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WillowOne's Positions

Mormonism

My Positions

  1. The Book of Mormon is a nineteenth-century composition by Joseph Smith. Its claims about ancient America (migrations of Israelites, cities of millions, horses, chariots, steel, wheat and a Christian civilisation wiped out in AD 385) are falsified by archaeology, genetics and the complete absence of any trace.
  2. The founding is documented well enough to watch a religion being made: a convicted treasure-seer dictating with his face in a hat, witnesses drawn from his family and financiers, and a second scripture "translated" from an ordinary Egyptian funerary papyrus that Egyptologists can now read.
  3. Mormons are, on the whole, admirable neighbours, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a corporation with a hundred-billion-dollar investment fund, a tithing requirement, and a history of revising its doctrines by revelation whenever the law or the public mood required it.

Notes

  1. The archaeology and the genes. No pre-Columbian site, inscription, coin, weapon or crop described in the Book of Mormon has ever been found. Horses, cattle, wheat, barley, steel and the wheel were absent from the Americas until Europeans brought them. Native Americans descend from Siberian populations, not from Israel, and the church's own 2014 essay on the subject retreated from "principal ancestors" to a possibility that some Israelites were "among" them, which is a retreat from a claim to a hope. The book also reproduces King James English, including the translators' errors in its Isaiah chapters, in a text supposedly written before the King James Version existed.
  2. The Book of Abraham. In 1835 Smith bought some Egyptian papyri from a travelling showman and "translated" them as the writings of Abraham, including the doctrine that black people were cursed. The papyri were thought lost but turned up in a New York museum in 1967. They are a common funerary text, the Book of Breathings, made for a priest called Hor around the first century BC, and contain nothing of what Smith said they did. The church's 2014 essay concedes that the text is not a translation and proposes that the papyri were a "catalyst" for revelation. A church that must say this about one of its scriptures has told you how to read the other.
  3. The founder. Smith was tried in 1826 for "glass-looking", using a seer stone to find buried treasure for a fee; he dictated the Book of Mormon by placing the same stone in a hat and reading words from it. The Three Witnesses who swore they saw the golden plates saw them "with spiritual eyes"; all three later left the church. Smith married at least thirty women, including a girl of fourteen and the wives of living followers, which the church denied for a century and now acknowledges online. He was killed in 1844 while in jail for ordering the destruction of a newspaper that had printed the facts about his polygamy. Richard Dawkins's point that a religion's founder is less impressive the better he is documented holds here as for Scientology.
  4. The method of knowing. Converts are told to pray about the book and attend to a "burning in the bosom" (Moroni 10:4). This is the Experiential Argument made explicit as doctrine: the feeling is the evidence. The same feeling confirms Islam in Jakarta and Pentecostalism in Lagos (Religious Experience), and a method that confirms whatever the person asking already hopes for is not a method.
  5. The institution. Members tithe ten per cent of income; the church's Ensign Peak fund was revealed in 2019 to hold over a hundred billion dollars and was fined by the SEC in 2023 for hiding it. Black men were barred from the priesthood until a revelation in 1978, which arrived shortly after the tax status of segregated religious institutions came into question. Polygamy was abandoned by revelation in 1890, the year Utah's statehood required it. A god whose revelations track the law so closely is a board of directors.
  6. Credit where due. The welfare system, the sobriety, the family cohesion and the sheer decency of most individual Mormons are real, and are a good example of the point under The human need for religion: the goods are produced by the community, and the doctrine is the price of admission rather than the source.

Sources

  • Brodie, F. M., No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (1945; 2nd ed. 1971)
  • Bushman, R. L., Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005), a believing historian's account, candid on the seer stone and the plural marriages
  • Southerton, S. G., Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church (2004)
  • Ritner, R. K., The Joseph Smith Egyptian Papyri: A Complete Edition (2011)
  • Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gospel Topics Essays: "Book of Mormon and DNA Studies" and "Translation and Historicity of the Book of Abraham" (2014)
  • SEC, "SEC Charges The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Ensign Peak Advisers", 21 February 2023

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