Greg Trimble's 11 Book of Mormon evidences

If you have Mormon friends on social media, chances are you've been presented with links to some pretty interesting Mormon logic. One post I've recently seen from a popular blog makes the case for The Book of Mormon in 11 poorly thought out proofs. The proofs are stated as questions and are the typical examples offered by general authorities of why The Book of Mormon is true which means they're the kinds of things you can say in church meetings to make yourself feel important and everyone else feel comfortable, but predictably they are not very convincing.

Here are the eleven questions that will prove the authenticity of The Book of Mormon and my brief responses.

1. Could an uneducated boy come up with 531 pages of ancient scripture on his own that was historically accurate and prophetic in nature?

Answer: Yes, absolutely. Please open your copy of the book to essentially any page that isn't copied almost verbatim from the King James Bible (that might be harder than it sounds). Now tell me how many verses you have to read before you find one that sounds like an uneducated young man (calling someone in his early 20s a "boy" is condescending and inaccurate) er-ing and um-ing a dictation from his head. Not many. Joseph Smith loaded his book so full of place keepers, redundancies, filler and slip ups that I'm amazed when I make it through a single verse without feeling the need to edit.

Keep in mind that this is how it reads even after the Church's editing of all the more egregious frontier farmer speech.

2. Would it be possible for that boy to understand and include ancient Hebrew literary writing styles such as idioms and Chiasmus, some of which weren’t even discovered until long after Joseph Smith was gone ?

Answer: Easily. He read the Bible a lot. He, like every other human being who reads, would absorb and reproduce the style of what he reads to some degree. As for chiasmus, it's an extremely common organizational tool that certainly appears in Jewish literature but is not in any way limited to it. I made a chiasmus on accident once, others are more carefully thought out. You can find chiasmus in children's literature as easily as you find it in adult literature from all over the world, European literature included. This just came to mind, maybe Jews wrote it:

(A) Hickory dickory dock! 
(B)/(C) The mouse went up the clock.
(C) The clock struck one,
(B) The mouse ran down.
(A) Hickory dickory dock!

And quit insisting Joseph was a "boy" when he wrote The Book of Mormon; he was a married man.

3. How would Joseph Smith have been able to know so much about the Middle East, especially the Arabian Peninsula where Lehi and his family traveled? The book includes findings in that region that no one had discovered yet.

Answer: The "knowledge" about the Middle East found in the Book of Mormon could have been derived from having been shown a map. What do you think has been discovered there after the printing of The Book of Mormon that was included in the text? The "NHM" alter? Come on, give us what you've got. Everything apologists have thrown out there has been debunked.

4. How could Joseph Smith come up with roughly 200 new names in the Book of Mormon and then have them turn out to be Semitic in nature?

Answer: He read the Bible a lot. He reused many of those names, modifying them as he saw fit. It wouldn't be hard to throw in a few more made up names that look similar to what's found in the Bible.

5. If you think Joseph Smith couldn’t have written this book, then where did it come from? If one says the devil put him up to it…then why would Satan want to publish another testament of Jesus Christ and a book that does nothing but promote righteousness. Jesus said that a house divided against itself would fall.

Answer: Only a moron would say the devil wrote or inspired the writing of The Book of Mormon. It's origins are clearly early 19th century publications and popular thought.

6. Who were the “other sheep” that would hear Jesus’s voice in John 10:16?

Answer: The "Gentiles", in other words, the non-Jews.

7. Why are there volumes of books written by non-LDS authors stating that Christ came and visited the America’s a couple thousand years ago just like it says in 3rd Nephi? (See Example “He Walked The America’s”) How would Joseph Smith have known this when at the time no one even considered it?

Answer: No one has a monopoly on stupidity, ethnocentrism and wishful thinking. The one book you linked us to is very revealing about yourself as a thinker.

8. If we have the stick of Judah (record of the Jews or the Bible), then where is the stick of Joseph that is referenced in Ezekiel 37:15-20? The Book of Mormon is the only explanation for this scripture. Lehi was a descendant of Joseph. Think Joseph Smith could have gotten that right by sheer chance?

