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mfree6464 wrote:
Which brings me back to my original post and question: If it wasn’t an uneducated JS then whom? How did someone born in the wilds of pre-Columbian North America write it?
Putting on my apologist hat – it’s one thing to write down current events about contemporary public figures and another thing entirely to invent stories, cast them with fictional characters, and keep it all straight. How much education would it take for people to write down, “This is what happened today.” over a hundred year period vs. sitting down and coming up with a story that spans a hundred year period.
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I don’t buy into the defense where the person holding the position that JS couldn’t have written the BoM issues a challenge to others, “You try to write a book like that. You couldn’t do it. Therefore JS couldn’t have done it either.” Different people have different aptitudes to do things. I knew a guy in college that after just a few
weeksof studying Spanish was able to speak better Spanish than some seasoned missionaries that served Spanish speaking missions. Aptitude. Just because I couldn’t write the BoM doesn’t mean Joseph couldn’t. Look at Christopher Paolini. He wrote a book at a younger age than JS. His book(s) had lots of characters, a complex story, etc. There are some similarities between Eragon and the BoM. The publishing was paid for by family/friends. Both had imagination and had worked on their stories considerably before committing them to paper. Both books are extremely derivative of existing stories, so much so that they’ve both received criticism for plagiarizing.
nibbler wrote:
Putting on my apologist hat – it’s one thing to write down current events about contemporary public figures and another thing entirely to invent stories, cast them with fictional characters, and keep it all straight.
It helps if half your main characters are named “Nephi”.
All I know is before Joseph Smith there was no book. Then there was a book That book, however it came about, has impacted my life and my family greatly.
dande48 wrote:Joseph Smith wasn’t the first of his time, to have the idea that the Native Americans were a “branch of Israel”. Nor was he the first with claims of seeing God and angels. Nor the first in his time to claimed to have translated writing into religious text, written in scriptural style English.
These are basic things, not that complex. When the church put “another testament” onto the cover, they were right, it’s a new New Testament in terms of scale.
Quote:including the JKV, Ethan Smith’s “View of the Hebrews”, Gilbert Hunt’s “The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain”, etc
KJV yes. However, the number of books it is claimed that Smith plagiarized is vast in itself, and I really don’t believe he had access to such a library. Books weren’t that common in the backwoods. I knew someone who grew up in a remote farming area in the mid 20th century and about the only book they had in the house growing up was the Bible and one or two other religious books. His family were peasants, but in a developed country. They had no local libraries for many miles, and in school, the teacher had the books and they learnt from them on slates off a blackboard. Books back in JS’ day were often big. You could get some small editions but they were expensive. Many novels came out in several volumes.
The other problem with many anti-Mormon theories is that they can contradict one another. If he stole certain specific names off a map, for example, he can’t have taken them from a certain unrelated book – it’s one or the other.
No paperbacks either.
SamBee wrote:KJV yes. However, the number of books it is claimed that Smith plagiarized is vast in itself, and I really don’t believe he had access to such a library. Books weren’t that common in the backwoods. I knew someone who grew up in a remote farming area in the mid 20th century and about the only book they had in the house growing up was the Bible and one or two other religious books. His family were peasants, but in a developed country. They had no local libraries for many miles, and in school, the teacher had the books and they learnt from them on slates off a blackboard. Books back in JS’ day were often big. You could get some small editions but they were expensive. Many novels came out in several volumes.
The other problem with many anti-Mormon theories is that they can contradict one another. If he stole certain specific names off a map, for example, he can’t have taken them from a certain unrelated book – it’s one or the other.
I don’t think Joseph would have to read the other books or have possession of them to participate in the discussion of the ideas presented. We can’t get around the fact that they existed, that the discussion about them was happening at least in the geographical area, and that the concepts made it into the BoM. Joseph may not have done a lot of reading, I don’t know. I do know he didn’t live in a vacuum though.
Only in the vaguest sense. Many of the detractors seem to think he lifted passages wholesale. This is certainly the case with the Bible – we know parts of Isaiah are quoted. Quote:We can’t get around the fact that they existed
So did the works of Thomas Aquinas and Spinoza but that doesn’t mean Smith had access to them.
SamBee wrote:
Only in the vaguest sense. Many of the detractors seem to think he lifted passages wholesale. This is certainly the case with the Bible – we know parts of Isaiah are quoted.Quote:We can’t get around the fact that they existed
So did the works of Thomas Aquinas and Spinoza but that doesn’t mean Smith had access to them.
I didn’t suggest he had access to them. I (and many others) also haven’t claimed he’s lifted the passages and copied them down. Copying ideas wouldn’t require access to the books.
