Making good men better

Growing up I remember hearing a David O. McKay quote quite often (#25):

To me this sounded like a proof of the Church. What we have makes better people, therefore we are the One True Church of God on Earth. It also sounded like a justification for staying Mormon even if the Church weren't true. Why abandon the fiction if it leads men to self-improvement? I preferred to see this statement as wise, prophetic council for a true prophet of God...

That is until I looked up "make good men better" on the Internet and learned that this little motto has been lifted from the Freemasons! (It's not the only thing Mormonism has borrowed.)

If the prophet's just getting his material from the Freemasons, what the hell are we doing in church instead of attending our local lodge? We might as well go to the source, right?

Here's your conspiracy handshake picture of the day. TOTAL FREEMASON HANDSHAKE!!!

Mark Twain's review

"The Mormon Bible is rather stupid and tiresome to read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. Its code of morals is unobjectionable—it is “smouched” from the New Testament and no credit given."

Read the entire review here.

Abraham and Sir Isaac

If Abraham really wrote the Egyptian papyri that Joseph Smith translated into The Book of Abraham, how the hell did Newtonian ideas end up in there? Were Abraham and Sir Isaac on the same wavelength? Did Joseph maybe sneak a little something into his translation that wasn't exactly in the words of Abraham but more in his thoughts? Or was it all made up post-Newton and have absolutely nothing to do with Abraham at all?

Whatever the case, whoever let Isaac into The Book of Abraham should have passed him up for a German fellow named Albert.

Paper plates

Everyone knows that The Book of Mormon was originally written on gold plates a couple of millennia ago and only translated into English in 1829, but not everyone believes that. Some people think that Joseph Smith (or someone else) wrote The Book of Mormon with a little help and a hardy dose of imagination.

Who's help might Joseph have enlisted? Well, some say Sidney Rigdon fed him an awesome (but very mysterious) manuscript that was easily adaptable to the aims of budding Mormonism, but it seems this theory is not especially popular at the moment.

 More people look at Ethan Smith's book View of the Hebrews (1823) as a source. Some folks, like LDS general authority B. H. Roberts (d. 1933), say Ethan's book gave Joseph's book its general premise and key points of its framework; others are content pointing out that Ethan's and Joseph's books both derive from popular notions held in the 1820s with regards to the origins of the First Nations.

Some people suggest that Joseph Smith and his father (Joseph Smith, Sr.) worked together on creating The Book of Mormon using William Marsden's The Travels of Marco Polo (1818) as a template.

Another book in the canon of Joseph's Potential Helpers is Gilbert J. Hunt's Late War between the United States and Great Britain (1819), which was "written in the ancient historical style."

There's also The First Book of Napoleon, the Tyrant of the World (1809) by Eliakim the Scribe. Reading it you might think it was trying to sound like The Book of Mormon.

John Walker's A Key to the Classical Pronunciation of Greek, Latin, and Scripture Proper Names (1808) seems to have inspired or directly provided Joseph Smith with names for Book of Mormon characters.

Many other textual similarities have been found in the writings of Mercy Otis Warren, David Ramsey, George Washington, The Declaration of Independence, and several founding fathers.

It's almost feels like The Book of Mormon was written in a post-American Revolutionary climate where these texts were part of common thought and parlance.

Oh, and let's not forget the Bible! Without the King James Bible The Book of Mormon would be much, much thinner!

But I doubt Joseph and his friends could have read all this stuff let alone be influenced by any of it. It doesn't make sense that an ignorant young man like Joseph could produce a book as complicated and poorly written as The Book of Mormon in such a short amount of time all by himself. The only logical solution is that he had the gold plates to translate from. It just makes sense.

Hebraisms in The Book of Mormon

Those doubters who would have you believe that Joseph Smith or some contemporary of his wrote The Book of Mormon have clearly not considered all of the Hebraisms in the text. If it wasn't written by Egyptian-writing Israelites, why are there indications that the English text Joseph translated came from a Hebrew-influenced source? The authenticity of The Book of Mormon is essentially proven thanks to literary and rhetorical devises typical in ancient Hebrew texts!

