The seerstone. Runnels says that Jo’s use of the stone was “basically like” using a ouija board, and these college aged kids hear that, take it literally, and say it can’t be true because the ouija board was invented in the 1890s long after Jo’s translation was done. Haven’t laughed so hard in a while.

https://youtu.be/C0umGReiTRU

These boys strike me as people who read FAIRmormon instead of the source material in order to protect their testimonies, which is why they made such a gross assumption about what Runnels thinks.

The reason the seerstone was jarring for me is because my whole life I was told that that was not true, because everyone I knew in the church was under the same impression that it was not true. Then one day the church cops to it out of the blue. It makes news headlines. The church never ever told us that the reason they knew it to be true was because they had the stone in their super-secure mountain vault this whole time and they didn’t tell us. And it’s not like it was just honestly lost behind the couch or something. They knew what it was. It was in a drawer clearly labeled and known by all the church historians authorized to know about it. They showed it because good journalism had made it obvious they had it, and because of the internet dissemination of this knowledge they couldn’t hide it away anymore. They not only didn’t tell us; they told us something different.

Let’s back way up and put it in a wider perspective. It’s not just the seerstone in a hat that bothered me. It was the tacit admission that Joseph Smith was a glasslooker and a money digger, which contradicts what the Pearl of Great Price says. See, in JSHistory, Joseph tries to put distance between himself and his money-digging past by saying that the whole episode of his life with Josiah Stoale was just a seasonal job cuz he needed work. Jo makes it sound like he was just a working class man with a shovel following around this crazy guy and digging holes to make him happy and it was dumb, but hey the pay was good. That’s not what happened at all. Jo was the guy leading him around looking for lost Spanish silver mines and other treasures. Jo was the guy pretending to be able to see the alleged treasures under the ground by use of his rock, the same rock with which he produced Book of Mormon mind you, the same rock which he dug out of a well and which he did not get from an angel. Josiah Stoale sought him out for the job, because this was not the first time he’d done this. Jo had a reputation. Jo was not the only scryer in town, but he was known as the best. He never actually discovered anything, because always always at the last minute it would turn out, Jo claimed as reported by Josiah in court, that a spirit guarding the treasure had been alerted to their digging and moved the treasure further under the earth magically. The poor bastard Josiah never figured out that he’d been taken for a ride, because that’s how good at conning people Smith was. He made quite a show and an act out of looking into his hat, but it becomes painfully obvious if you study this at any length that he couldn’t see anything in it but he was acting as though he could. Again, remember this is the same method he used to make the marvelous work and the wonder. If you take the time to understand scrying and “second sight” and money digging and the rest of the folk magical New England context in which Mormonism emerged, a whole lot of your testimony’s moving parts blow up all at once.

“Glass looking” was illegal and disreputable in early 19th century New York. It was common enough to have laws against it. It was like any other kind of fortune telling, and it was generally viewed as a kind of fraud. When we say that the “rock in the hat” way of translating the Book of Mormon is the same manner in which Jo would pretend to see things under the ground, the common TBM reaction is “well, you can’t prove he didn’t see things.” My dear TBMs, you just don’t get it. You don’t get it because your starting place is basically Joseph’s 1838 account, which is the account he told after he’d had a decade to polish his story. He knew by then that his connections to scrying did not poll well, so he told a version of history with it all edited out. In other words, later in his life he retold the story of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon in a way that played down most iffy parts. In fact, if you compare the Book of Commandments to the Doctrine and Covenants, you’ll find a bunch of wording was changed to omit or downplay these connections, such a reference to Oliver Cowdry’s witching sticks, which at one point he apparently tried to use to translate the imaginary plates in imitation of how Smith did it. My dear TBMs, you do not know what you are defending when you try to dignify the rock in the hat. There’s so much more that you don’t know, and the church will not educate you about properly.

I was not aware of this dimension of Joseph Smith’s early life, because not only did Jo’s 1838 account (JSHistory) hide it from me, but the church pushed that same version of reality on me through all the media portrayals of this event that I was ever exposed to by the church’s hand. There may well be an Ensign article somewhere buried in a fifty-year old magazine that you can’t even find on the church’s digital archives that makes some mention to the personal seerstone of the prophet besides the Urim and thumim, but that’s as much as there was to find — at least this is the way it was before the “gospel topics” era began. Mormons in my day were obvious to all of this, and it was not because they were stupid and lazy. It was because we were taught differently in Sunday school, seminary, and all of it.

This is why I took the picture of the seerstone as a betrayal, and it was this combined with the no-gays-allowed stuff in late 2015/early 2016 that it made it clear to me that I had to get out as soon as I could. What makes it so hard to live in the church after you start to wake up is that everybody else is still under the old spell, like a deep sleep, and they will not be roused from it. You can try, but you’re just outing yourself as an apostate with faith issues. If you make a great case and stick to your story, that just means you always wanted to leave, probably because you have a porn addiction. You can’t win. You don’t realize how much control the Brethren have had over the people in your life until you start to think for yourself and push back.

I think maybe what we’re seeing in these FAIRmormon videos is gen Z Mormons coming of age. I didn’t realize it’s been six years since the narrative was changed and the church redid the church education system’s curriculum to inoculate the rising generatio. These boys remember the gospel topics essays coming out and remember the great changes the church made, but were too young to realize how it was significant at the time. A little further down the line and kids growing up won’t remember that things were ever otherwise than they are now. Kids growing up in the church now are being taught things that were never taught to me, and that are only being alluded to now because the internet has changed the game. The church can’t just pretend this corpus of knowledge doesn’t exist and teach a completely white washed narrative anymore. The new approach, which is “more” honest and “more” transparent than the church has hitherto been, still isn’t honest or transparent. Case in point: Mormon kids are only being taught enough and by still-censored church-controlled sources in order to think that all those critics out there in the gentile wild are deceived and insane and full of prejudice against their beliefs for no good reason, no not a single good reason. They are not being properly educated. I am convinced the one part of the church’s correlated material they were never rewrite is the part about how its dissenters are the root of all opposition to the church and that this is so because of Satan. They will never frame history in this way: that thousands of Mormons from beginning have left the church because they discovered shocking truths that contradicted what they thought the church was all about and tried to talk about them but were chased away by the fanaticism of Jo’s followers and the great power that Jo and his successors have had to make their words reality within the little Mormon world because of that trust. They can and have and will again use that power to tell outright lies when they can get away with it, and when they can’t anymore they’ll retell the story in a way that makes it sound like people like me are unfair and unreasonable and out to get your testimony just because.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/30/2020 05:40AM by Cold-Dodger.

Thank you for your post. Spot on!