The Gold Plates

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, Stargazer said:

We do the best we can. What I have seen of the universe so far convinces me of the reality and nature of God.

I look at the universe that God has created, and marvel.

Look out!

Danger! Sounds like religious experience to me!

You have just said that religious experience confirms reality!

Great!  BUT you are not seeing it then from a scientific perspective then, - exactly my point, you are going by qualia or "raw feels".

You are definitely getting it!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

Imo, these experiences ARE reality!

"Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, as well as the redness of an evening sky. As qualitative characters of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to propositional attitudes,^[1] where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing.

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett once suggested that qualia was "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us".^[2] "

^{If you get this, you get my ubiquitous Rorty quote, differentiating raw experience from prepositional objectivity}

I see religious experience as qualia.

Edited September 26, 2022 by mfbukowski

[Bernard Gui]

52 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

Look out!

Danger! Sounds like religious experience to me!

You have just said that religious experience confirms reality!

Great!  BUT you are not seeing it then from a scientific perspective then, - exactly my point, you are going by qualia or "raw feels".

You are definitely getting it!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

Imo, these experiences ARE reality!

"Examples of qualia include the perceived sensation of pain of a headache, the taste of wine, as well as the redness of an evening sky. As qualitative characters of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to propositional attitudes,^[1] where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing.

Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett once suggested that qualia was "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us".^[2] "

^{If you get this, you get my ubiquitous Rorty quote, differentiating raw experience from prepositional objectivity}

I see religious experience as qualia.

I testify that the pain of a cluster headache is the most real thing in the universe.
 

Nibley once said,
 

Quote

A temple, good or bad, is a scale-model of the universe. [I believe] the first mention of the word templum is by Varro, for whom it designates a building specially designed for interpreting signs in the heavens—a sort of observatory where one gets one’s bearings on the universe.

“What Is a Temple?” Collected Works of Hugh Nibley 4:357-58

 

I love the many implications of this image from the Temple Institute of Jerusalem...

 

Edited September 26, 2022 by Bernard Gui

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, Bernard Gui said:

I testify that the pain of a cluster headache is the most real thing in the universe.

Never had one of those, I only have had kidney stones and shingles, and a couple of other fun sessions.

So maybe I hope this makes a point about my views,  and to @Stargazer , your question raises the exactly right questions and how the notion of qualia is related to religious experience.

Can we compare /measure my pain vs yours?

No. Are both "real"? Yes.  Can this question now be settled through empirical,objective evidence?

No.

Does this mean that our individual pains are "all in our heads"?

No! As Rorty might say, it is clear that pain is CAUSED by something objectively "out there" : the cause of Bernard' headaches, the causes of my kidney stones and shingles, yet the truth can only be known by our DESCRIPTIONS.

I think that this model is a good one to compare to the question "is God real" and the only "evidence" available to answer the question.

It also handles another question: "In what sense is the church 'true' "

Edited September 26, 2022 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

3 hours ago, Bernard Gui said:

I testify that the pain of a cluster headache is the most real thing in the universe.
 

Nibley once said,
 

I love the many implications of this image from the Temple Institute of Jerusalem...

 

Racist!

Why does the universe have a BLUE eye???  😉

[Benjamin McGuire]

13 hours ago, Stargazer said:

I don't see my view and Leibniz's as at all similar. 

So let's ask three big questions -

1: Do you think that God has minimized the evil in creation? Or is God unconcerned with the amount of evil within creation? God being omniscient means that God should be at least knowledgeable about how to do so.

2: Do you believe that mankind has absolute agency? That they have in every instance the ability to make a choice for themselves between good and evil?

3: If you view mortality as a test for humanity, do you believe that God was able to develop the perfect hashing algorithm that created an equal test for everyone?

[Bernard Gui]

7 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Never had one of those, I only have had kidney stones and shingles, and a couple of other fun sessions.

So maybe I hope this makes a point about my views,  and to @Stargazer , your question raises the exactly right questions and how the notion of qualia is related to religious experience.

Can we compare /measure my pain vs yours?

No. Are both "real"? Yes.  Can this question now be settled through empirical,objective evidence?

No.

Does this mean that our individual pains are "all in our heads"?

No! As Rorty might say, it is clear that pain is CAUSED by something objectively "out there" : the cause of Bernard' headaches, the causes of my kidney stones and shingles, yet the truth can only be known by our DESCRIPTIONS.

I think that this model is a good one to compare to the question "is God real" and the only "evidence" available to answer the question.

It also handles another question: "In what sense is the church 'true' “

 

Racist! Why does the universe have a BLUE eye???  