Who cares if those same literary and rhetorical devises can be found in literature from across the world and in different periods, including Jacobean England? Who cares if the translators responsible for the King James Bible created a widely dispersed and extremely popular English text based on Hebrew Old Testament writings? The KJT might have influenced other books that followed it, but not The Book of Mormon! I mean, how could it have? The Book of Mormon was compiled 1200 years before the KJT ever existed, right? 

Reading material.

Scriptural errors

"And now, if there are faults they are the mistakes of men; wherefore, condemn not the things of God, that ye may be found spotless at the judgment-seat of Christ." (Title page of The Book of Mormon)

This would be a great "Get out of jail free card" for the ancient writers of The Book of Mormon if the faults and mistakes in their writings were not the same faults and mistakes of the translators of the King James Bible.

The Book of Mormon repeats verbatim the mistranslated words, it often keeps the non-textual words and phrases added by KJT translators, it promotes  misunderstandings of the Bible popular in Joseph Smith's time, and it doesn't even align with the "inspired" corrections of the JST.

To suggest that the Lehite prophets possessed the KJT is absurd. To suggest that God filled Joseph's illuminated translating mind with the texts he was already familiar with instead of giving him the actual translation of the gold plates defeats the purpose of bringing out new and improved scripture.

We need to think about this a little bit. If a student turns in homework with the same mistakes as another student, what is the teacher to think? If Thomas Monson came out tomorrow with a new book of freshly translated ancient scripture from Australia and a large part of it quoted verbatim sections from the Doctrine & Covenants and, say, the Book of Enoch, how would we feel about that?

Isaiah and the Book of Mormon

Deutero-Isaiah (or is this one Trito?) writing about Jesus. 

If the fact that Isaiah was written by more than one person isn't enough to bring on at least a little doubt, consider this fact: anything from Isaiah chapters 40-66 that made it into The Book of Mormon either verbatim, slightly altered, or paraphrased (1 Nephi 10:8, 13:37, 17:36, 20-21, 22:8 & 10-11; 2 Nephi 6:6-7 & 16-18, 7-8, 9:50-51, 10:9, 26:25; Mosiah 12:21-24, 14, 15:10-11 & 14-18 & 29-31; 3 Nephi 16:18-20, 21:8-10 & 29, 22; Moroni 10:31) was written after Lehi & Co. left Jerusalem. So how the hell did they make it onto the brass plates and over to the New World?

You could doubt the authorship of The Book of Mormon at this point if you wanted to. Or you could simply doubt the scholarly understanding that Isaiah was written by multiple authors on into the years following Lehi's departure. After all, we know that The Book of Mormon is true and that "the wisdom of this world is foolishness" (1 Corinthians 3:19).

Problem solved! Except there's still the whole plagiarism thing you have to consider too...

Book of Mormon - King James Bible

The more I read The Book of Mormon and the more I read the Bible the more I saw how much of the King James Bible was in The Book of Mormon. It was already weird enough that Nephi didn't have the foresight to spare us all the Isaiah that we would have anyway (he should have simply left things with "hey, Isaiah's awesome so read up!"). Jesus could have left a simple endorsement as well.

As a believer I was taught that some of the Bible made it into The Book of Mormon because it wasn't really the Bible per se, just God's pure inspiration and profound insights given in the same words to his prophets. And I bought that explanation. For a while anyway. Did God really inspire them to write the exact same words? I can understand him imparting the same concepts, but the EXACT SAME WORDS? Usually you can't even get two people sitting in the same lecture to write the same notes down.

I think it would have been a little more convincing had there been something in the Bible that felt a little more like The Book of Mormon, if that makes sense. Maybe an epistle from Peter about some Roman village that converted after falling to the ground and then being baptized en masse after burying all of their weapons and making oaths to never fight Gauls again or something along those lines. Why was it that The Book of Mormon felt so desperate to be the Bible, but the Bible doesn't feel much like The Book of Mormon?

Unfortunately for Mormons who want to believe The Book of Mormon is the actual historic record of another so-called flock, there are some real problems to consider. It starts to look more and more like somebody just sat down and plagiarized the living shit out of the Bible all willy nilly.

