When You Remove The Keystone Everything Does Fall

[Kenngo1969]

Honestly, the only interesting things I ever saw in the BoM were Christ's appearance in 3 Nephi 10 and his subsequent words. The story of the brother of Jared was interesting when faith was something interesting. It really is a very uninteresting book, QB.

The truly erudite among us, along with Sam Clemens, consider the Book of Mormon "chloroform in print."

[Kenngo1969]

That pestiferous LDS heterodoxy perhaps has me a bit sensitized to its presence in any discussion. ...

"Pestiferous"? I think I'll suggest that to Bill O'Reilly as a "Word of the Day": "And please remember, when writing the Factor, do not be 'pestiferous'." I like it!

Edited November 1, 2011 by Kenngo1969

[Questing Beast]

Interesting question, Questing Beast.

... We really are the Gods, male and female; being eternal Uncreated Intelligence, with no Gods formed before or after us, we are responsible for our own actions because we cannot blame our sins on anyone else.

...

I enjoyed all of your response. But this part I found particularly interesting. I could certainly suit it to my concept of what "God" Is....

[Bernard Gui]

It turns out that the Book of Mormon is ,,,

FWW

I think it's worth a lot, Kevin. Thanks for putting this out.

I have included some internet resources that further explain and validate Kevin's statements

for those who are interested.

Bernard

It turns out that the Book of Mormon is, among other things:

• an excellent Twelve Step book. See Colleen Harrison's 'He Did Deliver Me From Bondage: Using the Book of Mormon and the Principles of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as they Correlate with the Twelve Step Program to Overcome Compulsive/Addictive Behavior and Other Problems'; and
  
• an excellent study of Near Death Experiences. [Alma the Younger and King Lamoni]; and
  
• an impressive study of Survivor Witness behavior, as later seen in Nazi and Soviet Death camps http://maxwellinstit...d=71&chapid=844 and the epistomology of Thomas Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.' http://maxwellinstit...l=2&num=1&id=48; and
  
• a window into First Temple Theology http://byustudies.by...aspx?title=8313; and
  
• an impressive guide to Guerilla Warfare http://maxwellinstit...d=66&chapid=728; and
  
• an impressive guide to Olive Culture http://fairmormon.or...s/Olive_culture; and
  

• a guide for how to get to Bountiful from Jerusalem, showing what to expect where. http://fairmormon.or...raphy/Old_World; and
  
• an impressive example of the archetypal Tree of Life visions. http://en.wikipedia...._of_life_vision; and
  
• an interesting study of what makes a culture rise and fall, as Hugh Nibley pointed out; and
  
• as Alan Goff has noticed, an impressive demonstration of the use of type scenes and allusion as later examined by Robert Alter in 'The Art of Biblical Narrative'; and
  

• a useful study in Mosiah [King Benjamin] of the Jewish pre-exilic ritual that combined coronation, Day of Atonement, Tabernacles, Sabbath Year, and the Jubilee. http://maxwellinstit...d=31&chapid=121; and
  
• a detailed study of large scale phenomena like volcanics and esoteric things like Arabian arrow divination [the Liahona]. http://hughnibley.or...book-of-mormon/; and
  
• in providing an interpretive framework for the Sermon on the Mount as a temple text that unifies what many scholars had long treated as a collection of sayings. See John Welch's books. http://en.wikipedia....i/John_W._Welch; and
  
• an interesting demonstration for how an archetypal Jewish Father should address his sons on the passover. [Alma's instructions to his sons]; and
  
• an exemplary approach to the nature of Epic cultures. http://maxwellinstit...l=2&num=1&id=40; and
  

• a helpful example of how to turn 'View of the Hebrews' about the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans and a study of pop culture thoughts about the Lost Ten Tribes and the Mound Builders into something completely different by burying one's face in a hat for two months and just blathering in hopes that something that comes out might sell a few books, and then keep John Sorenson, Diane Wirth, Brant Gardner, Larry Poulsen and Mark Wright busier and more enthused than that might be otherwise in 180 years, and never mind the tar and feathers, the loss of several children, and a few months in Liberty Jail."
  

Edited November 1, 2011 by Bernard Gui

[Questing Beast]

"Facts?" Here lies, of course, the proverbial rub.

And you pass by with facile dismissal. Yes, what people write are facts to us: we study the writings, we compare them, we note the discrepancies and the unfounded assertions, etc. Study of the BofM text produces many problems with known outside facts; and study of the facts vis-a-vis how the BofM might have come to be presents many more facts that are problematic. It is a fact to my pov, that the BofM can only be taken literally as history if we ignore the problems and take it as history on faith alone.

"Thou shalt not commit adultery." Is this statement "true," and if so, "true" in what sense that could be empirically confirmed?