Answer: This is a misinterpretation of the Bible.

9. How could there be so many witnesses of the Book of Mormon and the plates and not one of them deny their testimony even when some of them became bitter toward Joseph Smith? With so many people involved…a hoax of this magnitude could never go uncovered.
 
Answer: People do and say all sorts of things for friendship, family and their reputation. Historian Dan Vogel has some presented some important information for you to consider.

10. How could the Book of Mormon never contradict itself while being an extremely complex book? After all these years…someone would have found something…but no.

Answer: The Book of Mormon is relatively straight forward in its narrative. It basically just tells the same story over and over again. The repetition is numbing, not profound. Despite the simplicity of the repeated narrative, contradictions and errors have in fact been found (you just have to be brave enough to read something other than LDS apologetic literature). It also contradicts known archealogy, natural history, and the history of religious and political thought; it contradicts other Mormon scripture; it contradicts current LDS beliefs (e.g. temporary suffering in hell vs. eternal suffering and the nature of the Godhead).

Even though The Book of Mormon isn't horribly riddled with internal contradictions, why does that somehow make it true? Many authors manage to avoid totally screwing up their stories, does that mean their books are true? Absolutely not.

11. How do I feel while I read the Book of Mormon? Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t trust your feelings. We are spiritual beings, and if we can’t trust our feelings, then what do we have? Over and over again in the Old and New Testament we’re told that we can trust that “still small voice” to guide us in our decisions. (1 Kings 19:12) I can write evidence after evidence to back up the Book of Mormon but each of those evidences I found were only secondary to the whispering of the Spirit I felt that day before I began waxing up my surf board.

Answer: Epistemology is a tricky thing. You're insisting that emotions are all we have. That's an unfortunate move on your part because we have a lot more than that: we have other senses to work with and we have logic. But if you're going to insist on feelings let's look at your feelings. Let's say you wake up from a dream about your wife cheating on you and you feel hurt and angry. You can't look at her the same for weeks. Did she really cheat on you? Are your feelings reliable? And what about others' feelings? Why do you seem so willing to disregard anyone's feelings and impressions that don't align with your own? What makes you think yours are the only true ones when members of essentially every other religion will use the same evidence as proof of their religion being true?

P.S. I wrote this blog immediately after reading the questions. The answers were too easy. I then went back to the blog to read the comments and saw that several people had written their responses as well. Several were similar to my own but I definitely encourage others to read through them.

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.

Searching online

To whomever made the first search, it seems like you might be struggling with a previous decision to have an abortion. I can only imagine how painful living with that decision could be. I hope you found something online that has helped you.

To whomever made the second search, WTF?

Keep doubting, my friends.

Escorting Satan

Mormon lore is a funny thing. Of all the stories you hear growing up in the LDS Church, a favorite is the story of the son of a friend of a friend who despite having Down syndrome wanted to get a patriarchal blessing. The jaw-dropping part of the story is that in this special blessing it is revealed that the reason the young man even has Down syndrome is because he had personally escorted Lucifer out of Heaven at the end of the War in Heaven and the chromosomal condition he now has somehow protects him from the temptations of the Devil!

It always sounded very fishy to me, but I doubted those doubts. I'm sure someone somewhere on Earth has been protected by a mental disability to keep him or her safe from Satan. That's totally the kind of thing a generous father would do to his extremely strong and valiant (so strong and valiant they were given the task of bouncing the Devil!) spirit child. God obviously has trust issues and is a bit of a control freak. And never mind the fact that taking away someone's accountability for his or her choices goes completely contrary to the very purpose of coming to Earth in the first place.

The evilest world

If there are so many other worlds inhabited by the children of God throughout the Universe, why were we here on Earth so lucky to host the Only Begotten of the Father? Well, the way I learned it was that the inhabitants of Earth were the very worst of everyone everywhere - the only people bad enough to kill the Son of God - and therefore needed Jesus the most.

