MG 2.0 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 20, 2022 11:49 pm
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?
The short version of my reply is that "faith" is a non sequitur here.
I think you're reading me as lamenting the absence of something, and you're interpreting it as one of the "doubting Thomas" narratives that you get in Church. I wasn't demanding proof or asking for evidence due to a preternatural skepticism. I'm talking about something slightly different. It's not that I had big dreams of seeing the plates and then those dreams went unfulfilled; it's that the Church put on big productions showcasing the Book of Mormon as real, put out story books, made life-size dioramas of the characters in the stories, and had replicas of the plates, all of this an attempt to say "this really happened." I simply assumed that it did so happen and this was all real, so I treated it like any other real thing. I don't have faith about real things (no one does); I just take them as given (everyone does).
It was only as I was told, basically, that I all that reality is not accessible that a sense of distance set in. Distance, I say, not disbelief. That reaction was totally natural, and I'm sure even strong believers have had it at some point. But it is not unlike the reaction that a child has to the Santa Claus myth on being told the store Santa Claus is just a helper, or whatever, and you can't meet the real one, even though, rest assured, he is real: what had felt immediate and real is now interrupted. Contrast this with the Joseph Smith story, which was also part of the pageant and part of the Mormon tour during pageant season: you see his farm, you see the Whitmer place, etc. I didn't need to see those things in order to believe in Joseph Smith as prophet; I was there to see them because I already believed that. However, if I had gone to the visitor's center and been told, "well, we don't know where the farm is, or where Palmyra truly is, and we don't have anything actually connected to Joseph Smith here; you just need to have faith that it is in western New York," it would have introduced that odd feeling, as well. It's not that I needed to see the farm (or needed to see the plates); it's that things that are real don't need justifications. They don't need faith. To make a claim about the real, empirically testable world of the kind that the Church used to claim (perhaps still does) for Book of Mormon historicity and to do it with the intensity and certainty that it did/does is to invite a natural curiosity about those realia. If the response to that curiosity is "well, you can't see any of this—but don't worry it's totally real, as real as anything else—you just need to have faith," you are going to invite some severe and much deserved skepticism. At the very least, because the burden has been placed on me to determine the reality of the thing, I will have to use my experience and my reason to arrive at a conclusion to that question. I would say that by high school I had concluded, based on my experience, that the odds of a sub-literate farmhand on the American frontier finding the record of an ancient civilization inscribed on golden tablets, and in his own backyard of all places, had to be very low. It is absurd, in fact. I have no problem with anyone who chooses to believe an absurdity, but I don't see why I should. In any case, my point is that this is a unique problem for Mormonism: how to make a claim about the real world—and a very large claim at that, and not about a spiritual world—without introducing this sense of distance from the real world when the particulars of the claim are always just one step (or many) beyond the real world.
Contrast that with traditional Christianity: it's faith in an event involving something beyond ordinary experience that does not set itself up for verification. It doesn't even invite verification. The degree of belief in historicity of the Bible story is a huge spectrum, not an either or. A believing Christian can never verify whether Jesus has saved humanity through his death or whether he is consubstantial with god or merely coeval. It is precisely because you cannot verify such claims that they are the subject of faith in the Christian sense, it seems to me. Whether he was born in Nazareth or Judea has no bearing on the issue either. But the claims about the Book of Mormon are subject to verification because they are claims about the ordinary world that we live, not the spiritual realm.
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?
I don't mean to be rude by not engaging in this speculation. I didn't need an angel then and don't need one now. This is bit like asking if I would believe in Santa Claus if he flew into my driveway on a magic sled driven by reindeer. Well, that is what I would expect him to do if he were real (if not my driveway, somewhere visible). This idea that faith means believing in something disprovable about the real world is a Mormon innovation, I think. I don't think very many Church Fathers, medieval philosophers, or modern theologians would see it that way. As I recall, St Paul (or rather a follower of his) says that faith is the conviction of things unseen—but not of things disproven or disprovable.
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?
Well, I have carried a lot memories with me. I don't put any significance into that; I just offer it is but one example of what I'm talking about. I will just recapitulate that it wasn't that I was looking for physical proof/knowledge. If someone tells me there is cherry cheesecake in the fridge, I will go to the fridge to open not because I am testing their claim and seek knowledge about the existence of cherry cheesecake but because I want to eat it. If I open it and it is not there, naturally I wouldn't understand what faith has to do with it. It's just not there. And likely to believe that person to the same degree the next time they tell me something I want to hear.
