Symmachus wrote:... would be cold comfort against the icy fact that "Enish-go-on-dosh" is gibberish and not Egyptian.
It's not gibberish, it's Gaelic and the thought of an Irish planet out in space is vaguely comforting. Éirinn-go-Brách and a top of the Hah-ko-kau-beam to ye!
Kishkumen wrote:I love the ancient texts, but LDS thought about the significance of ancient texts is pretty shallow. Joseph Smith saw the ancient as a playground for his own theological creativity, just as some Gnostics did. This is consistent with the Hellenic culture of myth. Everyone knows the basic story, but each artist and each generation will tell the story in a new way. That is what Smith did. In a sense, that is what Nibley was doing too. FARMS, at its best, expanded the Mormon mythos. The Toscanos attempted the same in their book Strangers in Paradox. These kinds of efforts are wonderful, in my opinion. But the dominant LDS approach to the scripture is to set it in stone and turn it into a restrictive code. It is this kind of rigid reverence for antiquity that kills cultures.
I have a hard time seeing Joseph's efforts as wonderful. He created his own religion primarily for his own selfish desires, and knew he was making it up and deceiving people doing it. The Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham are not wonderful works because they were attempts to create false history, and he knew they were false. I suspect some of the ancients had similar motives as Joseph, and I don't see it as wonderful. I can appreciate it in other ways though. I can also at least understand church leaders today do what they do out of real belief, and not so much for selfish and dishonest reasons Joseph did.
Kishkumen wrote:And that is the error of the apologist's way--to insist that his preconceived ideas, propped up by fallible people of earlier times, must prevail in the end, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
Drop it, apologists! It is a pointless distraction in a preciously short life to insist that Noah's Ark totally works so long as Jesus shrank the animals to make them fit inside.
To drop it means not to just admit Joseph was fallible, but to admit he was a fraud, a liar, an adulterer, a thief, a scoundrel, etc. Not a great place for a religion to survive.
Themis wrote:I have a hard time seeing Joseph's efforts as wonderful. He created his own religion primarily for his own selfish desires, and knew he was making it up and deceiving people doing it. The Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham are not wonderful works because they were attempts to create false history, and he knew they were false. I suspect some of the ancients had similar motives as Joseph, and I don't see it as wonderful. I can appreciate it in other ways though. I can also at least understand church leaders today do what they do out of real belief, and not so much for selfish and dishonest reasons Joseph did.
In my defense, I said that "these kinds of efforts are wonderful" and by that I mean the creativity of composing new sacred texts and novel theological interpretations. I do not mean that everything Smith came up with was good. As for his motives, I believe they were complicated. Feathering his own nest was a big part of it. So was being a big cheese. But I believe that the beauty of sacred texts is partly that they are malleable. Interpreters can improve on the text. The Bible is full of creative interpretations and fabrications. Still, I think there is value in the texts.
My value, of course, is probably nothing resembling the value most Christians and Mormon Christians see in there, but that is part of my point.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
Not so much beautiful as inventive and unique, in my opinion. And I think this argument can be used in relation to Smith's sermons, especially from the Nauvoo period. I find many of them sublime and entertaining, sprinkled with a smattering of the ridiculous. Still well worth the read, if one wants to try and understand Smith. In a way, he reminds me of Vernon Wayne Howell and how he articulated himself through his music. Gifted. Joseph could do so very well through the spoken word. I imagine he was electric when he spoke. But like Koresh, I think his motives were horribly self aggrandizing and narcissistic.
Riding on a speeding train; trapped inside a revolving door; Lost in the riddle of a quatrain; Stuck in an elevator between floors. One focal point in a random world can change your direction: One step where events converge may alter your perception.