Thanks for sharing Rorty’s philosophy of pain.

I don’t want to talk about shingles. Haven’t had stones, but I hear they are awful.

Some say cluster headaches (also called suicide headaches) are worse than childbirth. I’ve witnessed childbirth seven times, but I have no way of comparing the two. I can compare them with shingles. Neither are much fun, especially in the place I had shingles.  

 

Have you read “The Mote in God’s Eye?”

Edited September 26, 2022 by Bernard Gui

[mfbukowski]

4 hours ago, Bernard Gui said:

Thanks for sharing Rorty’s philosophy of pain.

I don’t want to talk about shingles. Haven’t had stones, but I hear they are awful.

Some say cluster headaches (also called suicide headaches) are worse than childbirth. I’ve witnessed childbirth seven times, but I have no way of comparing the two. I can compare them with shingles. Neither are much fun, especially in the place I had shingles.  

 

Have you read “The Mote in God’s Eye?”

No, I haven't 

I did not mean it to be about pain but that was the quale that happened to be being discussed.

It could have been any qualia, the smell of a rose, the sound of a voice, especially the still small one, the growl of a bear, our perceptions of any color, Beethoven's 5th, a smile received, etc.  Any "stimulation" which causes a human perception, in other words, anything we can know by the 5 senses.

And it is not just Rorty, it is virtually every philosopher in the mainstream in the last 75 years.

Mind Body Dualism is dead, Positivism is equally moribund 

Yet the general populace still believes.  Eventually the influence of postmodernism will be in vogue still after we have developed radical empiricism.

As it always was, letting the days go by...

Maybe in 150 years, someone will rediscover Joseph Smith, and finally we will have the Restoration of the Restoration after the Plates War is over. 🧐🙄😜

[Kevin Christensen]

On 9/24/2022 at 2:19 PM, Nevo said:

I guess once your paradigm has shifted there's no going back. I don't know of anyone else who thinks Nibley's 1957 article, "Old World Ritual in the New World," still holds up. Even at the time, as Szink and Welch note, Nibley's year-rite theory "attracted few fully settled followers."

Of course, as common sense would suggest, there is no 36-element "pattern" that all New Year rites in the ancient world followed. Even the most die-hard Myth and Ritual proponents never went that far. Here, for comparison, is S. H. Hooke:

The early 20th-century scholarly fad of "patternism," which informed the Myth and Ritual school and much of Nibley's work, has long since faded into oblivion.

Kent Jackson's critique of the Old Testament Studies volume of Nibley's collected works applies equally well to Nibley's year-rite theory. Some relevant excerpts:

• "Nibley shows a tendency to gather sources from a variety of cultures all over the ancient world, lump them all together, and then pick and choose the bits and pieces he wants. By selectively including what suits his presuppositions and ignoring what does not, he is able to manufacture an ancient system of religion that is remarkably similar in many ways to our own."
• "If we define an artificial collection like this—which spans hundreds of years, thousands of miles, and widely diverse societies and religions—as all being the same, we can bring forth proof that 'the ancients' believed anything we want them to believe. This kind of method seems to work from the conclusions to the evidence—instead of the other way around. And too often it necessitates giving the sources an interpretation for which little support can be found elsewhere." 

Metcalfe's 4-element "revivalistic conversion form," while having less elements than Nibley's 36 or even Hooke's 5, at least has the virtue of being historically defensible.

There's nothing in Mosiah 2–6 that indicates a new year or harvest festival setting. The people gather at the temple because King Benjamin summoned them (on less than 24-hours' notice) for a special meeting. The stated purpose of this ad hoc meeting is to proclaim Mosiah king and to give the people a name (Mosiah 1:10–11). After King Benjamin delivers his farewell message, the people are convicted of their sins. He invites them to repent and receive Christ. They make a covenant with God and take upon themselves the name of Christ. At the conclusion of this mass conversion event, Benjamin takes down the name of everyone who made the covenant. Only then, almost as an afterthought, does Benjamin "consecrate" Mosiah "to be a king and ruler over his people" (Mosiah 6:3). The text is silent on any ritual that may have been involved.

I'm no expert on Kuhn, but I don't think a paradigm shift has much value if it leads you to see things that aren't there.

