Imagine if the Book of Mormon was available to any person on earth before its 1830 publishing.Would anybody seriously believed it?People believed the bible ,because it was passed down and translated through ancient Greek language through almost 2000 years.What would cause me or any person to believe as a literal history of people and places before Joseph Smith was alive?

All you have to do is make up a story and there will be some who believe it. It happened then and it happens now.

Back then, the average bumkin didn't know anything about Native Americans but they did know folk magic and religion.

Yes, They had the Salem-Witch-trials and believed in winged pixies. The real question is. Had Joseph lived today and told that cockamamie story...few would believe him, but some would, and then move to South America.

How do you know there are no winged pixies?

because Belief is not an intellectual entity.
It is emotional.
The book itself arbitrary. Not even necessary.
Belief is primary; the book is secondary.

Look around. Today. Now.
Consider the ridiculous things out there that people of Belief mindset, Believe today.

People have not changed.
We are still the same dark creatures of a millennia ago.
Our Achilles heel, is we smugly assume we are sophisticated.

Civilization and Reason are but a thin ephemeral veneer

Precisely.

Believers Believe what it is they believe.
It is emotional.

The book - any book - is superfluous.



People don't Believe books.
Books are not foundational to Belief.

I'm not sure I follow. There's nothing that happened in 1830 that made the BoM more believable than it would have been in 1825.

JS was a good con man who happened to be in the right place at the right time for promoting religious flim flam. Had any number of things gone slightly differently, Mormonism would be a minor footnote in American religious history. But it didn't go differently.

Now the BoM is being made a footnote by the Mormon Church itself, with their "Don't call us Mormons!" campaign, cancellation of the Hill Cumorah pageant, etc.They know the story is not believable, and more importantly, the book is irredeemably racist. They are trying to scrape this turd off their shoe while hoping nobody notices or comments on the smell.

I saw one of the last Hill Cumorah Pageants... That damn thing really cancelled itself. A faithful family member was with me and thought it was really, really bad and was embarrassed by it. Of course there were those in attendance that were all into this thing, so one member thinking it was awful does not mean enough would want to get rid of it.


With the right backstory and applied force, any belief system could be 'believed' or at least accepted as a belief system. The sword has been a powerful historical missionary tool.

OP poses two separate questions and then conflates them. The first, would anyone believe the BoM before 1830, can be answered "yes." Had it been published in 1829 or 1828 or 1827, of course it would have been believed. The same elements and folk superstitions were all in place to be exploited.

The second question is entirely different, i.e., if the BoM had been published before 1805. *This* question makes no sense. You cannot logically separate JS from the BoM, as the book (and mormonism) would not exist without Smith. It's like asking if anyone would have believed in Dianetics or Scientology before [L. Ron's birth in] 1911.

In addition, some of the books that Smith cribbed from weren't around in 1805. The Late War was published in 1816, The First Book of Napoleon in 1809, and View of the Hebrews in 1823. Any so-called "BoM" written before 1805 wouldn't be the BoM.

You mean like people believing in the God of Thunder, or Zeus or some God with a jackal head? Would they have believed it?

The century before the book of Mormon all kinds of people were claiming visions and getting followings and making a buck. Have a vision, claim to know a god, claim to be the intermediary for said god, and voila! you're in the big time!

And today many of the same people that would laugh at the Book of Mormon believe that some politicians eat babies.

So yeah.

"There's a sucker is born every minute." P.T. Barnum

> "There's a sucker is born every minute." P.T.
> Barnum

And that is the end of the discussion. Stupid is as stupid does, and there is plenty of stupid in this world.

There's a sucker born again every minute.

Yes. Read about the First and Second Great Awakenings during the 1700s and 1800s in the US. It was a time of protestant revival camp meetings which attracted huge crowds. The preachers were emotional and fiery, creating hysteria in the audience. If it hadn't been for the Protestant revival meetings, the Mormon church wouldn't exist.

Here's a description of one of the camp meetings in Kentucky in 1802. Twenty thousand people attended:

"The noise was like the roar of Niagara. The vast sea of human beings seemed to be agitated as if by a storm. I counted seven ministers, all preaching at one time, some on stumps, others on wagons ... Some of the people were singing, others praying, some crying for mercy. A peculiarly strange sensation came over me. My heart beat tumultuously, my knees trembled, my lips quivered, and I felt as though I must fall to the ground."
https://www.ushistory.org/us/22c.asp

That could have been written by Joseph but it was written by a young man who became a Methodist minister.

Josep, a conman and treasure seeker, was greatly influenced by the camp meetings. I think he was mostly influenced by the hysteria of the audience. He said the meetings inspired him to pray in the woods and ask God which church to join. He saw a great opportunity, wrote a book and founded a religion. He was in the right place at the right time to start a new religion. People were more receptive to new ideas.

Prior to the Great Awakening of the 1700s and 1800s I don't think Joseph would have been successful. I don't think people would have been as receptive to the Book of Mormon.

It's all about timing. Circumstances have to be just right for someone like Joseph Smith to be successful. Martin Luther wouldn't have stood a chance if it hadn't been for the newly invented printing press.

It makes me wonder why the Mormon church teaches that the true church came to an end when Jesus was crucified, and wouldn't be restored for almost 2,000 years when Joseph Smith came along to restore it. It makes no sense. Instead of Jesus having a successful and lasting church, that honor went to Joseph Smith, a country bumpkin and conman. I guess the timing wasn't quite right for Jesus.

Most excellent!

And, the one phrase, "It makes no sense," is all that really needs to be said about the Mormons. Oddly, though, what has made that church sustainable for so long is that---it makes no sense.

“If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” - W. C. Fields