The one thing that my kids knew they had better not say, if they got caught doing something they shouldn't have done, was, "everybody else did". I never used the "jump of a cliff" response. My kids were smarter than that. But the use of other's bad behavior to justify your own, didn't fly at my house.

I have heard the apologists use that defense for JS in several situations. It riles me.

JS married teenage girls. Let's look at the legal age for marriage at the time. Why, it was legal to marry a girl who was twelve. JS didn't do anything that other men weren't doing. The problem is that other men didn't already have a wife.

JS set up an illegal bank. But it was the wild, wild, almost West. Lots of other people set up banks that were shady. That's a defense? Shouldn't all of them have gone to jail.

JS engaged in fraudulent land speculation. So, it was done all the time.

JS defrauded people of their money by claiming to be able to find buried treasure. He was not the only scryer.

JS claimed to have a vision, but he told the story differently each time he told it. Nobody's memory is perfect. He told different audiences different stories based on what they were ready to hear. So did Mark Twain, but the subject matter was a little different.

This is the short list. There are many other offenses and the apologetics are similar for all of them. Everybody else was doing it.

I'm not sure that I understand how people can hear about all of the things that JS did, that point to the fact that he had a questionable character, and not have the sheer number of different offenses make them question.

When you add the fact that this man is supposed to be the prophet of the dispensation of the fullness of time, it boggles the mind that so many people are willing to accept so many flaws in one who should be so great.

If JS was a "rough stone rolling" people should have run for high ground, because according to the apologists, it was an avalanche.

In the case of early marriage, everyone else *wasn't* doing it. That is a Mormon myth. The mean age of first marriage for women in the U.S. was 23.1 in the year 1850. Even on the western frontier it was in the 20-22 range throughout the 1800s. Marrying young teens was no more normal then than it is now.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3002115/table/T1/



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/27/2014 10:23AM by summer.

Exactly. "Everybody is doing it" is not a bad rationale, as long as it happens to be true. In the case of JS, it wasn't even close to true.

I am going to see if Eric can find a place to link that chart.

As discussed a couple of days ago, "the Egyptians were a lot freer about sex." So it's OK to show God Almighty in Facsimile #3 in the BoA with a huge, hard dong?

Really.

Those things were more common and socially acceptable in the past, true. But it doesn't mean they're okay, just that they were probably a bit less shocking at the time than we find those things today.

I actually don't have too much of a problem with JS treasure hunting. But when I look at the circumstances of finding the BOM, it's clear that the BOM was originally just an extension of treasure hunting. Fraud.

Coercing teenagers and married women to "marry" him with salvation hanging over their heads is a perverse abuse of power.

It's nice to know that the apologists set the bar so low for their "prophet."

Exactly!