In Szink and Welch's paper on "An Ancient Israelite Festival Context" right after they write that Nibley's theory "attracted few fully settled followers" (probably because few people have the talent and interest to handle the range of material required),  they state that "The main question that Nibley left unresolved was why an inspired king in the house of Israel would ever be inclined to mimic or dignify the practices of a pagan year-rite cult."  (in King Benjamin's Speech: That Ye May Learn Wisdom, Welch and Ricks, eds., (FARMS, Provo, 1998) 149.   They then say that "A possible answer to this question began to emerge in the 1970s and took clearer shape in the 1980s. Rather than ranging far afield among widely scattered ancient civilizations, but without rejecting the value of comparative studies, Latter-day Saint scholars in those years focused their attention more extensively on the Old Testament, as well as on many features of subsequently related Jewish History, literature, and ceremony grounded in the Hebrew Bible. Interesting bonds were discovered between Benjamin's speech and hte laws, statutes, and ordinances revealed by Jehovah to the prophets of Israel who preceded and influenced Lehi and Nephi."   

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=6&article=1045&context=mi&type=additional

Where you say "There's nothing in Mosiah 2–6 that indicates a new year or harvest festival setting" the authors of the paper you cite to debunk Nibley discuss the three main Holy Days, of which the "third was an autumn festival complex that later developed into the composite two-or three-week-long observance of the three related celebration of Rosh Shanah (New Year and Day of Judgement), Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), and Sukkot (Feast of the Tabernacles)."

Quote

As this study will show, it appears to us that Benjamin’s speech touches on all the major themes of these sacred
days, treating them as parts of a single festival complex, consistent with what one would expect in a preexilic
Israelite community in which the fall feasts were not sharply differentiated but were still closely associated as
parts of one large autumn festival. Indeed, Kraus believes that the divisions into distinct Jewish festivals must have
taken place around 600 B.C.  (Welch and Szinc, 159).

They then provide a great deal of evidence that makes sense of Benjamin's speech in that context, and other chapters in the book do more, including in relation to Mesoamerican evidences and practices.  I am also very impressed by Gordon Thomasson's "Mosiah: The Complex Symbolism and Symbolic Complex of Kingship in the Book of Mormon" in JBMS 2/1, particular as he compares Benjamin passing to Mosiah the sword, the book, and the liahona, symbols of kingship that have equivalents in paintings and records of kings in a great many times and places, but which do not often appear at Revivals.

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol2/iss1/3/

One thing I noticed from reading Jackson's 1988 critique, [a review not of Nibley's entire career, but his personal view of one Nibley book, Old Testament and Related Studies], is that what he offers is an assertion of his case, rather than a demonstration of it.  For a rather different view of Nibley's scholarship from Jackson's own perspective, see his essay in "The New Testament and the Great Apostacy" in By Study and By Faith vol 1, noticing his footnote 2 complimenting Nibley's work.  In the same By Study and By Faith vol, Lou Midgley offers a useful reponse to Jackson's 1988 critique on pages lxx to lxxiii.   Nibley's essay on "Before Adam", published in Old Testament and Related Studies, was, for me, a mind-opening, paradigm shifting change.  I do have one of Jackson's books, The Restored Gospel and the Book of Genesis, and I can say that one thing it does demonstrate is that Jackson is no Hugh Nibley. (I'm not either, obviously). The one useful thing about Jackson's critique of Nibley is that in his excellent review Martha Nibley Beck's Leaving the Saints, he could say, 

Quote

And as for the fear of losing one’s job at BYU and suffering reprisals from the church, I should note that my review was
published in BYU’s official academic journal, BYU Studies, and none of the consequences foretold by the man in the tweed jacket happened
to me.11 For those reasons, I doubt that the man in tweed ever really existed, except in Beck’s Leaving the Saints.

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1599&context=msr

In critizing Nibley's chapter on "Old World Ritual in the New World" as drawing conclusions from too broad a survey, Nevo has not prepared us for Nibley's own essay in King Benjamin's Speech, "Assembly and Atonement" in which he makes particular use of a single relevant source:

Quote

Since treating the subject of ritual in the Melchizedek Priesthood manual for 1957 (lesson 23),
 I have come upon more confirmation, such as in a particularly interesting writing of Nathan the Babylonian, a writer of the
tenth century AD who has left us an eyewitness account of the coronation of the Prince of the Captivity or
Exilarch in Babylonia. He speaks with the detachment of a gentile though he may have been a Jew.