That’s what they’re saying though – it’s not ideas but actual lines, words, phrases, passages. You do require access for them. 1)It seems to me the Smiths were very social people. With the “religious excitement” of the day it also appears they regularly interacted with those various religious practitioners. It is therefore likely that Joseph was at least a passive participant in much of what was going on and in those interactions, and again, being there was no television or radio (or baseball), family conversation and story telling were usual pass times. I think it highly likely all of the Smiths, and any other locals who were just as social, were exposed to many different ideas of the day, including those mentioned elsewhere in this thread. They didn’t necessarily have to have access to the books themselves, only to others who had at some point had access and had shared ideas and thoughts or shared ideas and thoughts others had shared with them. And we need to keep in mind that some of these practitioners of religion were likely educated as ministers and had likely been exposed to various theological ideas on an academic basis. That some people had the idea that the native Americans were somehow linked to ancient Israel is doubtless, it is not impossible that the Smith’s (even just one of them who then shared it) were exposed to such an idea. Many of the early teachings of JS are very close to Methodist theology, and Methodists were a large part of the aforementioned religious excitement. As a native of this area, I can point out that almost all those quaint little white churches in the picturesque small towns of the area are Methodist. Within less than 10 minutes of my own home I could be at no fewer than 4 Methodist churches. And guess what the next most common of those little white churches is? That’s right, the majority that aren’t Methodist are Presbyterian (my own little town has 3 churches, a Presbyterian church established in the early 1800s, a Methodist church established in the mid 1800s and a baptist church established in the 1960s). 2) Again as a native of the area and putting aside Comoros/Moroni, there are some place names (like Oneida and Lehigh) that are strikingly similar to BoM names.
3) I think it would be hard to argue that a short time after the publication of the BoM when JS was working on the JST that he did not have access to Adam Clarke’s Commentary on the Bible. It’s just too similar.
I’m not saying that Joseph Smith made it all up either by himself or with help. I’m not saying he couldn’t have either. And it is also possible that he really was inspired and that the BoM is really what it is purported to be.
JS was about as educated as the average American Frontier farmer in the early 1800’s. Does that make him uneducated? No. Does it make him educated by our standards? No. The Smiths were not land-owners. They were tenant farmers, barely making it. In fact, if not for the rise of JS as a prophet, I’m sure the entire Smith family would have gone under financially.
It bears mentioning that there was no way to read the written word in those days without having a physical copy of a book in your own hands. This was slightly before the advent of the internet, google, cell phones, search and copy-paste functionality. This was before youtube, podcasts, ted talks… it was before “online”. It was before the telephone, the radio, and even the telegraph. There were only four modes of transportation in the area: foot, horse, cart/wagon/sled drawn by an animal, and boat. There were probably no more than three or four families living within a mile radius of the Smiths, and with no phones or cars, we would consider this to be very isolated today.
Additionally, they weren’t simply living on the outskirts of “civilization”. The first Palmyra newspaper was printed in 1817. The population of Palmyra in 1820 was 3,124 people. The area was “booming” because of the advent of the Erie Canal; 1,500 people moved into the area in the next five years. Yet, this simply meant more construction workers and shipping laborers and businesses to sell goods. It would be an error to think that highly educated philosophers occupied the area. The village was incorporated in 1827.
For my part, I’ve never been motivated by the number of different proper nouns. Many of the concepts in the BofM reflect religious thoughts and questions of the day. Could the idea of the Native Americans being descendant from Israelites have been the subject of farmer philosophy around the hearth? Sure. But the prose, the story arcs, the foreshadowing elements, the different voices from different characters, the adept interpretation of Isaiah, the theological connections between old and new testament, the Psalm of Nephi, the protagonists who fall, the unlikely who rise, the compassion, the oppression, the lust for power, the faith to persevere… there is something here that is more than just general exposure to ideas.
Look, I don’t believe there were plates. I don’t believe JS translated by the “Gift and Power of God”. I don’t know how he did it. But I think it’s silly not to acknowledge that producing the BofM at the age of 23 in that environment was amazing. And, BTW, it was the first in a long series of amazing achievements. JS was a once-in-a-generation figure. He had a mind that operated on a different level, but he also didn’t know how to stop. He reinvented constantly; making every step grander than the last. For people like us, we tend to focus on his major failures (of which there were also many, and serious), but for some reason, we also tend to minimize and explain away his accomplishments. Believers, on the other hand, minimize and explain away his failures and focus on his accomplishments. As I said earlier, we start with our conclusion in mind and work from there. We all do this. This is why two people can have a conversation about JS, the BofM, the Church, Politics, Society, and each thinks the other is wrong.
On Own Now wrote:
we start with our conclusion in mind and work from there. We all do this. This is why two people can have a conversation about JS, the BofM, the Church, Politics, Society, and each thinks the other is wrong.
