If plates then God

[Morley]

Howe may have a point in calling the Book of Mormon a great achievement in American literature; but he is not actually saying that it is great literature. He credits it for scope and ambition.

I should mention that Grant Hardy, too, recognizes this.

In his essay, "The Book of Mormon as Literature," Hardy writes:

The Book of Mormon, with its ungainly repetitive style, is not an obvious candidate for literary acclaim. Yet if readers can see past the individual sentences and verses to larger units of paragraphs, pericopes, chapters, and books, its literary features become more evident. . . .

Despite some modest stylistic variety, the Book of Mormon is not known for its rich vocabulary, nimble syntax, original metaphors, or felicitous expressions. Its literary interest is not typically at the level of individual sentences. . . .

While the Book of Mormon exhibits aesthetic qualities, they are not those of mainstream literature. Perhaps this makes it something like naïve art, produced by artists with little formal training or exposure to elite culture, which can nevertheless be arresting or impressive on its own terms.

(Hardy, The Annotated Book of Mormon, 795, 797-98, 800)

Thank you for posting this.

[MG 2.0]

Sure. What thinking person wouldn’t?

Thanks for this direct answer to the question of what an average reasonable modern person might say when confronted with the claim that a huge and culturally complex Nephite empire once flourished in the Americas, but has left no convincing archaeological evidence of it ever having existed.

As I’ve said and talked about a whole bunch of times now on this thread and elsewhere I see certain issues as being peripheral to others.

The primary questions for me are:

1. Is there a God?
2. If so, does God have a plan/purpose for humanity?
3. Is He able to reveal that plan/purpose?
4. Is that plan (or parts of that plan) readily accessible and if so should I not find myself in congruency with that plan?

All else is secondary and/or peripheral. But once I’ve determined that these ‘primaries’ seem solid then I can move on to secondary/peripheral issues/questions. I also accept the fact that I live in a world of ambiguity and that I see through a glass darkly.

Regards,
MG

Yup. You are a Mormon, and those are the possible reactions of a thinking 21st century Mormon to being confronted with the sheer implausibility of the historical claims made in the Book of Mormon about what happened in pre-modern America.

But for the early 19th century Americans to whom Joseph Smith addressed himself, at a time when archaeology in general and the archaeology of the Americas in particular, was much less developed, the reasons for scepticism about the historicity of the Book of Mormon narrative were considerably weaker. And as a result, the adherents of the CoJCoLDS were able to retain their belief without the elaborate mental stratagems (dare I call them 'gymnastics'?) that you find necessary.

I do wonder how the missionaries succeed in converting anybody with some historical training nowadays.

I don’t know your situation as to your belief in a personal creator God. So as to whether or not you believe in a ‘plan’ matters in this conversation. If you don’t believe, then religion ultimately doesn’t matter. Choose your own adventure essentially. If you do, then it becomes a matter of looking at the marketplace of religions and/or belief systems to try and locate/narrow down those religions that seem to have the biggest bang for the buck (not literally but figuratively) in the eternal scheme of things. The one that seems most broad and all encompassing with doctrines related to progression, happiness, family relationships, etc.

So a hypothetical…

Which religion/belief system would you place in that category?

I think we can both agree it’s not Scientology.

What I’m getting at is that the ‘larger picture’ is not unimportant. It’s back to the Monet paintings analogy I’ve used before. Looking at the individual blotches of paint may distract from the overall beauty of ‘the plan’ in its complete framing.

If there is a personal creator God that has a plan/purpose for mankind and the LDS Church is up there in the running for ‘biggest bang for the buck’ then one might more readily accept the possibility that there would be additional scripture along with the traditional Judaeo Christian scripture that was already in place at the restoration.

That would give greater credibility to plates, angels, and modern scripture(s) as a result. Such as the one quoted at the bottom of this posting.

I guess I tend to look at things in a wider and more global view than simply looking at what President Hinckley used to call ‘the warts’. Blotches which are part of a larger picture.

If you or anyone else has discarded the idea of a personal creator God in whose image we were created then all this is simply the meanderings of ‘a frenzied mind’.

Alma 30:
12 And this Anti-Christ, whose name was Korihor, (and the law could have no hold upon him) began to preach unto the people that there should be no Christ. And after this manner did he preach, saying:

13 O ye that are bound down under a foolish and a vain hope, why do ye yoke yourselves with such foolish things? Why do ye look for a Christ? For no man can know of anything which is to come.

