Posted by:
amos2
(
)
Date: August 04, 2011 12:51AM
...I vote yes
IMO, the Book of Mormon, D&C, and Pearl of Great Price are the best "anti-Mormon literature" out there. My testimoney(sic) of 18 years collapsed under the weight of nothing but the Standard Works. Too many WTF's in there.
Don't get me wrong, I think the scrutinous "body of research" on mormonism is compelling and explanatory, but before anyone studies it they have to be open to it first. I wasn't, until Mormonism's own internal paradoxes and my own preoccupation with trying to make it all work anyway forced me out on a limb and it all came crashing down.
It's amazing how I conditioned myself to not even notice (or even think they were forms of higher benevolence), the bald-faced atrocities of the Book of Mormon.
It's easy, I can count the fatal flaws on one hand. 1,2,3.
1. The book unequivocally states that God cursed the Lamanites with a skin of blackness. It's not just an isolated passing verse either, it's a theme throughout the whole book. If that's not enough the PGP is not quite as unequivocal, but it's one heck of a squirm to get out of, that the infamous "curse of Cain" was...a black skin.
Mormon apologists dig their own pit answering this. You don't even need to do any work. Not to pick on anyone, I'll pick on myself: About my first week in the mission field (to a Great Lakes state), we "followed-up" on an investigator's progress in her "commitment" to read the BoM. She answered the door, almost speechless, shaking, and ran to get the book. She had 2Ne5:21 dogeared and highlighted, and asked us to explain. That was my first attempt as an apologist. Since then I've realized that the BoM forces the defender into a small menu of possibilities, and that you pretty much come up with them spontaneously. The exception, and the most aggregious one, is the Jesus-and-the-Gentiles cop out. That's where Jesus says hold off on preaching to the gentiles for now in the bible, and that's supposed to somehow equate to hold off on preaching to the blacks. And that's their BEST one! The pit only gets deeper, and they're digging it themselves.
2. The book is unequivocal that God massively culled the "Lamanites" to make room for a believing nation in America (of white gentiles), as a direct result of their fall from ancient American christianity. Nevermind the new apologetic posture that Lamanites were a nearly extinct minority mixed in with the asiatic population, ie the DNA debate, which means God not only wiped out the Lamanites but took down millions in collateral damage. Nice to be god, the Hague can't indict Me. But assuming God was a better shot than that, and ONLY exterminated true-blood Lamanites, it's still, well, fucked up huh? (BTW the Quetzelquatl or whatever myth was "whitened" by the Spaniards to aid in the conquest, and the myth existed 300 years before the Book of Mormon was written. Apologists love to say Smith couldn't have known about it, come on, 300 years, and Smith made a living seeing gold rumored to be buried all over the countryside by...Spaniards?)
3. The book laments, with crocidile tears (Oh how hast thou fallen), the plight of the Jews with the they-had-it-coming explanation of "none other nation on earth would crucify their God". Hmmm. That's all I have to say about that. You fill it in.
So, yes, by all means READ the Book of Mormon. I didn't get to the lame polygamy "law" in the D&C. The mormon scriptures dig their own pit to fall in. I read the BoM 20-30 times in my 18 years as a TBM. I was a full-on chapter-a-day believer right up to the day my testimoney collapsed, not despite the BoM, because of it. In 2009 Elder Holland lashed out that if you leave this church it's crawling "over, under, and around the BoM". He left out "through", it was my window out.
And lastly, my plug for the Spalding-Rigdon theory. Elder Holland called it "pathetic". I find it parsimonious. Please, anyone who's got good evidence to the contrary, pull the seams for me. A good theory welcomes competition.