Exorcisms

The first miracle of Joseph Smith's new church was an exorcism. Now not all latter-day saints know what to make of exorcisms, but it's definitely a recognized practice in the New Testament, The Book of Mormon and elsewhere.

If you've heard the story of how Joseph cast a devil out of Newel Knight, there's a good chance it sounded pretty straight forward. The LDS Church, as it just so happens, likes to present its history in a clean, easy to swallow format fit for children - even if its for adults.

I, however, suggest we look at a more complete version of this miraculous exorcism as described by Dan Vogel, who takes into account a number of witness testimonies (emphasis mine).

"... when [Joseph] Smith asked him to pray, Newel begged to be excused. Like his father, he may have considered prayer to be a private matter and found his first attempt at public prayer embarrassing and difficult. Despite Smith's encouragement, Knight insisted on delaying his vocal prayer until morning when he could go into the woods.

"The next day, Knight attempted several times to pray vocally but experienced great difficulty. He began to feel a flood of emotion: anxiety, guilt, confusion, and finally panic. By the time he returned to his house, 'his appearance was such as to alarm his wife very much.' A desperate Newel anxiously asked his wife to bring Smith to him. 'I went and found him suffering very much in his mind,' Smith recalled, 'and his body acted upon in a most strange manner. His visage and limbs [were] distorted and twisted into every possible shape and appearances, and finally he was caught up off the floor of the apartment and tossed about most fearfully.' ...

"... Knight was unable to speak during his convulsions, for Smith reports that when he took hold of Knight's hand, 'almost immediately he was able to speak.'
"... Newel earnestly requested Joseph to cast the devil out of him. In front of eight or nine people who had gathered to witness the scene, Joseph said, 'If you know that I can, it shall be done.' Then Joseph rebuked the devil, commanding it 'in the name of Jesus Christ' to depart from Newell, upon which the latter 'saw the Devil leave him and vanish from his sight.'

Newel recalls levitating at this point:

"I felt myself attracted upward and remained for some time enwrapped in contemplation insomuch that I know not what was going on in the room. By and by I felt some weight pressing upon my shoulder and the side of my head; which served to recall me to a sense of my situation, and I found that the Spirit of the Lord had actually caught me up off the floor, and that my shoulder and head were pressing against the beams."

"... When Smith is brought to trial in South Bainbridge and Colesville in July 1830, Knight testifies that Smith had cast the devil out of him, but is evasive when asked to describe what the devil looked like. ... Apparently, he was less evasive in his home town, for Joel K. Noble, who presided over the trial in Colesville, remembered that Knight 'swore in open court [that] Jo. Smith cast a devil out of him ... and said how [the] devil looked. Said devil was a body of light..."

 "So I just cast it the fuck out right then and there! Easy!"

"... others remembered that Knight gave additional details. In the earliest account of the incident, [Martin] Harris said to Abner Cole in June 1830 that the devil, whom Smith had cast out of Newel, was of 'an uncommon size.' According to a later source, Joseph Knight Sr. and Josiah Stowell testified that they had seen the devil as well. Once testified that he saw 'a devil as large as a woodchuck leave the man and run across the floor,' while the other said he saw the devil leave the possessed and 'run off like a yellow dog.' neither witness said that Knight specifically described the devil's appearance, only that he had given an approximation of its size. This was confirmed by William R. Hine, a resident of Colesville, who said that Knight's testimony before Justice Noble was that 'Smith had cast three devils out of him. ... The first was as large as a woodchuck, the second was large as a squirrel, the third about the size of a rat.' When the judge asked what became of them, 'Knight said that they went out at the chimney.'" Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet, pp. 496-98.

Demon woodchucks and their pals? I fucking hate them. Floating on the ceiling in ecstasy? Fucking love it. Thoughts on whether this miracle is legit? I think I'll go eat some ice cream.

