Catholic Guy:
Has anyone else used the above links for Zelph the parody, and Zelph the Apologist explenation. Curious about your thoughts.
Catholic Guy
Yes, I linked first to the “Book of Zelph” link and sheepishly admit that it took me a few minutes to realize that it was a parody (it certainly has the ‘look and feel’ of the LDS scriptures website). I read, I think, the first six chapters of the first ‘book’ contained in “The Book of Zelph” (the Book of Laban?) and, because of the ‘quality’ of the humor was not the type that I usely enjoy, on the one hand, but that - owing to a more-than-passing knowledge of the Book of Mormon - on the other hand, I found parts of the parody almost pure genius - I stopped reading with the intent of going back and picking up where I left off. I realize that some Mormons might find the parody blasphemous - I, were I Mormon, don’t think I would: however, having made that statement I must confess that, as an orthodox Catholic, there are parodies of Catholicism and Christianity which others find blasphemous which I find fall-on-the-floor hilarious: two fairly recent examples would be the movie “Dogma” and the book “The Gospel According to Biff”. The movie, if I recall was so successfully protested by Catholics even before its release that it was distributed by another distributor than the original. I don’t want to get into an argument over that particular movie on this thread, I only bring it up as an example of not being terribly thin-skinned when it comes to religious parody - even if the parody is of my particular religion.
When the second link was posted, I was absolutely astounded. I’ve read thousands of pages of FARMS apologetics and, upon reading that particular paper, I had to verify that the source actually was FARMS and not some surreptitious link to another parody site. Many - if not most - Mormon apologists admit that Joseph Smith was capable of error, that he was inerrant only when in full ‘prophetic’ mode and I would have thought that this would have been one of those historical cases where it would be more likely to admit that the question of ‘Zelph’ was one of those instances where Smith had not received a ‘revelation’ in full and unquestionable ‘prophet mode’. But instead the apologist accepts this as a true revelation, with plenty of witnesses and accounts, and proceeds to attempt an explanation and defend the ‘revelation’. It’s no wonder that, in all of my reading about the LDS church, I had never come across a character named ‘Zelph’ but what I do wonder about is why in the world anyone associated with FARMS would feel that the issue was one of defending ‘true revelation’ - why not stick to that which is written in the canon of Mormon writings? Whenever I bring up subjects
not in the canon, most - if not all - Mormon apologists dismiss the subject altogether, insisting it not worth apologetics as it’s not in the canon and insisting that any history outside the canon is subjective and, therefor, not worthy of discussion. This bit about ‘Zelph’ on FARMS is another instance of an argument that strongly favors the notion that FARMS functions not as an apologetics association as apologetics is usually thought of - that is, defending a faith to those outside the faith - but rather as a source for internal ‘apologetics’ - serving to defend the faith for those who are a;ready among the faithful only but who might have become a little “too curious” about the history of their church and, coming across something as incredulous as the ‘revelation’ concerning ‘Zelph’, a quick little article needs to be cooked up to defend a witnessed and recorded revelation.
If you read only the first message in the “Mormon apologetics” thread here, you get an excellent definition of how that term operates, I think, and the further along that thread goes the more I see how essentially correct the definition given. That said, I have to say that I am still somewhat shocked by the FARMS article even if only because it proves the point so well that ‘Mormon apologetics’ has little, if anything, in common with Christian, and particularly Catholic, apologetics.