14 Behold, these things which ye call prophecies, which ye say are handed down by holy prophets, behold, they are foolish traditions of your fathers.

15 How do ye know of their surety? Behold, ye cannot know of things which ye do not see; therefore ye cannot know that there shall be a Christ.

16 Ye look forward and say that ye see a remission of your sins. But behold, it is the effect of a frenzied mind; and this derangement of your minds comes because of the traditions of your fathers, which lead you away into a belief of things which are not so.

17 And many more such things did he say unto them, telling them that there could be no atonement made for the sins of men, but every man fared in this life according to the management of the creature; therefore every man prospered according to his genius, and that every man conquered according to his strength; and whatsoever a man did was no crime.

18 And thus he did preach unto them, leading away the hearts of many, causing them to lift up their heads in their wickedness, yea, leading away many women, and also men, to commit whoredoms—telling them that when a man was dead, that was the end thereof.

Regards,
MG

[Physics Guy]

While the Book of Mormon exhibits aesthetic qualities, they are not those of mainstream literature. Perhaps this makes it something like naïve art, produced by artists with little formal training or exposure to elite culture, which can nevertheless be arresting or impressive on its own terms.

Yes, I think this is a good way to express the limits and the merits of the Book of Mormon as literature. It's interesting and impressive, for sure—just not in any way that would be unlikely for someone like Joseph Smith to have produced by himself.

Perhaps in fact Smith did have help, and perhaps his helper(s) did more than just encourage him. The point for me is that the Book of Mormon as a text is in no way at all implausible as a purely human product from early 19th century New England. A talented and fortunate individual, like the many who start historically visible religious movements, could quite clearly have done it. If in fact Joseph Smith really needed help from Sidney Rigdon or Oliver Cowdery or someone, that would just mean that he himself wasn't quite in the Mary Baker Eddy or L. Ron Hubbard league.

He totally could have been. People like that do happen. So no apologetic arguments to the effect that Smith must have been a real prophet, because he couldn't possibly have produced the Book of Mormon himself, hold any water at all.

[MG 2.0]

While the Book of Mormon exhibits aesthetic qualities, they are not those of mainstream literature. Perhaps this makes it something like naïve art, produced by artists with little formal training or exposure to elite culture, which can nevertheless be arresting or impressive on its own terms.

Yes, I think this is a good way to express the limits and the virtues of the Book of Mormon as literature. It's interesting and impressive, for sure—just not in any way that would be unlikely for someone like Joseph Smith to have produced by himself.

Perhaps in fact Smith did have help, and perhaps his helper(s) did more than just encourage him. The point for me is that the Book of Mormon as a text is in no way at all implausible as a purely human product from early 19th century New England. A talented and fortunate individual, like the many who start historically visible religious movements, could quite clearly have done it. If in fact Joseph Smith really needed help from Sidney Rigdon or someone, that would just mean that he himself wasn't quite in the Mary Baker Eddy or L. Ron Hubbard league.

He totally could have been. People like that do happen. So no apologetic arguments to the effect that Smith must have been a real prophet, because he couldn't possibly have produced the Book of Mormon himself, hold any water at all.

I think you may be bracketing the translation process. Joseph doing all this whilst his head is in a hat. He could leave the translation room/process and go about other activities…and then come back and continue right where he left off. The final product requiring very little editing in the actual narrative and substance of the book.

It’s not like he sat down and wrote a novel in the traditional sense. That would require many edits and rewrites.

Are there any other examples of a comparable work that you can think of (as it relates to the conditions which Joseph Smith operated under…age, education, etc.) where the author literally dictated the length and breadth of the novel verbally while a scribe took the dictation?

And it was a ‘flash in the pan’ work?

Regards,
MG

[Physics Guy]

The Book of Mormon isn't a novel. It wasn't rewritten and edited. And it totally shows.

How much harder is it to dictate a story from inside a hat than just to dictate it to a secretary while walking around the office? Dictation is hardly an insurmountable barrier to composition. Plenty of long texts have been dictated. Some authors still write that way, using dictation software. People who like it say it's faster than typing.