Since we find no extended description of a coronation in the Old Testament, as we do in the Book of Mormon, and
since no one showed interest in the remarkably uniform pattern of ancient coronations until the present
century, Nathan’s account provides us with strong evidence for the authenticity of Mosiah’s account.

https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=6&article=1044&context=mi&type=additional

Back to Jackson's claim that Nibley is only re-enforcing his own preconceptions, Midgley points to Novick's That Noble Dream, and its critique of Positivism, which in turn, draws from Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Novick makes the case that it is far better to admit your preconceptions up front [which Nibley does], rather than to pretend that you don't have any.   Novick explained to an audience of LDS scholars at Sunstone the problem with the ideal of objective scholars simply following the evidence wherever it leads:

Quote

If one could not eliminate outside influences, one would struggle against them with all one’s strength. But above all—and if I repeat myself, it is because it bears repetition—the objective historian was to cleave to one goal and one goal only, mirroring to the best of her powers the past as it really was.

    Though radically compressed, this is a fair statement of the mainstream position on historical objectivity. Now I have not the time, and you have not the patience, to go through the ups and downs of this program over the past hundred years. I will only report that to an ever-increasing number of historians in recent decades it has not just seemed unapproachable, but an incoherent ideal; not impossible, in the sense of unachievable (that would not make it a less worthy goal than many other goals that we reasonably pursue), but meaningless. This is not because of human frailty on the part of the historian (that, after all, we can struggle against), not because of irresistible outside pressures (these too we can resist with some success, if not complete success). No, the principal problem is different, and it is laughably simple. It is the problem of selecting from among the zillions and zillions of bits of historical data out there the handful that we can fit in even the largest book, and the associated problem of how we arrange those bits that we choose. The criterion of selection and the way we arrange the bits we choose are not given out there in the historical record. Neutrality, value-freedom, and absence of preconceptions on the part of the historian would not result in a neutral account, it would result in no account at all, because any historian, precisely to the extent that she was neutral, without values, free of preconceptions, would be paralyzed, would not have the foggiest notion of how to go about choosing from the vast, unbelievably messy chaos of stuff out there. (Peter Novick, “Why the Old Mormon Historians Are More Objective Than the New.” A talk delivered at the 1989 Sunstone Symposium held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.  MS in my possession.)

A good example of scholar making a statement in which he presumes his own perfect objectivity and rationality in following the evidence where it leads is Bacon:

Quote

Bacon, the philosopher of science was, quite consistently, an enemy of Copernicus.  Don’t theorize, he said, but open your eyes and observe without prejudice, and you cannot doubt that the Sun moves and that the earth is at rest.  (Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework: In Defense of Science and Rationality, (London and New York, Routledge, 1994) 84-85)

We all theorize.  We all have prejudice.  The question is "Which paradigm is better?" and the answer to that inescapably turns out to be a value-based decision, rather than a rule-based decision, which means we can and will disagree in how we apply those values in what framework.  And we all, to one degree or another, draw on our own paradigms to define our tests.  Our maps give us directions for map making.  Real testing must be comparative and consciously draw on values which are not completely paradigm-dependent:  Puzzle definition and Testability, Accuracy of key predictions, Comprehensiveness and Coherence, Fruitfulness, Simplicity and Aesthetics, and Future Promise.  It's one thing to assert that a 19th century revival context is enough to account for Benjamin's speech on the face of it.  It is quite another thing to demonstrate in comparison with a wide range of scholarship that a revival context is better.

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

Edited September 26, 2022 by Kevin Christensen

[Stargazer]

9 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

So let's ask three big questions -

1: Do you think that God has minimized the evil in creation?

No. I think that God gave man the ability to choose freely between good and evil. This gave us such monsters as Genghis Khan, Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. There has clearly been no minimization of evil. Another evidence that He has not minimized it is the Manhattan Project. As Oppenheimer said, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." 

9 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

Or is God unconcerned with the amount of evil within creation?

Yes, God is unconcerned with it. He knew in advance there would be a lot of evil committed by those to whom he gave the freedom to disobey. He gave us all enough latitude to choose the very worst we could choose. I offer as proof the previous list of monsters, and add to it such people as the "littler" mass killers we call "serial killers".

9 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

God being omniscient means that God should be at least knowledgeable about how to do so.

I assume he knows how to minimize evil. You know who wanted to absolutely minimize evil? Lucifer wanted no evil whatsoever. God permitted 1/3 of his children to choose Lucifer. That's too many to make it possible to think God was at all interested in minimizing evil. He allowed a huge number to completely rebel against Him -- which is the ultimate evil, along with the denial of the Holy Ghost.

God is perfectly capable of stopping those who do evil. Of the most evil men we know of in history, who did not live into ripe old ages? So it is clear that God will not intervene on any level, so far at least. If He has done so previously, I'm not aware of it.

9 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

2: Do you believe that mankind has absolute agency?

I don't know for sure what you mean by absolute agency. But I know I am perfectly capable of committing heinous crimes. There is nothing holding me back from doing so, except my own conscience. 

