Way ahead of the times

Cowboys only wish they'd invented the sport.

The Book of Mormon is full of hipster, I-was-doing-that-before-it-was-cool types. Today you might run into folks who flaunt their early adoption of quinoa and kale, but the characters of The Book of Mormon predated certain trends by hundreds, if not thousands of years. Take the Jaredites for example. They were keeping honey bees in the New World thousands of years before the European honey bee ever existed there! That's very impressive. They also kept cattle and sheep thousands of years before domesticated livestock like that had even set hoof on the American continents.

The point is, when considering evidence for The Book of Mormon, we can talk about what's not been found, but we also need to recognize what shouldn't logically be included in the text. There are a number of physical anachronisms in The Book of Mormon that should definitely cause every believing Mormon more than a few minutes of doubt.

Why do we have Nephites working all manner of precious ore of every kind, including steel? Why are they riding chariots and horses into battle? Why are they working silk and all manner of fine cloth? Mormon apologists have their answers, which always involve pipe dreams and defiance of known research coupled with an active imagination.

And somehow those apologetic tactics are supposed to fit the text and squelch our doubts even though things end up looking rather ridiculous. Could this be the true interpretation of Mormon scripture?

Or maybe this?

What's that? They didn't have missiles back then, you say? No, no they didn't...

I wonder why God couldn't give Joseph a more believable translation.

What it's all about

If The Book of Mormon was written for these latter days, why does its content seem so tightly focused on Joseph Smith's day? The whole thing is essentially a series of Second Great Awakening style sermons strung together in a narrative based on the answer to the question "who are the indigenous Americans?" In addition to the religious concerns of the early 19th century and the curiosities surrounding the First Nations people, we have a number of other very culturally specific topics of concern such as the preoccupation with avoiding a king as a ruler and opting instead for self-governance, declaring independence, war as a means of obtaining freedom, frontier justice, colonization, suspicion of secret societies like the Freemasons, and treasure seeking.

What does The Book of Mormon contain that addresses our current concerns about racism, LGBTQ rights, gender equality, abortion, proper taxation, etc. with the same perspective and precision? One might be prone to say that The Book of Mormon was written in Joseph's day for himself, and not thousands of years ago for us and our posterity. Unless you're one of these folks and have an awesome ability to make shit up.

Tough love

Learn to be white in a just a few years! It's easy!

As if the LDS Church's quest for spiritual and cultural domination over the earth weren't enough to make to make me doubt, finding out about the Indian Placement Program and electroshock conversion therapy use on homosexuals at BYU certainly brought to mind some fresh thoughts about what Christ-like love ought to look like. The justifications for keeping First Nations children physically distant from their families in order to culturally distance them from their traditions point nowhere near the love and acceptance one might expect from Jesus. Likewise the use of physical and psychological torture to reform homosexuals points nowhere near Christ-like behavior. These are two programs (the IPP admittedly much bigger than McBride's experiments) that have to cause members to scramble for answers. How can these sorts of things be inspired? How offensive is it that Mormons expect First Nations people to turn off their identity? Why do Mormons think homosexuals can do it? How can they be justified in the name of a loving god? How is it that the LDS Church and BYU have not apologized for these damaging programs?

Turning off the gay was supposed to be as easy as hitting the lights!

UPDATE: A Mormon Stories episode on the Indian Placement Program has just been added (4/4/14). Listen to it here.