Stem wrote:If so he [they] did a pretty damn good job making the adjustment on the fly and putting to print words called scripture. People to this day hang on it's very words and consider the whole more inspirational than anything else out there. And Joseph started a religion that flourishes. I don't mean to overstate either case, but the whole enterprise becomes all the more fascinating when you consider different possibilities and theories. If it did derive from what you describe or any other theory its pretty crazy to imagine people consider it all from god.
It probably took less of an adjustment than you might expect. Listen, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry are comfortably within the stream of Christian to Deistic Christian thought. Renaissance Christians adopted Jewish Kabbalah and Christianized it. They even used it to try to convert Jews to Christianity (and sometimes succeeded). Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry are child and grandchild of these Renaissance efforts. It takes little effort to make the implicit Judaeo-Christian content of Masonry explicit. Similarly, it takes little effort to subdue the Masonic elements in your esoteric Masonic Bible in order to re-pitch it as new Christian scripture. There is a reason why Dan Vogel saw the Book of Mormon as anti-Masonic. It is because the allusions to Masonry are there but the negative allusions are more obvious (secret combinations). So too are references to magic, the search for the pure language, and alchemy. In other words, the Book of Mormon is clearly a frontier esoteric text that was executed in the cultural language of frontier Christianity and through the quest to identify the origins of America's aboriginal people as Israelites.
The reason the Book of Mormon worked so well was because, underneath its arguably inept execution, there is a hell of a lot of interesting stuff going on. Yes, it is true that it rips off the KJB in an obvious and ham-handed way, but it is also packed with very rich and finely interwoven use of biblical myths and themes.
I believe that the Book of Mormon should be taken seriously. I don't question its status as scripture for the various branches of the Smith Restoration. I do, however, hold its imperialist and colonial vision to be repugnant and ultimately unsalvageable. In order to explain that fully, it would take pages of discussion to unpack things. I can no longer defend the Book of Mormon's paternalistic and racist attempts to rewrite Native American history, however well intentioned they may have been. In fact, I apologize for having done so on this board. I didn't fully understand what it was I was doing, and now I deeply regret my arguments in defense of the Book of Mormon on the issue of racism.
I have always acknowledged that the Book of Mormon was racist. And I have always been opposed to the Book of Mormon's racism. But, in my scholarly interest to unpack its attempts to incorporate Native American ideas and myths, I erroneously tended to defend the Book of Mormon as not being maliciously racist so much as wrongheadedly racist in its vision of the possible future unity of Native Americans and Euro-Americans. In the end, however, this vision does not matter as much as the fact that it was a vision cooked up by Euro-Americans, or, in other words, unity on their terms with ultimately no room for the primacy of Native American culture on American soil. The Book of Mormon gives Hebrew-Christian origins to Native American myths. In this way it is even more insidiously racist. Native American culture is constructed as flawed, and redemption is only seen in even deeper Biblically-defined origins.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
