The joke is that a guy is sitting at a bar and a hooker sidles up
to him and says, "tell me your fantasies."

They guys thinks for a moment and says, "all my fantasies involve
time travel."

I have time-travel fantasies now and then. One example would be
me as a teenager back in the '60s coming home to my uber-TBM dad
and telling him the horrible anti-Mormon lie that someone told me
at school. I'd say, "they said that in the temple Mormons
pretend to slash their throats and cut their guts out. I told
him he was lying and the gospel of Jesus Christ would never have
something that horrible and disgusting." Then I'd watch my uber-
TBM dad try to defend the Church against such "lies."

I’d like to go back to my mission (for a very short time—I couldn’t stomach it for long). I’d say “this picture in my flip chart isn’t a historically accurate depiction. Actually, the golden plates weren’t used at all. Joseph put a rock in a hat and ‘translated’ the Book of Mormon.”

I wonder how quickly I’d be sent home (dishonorably) from my mission.

I would love to go back (with the knowledge of church history that I have now...complete with references) and pepper the hell out of my seminary teachers to the point of them kicking me out. Then I would be able to sleep-in through my high school years.

I'd go back to Horny Joe's time, with a video camera, and secretly record him screwing teenage girls.

Then I'd have "movie night" in the Nauvoo town square.

Such fun! :)

I thought about time travel a few times, but I don't entertain them too much due to time travel confusing me.
Example: If I were to go back in time and try to kill Joe before he started Mormonism, succeeding in killing him would cause a paradox; my reason for killing him would have been him founding a cult. But if he never founded the cult, what would have been my reason for going back in time? Or would terminating him cause a timeline different than the one I came from to exist? Or would my attempts to kill him end up forming aspects of Joe's cult?
Hie, your fantasy also has a few problems: If you showed the footage of Horney Joe to the people of Nauvoo in that time, how would they understand what they were seeing? Shadow puppets and magic lanterns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern) would likely be their only frames of reference for the footage. There would be the possibilities of Joe claiming that you're a demon or acolyte of Satan sent to lead the followers away, or it might prevent Mormonism from spreading while also creating a new cult dedicated to the figure who showed moving images to people of 19th century Nauvoo.

Or I might just be overthinking time travel fantasies.

ookami Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hie, your fantasy also has a few problems: If you
> showed the footage of Horney Joe to the people of
> Nauvoo in that time, how would they understand
> what they were seeing? Shadow puppets and magic
> lanterns
> would likely be their only frames of reference for
> the footage.

I'd just claim it was a "miracle from god," taking a page from Joe's playbook.
And let the video roll.

And, yeah -- you're overthinking it. It's a fantasy! :)

You got it right. Didn't you ever see that classic, award-winning movie (or not), "Back to the Future"? What you do when you time travel can affect whether you were even born. So if someone went back and took out Joseph's Myth, and their parents met because of the cult, you would erase yourself. That would probably take a majority of us out.

I'd be erased. I laugh every time I watch the movie "White Christmas" and when the female leads are singing a song at the end called "Gee, I Wish I Were Back in the Army," one of the lines is "a million handsome guys with longing in their eyes, and all you had to do was pick the age, the weight, the size...". My mother was an officer in the Army Nurse Corps during the Korean War and met my dad (an enlisted guy, BTW) in Tokyo. At church, of course. They married and that was the end of that independent girl who got an education, left podunk Utah and joined the Army. She has been under the controlling patriarchal thumb of that enlisted guy for 65 years since. If she hadn't thought she had to find a fellow cult member to marry, all she had to do was pick the age, the weight, the size. Surely she'd have picked a not-so-boring or controlling, already-educated officer. Although she did pretty good, at the time, in the looks department. But hey, I'm here because of it and that ain't so bad. And I wouldn't want to give up having known that guy's parents, my wonderful grandparents.

But I've always thought that if I could time travel, I'd want to go back to the early 50s and see my mother in the Army. She tells some of the funniest stories, some pretty gory ones too--she treated soldiers with traumatic brain injuries at an evac hospital. But I'd like to see her as her young, independent self. I realize more and more that at the core, we have way more in common than I ever knew.

provided that I could be vaccinated for everything possible, and could go back home on a moment's notice. And understand the language that is being spoken around you.

If Jesus really existed, what would it be like to hang out with the crowds that followed him everywhere? What was their take on what he taught? How was it different from what they had grown up with?

What would it have been like to hang out at the fringes of King Henry VIII's court? To see the shenanigans that went on back then? (Being careful to stay in the shadows, of course!) To hear the music, and see the stately dances, and the costumes.

To see a play by Shakespeare, while the Bard himself was still around? Maybe even to talk to him?

To experience the Massachusetts Bay Colony, if only for a short while. (I don't think I could take the oppressive atmosphere for long.)

To head for California with the Gold Rush of 1849, and see what it was like.

To learn how to make do without modern conveniences, but to see history up-close. Yeah, I think I would enjoy visits, but not prolonged stays.

catnip Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If Jesus really existed, what would it be like to
> hang out with the crowds that followed him
> everywhere?

Go back with a smartphone, some antibiotics, and a keychain laser. You could heal more people than Jesus, do better miracles, and put on an amazing light show. People would flock to you, and ditch Jesus. When you came back, you'd find the mormon's official name to be the Church of Catnip of Latter-Day Saints!

:)

We're a pretty inclusive group.

My time-travel-to-the-future fantasy is seeing my one-time-TBM sons chatting over lunch saying, “Mom was right!”

I reckon that going back and making sure that Alvin Smith survived would probably have prevented all this mormonism nonsense ever occurring ;-)

For anyone who enjoys time-travel stories, the accepted master (in my opinion) is Connie Willis, who has written several fantastic novels about it, including The Doomsday Book (which revolves around the very problem of vaccination that Catnip referred to) and the double novel Blackout / All Clear, which is a fascinating take on the 2nd World War.

Tom in Paris