Whose fault? Yours or the church's?

[Taq Man]

A lot of them might just think, "bitter apostate."

Thanks for proving my point Tex. Most Mormons would say bitter apostate instead of recognizing the truth. Call me crazy but I thought the Saints were lovers of the truth.

[SeattleUte]

Call me crazy but I thought the Saints were lovers of the truth.

You're preaching to the choir. The cuf consensus is that truth for truth's sake is not a high ranking LDS value. We've discussed this at length before.

[LA Ute]

Who gives a shit where the picture came from?

Okay, I mean no offense, but I'd like to suggest another way of looking at this.

Supposing, just for the sake of argument, that Joseph needed darkness to see the writing on the stone, using a hat seems like a pretty rational and effective way to do it. That way, his scribe could remain in a lighted room and write down what Joseph was saying.

Yes, that does sound a little odd, doesn't it? But I spent a lot of time for a couple of years writing about news accounts of Mormon weirdness. I had many opportunities to point out how any religious belief looks weird to the uninitiated. The Catholic belief in transubstantation was one of my favorite examples. Here's how it usually went:

The next thing you know, some church with a hundred million members worldwide will start claiming that a wafer used during a religious service and placed in the mouths of believers actually becomes the flesh of a god who was born as a man, then died, and then took up his body and still lives today. They might even claim that the ritual wine becomes that god's blood while it's in the believers' mouths.

The only reason people today don't blanch at that doctrine (and many people still do) is that it is old news. For those who believe in the miraculous, most examples are ancient. Then again, the apparitions at Fatima were reported to occur in 1916-17. But no one bother to poke fun at Fatima.

The difference seems to be that the Catholics have been around 2,000 years and people are used to their "weird" beliefs. Also - and this is important -- Catholics are totally open about such things, at least in modern times. Our church has not been so open, it seems. We could do better at that. It has absolutely nothing to do with the truth or falsity of our claims, but it does affect public perception, it seems to me.

(I hope Bro. TD does not find this post too pedantic so far.)

Stay with me on this.

You might be able to find somewhere, on a website devoted to attacking the Roman Catholic Church, a painting of a Mass participant with blood dripping from his mouth and human flesh protruding, clearly designed to mock the Catholic belief in transubstantiation. Then you could go to a message board frequented by devout Catholics and use that painting as your avatar. When one of the believers who posts there suggests that your avatar is from an anti-Catholic website and raises some questions about your bona fides, you might respond with, "Who gives a sh** where the picture came from?" but lots of fair-minded readers would pay less attention to what you have to say than they would otherwise.

I hope that makes sense to you. I've just devoted many more words to this topic than it merits, but you got me thinking.

I'll look forward to your upcoming posts. UtahDan likes you, and that counts with me.

[Indy Coug]

Thanks for proving my point Tex. Most Mormons would say bitter apostate instead of recognizing the truth. Call me crazy but I thought the Saints were lovers of the truth.

I'm not a lover of people giving disproportional weighting to fringe topics. This topic is the equivalent of the "birthers" movement.

[All-American]

You're preaching to the choir. The cuf consensus is that truth for truth's sake is not a high ranking LDS value. We've discussed this at length before.

Meaning, SU has decided that truth for truth's sake is not a high ranking LDS value, two or three people have openly expressed their concurrence, and everybody else who didn't respond must agree.

[Taq Man]

Okay, I mean no offense, but I'd like to suggest another way of looking at this.

Supposing, just for the sake of argument, that Joseph needed darkness to see the writing on the stone, using a hat seems like a pretty rational and effective way to do it. That way, his scribe could remain in a lighted room and write down what Joseph was saying.

Yes, that does sound a little odd, doesn't it? But I spent a lot of time for a couple of years writing about news accounts of Mormon weirdness. I had many opportunities to point out how any religious belief looks weird to the uninitiated. The Catholic belief in transubstantation was one of my favorite examples. Here's how it usually went:

The next thing you know, some church with a hundred million members worldwide will start claiming that a wafer used during a religious service and placed in the mouths of believers actually becomes the flesh of a god who was born as a man, then died, and then took up his body and still lives today. They might even claim that the ritual wine becomes that god's blood while it's in the believers' mouths.

The only reason people today don't blanch at that doctrine (and many people still do) is that it is old news. For those who believe in the miraculous, most examples are ancient. Then again, the apparitions at Fatima were reported to occur in 1916-17. But no one bother to poke fun at Fatima.

