What about those stories?

[Anonymous]

I have been thinking about the miraculous foundational stories that are so apart of Mormonism. For example:

God and Jesus visiting Joseph

Angel Moroni visiting Joseph

Gold Plates

Angels with flaming swords

The whole Kirkland temple dedication experience.

I am beginning to understand those outside of Mormonism find these stories sort of nutty. Yet when I was TBM I took them for granted and they did not seem that fantastic. Now they seem off the charts exaggerations to me.

So my question is what do you think? Without trying to adapt and bend the story into some kind of metaphor do you think they really happened? Did angels physically appear to Joseph?

Personally I do not think so. I think it is all made up, but I could be wrong. What do you think?

[Anonymous]

I think these things may have value as myth (though they don’t all, currently, for me), but that’s about it. What else can you do with them?

[Anonymous]

I think they happened in some way that was real to those to whom they happened. I think they didn’t happen in the way that many people assume.

I know that’s true of my own strongest experiences – and I’ve had some really strong, really difficult to dismiss experiences.

[Anonymous]

Cadence wrote:

I have been thinking about the miraculous foundational stories that are so apart of Mormonism. For example: …Gold Plates…Angels with flaming swords…The whole Kirkland temple dedication experience.

I am beginning to understand those outside of Mormonism find these stories sort of nutty. Yet when I was TBM I took them for granted and they did not seem that fantastic. Now they seem off the charts exaggerations to me…So my question is what do you think? Without trying to adapt and bend the story into some kind of metaphor do you think they really happened? Did angels physically appear to Joseph?…Personally I do not think so. I think it is all made up, but I could be wrong. What do you think?

My favorite conspiracy theory about the Kirtland temple experiences was that maybe Joseph Smith drugged the sacrament wine with the Datura plant. One skeptic even tried to steal the wine bottle during one of the meetings in Kirtland in an attempt to prove it was drugged. Of course, most of these stories could have easily been made up in any cases where we are supposed to just take Joseph Smith’s word for it but what about receiving the priesthood from John the Baptist and Peter, James, and John? Wasn’t Oliver Cowdery supposed to be there too? So I guess he would have been in on it too the whole time if it was all fabricated unless JS tricked him into believing it somehow. Personally, I think David Whitmer really believed in the BoM even though he later described seeing the plates with “spiritual eyes.”

[Anonymous]

I don’t know what I think, though I am leaning towards significant skepticism.

However, I just wanted to say that having broken out of the bubble, I now really understand the perspective of the outside looking in much better, as you say. So much of what we take so earnestly, really does seem nutty from an outside looking in perspective. When we are inside looking out, and have never really had any other thoughts, I think we perceive that others perceive our religion as we do. I was taught my whole life that it was because of the hardness of their hearts (of those who reject the missionary message), but I think it is more likely that their entire background gives them a completely different view of what we are teaching.

[Anonymous]

Since the flaming sword was described in the context of JS trying to convince someone other than his wife to marry him, I have a hard time accepting it as real and a manifestation for God. Given that, it makes everything else he claims to have seen as being either real or imagined as suspect to me. It was hard to admit that to myself but I have no other explanation for it.

[Anonymous]

Cadence wrote:

I have been thinking about the miraculous foundational stories that are so apart of Mormonism. For example:

God and Jesus visiting Joseph

Angel Moroni visiting Joseph

Gold Plates

Angels with flaming swords

The whole Kirkland temple dedication experience.

I am beginning to understand those outside of Mormonism find these stories sort of nutty. Yet when I was TBM I took them for granted and they did not seem that fantastic. Now they seem off the charts exaggerations to me.

Quite a swing, isn’t it? Rather mind-blowing, for me. Being raised in the Church by extremely conservative parents & relatives (Cleon Skouson is (was) my cousin) I was right in step with Joseph Fielding Smith, Mark E. Petersen, Harold B. Lee, Bruce R. McConkie, etc.

Until I went to college and learned a few things. Like philosophy, science, logic, biology and such.

Cadence wrote:

So my question is what do you think? Without trying to adapt and bend the story into some kind of metaphor do you think they really happened? Did angels physically appear to Joseph?

Personally I do not think so. I think it is all made up, but I could be wrong. What do you think?

I don’t think the angels, God and Christ were physical, but I don’t *know* they weren’t. This is something that bothers me a bit about the intellectual approach to spiritual truth. It doesn’t really work, when it comes to religion, faith, angels and the like because it takes a probabilistic approach to what is possible.

And that doesn’t match reality. Don’t think so? How do you suppose the crew at Ripley’s Believe-it-or-not survive and even make money, as they have since the 1920’s? I’ll grant that the stuff we typically see today is pretty lame — but over the almost century they’ve been in business, they’ve really come up with some incredible yet true stuff. And it works BECAUSE it’s true yet profoundly improbable.

