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eman wrote:
I don’t mean necessarily that the BoM is a “hoax” or all the other event. I simply meant the plates themselves. Perhaps (and I’m not stuck on this idea by any means) he really did create some “gold” plates and so when others saw them there really was something to see. As for the 3 witness, not sure. Thanks for pointing out the holes in this otherwise perfectly reasonable explanation DB!
:crazy: I just haven’t heard and can’t think of another reason for having the plates along with all the difficulties there if he wasn’t even going to use them.Other then to assume that for Joseph to have faith in this “History” he never experienced he had to have plates to know it is real.
Why carry an “ark of the Covenant” around? was God actually constrained to being in the ark? Could he not show himself without it?
I see the ark as something the people needed, not God. IT helped them to say with surety God is there. I see the plates in a similar fashion. For me the plates were real. my opinion only
I’m missing something. I seem to remember the ark being where they kept the 10 commandments… Regardless, JS seemed to do okay in receiving the book of Moses without plates. And if the purpose of the plates was to inspire faith, why only in JS and a dozen others? Couldn’t the presence of the plates have inspired faith in countless others? I don’t know. I guess in keeping with the purpose of this site, believing the plates existed and were a catalyst of faith is a better explanation than all the inconsistencies of a fake set or falsified testimonies. DBMormon wrote:I see the ark as something the people needed, not God. IT helped them to say with surety God is there. I see the plates in a similar fashion. For me the plates were real. my opinion only
I agree.
The plates might have been made of real gold and of ancient origin or they could have been facsimiles created in the time of JS or they could have always been spiritual and never physical.
But whatever theory you choose to go with, I think that it is us that need them as a prop and not God.
The BOA papyri might cause us difficulties now but at the time they were held up as physical evidence and shown to everyone that was curious. It is possible that Joseph finally had something tangible to show people and was relieved for it.
In the movie “Emma: my story” there is this piece of china that Emma brings from her family. She moves it from house to house, in one incident it is shattered, and then (if memory serves) it get’s glued back together. The director’s commentary explains that this piece of china was an invention for the sake of having an item to tie the different elements of the story together. It serves to symbolize the journey that Emma went through and her sometimes tenuous ties back to her family.
There is an episode of Law and Order where a holocaust survivor immigrates to America with a copy of the Talmud that he had kept hidden through the ordeal. This book is treated as an almost sacred item by the descendants. After this book is involved in some violence that ends in death an investigation discovers that the book was actually purchased after the holocaust and that it would have been virtually impossible to smuggle an item like that in the concentration camps. The survivor had purchased the item and told the story to make it a symbol of what his family had endured for their faith.
The gold plates also tie together the ancient narrative with the new revelations and the whole restoration. Joseph’s mission was to bring forth the BOM. But why? What about the BOM could help save us that couldn’t more easily be “revealed” to a living Prophet? It is my belief that the central purpose of the BOM was to convince people first of the restoration and then later (and still today) of Joseph’s role as the Prophet of the Restoration.
Whatever one believes about the actual plates the important thing is the symbol that they represent. I believe that for many individuals believing in authentic plates of ancient origin is necessary to sustain the power of the symbol. But as a story telling tool and symbol the plates work just as well to tie things together even if they weren’t physical.
I personally believe that many of the foundational experiences that we understand to be physical today (such as the visit of Moroni, the first vision, and the trip inside the cave of hill cumora, and many others), were understood at the time to be spiritual. Or at least that people of that day didn’t draw so fine a distinction between the spiritual and the physical.
“Early Mormonism and the Magic World View” Thank you! That’s the one. Exceptional book for anyone who wants to try to understand Joseph’s time better, in context.
Old-Timer wrote:“Early Mormonism and the Magic World View”
Thank you! That’s the one. Exceptional book for anyone who wants to try to understand Joseph’s time better, in context.
Oh I don’t know Ray. It’s written by a dirty apostate and is filled with anti-mormon lies.😈 Sent from my SGH-T889 using Tapatalk 2
eman wrote:Old-Timer wrote:“Early Mormonism and the Magic World View”
Thank you! That’s the one. Exceptional book for anyone who wants to try to understand Joseph’s time better, in context.
Oh I don’t know Ray. It’s written by a dirty apostate and is filled with anti-mormon lies.😈 Sent from my SGH-T889 using Tapatalk 2
an excommunicated intellectual member with same sex attraction who also still believes the church is true.