I wrote a first draft of a novel in exactly one year, once, working only a few hours a week. Lots of people write novels in one month, every year: it's a thing. My novel's first draft was bad, but it was bad in ways that wouldn't have mattered if I had been aiming at something like the Book of Mormon. I had a lot of characters who appeared and disappeared again after just a couple of scenes. And I had a lot of arbitrary events in my plot that didn't fit into a larger momentum but were just orchestrated to set up my next cute scene.

No doubt my draft had lots of other flaws, too. Those were just the ones that were most obvious to me even at the time. I stuck with the project because I had gotten the impression that just filling the pages was an important obstacle to overcome. I confirmed, though, that that's not actually the bottleneck, if you want to write a good novel. The hard parts are mostly things that the Book of Mormon doesn't even attempt. That's maybe where Smith was smart.

Writing a long text is an effort, all right, but it's an effort like running a marathon. It's by no means superhuman. People do it. Writing a really good book is a lot harder still, but plenty of people manage to do even that, the way some people run ultra-marathons. A whole lot more people write mediocre long texts that have a few neat things in them.

Try it some time. Or get WattPad and see how lots of other people have tried it. You'll never again be impressed by apologetic arguments from the text of the Book of Mormon. That Book took a talented and motivated author (or authors), and the particular kind of Bible-fan-fiction work that it is made a lot more sense in 1830, marketing-wise, than it has since. That's all that's special about the Book of Mormon, however, as a text. It's nothing that Smith, or a person like Smith, couldn't have done.

[Gadianton]

I think we can both agree it’s not Scientology

That's only because you were born a Mormon and not a Scientologist.

[Kishkumen]

The Book of Mormon isn't a novel. It wasn't rewritten and edited. And it totally shows.

How much harder is it to dictate a story from inside a hat than just to dictate it to a secretary while walking around the office? Dictation is hardly an insurmountable barrier to composition. Plenty of long texts have been dictated. Some authors still write that way, using dictation software. People who like it say it's faster than typing.

I wrote a first draft of a novel in exactly one year, once, working only a few hours a week. Lots of people write novels in one month, every year: it's a thing. My novel's first draft was bad, but it was bad in ways that wouldn't have mattered if I had been aiming at something like the Book of Mormon. I had a lot of characters who appeared and disappeared again after just a couple of scenes. And I had a lot of arbitrary events in my plot that didn't fit into a larger momentum but were just orchestrated to set up my next cute scene.

No doubt my draft had lots of other flaws, too. Those were just the ones that were most obvious to me even at the time. I stuck with the project because I had gotten the impression that just filling the pages was an important obstacle to overcome. I confirmed, though, that that's not actually the bottleneck, if you want to write a good novel. The hard parts are mostly things that the Book of Mormon doesn't even attempt. That's maybe where Smith was smart.

Writing a long text is an effort, all right, but it's an effort like running a marathon. It's by no means superhuman. People do it. Writing a really good book is a lot harder still, but plenty of people manage to do even that, the way some people run ultra-marathons. A whole lot more people write mediocre long texts that have a few neat things in them.

Try it some time. Or get WattPad and see how lots of other people have tried it. You'll never again be impressed by apologetic arguments from the text of the Book of Mormon. That Book took a talented and motivated author (or authors), and the particular kind of Bible-fan-fiction work that it is made a lot more sense in 1830, marketing-wise, than it has since. That's all that's special about the Book of Mormon, however, as a text. It's nothing that Smith, or a person like Smith, couldn't have done.

Did you write your novel under a pseudonym, and, if so, would you mind letting us know the title?

[Morley]

What I’m getting at is that the ‘larger picture’ is not unimportant. It’s back to the Monet paintings analogy I’ve used before. Looking at the individual blotches of paint may distract from the overall beauty of ‘the plan’ in its complete framing.

Please stop misusing poor, old Monet. He didn’t paint in blotches. Looking at his work closely doesn’t distract from its beauty. Every tone of color and each piece of brushwork was carefully planned and could stand on its own.

I cringe every time you employ this analogy. Sorry to do this, but I can’t stand back anymore. It’s obvious that you wouldn’t know a work by Monet from your own brown taint.

[honorentheos]

If you don’t believe, then religion ultimately doesn’t matter.

Exactly.

[tagriffy]

Could Joseph have written this book or is it the work of God?

Regards,
MG

Why the dichotomy? For me, it's either/or. It's both/and.