How long/intensely did you believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon?

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MG 2.0
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Re: How long/intensely did you believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon?

Post by MG 2.0 »

drumdude wrote:
Fri Aug 12, 2022 9:05 pm
I'm curious among everyone here how you dealt with the belief that Hebrews were actually here in the Americas. In 600 BC.
Like some of you, I don’t think I gave Book of Mormon historicity much thought until the early nineties (in my forties) when the internet came along. I think the big trigger was Metcalf’s book, “New Approaches to the Book of Mormon: Explorations in Critical Methodology”. I read it soon after it was published in 1993.

That definitely got the ball rolling.🙂

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MG
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Re: How long/intensely did you believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon?

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Long time, but not very intensely. Still recall the first conversation wife and I had after we got married about Mormon stuff. I was casually telling her the Book of Mormon was probably not historical. She broke down in tears prophesying I was on my way out of the Church. It was that quick and certain boundaries about what we talked about regarding Church were formed. The bigger problem for me was coming to the conclusion the material in the Book of Mormon wasn't all that interesting or useful, good or inspiring. Once I thought back realizing many things inspired me or motivated me more than the Book of Mormon, I was ready to conclude it wasn't as unique or wondrous as I was taught.
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Re: How long/intensely did you believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon?

Post by Moksha »

I had no reason to disbelieve until I was about 17.5 years of age. At that time, the information integration function of my pre-frontal cortex clicked on and I was able to put together various strands of information stored throughout my brain. I think religiously this physiological function could be considered an epiphany. Things that didn't add up became apparent. Anyway, this adult human ability kept me from going up to Oregon to free the Bhagwan, getting involved with Dianetics, or joining the Moonies.
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Re: How long/intensely did you believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon?

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my post deleted as my post was not relevant to the thread and was pointless
Last edited by huckelberry on Sat Aug 20, 2022 7:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How long/intensely did you believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon?

Post by Symmachus »

I certainly lacked the precocity of our Dr. Scratch. Like almost all children, I took the world as it was given to me. I did not have an internally consistent view of things that was constructed from valid logical inference of evidence. The Book of Mormon happened just in the way that the cartoon videos said it did, if I even thought about it. And the stories had a kind of excitement to them: Nephi electrocuting his evil brothers (that's the cartoon's interpretation of it, anyway); Ammon slicing off the arms of evildoers; Abinadi avenged in the end.

As a child I was very interested in the plates. When I was six I attended the Hill Cumorah pageant, which I loved at that age, but the day after tinged the experience with disappointment: when a sibling and I visited the hill and started moving stones to find the Golden Plates, a missionary person who happened to be nearby reprimanded us for playing where we were. I really wanted to see those plates. When we visited the Temple Square visitor's center later that fall, I loved the Disney-land dioramas of the Book of Mormon stories and I was very taken by the faux-plates they had on display, but when I asked when we could see the real plates, my mom told me that an angel took them up to heaven. I just hadn't understood that part, and it seemed odd—why not just have them on display so we can see them? I didn't suspect anything nefarious, and I wouldn't say at all that this was a precocious skepticism or that it led to a doubt in the historicity of the Book of Mormon. It just detracted from some of the wonder that made the Book of Mormon stories seem immediate and real. It must have been how my sibling felt when I pointed out that Santa Claus's handwriting was identical to mom's. It's not positive disproof but it makes the makes the assumptions about the object feel less real and the object about which the claims are made appear more remote. Once that feeling of remoteness and distance set in, it never went away. I grew up with that feeling of distance, then, between the world I lived in everyday—a world which presented me with nothing miraculous in a supernatural sense—and a world where Joseph Smith's miraculous Golden Plates were real objects. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. It really only became an issue as I got older and the Church people would insist on the primacy of the remote world, usually to justify why I needed to subordinate myself to the goals of the Church (particularly a mission).