Not sure if that is an actual attempt at disacredation…or tongue in cheek johnh wrote:Not sure if that is an actual attempt at disacredation…or tongue in cheel
Sorry..completely tongue in cheek. I have a great amount of respect for michael quinn and his books are on my list to read. I was playing the part of a tbm…and poorly I might add.Sent from my SGH-T889 using Tapatalk 2
eman, that’s why we generally try to avoid playing parts here. 
It’s cool. Don’t worry about it. Just don’t make a habit of it.
Here’s what Richard Bushman said about Quinn’s book: Quote:John Dehlin, “How much of this misunderstanding about magic do we owe to Michael Quinn do you think, or is he just one of many? Shall we sort of thank him for the research he did to help us really understand this better?”
Bushman, “Well the basic research was done before Michael Quinn by scholars of European culture and American culture. Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic is the key turning book, and then other books written about the hermetic tradition in the Renaissance. Michael built on that, I suppose maybe many Latter-day Saints learned nothing about magic until they came to Michael. The trouble is his book doesn’t really put things in balance. What it does is it just piles it higher and deeper and gets this huge material, collects it all and assumes that this vast quantity of lore which developed over the centuries was in the minds of everyone who ever went out and searched for buried treasure. So it kind of leads your astray at the same time that it opens up a new world to you, so I think it is a fabulous work of scholarship, ingenious I must say, but I mean It’s really overblown in so many ways.”
JD, “Kind of like the dynamic about the fascination with Indians and trying to fit that back.”
Bushman, “Yeah, exactly. You pile it all up and think everybody in the world was just totally absorbed in magic.”
For whatever reason, the seer stone / plates thing just doesn’t really bother me that much. I’m more bothered by the Book of Abraham, which also doesn’t bother me that much. I find polygamy more bothersome than polyandry. Polyandry actually makes it more palatable to me, not less. It’s interesting how we are all differently impacted by things, to completely different degrees. I visited church sites a lot growing up, many of which were run by the RLDS (now CoC), and their versions of history were so different, I realized that there was a lot more to the story than we got in Sunday School. Having said that, there has been a deliberate suppression of information that is troubling or for which the church has no official stance, and I do think it leaves teachers, especially missionaries, vulnerable. Because most people are not going to go searching for more information than there is in the manual, we are perpetuating ignorance and wrong ideas that are easily debunked with a few simple keystrokes. We aren’t promoting thoughtful researching and deep understanding. We need to provide people with some tools how to deal with the complexities of the information presented. The Joseph Smith Papers project is a good starting point at least.
Hey Hawkgrrrl You pretty much nailed it. Any of these items by themselves would likely not be a deal breaker to people if it had been fully disclosed and discussed from the beginning. But the years of claiming it as anti mormon propaganda, covering up, sanitizing, then mix that with changing doctrines like tithing to help pay for leaders bumbles and then stopping full disclosure to hide those bumbles then pushing a culture of “shut up and follow the bretheren” creates a situation like the church is seeing now.
Everyone stretches the truth a bit, either intentionally or unintentionally…and generally those around you are fine. But once folks see you stretching the truth frequently, even when others have told the real story…well then you lose full credibility.
Even worse is when you fight simple changes just based on power struggles…like the nonsense Sunday where they rolled out the YW president with the message about righteous women don’t need rights….sheesh
johnh wrote:Hey Hawkgrrrl
But the years of claiming it as anti mormon propaganda, covering up, sanitizing, then mix that with changing doctrines like tithing to help pay for leaders bumbles and then stopping full disclosure to hide those bumbles then pushing a culture of “shut up and follow the bretheren” creates a situation like the church is seeing now.
The church didn’t call it anti mormon propaganda. Bad apoligists and uninformed defensive members did.
I also don’t see the church stretching the truth on most occasions, but rather retracting it. Only sharing 10% of the story, the basic faithful facts and leaving the troubling stuff out. The new Testament also does the same. As well as the old testament, as well as the Book of Mormon, and for that matter my journal, or the american history books. In fact it seems we all tell the story in a way as to help readers come to the conclusion we want them to including the critics. That is human, and the church is ran by humans…. so why expect any different? Were the israelites without drama becasuse they had moses the prophet leading them? were Jesus’ disciples reassured at every turn and by his side on every step because he was always making faith easier… contrary…. faith when worked on will be a virtue that must be chased. Faith is hard and it is meant to be so. i guess….but at that point the church is no different….its like saying “I need to go somewhere…need to choose which bus to ride on. Most are headed in the general direction…Joe has a map on how to get there but he quit and the other guys don’t really like it much so they are drawing new routes”
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