A Newly Re-Energized Hamblin Pinches Off Another One

[_Kishkumen]

So, you're telling me that when Homer wrote, "Sing, Muse, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus," the Muse did not actually reveal to him the real events that took place during the real war of Troy? Why would Zeus lie to him? What sort of lesson do we learn from Achilles' anger, if he didn't really lose his dearest friend Patroclus to the wicked Trojans? How can we appreciate the futility of war, if a man named Hector did not truly die on the plains of Troy, trying to protect home, hearth, and family?

Why would Zeus lie about these things? Why would Homer say that a Muse inspired him, if Muses don't actually exist?

I'm sooooo confuuuuuuused!!!!!

Don't you know that we have found Troy and know where Sparta and Argos are? There is a whole catalog of ships that specifies quite clearly which cities of the Greeks sent contingents to rescue Helen from the perfidious Paris.

You atheists make no sense. With all of this evidence, how can you not accept the truth and historicity of Homer's Iliad?

[_MrStakhanovite]

You need to re-read what Hamblin said.

I read him pretty carefully.

He has no problem with a non-literal story being used to teach divinely inspired knowledge. His problem is with a historical account being revealed by God and taught by his Prophet as if it really were true, when in fact it is not. In other words, for God and his Prophet to lie to people, or bait and switch, whatever you prefer

Yeah, and there are thousands of pages of ink spilled about that very same point from Europeans in the past 300 years. Germans have been over this, if the scriptures are the errant works of a middle east culture, how does God and his inspiration factor in? Can we still affirm ancient creeds if we cede the historicity of the Bible? They have all kinds of arguments and counter arguments on this.

Hegel and Feurerbach's criticism of Hegel hashes a lot of this out. Bill should know better. But he doesn't.

[_Sethbag]

If there were no Nephites, then Joseph’s entire foundational story is ontologically [sic]false. Which means he was either lying (he knew there were no plates, but told his followers he had them), or he was delusional (there were no plates, but he was hallucinating that there were). Either way, the only intellectually honest and coherent conclusion is that Joseph Smith was not an authentic prophet. The only remaining choices are liar or lunatic.

Aha! So, it was about crafting a false dichotomy. He kept us waiting, only to spring this surprise turn of events on us. Quite brilliant, no?

I don't agree that the dichotomy is false. Joseph Smith said that the Nephites were real, and that he had gained this knowledge from God. If the Nephites really weren't real after all, then either Joseph was lying, or else delusional, or, I guess, converting this to a trichotomy, Elohim approves of the "bait and switch" approach to Truth.

Hegel and Feurerbach's criticism of Hegel hashes a lot of this out. Bill should know better. But he doesn't.

Yeah, that's it. It's really perfectly to be expected that God would reveal stuff to people as historical fact, knowing that it would someday come out that it really wasn't fact after all, and think this was a great way to teach and inspire confidence in him. If only I had read Feuerbach, I'd understand why it's just fine that God and Jesus and Joseph Smith, and the Angel Moroni, would teach the world about the Nephites as if they actually existed, when in reality they didn't exist.

To Kish: I have no problem with Homer. I acknowledge that whatever wisdom, or moral, social, or cultural informational content in that book, of whatever merit, originated from the mind of a human being. If we all agree that the Book of Mormon originated in Joseph's mind (or his associates, whatever), I'd have no problem treating its contents in exactly the same way that we'd treat The Illiad, or The Lord of the Rings, or whatever.

[_Cylon]

Once again I'm going to come across as an uneducated rube to some of you, but I have to agree with Hamblin on this one too. I really cannot buy the whole "Book of Mormon as inspired fiction" thing, and for mostly the reasons that Hamblin outlines.

It makes no sense to me that a God of Truth, as Elohim is portrayed to be, would try to convince people that his Prophet, Seer, and Revelator on Earth really knows what he's talking about by letting this guy "reveal" fiction as if it were fact. The problem is, once the readership becomes educated enough, or the state of knowledge advances far enough, or whatever, that people become able to recognize the fiction as such, the jig is up; the "Prophet" loses his credibility.

And that more or less sums up my problems with the Bible too. I guess I've just never educated myself up enough to where I can buy into the whole "inspired fiction taught as fact in order to deliver some profound message" thing.

Back to Hamblin, my takeaway from this is that the Book of Mormon has to be literally true in order for it really to have come from God because it was taught as being literally true in the first place. Hamblin may not have said it in exactly this way, but that's his gist, and I agree with it. The alternative just does not make sense.

