Posted by:
windyway
(
)
Date: March 18, 2017 12:23PM
I commented on it and copied a bunch of a post I just made on my Magical Thinking thread. Gatorman, apparently, my opinion on the BofM is in flux! Here's what I said as a repsonse to the blog:
ina, my convictions about Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon have changed drastically of late. I will try to explain:
One line I love in Persuasion by Jane Austen is Anne describing how she distrusts Mr. Eliott because she never sees him respond to anything geuinely with "burst of feeling," rather he has a constantly curated demeanor with her. Here, Austen is talking about how we, epistemologically, learn about the true nature of a person and with better accuracy and how important it can be to know this.
And it's exactly this type of depth that began shattering my testimony of Joseph Smith. I learned about him because I met someone who lied, who lied so much that his lies impacted people's lives in major ways and he never recanted. And I knew, I know, that such a man cannot be a prophet.
This is my experience in my life: my parents came out of dysfunctional families and into the church and with the church as their partner they produced their family that functioned better. They are always trying to draw themselves closer to Christ and His goodness. We kids, even the ones who left the church years ago, follow in those footsteps: we're trying to be good and genuinely happy, too. We believe that there is life in that.
So what happens when you've built a life around this concept--your family, your friends, your perception of how things work best at church, it all flows from this concept of constant search for goodness--and then you see a person who, though perhaps a pitiful human being, is actively doing evil that hurts people? His friends say he has spiritual gifts, he says insightful things in Sunday School, he can be smart and charming, but he is also lying about you to the bishop, the stake, the police, the government, his wife, his kids, his friends...he assaults and intimidates. (Some of the things he's said remind me of Dicken's Uriah Heap in David Copperfield, btw.)
Me, I realised that God can choose from better vessels than such a man! I realised that even when he said "good" things he was building his case to add legitimacy to his lies, so even his "good" was a tool for evil.
I used to think that, with Joseph Smith, he could have been a prophet even if he really screwed up. Now, I know he could not have been a prophet that I could sustain, because I understand what liars look like and the damage they do. When you deliberately engage in continuing, major deception, you absolutely cannot be a credible mouthpiece of the Lord.
I'm not sure if, in a year or five, I will come back to the Book of Mormon and value it as a distinctive treatise on how we humans should shape up. Perhaps I will be able to identify valid points and sift them out to create a thesis that wins on its own merit. At the moment, it stands as the fruit of a corrupt tree.
Of course, I am not like Anne Elliot who is deciding on who to marry, although joining or staying in the church might be considered as an equally or even more critical decision. But, in both, you're largely all in or all out. You take the bad with the good in your spouse on an everyday basis, same with church. With a book, if we let it stand on its own, and each merit on its own merit, then we also are disabused from the notion that good feelings about it in general are not to be considered approbation for the whole thing. And then the dominos fall for everything else in the church: the Restoration, prophets, the priesthood, the First Vision...each become subject to rational criticism and evaluation and cannot be verified by feelings on it itself or on any other leg of the stool.
Where does that lead?