SeN: Bible & Qur’an Don’t Measure up to Book of Mormon Because of “Sheer Size”

[Everybody Wang Chung]

I don't know how accurate this is, but it has been reported that "2.5% of the Book of Mormon is an "[it] came to pass" reference, and at least 14.7% of the verses in the book were copied in part or whole from Joseph's KJV (Isaiah)"

https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comme ... e_to_pass/

More important than the length, the Book of Mormon is clearly a sloppy 19th Century creation.

[Dr Exiled]

I don't know how accurate this is, but it has been reported that "2.5% of the Book of Mormon is an "[it] came to pass" reference, and at least 14.7% of the verses in the book were copied in part or whole from Joseph's KJV (Isaiah)"

https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comme ... e_to_pass/

More important than the length, the Book of Mormon is clearly a sloppy 19th Century creation.

Yep. No question.

[Doctor Scratch]

Recently, though, I was astonished to see… the master of the revels among the zany folks on the Obsession Board -- insinuate that I'm anti-Islamic, of all things. (It's difficult for [them] to surprise me anymore, but I'll admit that that charge did surprise me.)

I don't know how, short of actually converting to Islam -- which, I admit, I'm very unlikely to do -- I could have spent much of my life in any way that would more clearly refute the slanderous falsehood that I'm an anti-Islamic bigot. But, as 1 John 2:4 puts it, "the truth is not in him." There is no other plausible explanation, so far as I can see, for such brazen mendacity.

A very telling post. The OP reports on a post in which the Afore argues that the Book of Mormon is “more impressive” than other religious texts, and somehow this amounts to a “slanderous falsehood”? Well, then: let the Afore walk back his assertion and tell his readers that the Book of Mormon is “no better” than the Qur’an or the Bible.

But he won’t do that. His latest spleen-venting is just yet more evidence of how tendentious and warped he is. Consider this: If a Calvinist, or a Catholic, or a Muslim, or a Jew, or a Buddhist, or a Methodist, or an Evangelical openly talks about how superior their religion/texts/prophets are in relation to Mormonism, is that “bigotry”? Personally, I would say “No.” But Mopologetic orthodoxy would absolutely brand such a person as an anti-Mormon bigot. It is certainly interesting that, in the Afore’s formulation, Mormonism cannot stand on its own, and instead it can only be celebrated by denigrating other faiths.

Again, if I’m wrong, then let’s see the Afore tell his audience about all the positive things that other religions have to offer. lol!! It will never happen: not because he’s a “bigot,” but because he’s insecure about his own religion’s “superiority.”

As for the notion of his converting to Islam: that would impress beyond anything that I’ve ever witnessed in my life. It won’t happen, but if it did, my estimation of the man would skyrocket. And he could even come back, ala Don Bradley!

[Gadianton]

Again, if I’m wrong, then let’s see the Afore tell his audience about all the positive things that other religions have to offer. lol!! It will never happen: not because he’s a “bigot,” but because he’s insecure about his own religion’s “superiority.”

It's a fascinating episode of the great decline for sure. I do think we must be careful how we frame the apologist's relation to other religions. The battle is fought on two fronts, and certainly other religions are noted positively at times because religion imbues morality. Without religion, it's not just that there is no purpose to life, but the very sentence I'm writing is meaningless. That's what the Afore believes. And so he does find positivity in other religion, although the positivity appears ONLY as its needed as a stick to beat atheist/secularists like Mr. Stak with. And that positivity endorses the faceless amalgam of all religion in general, not specifics about any religion in particular. It's the biggest religion tent there is, it's really inclusive because the more inclusive it is, the greater the contrast is to secularism, which then become a special case of degeneracy of thought.

As I will be misinterpreted, it's important to note that the Afore isn't claiming atheists can't be moral, but that they are moral in spite of not having a worldview in which morality is possible (presuppositionalism / Jordan Peterson). And so he's not claiming that other religious people are necessarily moral, but that their belief in God makes their belief in morality rational. It's this way in which secularism is uniquely nihilistic. If he excluded, say, Calvinists, then that's a big problem because Calvinism undergirds a huge sweep of Evangelicalism, and so secularism wouldn't be any worse off fundamentally than much of the religion out there. As long as the religion broadly posits a personal supreme being, they are in the tent.

There is some further positivity in terms of very general theological concepts, such as the trinity (he claims to be a "social" trinitarian. This is also important, because he must be able to include Mormonism as within one of his Venn diagrams that defines what it means to be Christian, so that that victim status can be claimed when other faiths criticize Mormonism and deemed anti. This gets tricky though, because Islam rejects Christianity as monotheistic because of its belief in the Trinity.