First off let me say that whoever came up with this idea was an ass and Joseph Smith was a bigger ass for endorsing it. Why would our spirit brothers and sisters be any different than us when they have the same spiritual parentage, were exposed to the same ideas and learning processes in the Pre-Existence, fought in the same War in Heaven over the same issues, have to undergo the same "test" of faith and have the exact same potential to become like God? Do they have better access to angel messengers? Does Satan have less influence on them (because he was cast down to Earth and not Outer Darkness or Outer Space)? And if everyone is saved only through Jesus doesn't that mean that every single spirit child of God needs Jesus to exactly the same degree, or do people who don't swear and always tell their moms they love them only kind of need Jesus a little bit? The way I heard it growing up, even the amazing Joseph Smith was in dire need of the Atonement the same as all the other prophets.

Why do we sit through lessons on this stuff and humbly absorb it? Why don't we speak out against this drivel? Are we really so enamored with guilt that we can't shut this kind of shit down?

Aliens - other worlds

Did you know that you have long lost spiritual brothers and sisters living out on other planets? Well Joseph Smith did!
 
I remember being taught as a little kid that Earth is just one of the many populated planets that Jehovah (Jesus) had made under the direction of Elohim (Heavenly Father). Do Mormons believe in aliens? You had better fuckin' believe it! But not the weird Star Trek kind, just normal, Homo sapiens kind.

In fact you don't have to go too far to find some of these brothers and sisters. Joseph Smith found tall Quakers on the Moon

and Brigham Young found that the Sun is inhabited.

Science has shown that they were totally right, right? No? Well it will! For now all you need to know is that Jesus died for all aliens, not just for us.

Zion's Camp

Throughout my life as a believing Mormon I never understood why we ever had Sunday School lessons on Zion's Camp, Joseph Smith's failed military effort of 1834 to regain lost lands in Missouri. It was always presented as a wonderful example of the Lord trying his people and having to change plans because they weren't obedient enough, and yet when I heard the story I couldn't help but notice a certain discomfort afterwords because Zion's Camp is so clearly a sloppy, uninspired effort put together by a leader who was desperate to keep his followers happy.

Seriously, read it. Read the inspiring version for adults, read the inspiring version for children, watch the corny movie version or read the Wikipedia version. They all conclude with Joseph's prophecy falling flat on its face. No fighting took place and yet more Mormons died than Mormon enemies. What the hell is that?

Is it OK that I've been confused for so long?

Why God requires polygamy

The LDS Church did something big. It finally opened up to discussing its lesser-known polygamist past. Congratulations, Mormons. Truly and sincerely.

But I do have a few questions:

1. What is inherently righteous, holy or godly about plural marriage? Where is the divinity in this principle?

2. Why is polygamy part of the Gospel Restoration? What does it have to do with the Fall, the Atonement and the Final Judgement? How does it fit into the salvation of humankind?

3. What good did plural marriage accomplish either for God or Joseph or any of his wives or anyone else involved in a plural marriage or the Mormon community in general or humanity at large?

From what I can tell the article offers no answers. Why not?

Smooth operator

Folks living in the Middle East and the Mediterranean are lucky sons of guns! They're blessed enough to live where olives have historically been cultivated and spread. Why does that matter? It matters because olive oil is the awesomest!

It's a magic healing elixir, folks. When consecrated by the power of the Holy Melchizedek Priesthood, it has amazing healing powers.

It transforms people into priests.

It turns you into royalty.

It made Jesus the Oily One way awesomer than all the other Jesuses. (I guess there were olives in the Pre-Existence.)

It guarantees Celestial glory.

And it's edible.

The point is this olive oil is very cool stuff when backed up by the proper magic which is why Mormon men tend to be locked and loaded at all times.

Keep your barrels well oil, brethren.

Heavenly fatherliness #43 - Having fun

According to popular wisdom, a good father knows how to have fun with his children.

It's hard to believe that a Guy who forbids loud laughter really knows how to have a rollicking good time. When was the last time you had a fun time with God? Are you sure God was there or was it just you and some people you care about talking a bit about God? What's the funniest joke God's told you? How long did it take you to get the punchline? What's the best game you two have played together? Did you win or did he? Do you guys, like, totally hit it off?