Book of Mormon - loss of steam

Is it just me or does The Book of Mormon have a hard time staying interesting? After a while I couldn't help but feel that as the book goes on the authors get increasingly bored with it all. It's as though whoever wrote The Book of Mormon lost interest in the material and took less and less time to develop the characters, flesh out events, or even write down what Jesus was saying.

It's true that The Book of Mormon takes a few downhill turns early on. Getting through the Isaiah chapters in 2 Nephi is notoriously difficult, and the tedium of Alma's war chapters is also known to force readers to a grinding halt, but for me the book really dives with Jesus' visit to the Nephites. I know, I know, it's supposed to be the best part - certainly the most important part - but honestly it sucks.

The Jesus chapters basically just rip off Matthew, Isaiah, and Malachi, and adds some crazy story about babies and children hanging out with JC and angels in a ring of fire. It's a pretty lame miracle by modern Mormon standards (Mormon's like practical miracles like healings, escapes, and mass feedings, not this overblown pyrotechnic shit). And really the whole visit sucks. Apart from telling the Nephites the same stuff that's in the Bible and stating that he wants his church to use his name, we just get Jesus praying in a language that can't be written and some a cryptic hints at totally mind-blowing stuff that was too sacred to write down. Thanks a lot. It feels like a total cop-out. I would have thought they could have spared us some of the war stratagems and given us a few more Jesus teachings.

Fourth Nephi should be one of the longest books, in my opinion, because that's the one that talks about how everyone lived in peace for an insanely long time and wouldn't we all love to know how exactly they did it? Some details on the how-tos would really come in handy these days. Instead we blow through 200 years of happiness to get back to more fighting. Then we move on to Mormon which is all about the final battle to the death, then you have Ether which is basically a Book of Mormon reprise concluding with another battle to the death, and then you have Moroni!

Moroni comes as a welcome change. It's not great but you have a fun chapter vilifying anyone or anything that doesn't persuade you to believe in Jesus, that great chapter about how infant baptism is evil, and the classic verses about how The Book of Mormon is true so pray to know that it's true and you'll know that it's true because it really is true! And for anyone missing the violence and gore of previous chapters, don't worry, Moroni includes some stuff about rape and cannibalism (I love how rape and cannibalism are worthy to be written about but not the things that Jesus said, the amazing things uttered by babes, or anything the translated apostles saw! Sheesh!).

After I got over the excitement and pride of having finished the entire Book of Mormon the first couple times I read it, I started picking up more and more on how lifeless the end of the book was. I think "lifeless" is the best way to describe it, but does that lifelessness also indicate soullessness?

The temple - secret signs and tokens

In the Mormon temple endowment ceremony you learn a lot of great stuff like all the different handshakes that will get you into the Celestial Kingdom.

It's not a joke. The really do teach you how to handshake your way into Heaven. I couldn't believe it myself. Seriously? This is how I'll unlock the Pearly Gates? I literally have to physically do this move on an angel standing guard? Oh, they're seriously so important I can't tell anyone about them? Wow... And no one else has let this out of the bag yet? Satan doesn't know about this? I can imagine Satan could really mess up the whole who-gets-into-Heaven thing if he knew about this.

The "signs and tokens" I was taught in the temple struck me as completely arbitrary and superfluous to heartfelt Christian belief and yet I was told that these were gestures passed down from God to man from Adam until the present day. The temple was supposed to be the oldest, most sacred ritual in the history of man. 

I knew enough about the Israelite's tabernacle in the wilderness, Solomon's temple, and the temple in Christs time to know that the whole story sounded a bit funky. I also kept somewhere in the back of my mind the allegation that Freemasonry had something to do with the temple, but I never dared look into it. I nurtured my faith instead of my suspicions and doubts.

As it turns out I should have followed up on the whole Freemason thing. The temple endowment, as it turns out, is a complete rip off of Freemasonry. And we're not just talking about a simple handshake here,

 

all of the handshakes were lifted from the Freemasons,

 

as are most of the words, explanations, now purged penalties, clothing, etc. All I did when I went through the temple was become a pseudo-Freemason. Look it up. This shit's not just weird, completely unrelated to ancient worship, and devoid of any real Christian significance, it's really not that exciting. 

I say if you want to become a Freemason, go to the Freemasons, not the Mormons.