It gives the lie to the methodology of research into the *probable*, which is all historians, even really, really good ones, can do. It’s safe, and if you use it you won’t be deceived (usually) — but the necessary cost is not accepting real, actual events that really, really occurred.

Now factor in psychology and subconscious mental/physical processes, and the fact is, you can’t rule out almost *anything* subjectively. I know from my own life, this is as real as my computer in front of me.

I can 99.999999% reject a physical world-wide flood. I can 100% reject some evangelical or even LDS literalistic account of a world-wide flood. I can’t even begin to reject Christ appearing to Joseph Smith. No can do.

HiJolly

[Anonymous]

I ought to write a book: “The probable God” :crazy:

HiJolly

[Anonymous]

Like you a physically literal interpretation of these stories seems absurd. Like Ray and HiJolly, I can’t deny them having some form of “reality.” Jesus appeared to Charles Finney, why not Joseph smith?

[Anonymous]

I tend to think angelic visitations and so forth are most likely dreams, which is practically the same thing anyway. Group stuff, though, harder to explain, but there are psychological precedents for group experiences like that.

[Anonymous]

HiJolly wrote:

I don’t think the angels, God and Christ were physical, but I don’t *know* they weren’t …

I can’t even begin to reject Christ appearing to Joseph Smith. No can do.

I think you’re saying something important here, but I’m not sure what. Maybe I just need a nap.

[Anonymous]

While I agree with HiJolly, my vote is that the visions were real, but not physical. I suppose even an abominable delusion like the flaming sword could have been subjectively real to Joseph Smith, though my vote on that one is wishful thinking and fraud.

It’s important, I think, to accept that Joseph Smith really was a visionary and holy prophet at some moments and a slimy huckster at others. That’s how we are. Moral of the story: Don’t give undue weight to personal authority; learn to treat facts and ideas independently.

[Anonymous]

doug wrote:

HiJolly wrote:

I don’t think the angels, God and Christ were physical, but I don’t *know* they weren’t …

I can’t even begin to reject Christ appearing to Joseph Smith. No can do.

I think you’re saying something important here, but I’m not sure what. Maybe I just need a nap.

It is EXTREMELY difficult for moderns (people today) to put ourselves into the mindset of someone in the 1830’s – 1840’s context. There was a huge, radical shift in worldview. It was going on right during that time frame. Western culture shifted from a magic worldview to a materialist worldview. When someone like Joseph Smith or other early saints saw a vision in with their “spiritual eyes” they meant that literally. They believed they had spiritual eyes, or spiritual sight, and they generally did not differentiate that from physical, material eyes. This wasn’t so much an act of fraud or fantasy (although that could happen). They understood this in a completely different way than we would today.

So when JS saw Jesus or angels, and the Witnesses had an angel appear to them and show them the Gold Plates, we might say this was a daydream or a fantasy. It wasn’t a physical visitation we could poke with a stick; so therefore, it was not “real” (a fraud or made up). They did not see it that way. They believed it was a real event, and mixed their communication of it between tangible and spiritual. That dividing line wasn’t so clear to them. The best analogy to our materialistic worldview would be they thought it was happening in a different dimension or another version of the quantum multiverse.

See how we come up with new names for the same thing? Physicists have fantasies of things happening that they see with the spiritual eyes. But instead of calling it a vision, they call it a “thought experiment.” We have whole areas of physics that are based purely on fantasies of reality (yes, supported by some limited experimentation). String Theory is a great example. We can’t actually see it. We can’t even test it really (which is one purpose of the Large Hadron Collider). But there are moderns who will talk about this stuff as if they have actually seen subatomic particles or dark matter. I don’t mean to sidetrack into a discussion of science or physics. I am just pointing out that we continue to wrestle with the same problems of talking about things that are not really visible or even physical, but we can see them with our “scientific eyes” (not so different than “spiritual eyes”in a magic worldview).

[Anonymous]

doug wrote:

HiJolly wrote:

I don’t think the angels, God and Christ were physical, but I don’t *know* they weren’t …

I can’t even begin to reject Christ appearing to Joseph Smith. No can do.

I think you’re saying something important here, but I’m not sure what. Maybe I just need a nap.

I’m saying that I can’t discount a vision of Christ to Joseph, but if it *was* a vision, I’m not sure it was physical like Joseph described. It could still be *real*, even if it wasn’t physical.

Spiritual eyes work just like physical ones. There is no discernible difference to the vision center of the mind.

HiJolly

[Anonymous]

Brian’s comment and HiJolly’s point are incredibly important, imo, for ANYONE who wants to try to understand the origins of Mormonism – and to understand humanity, in general.

[Author]

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