5 Responses

1. John, one minor comment. You should probably stop using the Thor’s Hammer analogy. It actually helps the Joseph Smith story. No one else can pick up Thor’s hammer because no one else is Worthy to pick it up. It has nothing to do with the weight of the hammer.

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2. As I listened to the podcast, the thought struck me that many, if not most, if the anachronisms are found in the first two books- which were written after the rest of the book, to replace the information found in the lost 116 pages. This leads to two questions. First, did the same anachronisms show up in the lost 116 pages? and, second, what as in the lost pages to begin with? Can we reconstruct the narrative found there? Thanks you.

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3. Thank you for pulling together all these together. Though I read Quinn’s book Early Mormonism and Magical World View decades ago, I never correlated that to Smith and the Gold Plates until listening to this series. The parallels are significant.

   As background, I had given up on Gold Plates decades ago, back before Podcasts andthe magical world of the internet. I had been an active participant up until my 40’s and grew up in Bountiful with kids of the GAs. My kindly Mother took care of Ezra and Flora Benson when he became Church President, and listened to stories of the aging church president.

   I apologize, this seems to be nit picky. In the podcast someone said it only takes one anachronism to prove it false. I didn’t count all of the anachronisms, but if Smith had got something like 19 bullseyes, only had one miss I believe that would not be a significant problem. Sometimes anachronism it is the eye of the beholder. The problem is that Smith got all misses and no hits and that can’t be brushed under that carpet.

   My other comment is during the (these) Podcasts more that once the GAs along with its members believe that the world is only 7,000 years old, evolution didn’t happen, and that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County Missouri. I do remember when McConkie said that evolution was from the devil. But, I point out even in my most orthodox days I never took any of those things as serious. Besides after running the Grand Canyon multiple times and seeing the geology of the Grand Canyon first hand its a bit difficult to reconcile a theology that pushes a 7,000 year old earth. I am sure there are church member that believe that nonsense, but they are only the most extreme.

   Robert Kirby, the SL Tribune columnist wrote about the five types of Mormons and describes one type as “Nazi Mormons”. He describes them as such because their beliefs are strict, rigid and believe that everything that comes from the “Prophets” are the literal opinion of Jesus himself. Back in the day when I was a “true” believer I never signed up to that nonsense. My observation is that the ones that describes having a “shelf of faith” that falls are those that have a rigid belief in the church. I never had a shelf of faith that fell. As I learned more about church history, like Bushman and Givens I was trying to make it work. In the end (because of all of the misses and no hits) I decided it couldn’t be reconciled.

   I haven’t listened to all of the episodes on Mormon Stories. It seems that there is a focuses on those the have big faith crises. The most sensational stories are those that have the most rigid beliefs and then then the switch flips in days or weeks and their entire belief system fails. Not everyone that ends up one the outside goes through that.

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4. Excellent session as part of an awesome series.

   Just a comment on FairMormon’s attack on using documentary hypothesis methodologies as a tool for identifying psedepigrapha – while they try to justify deutero-Isaiah existing in the BoM, it doesn’t occur to them what an excellent example the BoM itself is . The BoM has very detailed prophecies about JS and events of his time, but all of a sudden turns incredibly vague after. The BoM has all the markings of psedepigrapha. And as stated in your video, the themes and topics in the BoM also marks its time period, just as deutero-Isaiah does the same. FairMormon shows an acute lack of self awareness.

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5. Are Mike’s slides available to download?

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