Jesus and the infinite atonement

How does it make any sense whatsoever that because Jesus suffered for our sins and shortcomings everything will one day be restored to perfection? How does it make any sense that one event that took place thousands of years ago is making things right today? Try anticipating your great-great grandchildren's debts and having the money ready for them in their exact moment of need. Try doing something today to absolutely guarantee your house will be clean in 100 years.

You can't do it, can you? Well God did. He did it for everyone. It was easy. He just had to kill his demigod offspring.

It works that way, promise! I know you don't have any demigod children of your own, but I'm sure that sacrificing one of your regular mortal children should at least take your mind off dinner for a week or two. Just make sure to burn the fat for Jehovah.

The missing links

Let's go back to my favorite childhood depiction of a scene from The Book of Mormon: Arnold Friberg's Abinadai and King Noah. It just so happens that my favorite part of that painting - the jaguars chained up at Noah's feet - cannot be found anywhere in The Book of Mormon. Neither can any of the other distinctly New World animals you would expect the Jaredites and Lehites to run into and describe. (As a quick note, The Book of Mormon does use lions in a few similes which might suggest they were calling jaguars or pumas "lions" out of ignorance, an ignorance God perpetuates in the translation he gives to Joseph Smith, but isn't it just as likely that Joseph included only Old World animals because those are the ones found in and copied from the Bible?)

Regardless of where in the New World you think the events of The Book of Mormon took place, there are a number of animals you would expect to see showing up in the text under a more specific term than "beasts." Where are the pumas, the deer, the alligators, the foxes, the wolves, the coyotes, the racoons, the peccaries, the bison, the elk, the moose, the beaver, the turkeys, the manatees, the dolphins, the skunks, the antelope, the bears, the squirrels, the otters, the porcupine?

Or the jaguars, the monkeys, the parrots, the opossums, the sloths, the armadillos, the ocelots, coati, the tapirs, the iguanas, the geckos, the egrets?

Or the llamas, the toucans, the capybaras, the giant tortoises, the river dolphins, the giant constrictors, the anteaters, the howler monkeys, the tamarin, the spider monkeys, the uakari, the chinchillas, the jaguarundis? Including a few of these animals in text would have really helped link it to reality.

What about flora? Where are the New World crops? Maize, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, cacao, vanilla, squash, sweet potatoes, peanuts, pineapple, avacado, peppers, agave, beans, strawberries, amaranth, papaya? An occasional description of some new and exciting crop would make a lot of sense in The Book of Mormon, and yet there's nothing mentioned other than Old World grains that have no evidence of cultivation in the New World. Now that's a gigantic hole!

What about other culturally significant information like how homes were built? What materials were used? How big were they typically? Who lived in a single house? What were families like? What were neighborhoods like? How were cities laid out? Where did people recreate? Did they make sports a priority at all? Why are we making assumptions that things looked like this?

Or this?

If I had to guess, I'd say Joseph Smith thought they were living in something like this:

But for all The Book of Mormon tells us, the Nephites' prosperity looked just like this:

I'm curious, if you were going to write an adventure story set in a the Pre-Columbian Americas, what sorts of details would you rely on to paint the scene for your readers? How would you describe a flourishing, prosperous people living in that context? Would you rely heavily on sheep, cattle, and horses to represent wealth? Would you talk a lot about finding gold in abundance and wearing fine linen? What does your Nephite society look like?

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.

Pulled from a hat

Supposedly God, in his infinite power, made the translation of the gold plates appear before Joseph's eyes as his face was hidden in a hat. (Originally we had been led to believe that the correct translation magically appeared through the lenses of the Urim and Thummim as Joseph scanned Moroni's text line by line.) In other words, the words Joseph dictated were not deciphered from a text - they were read aloud by Joseph as they magically illuminated in his hat.