This is a root problem for Mormonism. Mass-marketed atheism is always very glib in equating traditional conceptions of God with Santa Claus because God is supposed to be remote and distant, and his interventions in the world are at points beyond observation: they are events. Maybe Jesus was resurrected—who knows?—the only reason not to think so is because we don't see that sort of thing happen in our everyday experience, but it is purely inference, however rational, that is retrojected on to some past event that either did or did not happen. What traditional Christianity/Judaism/Islam offer are a means of accessing that remoteness. But Mormonism has traditionally offered the denial of that remoteness itself. It truly is more like Santa Claus. The Santa Claus story presupposes an entirely different physics, an entire society of separate creatures presided over by a mystical being, excessive in his generosity as he is presumptuous in his judgment of small children. And yet it operates here in the world of our common experience, on the northern top of the planet, right now at this very moment. Anything that introduces a sense of distance and remoteness in the mind of a child ultimately leads to a rejection of this story (if the handwriting isn't his, then he is that much farther away from your experience). Mormonism has this problem too because its unique and characteristic claims aren't about the event of God's intervention but about an entire civilization that lasted for a thousand years, right there in the middle of the planet. Like looking for a gigantic toy factory in the North Pole (but very unlike one person's resurrection 2,000 years ago) it's something you can test for veracity.

Mormon apologists are only making it harder by insisting on the nearness of this civilization to the real world ("there really is a Santa Claus at the North Pole!"); they are trying to accumulate more and more objects (whether they are physical or linguistic), which just means more and more things to test. They need some theologians to refocus things on events instead of objects. A theology of objects is not possible. The point of relics was that they were used to access that remote world. A piece of Jesus's cross or some saint's bones weren't desirable for themselves but for their divine powers that could act in events in people's lives ("I touched this fragment of Peter's thigh bone, and my headache went away!") or at least connecting with the divinely distant in a very immediate way.

But the apologists use objects nearly in the reverse, as ends in themselves that explained by the existence of god: the objects are the remote world, and they collect them but they really serve no purpose beyond that; they don't explain anything about god but (perversely) god explains them as a general theory, since his intervention in 585 BCE or whenevers explain the origin of Nephite civilization—how else do you explain that lack of Book of Mormon names beginning with "F"? It's really kind of backwards. Knowing that no Book of Mormon names start with "F" is the goal in itself because it is a substitute for Golden Plates, not something that will cure your headache by linking you up with the divine world. Let us suppose that they are all entirely correct about the Nephites: would that really make any difference? Would a steel sword that belonged to some nameless Nephite 2,000 years ago give you any greater access to the unseen world than a plastic fork from Kentucky Fried Chicken? We would know more about New World steel, I suppose. As I say, all of these "evidences" are just a replacement for the Golden Plates, which are a replacement of this lost civilization—but what difference does it make if there was such a civilization? It doesn't follow that Joseph Smith knew any more about God than anyone else; for all we know, a time traveler with a taste for practical jokes revealed it all to him. The chain, I guess, is supposed to operate like this: Book of Mormon Evidence > Nephites > Joseph Smith > the LDS church > God. In other words, God's existence is hinging on what letter Book of Mormon names start with. Very bad idea.

The old maxim that Mormonism has no theology is truer than the apologists realize; it's archaeology all the way down.
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Re: How long/intensely did you believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon?

Post by MG 2.0 »

Symmachus wrote:
Thu Aug 18, 2022 7:20 pm
Once that feeling of remoteness and distance set in, it never went away. I grew up with that feeling of distance, then, between the world I lived in everyday—a world which presented me with nothing miraculous in a supernatural sense—and a world where Joseph Smith's miraculous Golden Plates were real objects. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. It really only became an issue as I got older and the Church people would insist on the primacy of the remote world…
I think that most humans can relate to this. Mother Teresa, for one.

The question I’ve asked myself over and over again is, “Why is God remote and seemingly unwilling to readily reveal Himself?” Of course, that question can be answered many ways. Some from a faith perspective and some from a non faith perspective.

