the ones who left the church years ago, follow in those footsteps: we're trying to be good and genuinely happy, too. We believe that there is life in that.

So what the hell happens when you've built a life around this concept--your family, your friends, your perception of how things work best at church, it all flows from this concept--and then you see a person who, though perhaps a pitiful human being, is actively doing evil that hurts people? His friends say he has spiritual gifts, he says insightful things in Sunday School, he can be smart and charming, but he is also lying about you to the bishop, the stake, the police, the government, his wife, his kids, his friends...he assaults and intimidates. (Some of the things he's said remind me of Uriah Heap, btw.)

Me, I realised that God can choose from better vessels than such a man! I realised that even when he said "good" things he was building his case to add legitimacy to his lies, so even his "good" was essentially evil.

I used to think that, with Joseph Smith, he could have been a prophet even if he really screwed up. Now, I know he could not have been a prophet that I could sustain, because I understand what liars look like and the damage they do. When you deliberately engage in continuing, major deception, you absolutely cannot be a credible mouthpiece of the Lord.

Magical thinking pretends to bridge these gaps somehow or resolve these contradictions, much like the abused might become convinced that being abused is for their own good.

It is amazing to me how much this experience with the liar we know has corresponded to the rise of Trump, btw. And then there's the parallel where at first I though Utah would reject him, but in the end they didn't. I tend to think that the same magical thinking that can tolerate jerk leaders and "prophets" is what makes it easier for Mormons to be enthralled by Trump. I wonder if it will ever click with some of them like my personal experience with a major liar clicked for me.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/18/2017 11:36AM by windyway.

WindyWay

I left a post from Patheos-KiwiMormon that some kind soul on RFM helped with the link. Something you should read. Blessings

Gatorman

THANK YOU!

Please, can we just give bother Joseph a break?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/18/2017 12:22PM by dirtbikr.

I realise this may just be a quote for the sake of sarcasm, but I'll respond anyway:

Sure, he was human, too. But there's no need to break ourselves to do so.

He was a talented man weak in integrity, and not a prophet.

May he rest in peace.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/18/2017 12:46PM by windyway.

Of course. Poor guy, his tawdry little secrets should have died with him instead of being writ large before the world.

Maybe that Jupiter talisman worked all too well.

The average episode of M*A*S*H has more humanity and morality than the entirety of the BoM, which is why it has been in syndication continuously on television for longer than many of the people reading this have been alive.

There are great swaths of literature (fiction and nonfiction) and cinema that are more inspiring than the BoM. It provides nothing that is not available in far higher quality in other works.

Dr Seuss beats the BoM. So does "Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten". Or the above mentioned M*A*S*H.

You make me wanna watch it. MASH, that is.

Just to reiterate, My point is that despite any goodness in it, the BofM, all it is at best is a collection of some ideas which must be valued based on individual merit, that one good feeling does not validate the whole.

In effect, without magical thinking, the BofM is catastrophically subordinate to its pretended status.