9 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

That they have in every instance the ability to make a choice for themselves between good and evil?

I know that I have the ability to choose between good and evil in every instance, and the only real restraints are the physical restraints imposed on me by my circumstances.

9 hours ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

3: If you view mortality as a test for humanity, do you believe that God was able to develop the perfect hashing algorithm that created an equal test for everyone?

I think He may have done so, but I am not certain of it. Are there other Stargazers out there in the universe, equally me, who are in different circumstances and facing different decisions than the ones I have faced here? I have no idea, but it might be the case. 

I assume that what is making the decisions here in this life is only a "partial" me, with the bulk of me standing on the other side of the veil. I say this because I assume that God chose us for this test because we have qualified for further development to possibly become like Him. We are gods in potential. He must test to see if we will choose the right even if we don't remember Him. The ones who rebelled against Him while in His sight proved they failed the first test -- or the First Probation.

Why are you so focused on Leibniz, anyway?

Edited September 26, 2022 by Stargazer

[mfbukowski]

On 9/17/2022 at 11:38 AM, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Perhaps you meant to direct this at Ryan? Nevo was just responding to him. 

Yes, for some reason I missed this exchange or ignored it

Frankly Ryan and I had a long discussion on all this a few years ago, (not here) as BOMC was just getting going and I think we kind of agreed to disagree.

We were going back and forth without getting anywhere and concluded it was a waste of time, iirc.  I think it still would be.

For me, it is all qualia.

If we both look at a color swatch and I see red and you see green, there isn't much to discuss.

For me the BOM is inspired and from God and I have created a paradigm based on taking Moroni's test and therefore testimonies in general as qualia, and I think millions would agree.

Absolute truth as a tautology: you get the qualia view or you don't. 

Same as it ever was. 

 

Edited September 27, 2022 by mfbukowski

[Nevo]

19 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

Where you say "There's nothing in Mosiah 2–6 that indicates a new year or harvest festival setting" the authors of the paper you cite to debunk Nibley discuss the three main Holy Days, of which the "third was an autumn festival complex that later developed into the composite two-or three-week-long observance of the three related celebration of Rosh Shanah (New Year and Day of Judgement), Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), and Sukkot (Feast of the Tabernacles)." They then provide a great deal of evidence that makes sense of Benjamin's speech in that context, and other chapters in the book do more, including in relation to Mesoamerican evidences and practices.

"A great deal of evidence," yes, but not very strong evidence.

Szink and Welch start with the assumption that "Nephites in Benjamin’s day would have kept holy observances that were appropriately similar to the festivals and holy days required by the Old Testament." Why? Because the Book of Mormon says the people kept the Law of Moses.

Unfortunately, no Israelite festivals are ever mentioned in the Book of Mormon, even in passing, so Szink and Welch need to read between the lines to recover these traditions. As they gingerly put it: "How the Nephites and Lamanites understood and applied those ancient biblical regulations . . . remains obscure." 

So we get stuff like this:

• The blowing of horns (shofars) was a common feature of Israelite culture and worship and was later particularly associated with Rosh ha-Shanah. Although the Book of Mormon never mentions horns in connection with King Benjamin's speech, "traditional occasions and purposes for sounding the shôfār are so clearly manifest at the ceremonial sectional dividing points in Benjamin’s speech, one can easily envision their being accompanied by the sounding of the shôfār."
• New Year's festivals included burnt offerings and Benjamin's people brought animals for burnt offerings when they assembled at the temple.
• According to the Mishnah, Rosh ha-Shanah is the day "when all mankind is judged." Benjamin's invokes God's judgment in his speech.
• In ancient Israel, God’s kingship was "celebrated by the sounding of trumpets, characteristic of the New Year." Benjamin refers to God as king three times in his speech.
• The New Year brought to mind creation. Benjamin refers to Christ as the Creator of all things.
• Leviticus 23:24 mentions a "memorial" or commemoration of horn blasts that should take place on the first day of the seventh month (which Jacob Milgrom insists was not New Year's Day). Benjamin emphasized remembering in his speech.
• In the Babylonian New Year rite, the king had to give a negative confession and was ritually humiliated by being struck on the cheek. Szink and Welch state: "[It] seems plausible that Benjamin’s frequent and sincere statements of humility and the accounting of his stewardship as king are in some way related to the general genre of humiliation and negative confession of the king found in other ancient cultures."

And on it goes. But I suppose someone who already thinks that Nibley "demonstrated that King Benjamin’s discourse was a coronation rite following a thirty-six element pattern" would naturally find all this additional evidence convincing. 