So does the Afore condemn Islam for rejecting Christianity's status as monotheistic just as Christianity rejects Mormonism as being polytheistic? My guess is that his beliefs float enough to suit the occasion. With is Islamic friends, he emphasizes the common ground of Mormonism and Islam, and allows fun to be poked at the idea of a monotheistic trinity. He doesn't admit to being a social trinitarian in that case.

I think the important thing to remember is that the positivity always exists as a temporary alliance to either beat an enemy with a stick, or as to keep Mormonism temporarily in the running to where it can finally, one day, squash all other belief systems and rule the world. And lets not forget that within Mormonism, the apologist interpretation is the right one, so essentially it amounts to the Mopologists ultimately ruling the universe.

[Physics Guy]

I would think that Mormons have automatically burned all bridges with Muslims by acknowledging multiple Gods and a prophet after Mohammed.

Islamic tradition from the Qu’ran on has explicitly considered the Trinity to be shirk, denying the supremacy of the one and only God, but Trinitarians can at least try to insist, honestly from their own point of view, that their God is still every bit as unique and supreme as Islam’s God. Muslims may not buy it, but at least there’s an honest plea to be made. On the charge of shirk, I don’t see how Mormons can plead anything but “guilty as charged”.

Christians generally deny that Mohammed was a genuine prophet at all, let alone the Seal of the Prophets, but at least mainstream Christians leave Mohammed as the sole serious pretender to the status of post-Biblical Prophet. Mainstream Christians may deny that anyone has the status which Muslims assign to Mohammed, but at least they don’t put anyone else in that place. Ranking Mohammed far behind Joseph Smith is surely much less respectful in Muslim eyes.

[Gadianton]

The Afore appears to reject the idea (publicly) that there exist multiple gods in Mormonism. On a revealing post at FAIR a long time ago, and I really wish I'd screenshot this stuff, he built on the idea of of a social trinity, denying that men become Gods and opting for a "body of Christ" interpretation.

[drumdude]

I like Dr. Barker’s emphasis on John 17, on the oneness there in the high priestly prayer. Let me just say something very briefly about that, because it is a powerful, powerful passage.

There is a trend now, in certain areas of Christian thought, to apply John 17 to the doctrine of the Trinity. Some people, not only in Catholic and Protestant circles but in Orthodox circles, are now formulating a doctrine of the Trinity called Social Trinitarianism. It is intended to replace what you might call the older Nicene Substance Trinitarianism. In Social Trinitarianism, the idea that there is a perfect oneness between Father, Son and the Holy Ghost does not make them one substance. Substance Trinitarianism rest on a Middle Platonic or Aristotelian conception that’s quite foreign to the scriptures. Instead, Social Trinitarianism makes the three members of the Trinity or Godhead absolutely one in purpose, in mind. An old Greek term that’s used for this kind of unity is perichoresis, which refers to a sort of perfect mutual in-dwelling, where each one is perfectly aware of what the other is thinking and feeling. There is, in this view, not a hair’s breadth of difference between them, and the idea here is that that kind of social fellowship, that perfect fellowship that exists between the members of the Trinity or the Godhead, is the kind of fellowship into which, to some degree or another, based on John 17, human beings might have the potential of gaining admission. For, if we are to be one as the Father and the Son are one (John 17:11), then it’s possible that, if we learn to align our wills perfectly with theirs and to be thoroughly indwelt by their spirit, we might be one with them, too. And then we could be one with them in that divine fellowship, and that, surely, would be a form of deification.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... three.html

[huckelberry]

I do not read Peterson's blog very often but decided to read the little essay being discussed here. Well the one I found discussed the size of the Book of Mormon in relation to other scriptures. I found he was posing a possibly interesting question, if Joseph was just making up something to make claims about himself the production is way outsized for such a purpose. Imagined superiority of the book compared to say the Koran or other scriptures was never brought up.

Ftitting within Peterson's usual line of thought the size of the Book of Mormon is a witness to the earnestness of purpose in the production of the book and by extension the honesty of the book. The book is bigger than a pretense, lark or con. I think there is enough to that argument to give one pause. If there were fewer reasons to see the book as 19th century fiction then the witness argument would think be more convincing. It still proposes that there is more going on than a con. I respect Fawn Brodie's efforts to see a more complicated process. It is of course not possible to see with assurance into the mental path of Joseph Smith. A real urge to say something , communicate something and tell a story that meant something to him certainly would appear to be operating. Ego and a desire for attention and admiration could certainly be a part of it, that is likely the case with a lot of authors. Other people may have encourage Joseph's prophet role as well.

