I Overheard A Surprising Comment Today From A Chapel Mormon

[_Physics Guy]

To be fair, the evolution and transmission of early Christianity happened so long ago and in such a different culture from ours that it's pretty reasonable to decide that many accounts in the New Testament may be garbled versions, at best, of what actually happened. It's a little hard to be sure what did actually happen, if anything, but one can hardly say that the whole religion stands or falls on whether Jesus really walked on water. Not even the bodily Resurrection of Jesus is really a necessary underpinning of the faith.

Not being Mormon I can't really say, but my impression is that Mormonism is a little more dependent on literal miracles being literally true. If golden plates were not conferred by an angel then Joseph Smith was a liar, and most of Mormonism seems to depend pretty critically on Smith not being a liar.

With every religion that comes in a range of intensities from fundamentalist to liberal, there is a question of whether it's even worth bothering with the less intense forms. It just seems to me that the question is more acute for Mormonism, because of how heavily Smith staked his claim to angelic revelation through miraculous artifacts. If you give that up, I have a hard time seeing what the fall-back position is for Mormonism.

[_Niadna]

To be fair, the evolution and transmission of early Christianity happened so long ago and in such a different culture from ours that it's pretty reasonable to decide that many accounts in the New Testament may be garbled versions, at best, of what actually happened. It's a little hard to be sure what did actually happen, if anything, but one can hardly say that the whole religion stands or falls on whether Jesus really walked on water. Not even the bodily Resurrection of Jesus is really a necessary underpinning of the faith.

Not being Mormon I can't really say, but my impression is that Mormonism is a little more dependent on literal miracles being literally true. If golden plates were not conferred by an angel then Joseph Smith was a liar, and most of Mormonism seems to depend pretty critically on Smith not being a liar.

With every religion that comes in a range of intensities from fundamentalist to liberal, there is a question of whether it's even worth bothering with the less intense forms. It just seems to me that the question is more acute for Mormonism, because of how heavily Smith staked his claim to angelic revelation through miraculous artifacts. If you give that up, I have a hard time seeing what the fall-back position is for Mormonism.

You are absolutely right.

. . . but I think the 'go along to get along' Mormons are . . . hmnnn . . . probably not believers in much of anything. They wouldn't find a better 'home' in any other belief system, or a more comfortable one. I don't think they THINK about the 'underpinnings,' or what Mormonism is based on, much.

Shoot, I've met such Mormons, who have been Mormons all their lives, are the children and grandchildren of Mormons, and who have never touched a cup of coffee in their lives, but who have never read either the Book of Mormon OR the Bible cover to cover. They have read whatever was assigned in seminary on the days they couldn't get out of going, and that's about it.

And yet they are tireless volunteers, loving family members, proud of missionary children . . . whatever it takes for membership.

Because what they SEE is that Mormon culture, Mormon family life and Mormon values are good ones and produce good people, generally. So they stay. Not so much because they believe in the miraculous nature of the founding of Mormonism, but because they don't see anything out there that's any better.

Certainly the ones I've spoken to don't have a great opinion of the general Christian belief system.

. . . and that's too bad.

[_DarkHelmet]

I think most of us in the Ward are smart enough to know it’s not really true but we enjoy our associations with other members.

This seems nice on paper, but in reality it is not very sustainable. Associating with other members includes sitting in Gospel Doctrine class and learning about the literal golden plates, the angel moroni visiting Joseph Smith, the stupid milk strippings story, the literal flood, literal Adam and Eve, and everyone is expected to nod their heads and agree with everything, and then people are expected to bear their testimony of these things, and/or actually teach these things. All that forced conformity and suppression of your genuine self leads to depression and a lot of missed opportunities for genuine happiness.

[_Dr. Shades]

The opening post for this thread has found a home in CARM. A whole thread was devoted to it, if anybody cares.

Will you please post a link to it?

[_Niadna]

The opening post for this thread has found a home in CARM. A whole thread was devoted to it, if anybody cares.

Will you please post a link to it?

Oh, of course...different forums, different rules...

https://forums.carm.org/vb5/forum/cults ... -let-us-be

[_Themis]

To be fair, the evolution and transmission of early Christianity happened so long ago and in such a different culture from ours that it's pretty reasonable to decide that many accounts in the New Testament may be garbled versions, at best, of what actually happened. It's a little hard to be sure what did actually happen, if anything, but one can hardly say that the whole religion stands or falls on whether Jesus really walked on water. Not even the bodily Resurrection of Jesus is really a necessary underpinning of the faith.