I do not. But then I'm a skeptic. For me, details matter

19 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

In criticizing Nibley's chapter on "Old World Ritual in the New World" as drawing conclusions from too broad a survey, Nevo has not prepared us for Nibley's own essay in King Benjamin's Speech, "Assembly and Atonement" in which he makes particular use of a single relevant source:

Actually, I think I prepared the reader quite well for that article. Characteristically, Nibley's "single relevant source," which describes the installation of a Jewish official in Baghdad in the tenth century AD, is unironically declared "strong evidence for the authenticity of Mosiah's account." Of course, it is no such thing.

In fairness, the exilarch does deliver a sermon on a wooden platform that has been specially built for the occasion. So it at least has that in common with Mosiah's account. But then, those elements figure in nineteenth-century camp meetings too.

 

19 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

Puzzle definition and Testability, Accuracy of key predictions, Comprehensiveness and Coherence, Fruitfulness, Simplicity and Aesthetics, and Future Promise.  It's one thing to assert that a 19th century revival context is enough to account for Benjamin's speech on the face of it.  It is quite another thing to demonstrate in comparison with a wide range of scholarship that a revival context is better.

I don't assert, by the way, that a nineteenth-century revival context is "enough to account for Benjamin's speech." I find a good deal of creativity and inspiration in Mosiah 2–6 that isn't reducible to a revival context. There may well be such a context in the background (Benjamin does use revivalist language), but I don't think that is the whole story or the most interesting or important thing that can be said about Benjamin's speech. I agree with Givens that Joseph Smith was a bricoleur, taking bits and pieces from his environment and crafting them into something new. 

When I said that King Benjamin's discourse "arguably more closely resembles a revival sermon than a 'coronation speech,'" I was making a relative claim: I think the evidence for an Israelite New Year/coronation/autumn festival context is weaker than its advocates suppose, and I think the evidence for a nineteenth-century context is "arguably" stronger. I gave some reasons why I think that, but I'm not really interested in trying to settle the question to everyone's satisfaction (an impossible task).

Edited September 27, 2022 by Nevo

[Benjamin McGuire]

17 hours ago, Stargazer said:

No. I think that God gave man the ability to choose freely between good and evil. This gave us such monsters as Genghis Khan, Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. There has clearly been no minimization of evil. Another evidence that He has not minimized it is the Manhattan Project. As Oppenheimer said, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." 

Good, we are making progress. So we can now follow the sort of classical responses to this. From this statement we can draw this premise:

1: Man has the ability to choose freely between good and evil. This represents absolute agency - whenever man commits evil it is a choice on his part to do so.

2: God made no effort to minimize the amount of evil in creation, instead allowing mankind to produce as much evil as they wanted to.

This is a bit ambiguous. You more explicitly express that ambiguity a bit later, but in your own circumstances, you make it clear that you believe that your own agency is absolute (you just aren't necessarily sure about others?). When you say that man can freely choose (this is the question of absolute agency) do you mean that whenever man commits an evil act it is a matter of personal choice? That is more or less the meaning of absolute agency. Do you recognize exceptions to this belief? Does someone with limited mental capacity commit evil in the same way as someone without? For the purposes of this discussion, I'll simply go along with the idea of absolute agency for now.

18 hours ago, Stargazer said:

Yes, God is unconcerned with it. He knew in advance there would be a lot of evil committed by those to whom he gave the freedom to disobey. He gave us all enough latitude to choose the very worst we could choose. I offer as proof the previous list of monsters, and add to it such people as the "littler" mass killers we call "serial killers".

3: God is concerned with the amount of evil that exists.

18 hours ago, Stargazer said:

I assume he knows how to minimize evil. You know who wanted to absolutely minimize evil? Lucifer wanted no evil whatsoever. God permitted 1/3 of his children to choose Lucifer. That's too many to make it possible to think God was at all interested in minimizing evil. He allowed a huge number to completely rebel against Him -- which is the ultimate evil, along with the denial of the Holy Ghost.

God is perfectly capable of stopping those who do evil. Of the most evil men we know of in history, who did not live into ripe old ages? So it is clear that God will not intervene on any level, so far at least. If He has done so previously, I'm not aware of it.

4: God knows how to minimize evil

The issue of Lucifer is irrelevant for this discussion.

18 hours ago, Stargazer said:

I don't know for sure what you mean by absolute agency. But I know I am perfectly capable of committing heinous crimes. There is nothing holding me back from doing so, except my own conscience. 

