Jason Bourne wrote:But here is the deal and you noted it above. Most active members do not know about the stones. They know about a Urim and Thummim, spectacles on some attached to some devise that hooks to a breastplate. Most don't know the extent of the treasure digging and the peep stone, the stone in the hat and so on. So how can they be requred to believe this to be fully Mormon if they do not know about it. Or how about Mesoemerica issues? Most know little or nothing about this and they just assume the Book of Mormon is historical because the spirit has testified to them. They are told that is all they need and they believe that. So they do not believe is spite of evidence that may suggest otherwise. They believe without knowing or even perhaps caring to know.
This is even worse. You're almost countering Beastie by saying that a person in fact needs to be mostly
ignorant of early LDS church history in order to be a firm believer. I don't see how that helps.
But really, the point isn't that people have to know this stuff in order to be a true believer. The point is that people have to believe it
once they find out. Look at Richard Bushman. He knows all this stuff, and he's a very smart man, and look at the utterly ridiculous crap he's had to get himself to believe in order to retain his faith in his chosen church. I actually now hold this against Bushman - his deciding to subvert his own intelligence and his own mind in order to maintain his chosen faith in the face of a harsh reality is one thing, but he seems to have worked very hard to find ways of convincing other people (not in possession of as many facts, and relying on someone on high to tell them how to react) that that's a reasonable thing to do as well, and that's intellectually inexcusable.
If there is some ultimate reckoning (which I doubt), Bushman will have to answer for all the people who might have recognized the truth about the church but were deceived by him into staying faithful, on the flimsy excuses for Joseph Smith that he offers up. And that goes doubly for DCP, Hamblin, and the rest. These are intelligent men, they ought to know better, but they have made the choice to maintain faith in their church whether it's true or not, and have worked tirelessly to provide an example to a lot of vulnerable Mormons that "smart men have looked into all this and tell us there's no problem".
For the record:
1. God using scrying for treasure with a magic rock in a hat, in order to train up a boy to be a Prophet someday, is patently absurd. God's golden boy learning this Prophethood by defrauding people out of their money, telling them he could show them where to dig up buried treasure and taking their money, without delivering the treasure, is also patently absurd.
2. God threatening this "prophet" with death if he didn't take even more women as additional, secret wives, than he already had done by this point, is patently absurd.
3. God commanding this "prophet" to secretly marry the wives of some of his followers and henchmen, behind their backs, is patently absurd.
4. Joseph Smith keeping all of his extracurricular bedroom activities secret from his own legal wife (and actively taking steps to conceal it) because "she wasn't ready for the truth", and that being a righteous thing on his part, is patently absurd.
5. The catalyst theory, the mnemonic device theory, and all the other theories there may be trying to explain away the fact that the papyrus Joseph had contained ordinary Egyptian religious funeral rites, while the Book of Abraham which was derived from it is still a true, ancient work, is patently absurd.
6. Tapirs as horses, all the crap trying to explain away steel and smelted iron in the Book of Mormon, etc. is patently absurd. Arguing that Joseph Smith wrote "steel bow" in the Book of Mormon because he meant "bow of steel" in the Old Testament sense, and that this was knowingly supposed to mean bow of some copper alloy, is patently absurd. I very much doubt Joseph knew that "bow of steel" actually referred to a copper alloy, and it makes no sense to perpetuate that bad translation from the Old Testament. People in 1828 knew very well what "steel" meant by then, however well-versed they were with the KJV, and using "steel" in this erroneous and possibly archaic way would just be confusing, with no benefit. It's patently absurd.
7. That Nephites would have some kind of cultural knowledge of smelted iron and steel from their ancestor Nephi, but have "lost" the technology for making it themselves, and yet ascribing it to their "legendary heroes" the Jaredites, is just patently absurd. The Book of Mormon clearly has the Jaredites smelting iron and making steel, and there's no evidence that anyone on the American continent was doing that during Jaredite time frames. It's all patently absurd flailing about and hand-waving exercises trying to keep up belief in something which is manmade fiction.
8. The notion that the LDS church is lead by Prophets receiving revelation, and yet excusing away all their wrong and mythological teachings as just their own ill-informed, personal opinion, is absurd. These guys still teach that there was a worldwide, catastrophic flood just a few thousand years ago that wiped out everyone on Earth except Noah and his family. This is demonstrably untrue - it's mythology being paraded around as "revealed" fact. So much for revealed religion - instead they've got the fictions of man, mingled with (manmade) scripture, and no real evidence of any divine revelation
anywhere to be found. And the examples go on and on of things these guys have taught that have turned out not to be true. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of evidence for real revelation, and a lot of evidence for ignorance and pure speculative opinion.
There's more. Much more. Just trying to explain 140k - 200k years worth of human existence and migration on Earth, in a context where God has only just gotten around in the last few thousand years to revealing to some subset of "his" people who he was, and what he wanted them to do, is absurd. In the overall human context it becomes so plainly obvious that Israelite religion was just one group's religious mythology, just like every other group of humans on earth, in their own particular time and place, had their own religious tradition and mythology. Trying to shoe-horn in a 6000 year duration of human existence from Adam on down into a reality where humans have existed for over a hundred thousand years, and covered every continent on Earth except Antarctica for at least tens of thousands of years, is just absurd.
These are not stupid people. They're smart. But they've also chosen to subvert their minds to a religious mythology, and hence have forced themselves to believe and support absurdities, because that's what it takes for belief in these things to be maintained. And they've chosen to set themselves up to other believers as examples of smart people who still believe, giving false hope to other believers that there's really no problem after all.
Mormonism ceased being a compelling topic for me when I finally came to terms with its transformation from a personality cult into a combination of a real estate company, a SuperPac, and Westboro Baptist Church. - Kishkumen