So here we are.

Gold plates. Not seen, but heard (supposedly). Is that or isn’t that all we need?

How much is too much when it comes to God revealing Himself or not? How much is too little?

We can argue the answers/merits of these questions and a whole slew of others until the cows come home. But by then it may literally be too late.

The church gives us ready made answers should we choose to accept them after prayerful study and also by faith. This faith thingy can sure be a stick in the mud, however. I’m the first one to admit that.

Faith IS hard.

Regards,
MG
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Re: How long/intensely did you believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon?

Post by Gadianton »

Symmachus wrote: It must have been how my sibling felt when I pointed out that Santa Claus's handwriting was identical to mom's. It's not positive disproof but it makes the makes the assumptions about the object feel less real and the object about which the claims are made appear more remote. Once that feeling of remoteness and distance set in, it never went away.
A very nice way to put it.
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Re: How long/intensely did you believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon?

Post by Symmachus »

MG 2.0 wrote:
Thu Aug 18, 2022 10:11 pm
I think that most humans can relate to this. Mother Teresa, for one.

The question I’ve asked myself over and over again is, “Why is God remote and seemingly unwilling to readily reveal Himself?” Of course, that question can be answered many ways. Some from a faith perspective and some from a non faith perspective.

So here we are.

Gold plates. Not seen, but heard (supposedly). Is that or isn’t that all we need?

How much is too much when it comes to God revealing Himself or not? How much is too little?

We can argue the answers/merits of these questions and a whole slew of others until the cows come home. But by then it may literally be too late.

The church gives us ready made answers should we choose to accept them after prayerful study and also by faith. This faith thingy can sure be a stick in the mud, however. I’m the first one to admit that.

Faith IS hard.
I really can't argue with this, nor wish to. I have no quarrel with people's faith nor do I think it ipso facto irrational or anything like that. I think what I was trying to get at with my post is how uniquely hard the Mormon version of it is. It seems inverted to me. My childhood assumption about the plates was a very natural one (and thus not a childish one) about the link between objects and the divine: like a relic, the plates were a physical, material symbol of god's power and especially his presence: something I can see and touch as a believer, not as a skeptic demanding proof. I wouldn't have thought of them as evidence of god's existence or the church being true at all because such a question wouldn't have occurred to me at that age. That kind of thought was still ten years off.

To put it simply, Mormonism has a unique but anxious relationship with objects. The plates were like a medieval relic in the sense in that they were secondary to belief and something to enrich it and deepen it, not a support it—except that there were no plates to show me. That's the sort of thing that makes skepticism possible (I had the same reaction to miracles: where were they?). It would be as a if some medieval Catholic were to come to a center known for some relic or other only to be told that the relic was in heaven, and that they should rely on their faith in god to believe such a relic was ever there in the first place. Such an arrangement would imply that faith in god was a tool for believing in the existence of the relic, rendering the latter a kind of idol. That was the situation as I experienced it in Mormonism: "Pray to know if these things are true" means functionally "use your faith in god to feel better about your belief in this otherwise totally unlikely thing." Faith in god was thus rendered subordinate to belief in Book of Mormon historicity.

Obviously, most believers wouldn't see it that way, and there are further threads to pull on (especially how all of is tied to the authority of the church organization), but Mormonism is more susceptible to this than other Christian sects, because historicity is zero-sum as regards Mormon scripture. In terms of the Bible, historicity is a wide spectrum: most of it is historical in the sense that it can be connected to verifiable people, places, and events. One can reject the patriarchal narratives but still believe in the historicity of Jesus (or vice versa, for that matter!). But with the Book of Mormon it is all or nothing; you can't reject the historicity of 1 Nephi but accept that of Helaman—no matter what you do, you have to accept or reject that there were Nephites and Lamanites. The OP's question is a bit off, then, because there is no degree of intensity at which you can believe in historicity: you either do or do not.

