...... I am working on revising an essay where I discuss different ideas about how to accept both propositions. First, one doesn't have to think anything. If Mormonism works for someone, that is all they need; they don't really need to reconcile the proposistions. Possiblilities I talk about in my essay include:
Joseph as pious fraud. If one accepts modern biblical scholarship, then one has to accept much of the Bible comes to us through "pious frauds." That God has done so in the past means we can't reject this possibility out of hand.
Joseph was (self-)deluded. Joseph had to interpret God's messages for himself just as much as he had to do this for others. And people have a tendency to hear what they want to hear.
God deceived Joseph. I've floated the idea here and elsewhere that it was Joseph who needed the ancients because he was never entirely comfortable in his prophetic skin. So God gave him what he needed.
.......
Tagriffy, though there may be something in your idea I think you may be stretching that cloak further than it actually reaches.
Considering Modern scholarship I can see possibly the book Joshua as pious fraud.The first books in the Bible are saturated with folk lore and imagination in places but that is not quite the same as pious fraud.(though that may be related to what you are proposing) That leaves the vast majority of the Bible out of the pious fraud category. Isaiah or Jeremiah? Psalms? Amos? Kings ? fraud does not fit even if you think that the presentations of history are biased.
In the same way, sincere and deeply held religious belief is less impressive to me when it's an important part of your religious belief that you alone are a Prophet.
Isn't it nearly as bad when an important part of your belief is that "your guy" is the lone prophet? Isn't this just a way of patting yourself on the back as you are in his circle?
Yes. No. Maybe. I rather think the important question is what are you getting from it? Nevo doesn't seem to be patting him(?)self on the back, and I'm certainly not doing to. If I am reading Nevo correctly, and this is certainly the case with me, we are getting deeply spiritual experiences that outweigh whatever judgment that may be made about Joseph himself.
He could have been the kind of narcissist who was convinced that he really was a great prophet, and that God Almighty was totally backing him up
But aren't all prophets "narcissists" to some degree?
In the essay I quoted yesterday, Richard Bushman also wrote: "Prophets are immensely confident, egotistical, bold historical figures who confront kings and attack whole societies . . . . And yet at the same time, these prophets present themselves as passive instruments in God's hands, saying only what they are told and doing only what God instructs" ("Joseph Smith and the Creation of the Sacred," in Joseph Smith Jr.: Reappraisals after Two Centuries, ed. Reid L. Neilson and Terryl L. Givens [New York: Oxford University Press, 2009], 101).
I can't think of any biblical prophetic figures who weren't convinced of their own divine authority: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos, John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, etc.
On the basis of personality traits alone, I think it would be hard to distinguish a "true" prophet from a "false" one. They tend to behave in similar ways (see, e.g., Len Oakes, Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities).
Yes! If we had as much information about Isaiah or Jesus or Paul as we do about Joseph, they probably would not do any better. We need to allow that prophets are human beings just like the rest of us. And however narcissistic are egotistical they may have been, they still wound up giving their followers things of great significance to them.
Or that there was anything written on the plates at all.
True. But, suspending disbelief just for the sake of argument, I'm thinking the ballpark of correctness would have to be a galaxy of correctness, because no area on this planet matches anything Smith put in the book.
Just for fun, I've done some speculating about the Nephites having really existed--in an alternate universe. The plates now become inter-dimensional objects and everything about the Book of Mormon becomes removed to the realm of unfalsifiability.
...... I am working on revising an essay where I discuss different ideas about how to accept both propositions. First, one doesn't have to think anything. If Mormonism works for someone, that is all they need; they don't really need to reconcile the proposistions. Possiblilities I talk about in my essay include:
Joseph as pious fraud. If one accepts modern biblical scholarship, then one has to accept much of the Bible comes to us through "pious frauds." That God has done so in the past means we can't reject this possibility out of hand.
Joseph was (self-)deluded. Joseph had to interpret God's messages for himself just as much as he had to do this for others. And people have a tendency to hear what they want to hear.
God deceived Joseph. I've floated the idea here and elsewhere that it was Joseph who needed the ancients because he was never entirely comfortable in his prophetic skin. So God gave him what he needed.
.......
Tagriffy, though there may be something in your idea I think you may be stretching that cloak further than it actually reaches.
Considering Modern scholarship I can see possibly the book Joshua as pious fraud.The first books in the Bible are saturated with folk lore and imagination in places but that is not quite the same as pious fraud.(though that may be related to what you are proposing) That leaves the vast majority of the Bible out of the pious fraud category. Isaiah or Jeremiah? Psalms? Amos? Kings ? fraud does not fit even if you think that the presentations of history are biased.
I'm thinking in terms like the book of Deuteronomy, claimed to have been written by Moses, but curiously was only discovered in Josiah's reign. Or the so-called deutero-Paulines and many of the catholic epistles which are pseudepigraphal in nature. Those would certainly qualify as the work of "pious frauds."
I'm sympathetic to Shades' view that God and fraud are incompatible. Ironically, in the real world, they go together like chocolate and peanut butter in a Reese's. And so if there really is a God, it's difficult to believe that fraud isn't the primary "mysterious way" of God.
I'll admit I'm directly challenging Shades' view as a theist here. (Shades is a theist, by the way, Dan, in case you're reading. Happy thanksgiving, by the way).
If 99% of religion is based on some kind of fraud, why hold out for the 1%? Don't you think God would see the moral hazard of belief in himself and hope that people find their way forward without belief in him?
It's kind of like saying we should be grateful for Fentanyl because the .01 percent of the time people use it legitimately, it really does the job!
I'm sympathetic to Shades' view that God and fraud are incompatible. Ironically, in the real world, they go together like chocolate and peanut butter in a Reese's. And so if there really is a God, it's difficult to believe that fraud isn't the primary "mysterious way" of God.
I'll admit I'm directly challenging Shades' view as a theist here. (Shades is a theist, by the way, Dan, in case you're reading. Happy thanksgiving, by the way).
If 99% of religion is based on some kind of fraud, why hold out for the 1%? Don't you think God would see the moral hazard of belief in himself and hope that people find their way forward without belief in him?
It's kind of like saying we should be grateful for Fentanyl because the .01 percent of the time people use it legitimately, it really does the job!
I have two very different, possibly incompatible thoughts here.
The first is that God deals with us as we are. In their socio-historical context, would the Priestly or Yahwist really comprehend evolution, let alone how God may have interacted with the process? Probably not. So we get "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" and "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens" (Gen. 1:1; 2:4). Much of the "fraud" is then God communicating to humans "in their weakness, after he manner of their language, that they might come to understanding" (D&C 1:24).
The other is that prophets have to do the best they can to communicate God's message. They may or may not entirely understand it themselves, but they are given this burden. And who's going to listen to poor little Tim out in Phoenix? But if Peter or Paul said it, people might just listen.