This process of translation gets me wondering what kind of translator God is. How the hell did he get confused over the whole "white and delightsome" vs. "pure and delightsome" thing? One would think he would have had the foresight to avoid the whole racist debacle, right? Why's he translating tapirs as 'horses,' deer as 'cows,' and turkeys as 'sheep'? Why did he need the King James translation of the Bible so badly? And why the hell couldn't he come up with a better translation for curelom and cumom? Here's an inspired rendering, or maybe this one's more accurate:

Read from a hat? It's more like this stuff was just pulled from somebody's ass.

WoW - meat eating

It's time to address the explicitly clear part of the Word of Wisdom that everyone hates. 

"Yea, flesh also of beasts and of the fowls of the air, I, the Lord, have ordained for the use of man with thanksgiving; nevertheless they are to be used sparingly; And it is pleasing unto me that they should not be used, only in times of winter, or of cold, or famine." (D&C 89:12-13)

In other words, God's cool with us eating a little meat if it's either (1) the cold season or (2) a time of famine.

If I had to guess, the justification for eating a little meat in the winter is that you can't grow crops when it's too cold and you're completely reliant on your most recent harvest; the justification for eating a little meat in times of famine is probably the same: you don't have crops growing.

Did God not foresee our day of global trade? We're no longer a bunch of do-it-yourselfer farming types. Did he not see the advent of industrialize agriculture? Did he somehow miss that science labs would produce super-hardy varieties of fruits and vegetables? We have fresh produce year round, brothers and sisters! The cold doesn't stop us! There are no more famines in the rich developed world! Who even needs meat anymore? Eat meat sparingly? Don't you worry, Lord, we no longer have to eat any at all!

The only problems is that we have all been seduced by the $1 hamburger menus across America. That's probably what God saw coming down the pipe. He probably saw the "evils and designs" of the "conspiring men in the last days" (D&C 89:4) running the vast majority of meat produced in the United States. God's just trying to protect us from extremely powerful men who want to cash us out, right? It's so clear!

And yet that's not what you'll hear in church. Ask any member about the "meat sparingly" bit in the Word of Wisdom and chances are you'll be informed that that advice is out of date and has been since the invention of the freezer/fridge combo. You see, back in the day they would never harvest an animal when it was warm because the meat would go bad so fast. Besides, the warm months are when grass grows and livestock can feed and fatten up. You want to get to butchering after the animals are fat, not before.

But what about the whole "sparingly" thing even when it was winter? It sounds an awful lot like God's trying to minimize the killing of animals. It sounds like God might be one of those PETA assholes. Let's not be ridiculous, we all know God's Kingdom invests in ranching.

The sacredness and beauty of procreative powers

Sexual sin is one of the worst sins according to Mormon scripture, but when a couple engages in the right kind of sex (nothing too crazy!) it's the most god-like act they can perform. Just remember, we have to do it God's way.

Great. So what about our animal kin? They're totally doing it God's way, aren't they? Animal sex is probably the most sacred sex because they have all they know is the nature God gave them. Should it be emulated then? Maybe. Is it loving? I suppose so. Is it beautiful? So much of it seems so violent and disgusting, but I'll let you be the judge.

God's obviously very cool with this because he's the one who wants them doing it in the first place. Is there any possibility that God thinks this is vile and base and wants to punish these animals for their behavior? What's the difference between their sex and our sex? The amount of lingerie worn? Where does God draw the line with licking and thrusting?

Some times I doubt he has a line drawn anywhere.

The dawn of Man

The story of Adam and Eve was an easy favorite for me as a child, second only to the story of Noah's ark. Probably because even though it had just as many animal species it lacked the adventure of the roundup and the violence of the Flood. I loved that Adam got to name all the animals and live with them and Eve happily in a kind of Tarzan-Jane-like existence. Even thinking about it now makes me happy.