I doubt you have real answers to these questions. I find the very idea of God having fun laughable at best.

*These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre as per their respective articles on what makes a good father.

Whittling our wicks

Even though Jesus supposedly fulfilled the Law of Moses and the uncircumcised have been initiated into God's covenant people since the days of Paul, Mormons in the United States still think it's a very good idea to have their newborn sons' prepuce paired down a tich.

I'm really can't imagine why God thought circumcision was a good practice in the first place. Or why it would be necessary. Didn't God create our bodies just the way he wanted them? So why'd he come back at us with a design adjustment?

 (Circumcision comes at the end...)

For some strange reason, God thought circumcision might be an effective sign of fidelity to him even though the only people who would see this physical sign were the circumcised men and their wives. It would have made more sense to trim down earlobes or something more visible and less functional. Oh well, God's not exactly known for his logic - mystery is more his game.

Let me ask you this: WHY WOULD YOU WORSHIP A BEING WHO SAYS "IF YOU LOVE ME  CUT YOUR PENIS!"? That's pretty messed up. If this reminds you of any of your intimate relationship I recommend you get out of them before you incur any further abuse.

Moving now to modern Mormonism, why exactly it is that members are so okay with this painful and presumptuous practice puzzles me. My guess is that it has more to do with being a part of American culture than than it does God's culture. (Then again, maybe God's insecure enough that he requires all his boys' penises to look like his.)

Mormons (and Americans in general), please stop cutting your sons. If they want the snip they can decide for themselves later. InthenameofOiledJoshua,Amen!

Words that mean everything and nothing

Mormons believe that essentially everyone will make it to heaven, but heaven is not created equally. In fact, there isn't just one heaven, there are three, each with its own degree of glory. The highest heaven is the Celestial Kingdom, which is typically compared to the glory of the Sun; the middle kingdom is the Terrestrial Kingdom, which is typically compared to the glory of the moon; and the lowest glory, compared to the brilliance of the stars, is the Telestial Kingdom.

Let's not get too caught up with the fact that this sun, moon, stars hierarchy does not reflect the actual height or distance of these heavenly bodies from the earth (otherwise the stars like Kolob would be our heavenly goal and the moon would be the lowliest of all glories), the comparison relies more on the amount of light given off with respect to our position. Fine.

What's most bizarre and most doubt-inducing for me is the etymology of the kingdoms' names. Calling something celestial means that thing is either like or somehow pertaining to the sky. That works great for the Celestial Kingdom as long as you still believe in the idea of the Firmament and God living in the clouds, otherwise you get stuck trying to reconcile the description of Kolob with current science.

The moon, as it turns out, is a horrible symbol for a place called the Terrestrial Kingdom. Terra means earth in Latin. If you want the moon, call it the Lunar Kingdom. Anyway, just how exactly is the Terrestrial Kingdom supposed to be like or pertaining to the earth? I thought even the lowest degree of glory was supposed to blow our puny earthing minds.

The least glorious heavenly realm is special enough to get a made up name. Telestial, like curelom and cumom, didn't exist as a word until Joseph Smith revealed it to us. The word seems to come from tele-, which is a Greek prefix for distant or far away, but it could also be going back farther to the root teleos, which means the end goal of a completed cycle, so basically the idea of perfecting a circle. If we go with the first possibility we get the notion that the Telestial Kingdom is the "Far Away Kingdom." Far from what? God? Hopefully not too far. If we go with the latter option, the Telestial Kingdom would seem to mean it's the designated end of the Plan of Salvation, but we all know that's not the case - the Celestial Kingdom is where we want to be. Maybe God should have given us his divine Adamic names for these places instead of misleading us with Latin and Greek.

It's pretty confusing. The meanings and explanations of these kingdoms come across as poorly thought out. And don't go to the temple hoping to sort things out. Take the rooms of the Salt Lake temple for example. You have the Creation [of the earth] Room, Garden [of Eden, which is on Earth] Room, World [a.k.a. Earth] Room, Terrestrial [= of the earth] Room, and the Celestial [heavens/sky/clouds] room. Why are there so many rooms for the same place? Why is there no discussion of the Telestial and Terrestrial Kingdoms in the temple, just a quick entrance through the veil into the Celestial realm? I thought the temple was where we go to learn the details of The Plan, but we're only given a partial view. So much for further light and knowledge!