This is that ambiguity about absolute agency. But, let's say you believe that we have a mechanism which you identify as conscience that allows us to distinguish between good and evil all the time?

5: Man has a mechanism called a conscious which allows him to distinguish between good and evil.

18 hours ago, Stargazer said:

I know that I have the ability to choose between good and evil in every instance, and the only real restraints are the physical restraints imposed on me by my circumstances.

Here you at least loosely accept the idea of absolute agency.

18 hours ago, Stargazer said:

I think He may have done so, but I am not certain of it. Are there other Stargazers out there in the universe, equally me, who are in different circumstances and facing different decisions than the ones I have faced here? I have no idea, but it might be the case.

I think you misunderstood the question. The question is, does the test equally test all humanity by putting them into the same space (mortality) - even if the test is different for each of us.

18 hours ago, Stargazer said:

Why are you so focused on Leibniz, anyway?

Think of it as a helpful jumping off point.

Your engagement of serial killers is useful in this argument. We can start with Hitler (your example of extreme evil). Of the billions of people who have lived in the past few centuries, very, very few have engaged to evil on this level (or have even found themselves in the position to commit evil on this scale). Would you agree with that? Assuming that you do, we might conclude that such a choice (to commit evil or not on such a scale) isn't a requirement of the test we find ourselves in. God, you argue, knows how to minimize evil. So the question becomes, if God could have eliminated this evil (by creating a different environment for Hitler that would have been just as effective in testing him - just as it is in testing most of us), then why didn't he do so?

Leibniz's conclusion was that God had in fact minimized evil and that he couldn't minimize it any more by changing Hitler's 'circumstances' to prevent the great evil that Hitler was going to do. The alternative, Leibniz argues, is that God not only knew that the evil was going to happen and could have changed it, he refused to change it, and so by creating the circumstances that led to that evil, God would be in fact responsible for that evil.

So we can start by asking you the same question that Leibniz was trying to answer -

You seem to believe that God is concerned with the amount of evil in the world (3), that God knows how to minimize that evil (2) but that God refused to do so (1). We are unclear yet on your view of the necessity of evil (and not just the necessity of the choice between good and evil). So how would you answer Leibniz's dilemma? Would you suggest (as he did) that God couldn't reduce the evil for whatever reason, or would you answer that God is in part responsible for some of the evil that God could have prevented, but didn't? Or do you have some third option?

I note in passing that you seem to lean in the direction that God couldn't reduce evil by pointing out that Lucifer in comparison to God merely intended to eliminate evil. Mormons tend to have a rather unique spin on this by suggesting that there is a purpose in the process that reflects the need to allow for evil, without which the eternal purposes of God (the greater good) could not be achieved. But this thinking isn't so different from Leibniz.  As an aside, to put this into some context, I don't believe in the notion of absolute agency. Especially in the Book of Mormon, which discusses this question, I read a relative agency, where we have only a limited ability to make decisions between good and evil, and judgment only occurs within the context of those decisions that we are able to make while exercising that limited agency. This probably also leads to some disagreements between us over the nature of evil.

[why me]

On 9/23/2022 at 6:45 AM, JarMan said:

I take the view that Joseph used a copy of a manuscript created much earlier. So it’s possible the original manuscript or Joseph’s copy is still in existence. Joseph likely destroyed his copy, but one day the Mormon world may be shocked when the original manuscript comes to light. 

He still needed to hide it from his family and from emma. And then he needed to stick his head in a hat and rewrite it from memory. Quite amazing when one reflects on it.

[Tacenda]

25 minutes ago, why me said:

He still needed to hide it from his family and from emma. And then he needed to stick his head in a hat and rewrite it from memory. Quite amazing when one reflects on it.

Unless they were in on it.

[SeekingUnderstanding]

28 minutes ago, why me said:

He still needed to hide it from his family and from emma. And then he needed to stick his head in a hat and rewrite it from memory. Quite amazing when one reflects on it.

If that theory was correct, he would just read the manuscript at the bottom of his hat. 

[mfbukowski]

1 minute ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

If that theory was correct, he would just read the manuscript at the bottom of his hat. 

On this model, where did the manuscript come from? I forgot that part.

And we know that it was NOT inspired because..... ? 

[SeekingUnderstanding]

1 minute ago, mfbukowski said:

On this model, where did the manuscript come from? I forgot that part.

And we know that it was NOT inspired because..... ? 

Not my theory. Ask jarman. And inspired is in the eye of the beholder, so only you can determine what is inspired for you. 

[mfbukowski]

6 minutes ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Not my theory. Ask jarman. And inspired is in the eye of the beholder, so only you can determine what is inspired for you. 