Yeah, I'm pretty much in that camp, too, although I'm fine with anyone calling any text "inspired" in the sense that it gives them inspiration. But once you get away from the idea that it's literal truth, you have to come up with completely separate arguments if you want to make the case that it still came from a source other than a human mind.

I do wish people would stop using the old "liar or lunatic" canard, though. I think there is plenty of evidence that perfectly sane people can have experiences that they believe to be real that don't actually happen anywhere but inside their brain. And there's even more evidence that people can remember things that never happened. So, yeah, Joseph Smith might have been a con-man, or he might have been insane, but he might also have believed in things that never happened. Or some combination of all three.

[_Stormy Waters]

I think declaring the Book of Mormon to be inspired fiction has some unique problems as compared to the Bible. Mainly the artifacts that Joseph Smith said that he found in the Box with the Golden Plates. Namely the Sword of Laban, and the Urim and Thummim. These are items that are found in the text of the Book of Mormon.

Wouldn't this be like saying that Noah's Ark was a metaphor while having the ark itself?

[_Sethbag]

Yeah, I'm pretty much in that camp, too, although I'm fine with anyone calling any text "inspired" in the sense that it gives them inspiration. But once you get away from the idea that it's literal truth, you have to come up with completely separate arguments if you want to make the case that it still came from a source other than a human mind.

Just to be clear, I have no problem with the idea of a God that uses a parable or whatever to teach important principles. I'd just expect that God to be forthright about it.

I do wish people would stop using the old "liar or lunatic" canard, though. I think there is plenty of evidence that perfectly sane people can have experiences that they believe to be real that don't actually happen anywhere but inside their brain.

That's why I prefer "delusional" to "lunatic". Delusional implies an experience someone perceives as real, but which happened only in their mind. Regarding Joseph Smith, I'm more in the "pious fraud" camp.

[_Sethbag]

I think declaring the Book of Mormon to be inspired fiction has some unique problems as compared to the Bible. Mainly the artifacts that Joseph Smith said that he found in the Box with the Golden Plates. Namely the Sword of Laban, and the Urim and Thummim. These are items that are found in the text of the Book of Mormon.

Wouldn't this be like saying that Noah's Ark was a metaphor while having the ark itself?

Not to mention the skeleton of Zelph, the White Lamanite, who served under the great prophet Onandagus. They took his leg bones all the way down to Missouri, for FSM's sake! "The man Zelph, whose leg bones I now hold in my hands, was a metaphor!"

[_MrStakhanovite]

Yeah, that's it.

Now hold on here, there is a difference between responding to you and responding to Bill.

You don’t pretend you are some hard hitting commentator of the Mormon intelligentsia, holding forth on a blog where you make sweeping and ignorant claims of an entire multi-discipline area of inquiry. You don’t consider yourself some kind of authority when it comes to the Book of Mormon and the Bible.

Had you made the exact same points Bill did, I’d have approached it in an entirely different manner with no German name dropping (Feuerbach by the way, is probably the best example of someone being an anti-theist, he is not exactly a faith promoting kinda guy).

[Guest]

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[_Sethbag]

Ok, thanks for that clarification, Stak.

I'm still confused though, and would appreciate a bit of illumination from you if you're willing to lay it out a little for us.

My read of Hamblin on this is that he thinks that Joseph Smith represented the Book of Mormon as a literally true history of people who actually existed, and that Joseph Smith got this literally true, factual account from God (or through God, whatever). Since Joseph Smith claimed that God told him the Nephites existed, and Joseph Smith himself taught that the Nephites really existed, Hamblin says that the Nephites really must have existed, or else Joseph Smith wasn't really teaching things he got from God.

I guess I could allow that maybe God really exists, but is more akin to ancient Greek gods in being devious, conniving, willing to lie, interested in doing things their own way for their own personal benefit, and so forth.

Hamblin's argument presupposes that God exists, and that God is not like that. Ie: God is perfectly good, perfectly honest, and so forth. God doesn't lie, God doesn't pull a bait and switch, God doesn't tell people something happened unless it really happened.

If you wouldn't mind explaining yourself a little more, what does Feuerbach have to say that contradicts this type of argumentation? Does he argue for a more flawed, human Greek-style God? Or does he argue that God can still be the type of God that Hamblin presupposes in his Mormon worldview, and yet still teach as fact things that really are fiction?

Where is he going wrong here? What am I missing because I haven't read much German philosophy that might have set me straight on all of this?