The difference seems to be that the Catholics have been around 2,000 years and people are used to their "weird" beliefs. Also - and this is important -- Catholics are totally open about such things, at least in modern times. Our church has not been so open, it seems. We could do better at that. It has absolutely nothing to do with the truth or falsity of our claims, but it does affect public perception, it seems to me.

(I hope Bro. TD does not find this post too pedantic so far.)

Stay with me on this.

You might be able to find somewhere, on a website devoted to attacking the Roman Catholic Church, a painting of a Mass participant with blood dripping from his mouth and human flesh protruding, clearly designed to mock the Catholic belief in transubstantiation. Then you could go to a message board frequented by devout Catholics and use that painting as your avatar. When one of the believers who posts there suggests that your avatar is from an anti-Catholic website and raises some questions about your bona fides, you might respond with, "Who gives a sh** where the picture came from?" but lots of fair-minded readers would pay less attention to what you have to say than they would otherwise.

I hope that makes sense to you. I've just devoted many more words to this topic than it merits, but you got me thinking.

I'll look forward to your upcoming posts. UtahDan likes you, and that counts with me.

That makes perfect sense and I see your point. To be honest the picture is found on a plethora of websites and if I'm not very much mistaken was made by a believing member. I knew the pic I wanted and it truly was luck of the draw to pull from that particular sight.

[LA Ute]

That makes perfect sense and I see your point. To be honest the picture is found on a plethora of websites and if I'm not very much mistaken was made by a believing member. I knew the pic I wanted and it truly was luck of the draw to pull from that particular sight.

I hereby bury the hatchet on this issue!

[Tex]

Thanks for proving my point Tex. Most Mormons would say bitter apostate instead of recognizing the truth. Call me crazy but I thought the Saints were lovers of the truth.

Oh, I love the truth that Joseph used a stone in a hat. Really I do. It's right up there with my love of atonement, mercy, and charity.

[Tex]

it is good to see you here, adding nothing as usual. Are you bored over at cougarguard?

Behold, one Tex post is mightier than Triplet and his fifty, yea, or even than his tens of thousands.

[UtahDan]

Oh, I love the truth that Joseph used a stone in a hat. Really I do. It's right up there with my love of atonement, mercy, and charity.

I agree with the spirit of what you are saying which is that there are important things and unimportant things, but 99% of the truly important things are not unique to our church. The things are unique to our church are inextricably tied to the factual claims regarding, primarily, the restoration. My point is that it is more logical to say that only the big things matter and it is a waste of time to focus on the smaller things if you are a unitarian or Universalist. If on the other hand you belong to a church that is proclaiming the message that it is different from all others because it has much, much clearer and more recent communication with God it is sort of hard to say in the same breath "but don't waste your time worrying about how we got that information, focus on the atonement, mercy and charity."

I'm not disagreeing with your big premise, I'm just saying that while true it is not an indictment of someone who is focused on the method of translation.

[Jarid in Cedar]

I agree with the spirit of what you are saying which is that there are important things and unimportant things, but 99% of the truly important things are not unique to our church. The things are unique to our church are inextricably tied to the factual claims regarding, primarily, the restoration. My point is that it is more logical to say that only the big things matter and it is a waste of time to focus on the smaller things if you are a unitarian or Universalist. If on the other hand you belong to a church that is proclaiming the message that it is different from all others because it has much, much clearer and more recent communication with God it is sort of hard to say in the same breath "but don't waste your time worrying about how we got that information, focus on the atonement, mercy and charity."

I'm not disagreeing with your big premise, I'm just saying that while true it is not an indictment of someone who is focused on the method of translation.

Well stated UD.

[LA Ute]

I agree with the spirit of what you are saying which is that there are important things and unimportant things, but 99% of the truly important things are not unique to our church. The things are unique to our church are inextricably tied to the factual claims regarding, primarily, the restoration. My point is that it is more logical to say that only the big things matter and it is a waste of time to focus on the smaller things if you are a unitarian or Universalist. If on the other hand you belong to a church that is proclaiming the message that it is different from all others because it has much, much clearer and more recent communication with God it is sort of hard to say in the same breath "but don't waste your time worrying about how we got that information, focus on the atonement, mercy and charity."

I'm not disagreeing with your big premise, I'm just saying that while true it is not an indictment of someone who is focused on the method of translation.

I agree with you, UD. I don't have time to say this well, but in essence I think proportion is important. I suspect you agree. I.e., historical facts, on the none hand, and faith and spiritual feelings/impressions, on the other, are part of the message and both have to be taken into account in order to consider the message fairly.