There are degrees to which you can care about it, though. Personally, I think Russell Nelson is on to something in eschewing the word "Mormon" because it means that the LDS don't have to be defined by their relationship to that book, at least not in the first instance. Maybe that will prove to be his most prophetic contribution. I doubt they will ever go the way of "inspired fiction" (whatever the hell that is) or tumble into the theological chaos that is the Community of Christ; historicity will always be the official assumption. But I think it will be dethroned and de-emphasized to a considerable degree.

I wonder whether people like our friends at the Interpreter, being limited in their vision and unable to think beyond Nibley (Beyond Nibley...there's a future book title for you, my Interpreters), will keep building their shrine to historicity with their pseudo-scholarly materials. It is pure idolatry over there. It's amazing to me how they use god as just an explanatory theory for their historical claims involving people who've been dead for 1,500 years, and who probably never existed at all.
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Re: How long/intensely did you believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon?

Post by MG 2.0 »

Symmachus wrote:
Sat Aug 20, 2022 10:37 pm
MG 2.0 wrote:
Thu Aug 18, 2022 10:11 pm
I think that most humans can relate to this. Mother Teresa, for one.

The question I’ve asked myself over and over again is, “Why is God remote and seemingly unwilling to readily reveal Himself?” Of course, that question can be answered many ways. Some from a faith perspective and some from a non faith perspective.

So here we are.

Gold plates. Not seen, but heard (supposedly). Is that or isn’t that all we need?

How much is too much when it comes to God revealing Himself or not? How much is too little?

We can argue the answers/merits of these questions and a whole slew of others until the cows come home. But by then it may literally be too late.

The church gives us ready made answers should we choose to accept them after prayerful study and also by faith. This faith thingy can sure be a stick in the mud, however. I’m the first one to admit that.

Faith IS hard.
I really can't argue with this, nor wish to. I have no quarrel with people's faith nor do I think it ipso facto irrational or anything like that. I think what I was trying to get at with my post is how uniquely hard the Mormon version of it is. It seems inverted to me. My childhood assumption about the plates was a very natural one (and thus not a childish one) about the link between objects and the divine: like a relic, the plates were a physical, material symbol of god's power and especially his presence: something I can see and touch as a believer, not as a skeptic demanding proof.
I would ask the question: How would the World at Large be different IF the plates had not been taken back by Moroni? The plates had been taken and put on display in the Smithsonian and also accessible to scholars to handle and peruse the caractors. The world at large knew of and understood the significance of the plates.

Let’s assume, for the moment, that the plates were real and delivered to Joseph Smith for translation. If your childhood dreams of being able to see and handle the plates had come true, how would your world have been different? If you were to have the plates shown to you by an angel NOW as an adult what difference would that make in your life?

Let’s make a second assumption, just for fun. Let’s say that for some reason(s) or another this thing we call faith is a necessary condition in mortality. How would faith operate and/or be made manifest/increase/decrease in your life if an angel had shown you the plates?
Symmachus wrote:
Sat Aug 20, 2022 10:37 pm
I wouldn't have thought of them as evidence of god's existence or the church being true at all because such a question wouldn't have occurred to me at that age. That kind of thought was still ten years off.
But the fact is, you would have carried that memory with you. What difference would that have made?

What difference would ‘pure knowledge’ have as you then went on to navigate life without faith in regards to the plates having been delivered by an angel sent by God? Yep, the REAL God with the flowy beard/robe. Knowledge is always a good thing, right?

Now, multiply your answer exponentially by all of humanity.

How WOULD the world be different?

Anyone else is welcome to chime in also.

Regards,
MG
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Re: How long/intensely did you believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon?

Post by doubtingthomas »

MG 2.0 wrote:
Sat Aug 20, 2022 11:49 pm

What difference would ‘pure knowledge’
Haven't you read the story of Elijah and the Priests of Baal? Or the story Nephi and the murder trial?

God likes to show off sometimes according to the scriptures.

Nice try MG.
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