Is living together outside of the bonds of marriage true or false, as a matter of principle, and how is this to be confirmed of falsified empirically?

How is charity (the pure love of Christ) demonstrated empirically to be a legitimate concept?

You pass by with facile dismissal the issue of physical facts (the writings and artifacts of others before us), and substitute metaphysical concepts as examples of my "facts" that I object to: I have never had a problem with what the scriptures teach vis-a-vis how to live a moral and just life intended to obtain Joy.

... The historicity of the Book of Mormon is its applicability to real human societies and individuals within history in real sociocultural settings, settings that provide real and lived historical patterns and lessons for all societies, including our own. Without that, the BofM becomes a mere theoretical theological treatise, the principles of which stand only as fictional stories bearing gospel teachings in the way there was a "moral" to all of Aesop's fables.

Then The Lord of the Rings is just as applicable to real human societies: for Middle Earth can be shown from our combined Eurocentric mythologies to have existed, IF Tolkien was under the influence of the hidden Elves and responding to the glamour that they wove around him throughout his life. J.R.R.'s writings are just as convincing in their realism to me and millions of others. If we proposed that my hypothesis of his inspiration was in fact real, then we would have every reason to accept his writings on Middle Earth as a form of scripture; since there is just as strong an element of moral lesson giving in the actions of the characters, as there is in any scripture like the BofM.

As Nibley always used to point out, it is the real, tangible, historical literalness of the vignettes and conditions recorded in the scriptures that really bother many moderns. We are fine with abstraction, symbol, and allegory, especially when placed in an ancient, far away and long ago setting, but recoil from the thought that any of this really happened, and therefore (as with, particularly, the decline and eventual destruction of entire civilizations), could happen again...to us....

I never wanted the BofM story to be abstract. It was a loss to me to accept that it is not literal history. I have not turned hedonist because Alma the Younger was not ever really a rake and libertine.

You specifically appeal to the fates of the two cultures in the BofM: it is a fact, that no other culture we know of in world history has ever been wiped out like the Jaredites and Nephites, after an apocalyptic last battle. Another feature of the BofM that does not see its like in the real world is the black and white, all or nothing split in its societies: the Jaredites and Lehites are all either righteous or wicked. There is no middle ground where the bulk of humanity exist, as we see in the real world. The BofM cultures are populated with cookie cutouts on a religious world view stage; and that world view is Joseph Smith's.

But the Book of Mormon setting, while a long time ago, in lands far from us in our particular neck of the woods, is, precisely, not in any sense alien, far fetched, or fantastic in nature. From the Gaddianton Robbers, to Korihor, to secret combinations, to the political and spiritual forces and dynamics with which the Nephites wrestled, The Book of Mormon is a "witness and a warning" for us in our day precisely because it all actually happened, in cultural cycle after cycle after cycle, to real people, in real societies, under real spiritual, social, economic, and political conditions that are directly relevant to us in the latter days because we are human beings, just as they were, motivated and conditioned by the same spiritual and human forces and influences. Further, nothing in the Book of Mormon, from a sociocultural perspective, is in any way out of the ordinary as matters of the human condition as we understand it within our own cultural context, or within the historical experience of many other known cultures of the past. Precisely, the Book of Mormon is not only a book of theological concepts, but a record of what the living, or failure to live, the teachings of the gospel really means to individuals, and entire societies, through lived experience and cultural history.

You see it this way through the eyes of faith. My faith is more dependent on pragmatic evidence. I see your appeal here as answered by all of the known factors in Joseph Smith's culture, combined with a spirit of inspiration; he composed the book's historical story while literally under the influence of his muse. Of course the guerrilla fighters, the political infighting, the cycles of wickedness to righteousness and back again, the perceived cursing of God upon the wicked, the theological concepts, the blatant Christian character of the Lehite religion, and many, many of the physical stage props of the BofM, are familiar and not alien: what could possibly be more expected of a 19th century religious book?

Joseph never taught from the BofM?

Did he? I don't know where or when. Do you have any of the "teachings of the prophet Joseph Smith" that are texts taken from the BofM?

The words of President Ezra Taft Bensen are appropos here, with a few bolded portions for emphasis:

Ahh...all that terrible literalness...

I read his "Witness and a Warning" and took it to heart. I started at that time to read the BofM every day and continued for well over ten years to do so. Ironically, to me, it was my very study which put me into increasing difficulty with believing that the BofM is literal history.

But it does not have to be. I also do not take the Bible to be literal history; it has more historical provenance and origin than the BofM, more facts to be found in it: but the primitive Christians evolved their religion just as surely as the Jews did centuries before them....

[Nemesis]

We don't allow testimony bearing on this board.

Nemesis