Ok thanks. Yes, we agree on the fact that God leads each of us individually.  Like GPS, my route to a given destination is different from your route to the same destination.

We all take different freeways to Disneyland. 🤪

[mfbukowski]

On 9/22/2022 at 8:45 PM, JarMan said:

I take the view that Joseph used a copy of a manuscript created much earlier. So it’s possible the original manuscript or Joseph’s copy is still in existence. Joseph likely destroyed his copy, but one day the Mormon world may be shocked when the original manuscript comes to light. 

No, not at all.

It is still as good spiritually, or better than anything in the bible.

We don't even know who wrote hunks of the Bible and no one cares.

Suppose we find the calculations for Einstein's E= mc2 a hundred years before Einstein supposedly made them.

Does that mean they don't "work"?

I just cannot imagine this logic.

Who wrote "Shakespeare"? Who cares?

EModE ? Irrelevant to me

A text changes your life and you care about who wrote it?  If it was Plato or Parmenides or Derrida?

I just cannot get it

[JarMan]

6 hours ago, why me said:

He still needed to hide it from his family and from emma. And then he needed to stick his head in a hat and rewrite it from memory. Quite amazing when one reflects on it.

Somehow Joseph was able to hide the plates from everybody. So couldn't he have hidden a manuscript? I propose that the "plates" he was hiding was nothing more than a box holding the manuscript.

He didn't need to memorize the manuscript. He simply needed to have it where he could view it while he pretended to read words off a stone in a hat. This is easy to do by keeping the manuscript behind the table somewhere near his lap.

[JarMan]

6 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

On this model, where did the manuscript come from? I forgot that part.

And we know that it was NOT inspired because..... ? 

The manuscript was originally created in Europe sometime around 1635-1645. It was copied at some point and came into Joseph's possession. There's no reason the original writer couldn't have been inspired if you believe in that type of thing.

5 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

No, not at all.

It is still as good spiritually, or better than anything in the bible.

We don't even know who wrote hunks of the Bible and no one cares.

Suppose we find the calculations for Einstein's E= mc2 a hundred years before Einstein supposedly made them.

Does that mean they don't "work"?

I just cannot imagine this logic.

Who wrote "Shakespeare"? Who cares?

EModE ? Irrelevant to me

A text changes your life and you care about who wrote it?  If it was Plato or Parmenides or Derrida?

I just cannot get it

You might not be shocked to learn there was an early modern manuscript. But the traditional Mormon world would be very schocked.

[Bernard Gui]

7 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

If that theory was correct, he would just read the manuscript at the bottom of his hat. 

Did have a sombrero muy grande or maybe a 10-gallon Tom Mix cowboy hat? How was the bottom of the hat lit to be able to read in candlelight or indirect sunlight in a cabin?

[Bernard Gui]

1 hour ago, JarMan said:

The manuscript was originally created in Europe sometime around 1635-1645. It was copied at some point and came into Joseph's possession. There's no reason the original writer couldn't have been inspired if you believe in that type of thing.

You might not be shocked to learn there was an early modern manuscript. But the traditional Mormon world would be very schocked.

Not if the writer was a descendent of this luminary…John Baptist Moroni:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giovanni-Battista-Moroni

I learned of this when I asked my friend S. Heber Young if he had heard of the EEM theory. S. Heber was initially shocked to find out that the Book of Mormon was actually written in Europe in the early 1600s, but his research into the Moroni family in Renaissance Italy has fortified his faith. 

The Book of Mormon author may have been one of John Baptist’s great-grandsons, Geremia Moroni or Angelo Moroni, both of whom were highly esteemed writers at the time, but have since been mostly forgotten. It is possible that Angelo was tutored in England during a visit there in his youth and became fluent in Early Modern English. Or through his literary connections he may have had scholarly friends in England translate his manuscript.

The Italian proper name similarities between the Moroni family and Joseph Smith are significant, he says. 

Edited October 2, 2022 by Bernard Gui

[SeekingUnderstanding]

38 minutes ago, Bernard Gui said:

Did have a sombrero muy grande or maybe a 10-gallon Tom Mix cowboy hat? How was the bottom of the hat lit to be able to read in candlelight or indirect sunlight in a cabin?

Easy. I’ve tried it. Have you?

[Bernard Gui]

3 hours ago, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Easy. I’ve tried it. Have you?

I’ll take your word for it. Were you in a room lit by candles or oil lanterns? How did you get light on the papers? How did you disguise the sound of papers rustling and turning?

Edited October 2, 2022 by Bernard Gui