Sun miracles

God's awesomest miracles happen in the sky. According to scripture the Sun, err... Shinehah miraculously did not set because Joshua prayed that it wouldn't. That's pretty amazing. We all know that the setting sun is really just the Sun fading from our view as the earth spins away from facing it, so saying the Sun stood still actually means the earth stopped spinning, and we know that if the earth were to suddenly stop spinning (coming to a halt in less than 24 hours is extremely sudden for a massive object like the earth to stop spinning at it usual speed of 1038 mi/hr along the equator if you're American or 2670 km/hr if you're not) anything that isn't bedrock would keep spinning around. think about what would happens inside a snowglobe when you stop shaking it - the internal atmosphere keeps shaking and splashing around for a while. We're talking about massive tsunamis and land upheavals that would trash the world worse than the Flood. And yet the holy word of God cannot be wrong! (For anyone tempted to play the "symbolic language" card, please explain how a symbolic reading is supposed to fit the context of this miracle.)

"C'mon, God! Please? We're not done killing people yet."

Then there was that time in 3 Nephi when the Sun set but it was still as bright as noon day. The star of Bethlehem hadn't even shown up yet to help illuminate the earth and some how no darkness fell at all that night. Amazing! What on earth or in heaven could equal the brightness of another star that's only 8 light minutes away from the earth? Don't worry about the science, just believe.

Plains Indians go to Mesoamerica to venerate the cross with the Nephites.

Shinehah, Olea, and Kokaubeam

We learn in The Book of Abraham God's name for the Sun, the moon, and the stars: Shinehah, Olea, Kokaubeam. Jah-oh-eh turns out to be God's word for the earth. Good to know, right? One might think that knowing these divinely appointed names would result in their adoption into the common Mormon lexicon. I mean, once it was revealed that God's name is Elohim and that Jesus is Jehovah, the LDS Church really latched onto that and takes care to reenforce this knowledge, and yet when you go to church and listen to your lessons or to the temple and watch the Creation film you won't hear the Sun, the moon, the stars, or the earth referred to by their true names even once! Why is that? 

It's also a little strange that God hasn't been very consistent or insistent with these names when speaking to his prophets. The scriptures are full of references to the heavens and their various features and yet they contain God's preferred names only once, in Abraham 3! The closest you get to seeing these names in other scripture is in the Old Testament where the ancient Hebrew שֶׁמֶשׁ (she-mesh) at least starts with the same consonant as Shi-ne-hah and is followed by a similar vowel,  יָרֵחַ (ya-rey-ahh) sounds quite a bit like O-le-a, and the Hebrew for star כּוֹכָב (ko-khav) is almost identical to the pluralized Ko-bau-beam (-im is a Hebrew plural noun ending). I guess Hebrew really is closest to Adamic after all! God must have been revealing bits and pieces of his native tongue to Joseph, like the whole "Pay-lay-ale!" thing. 

But I still have a nagging doubt about these divine names found in Abraham 3. Didn't Joseph start learning Hebrew just after he purchased The Book of Abraham? Oh, really? Less than a year later? And when was the translation finally finished? Not before 1838? Hm... When was the translation finally published? 1842! So Joseph had about six years to dapple in Hebrew before going public with this thing. Do you think it might be possible that he was trying to show off his newly acquired Hebrew translating skills?

Not a smart move for an abecedarian. He's left too obvious a trail.

Of course, if Joseph's freestyling Hebrew isn't goofball enough, you can still relish in the other blunderful names found in the papyri translations (Elkenah, Enish-go-on-dosh, Kolob, Korash, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Oliblish, Olimlah, Raukeeyang, Shaumau, Shulem). Hebrew rip offs, pseudo-Egyptian, and a touch of fantasy make having faith in The Book of Abraham very problematic.

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.