Not being Mormon I can't really say, but my impression is that Mormonism is a little more dependent on literal miracles being literally true. If golden plates were not conferred by an angel then Joseph Smith was a liar, and most of Mormonism seems to depend pretty critically on Smith not being a liar.

With every religion that comes in a range of intensities from fundamentalist to liberal, there is a question of whether it's even worth bothering with the less intense forms. It just seems to me that the question is more acute for Mormonism, because of how heavily Smith staked his claim to angelic revelation through miraculous artifacts. If you give that up, I have a hard time seeing what the fall-back position is for Mormonism.

There is a lot that Joseph did to make many of the events in the Bible needing to be literal for Joseph not to be shown a liar. One is how Jesus just repeats many of the things in the Book of Mormon he supposedly said and did in the New Testament. People like Abraham, Noah, Adam, etc have to be real people for Joseph's to be who he claimed to be.

[_Physics Guy]

That's a good point. Some Mormons have been able to make more of a defense than I expected by arguing that even if the golden plates were received and translated miraculously, they were originally composed in a natural way by fallible writers in an ancient culture. So (the argument seems to run) the transmission from Mormon to Smith may have been miraculous but Mormon may well have gotten all kinds of things wrong.

I'm not sure I can call that self-contradictory but the scenario strikes me as wildly incongruous. My feeling is that a world that features fallible scribal redaction of oral tradition cannot be the same world that includes translation of unknown glyphs by seer stone. The mixed miraculous naturalism of people like Clark Goble looks to me like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? with its same-scene juxtaposition of live actors and cartoons. That's just an impression, however, not an argument. Who am I to say how the world really works?

Your point is more telling, I think. Jesus in the Book of Mormon repeats some verses from the gospels word for word, or very close. There is no naturalistic way for that to happen. Either some advance copies of the New Testament somehow found their way to Mesoamerica (or wherever it was), or Jesus himself found his way there and repeated the same set speech that was also preserved verbatim back in the Old World.

(The Book of Mormon also ascribes a lot of words and actions to Jesus that are not in the canonical gospels, and that are so different in style and character from the repeated passages that the character of Jesus in the Book of Mormon seems to have a psychotic break. To me reading 3 Nephi was like reading a bootleg copy of Hamlet in which Hamlet finishes his "To be or not to be ..." soliloquoy and then kills everyone with a machine gun.)

[_moksha]

The opening post for this thread has found a home in CARM. A whole thread was devoted to it, if anybody cares.

Isn't CARM the Evangelical equivalent to the old FAIR board which preceded today's Mormon D&D board and bearing similar pitchforks, cudgels, and torches to those used by FAIR?

Bet they even have their own counterparts to Pahoran, Smac, and Scott Lloyd.

The mixed miraculous naturalism of people like Clark Goble looks to me like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? with its same-scene juxtaposition of live actors and cartoons.

If so, what is Clark Goble's take on Jessica Rabbit? Does he accept or condemn her for being drawn that way?

[_Johannes]

That's a good point. Some Mormons have been able to make more of a defense than I expected by arguing that even if the golden plates were received and translated miraculously, they were originally composed in a natural way by fallible writers in an ancient culture. So (the argument seems to run) the transmission from Mormon to Smith may have been miraculous but Mormon may well have gotten all kinds of things wrong.

I'm not sure I can call that self-contradictory but the scenario strikes me as wildly incongruous. My feeling is that a world that features fallible scribal redaction of oral tradition cannot be the same world that includes translation of unknown glyphs by seer stone.

Exactly. It's taking Smith's basically pre-Enlightenment worldview from rural Palmyra and splicing it with the emerging literary criticism of scripture that you might have found in the faculty common room at Tubingen. The two worlds just didn't intersect. It reminds me of what Islamic modernists like Abduh and Rida tried to do with their own faith - e.g. arguing that the djinn in the Qur'an were to be interpreted as microbial bacteria. THe resulting mix of the modern and the premodern just doesn't work.

(The Book of Mormon also ascribes a lot of words and actions to Jesus that are not in the canonical gospels, and that are so different in style and character from the repeated passages that the character of Jesus in the Book of Mormon seems to have a psychotic break. To me reading 3 Nephi was like reading a bootleg copy of Hamlet in which Hamlet finishes his "To be or not to be ..." soliloquoy and then kills everyone with a machine gun.)

Well played, sir.