19th century literature and worldviews, Book of Mormon and masonry

[Guest]

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[_Sethbag]

Thanks for the comments! I finished the podcast over the weekend. I must have listened to the episodes out of order, because the last one I actually listened to almost first while at the gym last week. Oh well.

I do recall George saying that George Oliver wrote the Antiquities of Freemasonry in the context of a merging of the ancients and the moderns, and the consequent joining of two separate histories into one. I'm just wondering how much of the myths in that book were George Oliver's invention, and how much was pulled from the various sources he had available to him.

As far as pious fraud, I came to the conclusion a long time ago that Joseph Smith at some point read the whole "whatsoever you shall bind on Earth shall be bound in Heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose on Earth shall be loosed in Heaven" thing from the Bible, and decided that this applied to him in his day. Thus, over time he began to believe that he could do whatever he thought was best, and God would back him up 100%. Something that he invented, and said, became the "Word of God" because he said it, and God had given him the power and promised to back him up. Like Hasa Diga Eebowai just said, the "Holy Spirit" was assumed to operate through and in people, and Joseph probably became convinced that things he said were prompted by the Spirit, so he just said or did whatever popped into his mind, and ran with it.

It seems so unlikely to us in our day that someone could invent something and actually believe it himself, because we don't assume that spirits and gods and supernatural powers are all around us and in us and operating through us on a continual basis, like Joseph and his family and associates apparently did.