Despite the thrill of such a wonderful story I knew there were some problems with it. For starters there were the likes of these guys

and plenty of others. Then again my parents never showed any indication of subscribing to young earth creationism. In fact my dad had taken me and my siblings out trilobite hunting once or twice and he was sure to explain that the fossils we found pre-dated the dinosaurs, who were themselves hundreds of millions of years old and probably never in the Garden of Eden. I was told at home, in church, and later at BYU that the details of the Creation would be revealed to us at some point after we died, so I kept the whole issue of where prehistoric creatures came from on the shelf labeled "We won't know, so we don't care" for a surprisingly long time. Admittedly I noticed the shelf bowing horribly when I was studying the Old Testament on my mission and read quote after quote from general authorities stating that the Church's stance on the matter was unbendingly pro-young earth and therefore aggressively anti-scientific. It hurt to read that kind of senselessness. I didn't want to be wrapped up with it, nor did I want to place my faith in something so demonstrably inaccurate.

Now let me return to the question of Adam and Eve. I was taught that they were literally our "first parents", meaning that all human beings can trace their ancestry back directly to them. I believed that my physical existence resulted directly from their procreative efforts so many millennia ago. (No, Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve do not fit the biblical narrative, people!) As a youngster I oscillated between thinking they were folks who looked like my family and our church-going neighbors and thinking they were probably special cavemen who had, you know, touched the obelisk or something.  

It's embarrassing now to think back on these things. It's painfully embarrassing to hear people defend creationism and attack evolution. The last two times I've attended LDS church services I was treated to witnessing explicit attacks on Darwin and the scientific method! Of course this was only a couple of months after Mormon apostle, Russell Nelson took a stab at refuting the Big Bang in General Conference with a snide and ignorant remark about an explosion in a printing press producing a dictionary... 

How does anyone stay a believer when this stuff is obviously wrong even to a small child? These are issues that extend far beyond Mormonism to all of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. How could this absolute nonsense persist and flourish still today among billions of people? I'm guessing that many people do what I did: they doubt their doubts and not their faith.

The literal baptism of the earth

Growing up my favorite stories in the Bible were always the ones that had the most to do with animals. The more prominent role animals played in the story, the more I liked it. favorites included Daniel and the lion's den, Jonah and the whale, the plague of frogs in Egypt, Adam naming all things living in the Garden of Eden (duh!), and of course Noah's ark. The story of the ark is still hard to beat. I love the idea of saving and caring for all the animals in the entire world and being up close with so many exotic species in all their well-behaved glory. I would have given anything to be on that boat with essentially every kind of Earth’s land animals as my pets. 

My enthusiasm for the animals, however, did not deter me from posing the question of just how exactly Noah would have found them all (think of all the animals living near the poles or in Australia or the Americas), sexed them, brought them back to his ark (I liked to imagine a Divine hand guiding them all in a mysterious migration pointed in Noah’s direction), somehow fit them all in (maybe he knew Merlin’s song from Disney’s The Sword in the Stone), kept them fed (I remembered seeing a picture in my Zoo Books of how much food an elephant eats in a year and it was basically a small hill), kept their pens clean (cows on farms for example always seemed to be up to their knees in manure), and kept them from killing each other (because animals do that quite naturally). Then I couldn’t help but wonder how in the world they managed to get back to their respective habitats (imagine the box turtles hiking from the Middle East to the Eastern United States, for example). 

Even as a little kid I knew the story was fishy, to say the least, but I held on to it as best I could. Years later as a missionary I found myself reading the Student Manual to the Old Testament about how the earth had to be literallybaptized by immersion to eventually attain its celestial glory, and how maybe - just maybe! - the continents moved to their current locations during the year of total submersion. It was clear, just as it had been from my earliest memories of the story, that the contents of Genesis 6-9 were to be understood as literal, historical events.

It was all too staggeringly hopeful. The story of Noah's ark full of pairs of some ten million species and the supposed flood that covered every mountain top on planet earth pointed me to one single conclusion: THIS IS FICTION, NOT HISTORY. 

And yet I doubted my doubts and believed on.