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skyrider44 said:
But it's OK for you to "suddenly" make an obtuse reference to Hitler that has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic under discussion.
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I gave an example of an event which could never actually happen, but which nonetheless presents a moral dilemma which it is interesting and instructive to discuss, in an attempt to establish if that was the sense in which you meant your comments on the story of Adam and Eve to be read. Because if it wasn't - if you believed that Adam and Eve was not just a story but actually did happen - that would make a difference to how others responded to those comments. It was neither obtuse or off topic, and your refusal to clarify the point was noted.

ETA: ninja'd by several other posters. That will teach me not to go and make a cup of coffee in the middle of composing a post. ;)
 
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Olowkow said:
True, Hitler has nothing to do with the topic. It could have been just as easily the example of going back in time and "killing one's grandfather" as a thought experiment.

The reference to Hitler was merely an example, quite often used to illustrate the ramifications of a time machine in fiction, of the poster's willingness to discuss hypothetical issues, and was not "obtuse" to me. I dare say anyone who has read any science fiction would understand this as a purely rhetorical device.
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Whatever you do, when attempting to shoot Hitler out of the window of a moving time machine, make sure you don't hit Eleanor Roosevelt by mistake.
 
skyrider44 said:
But it's OK for you to "suddenly" make an obtuse reference to Hitler that has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic under discussion.
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Please tell us Skyrider44 which references we are allowed to make, concerning a made up book, centered on an imaginary being, written by a naive conman.

A small papyrus will do.
 
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deaman said:
Please tell us Skyrider44 which references we are allowed to make, concerning a made up book, centered on an imaginary being, written by a naive conman.

A small papyrus will do.
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And a magic hat. Smith gave the whole thing away at the start when he called his angel Moroni.
 
I should add that recently while going through some family archives, I came across a large amount of material written by a relative in first half of the 19th century, who had married a minister, and observed a great deal, including the notorious persecution of Mormons in Illinois. An obsessive religious scholar, she wrote a great deal, and transcribed the work of others prolifically. She even hand wrote, and had bound, the sermons of a particularly eloquent minister named Nathaniel Taylor, who like her husband had studied at Yale. Fortunately, she wrote a beautiful and unadorned hand, easy to read, unlike many of her contemporaries, whose stylistic flourishes and adornments are pretty but tedious to read. Much of it is religious cant, of course, but the writing is smooth and elegant, good reading and often scholarly in its own way. The quality of the research is of course questionable, but the diligence and depth are clear. I also have reams of letters by other relatives at that and earlier dates, from which it is clear that grammar, rhetoric, and literary style were taken very seriously. Even those who, from their penmanship and spelling, were obviously poorly educated, spoke well.

I mention this simply in case anyone should erroneously think that the stilted and faux-antique style of Joseph Smith was, somehow, usual for the period. It is not. As Mark Twain trenchantly observes, it was always horrible.
 
dafydd said:
And a magic hat. Smith gave the whole thing away at the start when he called his angel Moroni.
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It does sound like a kind of pasta, doesn't it?

Moroni Pasta has a nice ring to it, and the name adds an air of authenticity. Leave it to the Italians to combine Italian coffee and pasta.
 
OT: Bruto, please move heaven and earth to get at least some of that ancestral material published, and all of it into the archives of a university. For all I know, the Smithsonian might be interested. Yes, I mean that seriously.

Anything mentioning the Mormons might earn you a visit from the fellahs,* of course, but the perils of scholarship are always with us.

* Hell no I'm not kidding.
 
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sackett said:
OT: Bruto, please move heaven and earth to get at least some of that ancestral material published, and all of it into the archives of a university. For all I know, the Smithsonian might be interested. Yes, I mean that seriously.

Anything mentioning the Mormons might earn you a visit from the fellahs,* of course, but the perils of scholarship are always with us.

* Hell no I'm not kidding.
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Lots of work left on this, but I do hope to find a receptacle for the diaries and other writings of this one relative. Unfortunately, in later life she excised a number of pages from the diaries (which I suspect regarded her marriage which ended early owing to husband's death) but there are still some interesting tidbits because he served for a time in the neighborhood of Nauvoo, Illinois, and she also seems to have dipped pretty deep into the preachings of William Miller.

I'm guessing that Yale might be interested, because her husband was a Yale man, as was Nathaniel Taylor, and I am not sure whether his lectures were preserved anywhere else but here.
 
^
That's a fascinating thing to read, Bruto.
All the best with finding the right place for those writings.

skyrider44 said:
But it's OK for you to "suddenly" make an obtuse reference to Hitler that has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic under discussion.
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You've disappointed me, skyrider44.
I'm still waiting for an explanation or justification of how spiritual benefit can derive from reading spurious scholarship and outright fraud, as exemplified in the BoA.
Or even an explanation for those elephants in the BoM.
Does Hitler matter to you more than defending Smith's 'translation' of Egyptian funerary literature?
 
pakeha said:
Does Hitler matter to you more than defending Smith's 'translation' of Egyptian funerary literature?
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No, but it's easier to rant about the details of an analogy than address the underlying issue.

It would be like someone taking issue with Samaritans being used in the Parable of the Good Samaritan and not an ethnic group he felt would have suited the message better. Whining about irrelevant tangents allows one to sidestep the real issues.

Sky and Jan really throw Cat's willingness to actually DISCUSS things with us into very sharp contrast.

I consider Fred Rogers one of the gold standards for religious behavior. Cat is a lot more like Fred than many other participants in this thread, myself included. To be honest, I'm hard pressed to think of a better compliment than comparing someone favorably to Fred Rogers.

Good Guy Fred Rogers meme:

http://i.qkme.me/3swzcb.jpg

http://t.qkme.me/3swy5b.jpg

http://i.qkme.me/3swzfh.jpg
 
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Wolrab said:
Mark Twain pegged it 140 years ago.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twain

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.
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I agree that Twain was on the mark (see what I did there). Anyway, I think it important again, to point out that even if we were to accept the original accounts of smiths "translation", it was not translating. If the stories are true the plates were superfluous. By the early accounts, Smith transcribed the BoM, letter by letter, by putting his head into into his hat and looking at a rock (seer stone). Of course such mysticism has fallen out of favor publicly and Mormon Prophets no longer claim to use such items.

It was this fact, that Smith had prior to the time of the reported first visit, been involved with divination, that Mark Hoffman exploited to get the Mormon Church to acquire forged documents that showed Smith in a more mystic and pagan light (see Salamander Letter). If there had been no such history (never mind we are talking about a church that claims to have a direct link to god) they would have scoffed at Hoffman rather than try to arrange the purchase of the various forgeries that they believed real).

ETA: The wiki article provides some apologetics for the church's failure to detect the deception. There's always an explanation. Also, some of the claims are in dispute so to be fair to Mormons it's not a slam dunk but certainly doesn't shine a welcome light.

IIRC, the seer stone(s), but not the Urim and Thummim are held by the Mormon Church to this day. I'm guessing they won't ever be analyzed to see if they have any mystical properties.
 
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I thought the Urim and Thummim, and The Seer Stone, were one and the same.

(I mean, aside from them being from one and the same, mythical fabrication.)
 
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Since it's come up, I wanted to mention this. The Urim and Thummim are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) several times as a divination tool to determine God's will when no other sign is given. They basically work the same way as flipping a coin, where Urim = Heads and Thummim = Tails. So they could be used in situations like the wiki article mentioned, where the people were divided into two groups in order to determine which group held the sinner. However, this also implies they'd be completely useless for the task of translating a language you don't already have some idea how to read.
 
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