MrStakhanovite wrote:Hi Seth,
Thank you for the kind words, I really do appreciate them.
sethpayne wrote:For me, this article absolutely, once and for all, discredited the argument that a "simple farm boy" with no education couldn't produce a complex literary work. Several examples were given of others writing about things which they had no knowledge given their cultural context.
I’ve not the read the article in question, but I am familiar with automatic writing. It is certainly a possible explanation, but I don’t buy the “simple farm boy” either. I recall reading about these two researchers (Lord and Parry) who were doing work in ancient epic poetry, and went to Montenegro to find the last few Guslars (medieval slavic bards) before the tradition died out. They found this illiterate butcher who couldn’t read in his native language, but could recite some 80,000 lines of verse from memory, I mean Lord and Parry recorded this guy giving a 16 hour recitation of just
one poem. This Butcher even listened to a epic poem he was unfamiliar with, and after one hearing, was able to recite it back in it’s entirety, with a bunch of extra lines added on the fly.
Humans can do some amazing stuff, I don’t understand the sentiment that the Book of Mormon is just too amazing for Joseph Smith to complete on his own.
sethpayne wrote:I wonder now, having been convinced by your argument, if it is polemics which should be absent from LDS apologetics? Perhaps not.
I think there is always a place for polemics, there is a time and place for just about everything.
I'm glad you came back to this specific topic. I was going to post on it but was afraid it would be too much of a hijack.
I've always liked the article in question and wondered why no one took up the topic. Sometimes when that happens I think maybe because its a stupid argument and I'm the only one who doesn't recognize that.
My contribution is that
1. Joseph Smith wasn't writing, he was speaking. So this would be trance speaking not automatic writing. I don't know if this matters a whole bunch. But within 10-20 years, trance speaking would become a really big thing, starting in upstate New York.
Although this was not the practice in later trance speaking, as far as I know, a trance could be induced by staring at an object, say, a stone. Perhaps the effect could be exagerated by excluding any light. So we are talking about techniques that would produce extreme mental focus. Two rocks in the bottom of a hat anyone?
Was there upstate trance speaking before the generally recognized dates that we don't know about or which researchers haven't written about? A smaller, less well known occurance of which Joseph Smith was a part? The book, in my opinion, is Ann Braude's
Radical Spirits.
Its about women and reform, but remember, early Mormonism was a reform movement. Hell, it even promised Emma ordination (D&C 25:7), a long time before any other woman was known to be licensed or ordained. An ordination that actually happened although the date is not known. Trance speaking allowed someone with less power, a woman, or a rural farm boy whose family was being squeezed out by industrialization, to speak back to more dominant powers.
On another board, I asked Vogel about this article, he was not impressed, his reason was that he, Vogel, thought Joseph Smith was making every last bit of it up. He had some specific evidence but I don't remember it (that would be the important part.)
2. Joseph Smith wasn't necessarily trance speaking about stuff he did not know about. Almost everything in the Book of Mormon was known, Joseph Smith and perhaps others who were involved, just recombined what was already thought. That would be typical of what I understand about automatic writing.