It is standard apologist move to claim that Brodie is out of line trying to imagine the inner working of Joseph Smith. It is impossible to see for sure just how it worked. I think that this objection is an obfuscation,waving arms saying do not look here there is nothing to see.Brodie sees possibilities to consider even.

I think Joseph had things to say that he really believed were worth saying. It is even possible that he believed he was inspired by God. Peterson has often pointed out that Joseph acted as if he believed.

I think that the puzzle about Joseph's invention is part of what makes the subject of Mormonism interesting.

[Markk]

I see that the Proprietor has been taking swipes at other religious traditions and religious texts once again. This time, he is apparently treating the Bible and the Qur’an as “inferior” because they’re not as long as the Book of Mormon:

the Qur’an — to which the Book of Mormon is occasionally compared — is 77,797 words long in its original Classical Arabic. That is approximately 80% of the length of the New Testament (which, accordingly, totals something close to 100,000 words altogether). And, according to Islamic sources, the Qur’an was revealed over the space of twenty-two years, between AD 610 and Muhammad’s death in AD 632. That’s rather longer than the 2.5 months required for the dictation of the Book of Mormon.
The Old Testament book of Isaiah is 25,608 words long in its original Hebrew text. Jeremiah, the longest book in the entire Bible, is 33,002. No single book in the New Testament even comes close. Between his own gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which he also wrote, Luke weighs in at a total of 37,932 words. A well-educated physician, he is the most voluminous contributor to the New Testament. By contrast, with all of his many epistles, the apostle Paul comes in at second place, with 32,408.

The Torah or Pentateuch — Genesis (32,046), Exodus (25,957), Leviticus (18,852), Numbers (25,048), and Deuteronomy (23,008) — is sometimes known as the Five Books of Moses. Taken altogether, it is at the absolute core of Judaism. And, in their entirety, those five books reach the impressive sum of 124,911 words. But that’s substantially less than half the word count of the Book of Mormon.

So far as I’m aware, therefore, the Book of Mormon stands as the single largest purportedly revealed text in the Abrahamic tradition, and it does so by a considerable margin.

Well, to be fair, shouldn’t we subtract the bits of the Book of Mormon that have been lifted straight out of the Bible? That kind of tends to put a bit of a damper on this argument, doesn’t it?

Regardless, it seems to me that the Afore is losing some of his polemical edge if he is really making such a dumb argument with a straight face. The Book of Mormon is somehow on a par with other religious texts simply because it is *long*? Gee, is Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past the greatest work of literature due to sheer length?

He goes on to pose a question:

I simply pose the question of why, if Joseph set out to pretend to prophethood, he chose to go to the enormous effort of creating such a massive work. Nobody else in the entire Abrahamic tradition of whom I’m aware, perhaps (though I can’t think of any) with the possible exception of one or two obscure actors who have plainly sought to create something in explicit imitation of Joseph Smith, has done anything of comparable magnitude.

Yes, it’s the old “How could this uneducated farm boy have done it!”, but the Afore is also answering his own question. What, really, is the difference between the “obscure actors,” seeking to imitate Joseph Smith, vs Joseph Smith himself, seeking to imitate the Bible?

Abrahamic Tradition?????....with DCP you first need to eliminate the ever present strawman. How is the Book of Mormon in the tradition of Abraham? heck Jesus is mentioned before he even came here according to the time lines which kind of erases any Abrahamic covenant.

On a side note Abraham is mentioned only 29 times in the Book of Mormon while he was mentioned 69 times in the Quran, and 236 times in the Old Testament and New Testament combined. I did not search Abram.

I also did a search on the name Moses, and the Book of Mormon is way behind the Quran and the Bible...the Bible is around 800 to the Book of Mormon's 75 times.

Jesus is mentioned almost 4000 times in the Book of Mormon, compared to around 1300 times in the Bible, so again, how is the Book of Mormon of a strict Abrahamic tradition.

Brian Hales in more or less championing the same type of thing. Given the internal evidences of the Book of Mormon fall, they have to go to the external anomalies type of "proofs."

DCP wrote...

The highly educated but unbelieving Fawn Brodie said that his imagination simply “overflowed like a spring freshet.” I wonder, though, how many years she required to write her biography of him.

Brian Hales was all over this in a e-mail conversation with me, basically claiming that the Book of Mormon is inspired in that it was written so fast....I brought up Dianetics by Hubbard, and he could not get around it. But it is not a big deal anyways if he is just copying the words off a rock in his hat.