Urim and Thummim

Though I feel it's common knowledge now, I had no idea that Joseph Smith discarded the Urim and Thummin as translating devises in favor of one of the magic, treasure-finding peep stones he had collected throughout his teens and twenties. He would put it in his hat and the words of the translation would appear before his eyes.

The Urim and Thummin approach with the gold plates at Joseph's fingertips is already pretty fucking magical, but removing the plates completely is totally fucking nuts.

And yet the LDS Church still defends the peep stone in a hat method even thought the Urim and Thummim framed in spectacle-like frames attached to a breastplate has been dragged around by Moroni for the sole specific purpose of translating the 50 lbs. (or more) plates 1200 years later. The Church even dares suggest that Joseph's heavy involvement in early American folk magic could have been used "for the higher purpose of translating scripture."

They must be joking. Seriously, it has to be a joke. How does bullshit treasure finder magic suddenly become a legitimate tool of God for the sake of translating ancient languages? This is like believing a tarot card reader turned bishop can use his card reading skills to better conduct worthiness interviews and lead the ward under the divine inspiration.

"I've also got some impressive stones, sister, should you be interested."

This is where Mormonism starts to feel like a gullibility contest.

Adam-ondi-Ahman

When the early saints moved down to Missouri Joseph Smith conveniently learned that it was a very cool place. Jesus was going to do some millennial ruling from there and, believe it or not, Adam, the father of mankind, would also be making a return visit! The exact location is called Adam-ondi-Ahman (Adamic for "Adam in the presence of God") but before that it was just good old Spring Hill.

"Spring Hill is named by the Lord Adam-ondi-Ahman, because, said he, it is the place where Adam shall come to visit his people, or the Ancient of Days shall sit, as spoken of by Daniel the prophet." (D&C 116:1)

Actually, before that it was the Adams and Eves family stopping grounds. 

"Three years previous to the death of Adam, he called Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, and Methuselah, who were all high priests, with the residue of his posterity who were righteous, into the valley of Adam-ondi-Ahman, and there bestowed upon them his last blessing." (D&C 107:53)

 No Eden here, try Missouri.

Yes, that means the Garden of Eden was in North America and not somewhere in the vicinity of the Middle East. Here's what Spring Hill/Adam-ondi-Aham/Almost Eden looks like.

I always had a hard time with believing this story. Adam, as in an actual historical non-literary first man created by God 6000 years ago? Missouri, really? God's mentioning mountains, I don't think this can be the right place. What about the whole scientifically-based "out of Africa" thing? And why's Adam coming back for the Second Coming anyway? Won't that steal some of Jesus' thunder? What other big names are billed for the event? If I get tickets for Adam's Blessing will I still be able to catch the Destruction of Gog and Magogs? I hear that show's gonna kick ass.

And how about the Adam-ondi-Ahman temple? Is that venue up yet? I can't wait! I hear it's gonna be sweet!

Believing blood

One of the stranger beliefs of Mormonism postulates that the more Hebrew blood you have the more receptive to the truth of the Gospel and authority of the LDS Church you will be. Apparently belief is genetic and the Hebrews hold the majority of shares when it comes to believing... that they're the awesomest, most chosenest people of God.

Even awesomer than believing in the truth because you've got a lot of Hebrew is that if you're of the tribe of Ephraim you won't rebel!

"And the rebellious shall be cut off out of the land of Zion, and shall be sent away, and shall not inherit the land. For, verily I say that the rebellious are not of the blood of Ephraim, wherefore they shall be plucked out." (D&C 64:35-36, emphasis added)

So Ephraim just might be the least rebellious of all the believers of Israel. Very cool stuff (even if it's total nonsense).

It really gives you a sense of what the world lost when the blood of Joseph Smith, a pure Ephraimite, a pure non-rebellious believing blood type, was spilled at Carthage. What a fucking waste of the "best blood of the nineteenth century" (D&C 135:6)!

Joseph Smith III, half Ephraimite, half Moggle.

What's worse is that obviously Emma contaminated that blood because otherwise Joseph Smith III would have surely reunited with the saints in Utah. If only we could once again breed the purest of believers...