I do not disagree with anything that you have said OON. What I think is bothersome is that believers in our church sometimes buttresses their faith by saying for JS to have written the BoM is impossible and that the only possible explanation is a miracle from God. Church is an environment where people that express certainty in the unverifiable get validation. I understand that. It is their club with their rules. People who believe like they do get validation. One of the reasons I participate at StayLDS is for the validation. Different club, different rules. Like you say – we all do this.Roy wrote:
What I think is bothersome is that believers in our church sometimes buttresses their faith by saying for JS to have written the BoM is impossible and that the only possible explanation is a miracle from God. Church is an environment where people that express certainty in the unverifiable get validation. I understand that. It is their club with their rules. People who believe like they do get validation.
I agree that it is bothersome… and that’s what started this thread… annoyance at misapplied (from our perspective) logic. One of the avenues I’ve tried to follow in my post-LDS world-view is to try specifically not to be annoyed or bothered. It is in the recognition that I do the same thing, so it’s worthwhile to give allowances for other people to process information from their own unique perspective and arrive at a different conclusion than mine.I remember once talking to a friend about healing miracles. This was long after my faith crisis and acceptance of Atheism. I told him that when I was a missionary in Latin America, I saw a lot of things that were impossible to explain. He looked at me incredulously… “You can’t possibly believe that!” He retorted. The funny thing was that I wasn’t trying to say God healed people, but rather point out that sometimes things happen that we can’t explain, and I was leaving off the obvious follow-on, which was that believing people will therefore see these things as miracles. I just thought it was funny that he wasn’t able to separate miracles from the belief in miracles; to him, because miracles don’t exist, it would be impossible for a rational person to have a belief in miracles.
This friend was also a conspiracy theory nut-job (I mean that in the most endearing way). JFK? Killed by the CIA. 9/11? US Gov’t. In that vein, let me say that our religious assertions are a lot like conspiracy theories. If you are one who believes, you can’t see why others don’t interpret the data the same way you do? I mean… come on… the magic bullet, right? If you are an anti-conspiracy person, then everything has an explanation. Two people look at the same thing and see things much differently. I simply learned not to talk to my friend about the JFK assassination and we remained friendly.
I agree with the premise, I’ll just throw this out there. On Own Now wrote:
If you are one who believes, you can’t see why others don’t interpret the data the same way you do? I mean… come on… the magic bullet, right? If you are an anti-conspiracy person, then everything has an explanation. Two people look at the same thing and see things much differently.
It’s true, people can receive what appears to be the same input and walk away with very different conclusions. I think one struggle is that sometimes we fall into the trap of assuming that other people aren’t working with the right set of data, and that if they would just accept the right data then they would reach the same conclusions as we have reached. Then it becomes an argument over which data is correct. It’s essentially the same phenomenon but with the focus moved away from belief/conclusion and onto what is or is not a “valid” data set.
In the context of church… “But Joseph Smith didn’t have a peep-stone.” If an argument ensues, is it a matter of two people looking at the same thing very differently or is it a matter of the two parties operating with entirely different sets of data? Is it worth working towards people agreeing on the data or should it be left at, “you see it your way, I’ll see it mine.” I suppose that’s all any of us can do when dealing with events that we weren’t present for. Heck, even events that we were present for can generate one set of data for person A and another set of data for person B.
On Own Now wrote:
I agree that it is bothersome… and that’s what started this thread… annoyance at misapplied (from our perspective) logic. One of the avenues I’ve tried to follow in my post-LDS world-view is to try specifically not to be annoyed or bothered. It is in the recognition that I do the same thing, so it’s worthwhile to give allowances for other people to process information from their own unique perspective and arrive at a different conclusion than mine.
I think the frustration that some experience is in knowing that they will not receive the same allowances that they are constantly making for others. But I suppose that’s a big part of it, learning to accept that, making allowances for that as well.
nibbler wrote:
It’s true, people can receive what appears to be the same input and walk away with very different conclusions. I think one struggle is that sometimes we fall into the trap of assuming that other people aren’t working with the right set of data, and that if they would just accept the right data then they would reach the same conclusions as we have reached. Then it becomes an argument over which data is correct. It’s essentially the same phenomenon but with the focus moved away from belief/conclusion and onto what is or is not a “valid” data set.
I think the root of this is, people automatically interpret evidence to support what they already believe. They rarely ever change what they believe to support the evidence.
dande48 wrote:
nibbler wrote:
It’s true, people can receive what appears to be the same input and walk away with very different conclusions. I think one struggle is that sometimes we fall into the trap of assuming that other people aren’t working with the right set of data, and that if they would just accept the right data then they would reach the same conclusions as we have reached. Then it becomes an argument over which data is correct. It’s essentially the same phenomenon but with the focus moved away from belief/conclusion and onto what is or is not a “valid” data set.
I think the root of this is, people automatically interpret evidence to support what they already believe. They rarely ever change what they believe to support the evidence.
I agree with this, but I think it’s important to point out in relation to this that for may of us here our beliefs have changed on the subject. Pre-faith crisis/transition I full believed the whole thing about the BoM, it’s origins and what it was. I did not doubt the Lamanites were Native Americans. My belief is much, much different now and that is in large party based on evidence.
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