In purely personal terms: On historical facts, my bias (reinforced by my work as a lawyer) is that it is terribly hard to know with any real certaintly exactly what happened at a given time and place. Memories fade and conflict, records are incomplete, and context is hard to establish. Re-reading Bushman's RSR last night I was struck again with how hard it is to know exactly how the translation took place or why certain methods were used. It doesn't appear that Joseph ever told anyone. So I take the information we have on such matters with at least a small grain of salt. That information cannot be the whole story.

On the spiritual side, I have the BofM in my hand. I ask myself: Do I really believe in my heart of hearts that any man, alone, could have written it in the brief period of the translation, let alone the uneducated Joseph? My honest conclusion has always been "no." I have lots of reasons. Chief among them is how I feel when I read the book prayerfully. To me, it's too wonderful to have been concocted by any man.

So I weigh the two -- impossible-to-resolve historical puzzles, on one hand, against, on the other hand, how I feel, with my head and heart working in concert. The BofM wins every time.

Everyone approaches this a little differently. Many cannot resolve the conflict, and trust their historical doubts. Others don't care at all about such doubts. Others, like me, are more in the middle, and can't close their eyes to history but recognize its limitations. In the end it's a matter of heart and head and how to balance the two. But both must be involved, IMO, because the message the Joseph Smith brought to the world requires both.

Now I have to get a letter out.

[UtahDan]

I agree with you, UD. I don't have time to say this well, but in essence I think proportion is important. I suspect you agree. I.e., historical facts, on the none hand, and faith and spiritual feelings/impressions, on the other, are part of the message and both have to be taken into account in order to consider the message fairly.

In purely personal terms: On historical facts, my bias (reinforced by my work as a lawyer) is that it is terribly hard to know with any real certaintly exactly what happened at a given time and place. Memories fade and conflict, records are incomplete, and context is hard to establish. Re-reading Bushman's RSR last night I was struck again with how hard it is to know exactly how the translation took place or why certain methods were used. It doesn't appear that Joseph ever told anyone. So I take the information we have on such matters with at least a small grain of salt. That information cannot be the whole story.

On the spiritual side, I have the BofM in my hand. I ask myself: Do I really believe in my heart of hearts that any man, alone, could have written it in the brief period of the translation, let alone the uneducated Joseph? My honest conclusion has always been "no." I have lots of reasons. Chief among them is how I feel when I read the book prayerfully. To me, it's too wonderful to have been concocted by any man.

So I weigh the two -- impossible-to-resolve historical puzzles, on one hand, against, on the other hand, how I feel, with my head and heart working in concert. The BofM wins every time.

Everyone approaches this a little differently. Many cannot resolve the conflict, and trust their historical doubts. Others don't care at all about such doubts. Others, like me, are more in the middle, and can't close their eyes to history but recognize its limitations. In the end it's a matter of heart and head and how to balance the two. But both must be involved, IMO, because the message the Joseph Smith brought to the world requires both.

Now I have to get a letter out.

I'm not trying to talk you out of that. I'm certainly not suggesting that the search for historical truth or spiritual truth must necessarily compel anyone to any particular conclusion. I think many conclusions are possible from the evidence of both kinds. I chose to hope that what I have been told is the truth and I act as though it is. The word for that choice is faith, as I understand it.

But I never met anyone who had curiosity about the historical issues who was satisfied by being told their concerns are ultimately unimportant, which was the essence of Tex's sarcastic/humorous remark. On the other hand, if you focus only on that which is troublesome and not that which is comforting and good the whole thing begins to lose its value for the individual pretty quickly. Some people can't help that but many can.

[Jarid in Cedar]

My issue is this:

If you have the hat and the seer stone, why do you need the golden plates at all? That is not translating as much as divining.

For 11 witnesses?

I have been thinking about this comment for awhile, and I have to wonder what the purpose of the witnesses are as well. They do not add or subtract from the narrative much at all. As as been stated, about the felt hat and stone, I think it would hard to find a person who fell one way or the other based on the witnesses.

[UtahDan]

I have been thinking about this comment for awhile, and I have to wonder what the purpose of the witnesses are as well. They do not add or subtract from the narrative much at all. As as been stated, about the felt hat and stone, I think it would hard to find a person who fell one way or the other based on the witnesses.

But you can see how when the claims were new it made a difference to have the testimonials of these people who were still around and among the saints, right? I think the only question is whether they saw them in the sense you and I are looking at our computer screens or whether they saw them with the "eyes of their understanding" as David Whitmer later claimed.

EDIT: And in fairness Whitmer never disavowed having seen the plates, though he moved all over the map on the issue of what it meant to "see" them alternitively saying that it was corporeal or incorporeal.