Slippery treasures

Did Joseph Smith the stone seer write The Book of Mormon? Well the text does share an interest in locking down elusive treasure.

Yea, behold, the anger of the Lord is already kindled against you; behold, he hath cursed the land because of your iniquity. And behold, the time cometh that he curseth your riches, that they become slippery, that ye cannot hold them; and in the days of your poverty ye cannot retain them. And in the days of your poverty ye shall cry unto the Lord; and in vain shall ye cry, for your desolation is already come upon you, and your destruction is made sure; and then shall ye weep and howl in that day, saith the Lord of Hosts. And then shall ye lament, and say: O that I had repented, and had not killed the prophets, and stoned them, and cast them out. Yea, in that day ye shall say: O that we had remembered the Lord our God in the day that he gave us our riches, and then they would not have become slippery that we should lose them; for behold, our riches are gone from us. Behold, we lay a tool here and on the morrow it is gone; and behold, our swords are taken from us in the day we have sought them for battle. Yea, we have hid up our treasures and they have slipped away from us, because of the curse of the land. O that we had repented in the day that the word of the Lord came unto us; for behold the land is cursed, and all things are become slippery, and we cannot hold them. (Helaman 13:30-36, emphasis mine)

And later on there's also this:

And these Gadianton robbers, who were among the Lamanites, did infest the land, insomuch that the inhabitants thereof began to hide up their treasures in the earth; and they became slippery, because the Lord had cursed the land, that they could not hold them, nor retain them again. (Mormon 1:18, emphasis mine)

Does God really do that kind of tricky shit or are these examples of how Joseph couldn't help but include his typical excuse (slipperiness) for never finding real treasure when out scrying?

He done a good job a translatin'

Given that the glowing text in Joseph's hat was produced by the power of God, we must either conclude that God as a translator has decided to reinterpret the shitty grammar of the ancient authors of The Book of Mormon using a 19th century rural American flavor, that God is catering heavily to an ignorant Joseph Smith, or that God himself spoke like an early American farmer.

Is it sacrilegious that the LDS Church has since edited the text to sound more educated and refined? Does God want or even need his grammar checked like that?

LDS artistic interpretations

The LDS Church has done a wonderful job of controlling the popular imagery of the translation process of The Book of Mormon. Searching the Church website will get you pictures like this:

Plates present but no hat.

Or this:

The plates again but there's no hat here either.

Notice that there is a huge discrepancy in the LDS version of the story:

It doesn't feel very good when the accuracy of a South Park episode surpasses all the prophet talks and prophetically endorsed pictures you've encountered as a highly active and fully believing member of the Church. How are we not supposed to wonder why the hat thing's not been very popular in Mormon art? What else is the average Mormon ignorant of?

The temple - head gear

Temple clothes are neither attractive nor holy, and seeing a large number of your immediate and extended family, a few neighbors, and a bunch of unknowns congregated in all that gear (for me) felt about like walking into the music video for Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" only more white and fewer shadows. It wasn't fun. Had we been 8 year olds prepping for a Christmas pageant I might have felt better about things.

What's the story with these awful hats? Who's the butcher, who's the baker, and who's the candlestick maker here? Why doesn't anyone else feel as ridiculous as I do? And why the fuck are all the women veiled? Seriously, why? Being segregated by sex was already weird enough, but the veil was really going too far for me. 

Why had no one shown me these clothes before stepping into the temple locker room or how to wear them before sending me into the endowment session? What did they mean? Why were they so ugly and poorly made? Is this really what we'll all be wearing in the Celestial Kingdom? Is this how God dresses?

I wasn't sure I should be taking out my endowment that day. Maybe I wasn't ready. Maybe I just had to sit through it and it would all come together. The Church and the Gospel made perfect sense to me at the time, so surely the endowment ceremony would eventually come into focus too, right? 

Doubt your doubts! This can't be as bad as it seems. Oh look! The women get to remove the veils from over their faces now! See? It's not so bad.