Part 2:… The Book of Mormon is offered as the documentary evidence for Joseph’s supernatural claims, not the other way around.
Okay. But then people do question the supernatural origins of the said evidence, and then search for the proof of supernatural, as well as proofs of it not being supernatrual. Looking for proof of the supernatrual is what a lot of people do with the Bible, and those same people (i.e., Bible Scholars) look for the same things in the BofM.
But here’s the thing: although Brodie started off trying to explain away the Book of Mormon, what she ended up producing was a biography of Joseph Smith.
True.
And it is in the nature of biographical writing that the only good biography is a sympathetic one. I don’t mean one that assumes that the subject is perfect, or even a “good guy,” but one that makes a pretty determined effort to understand what matters to the subject, and what he was trying to achieve.
Yes, I do think she made a rather sympathetic biography of Smith. It was strange, even though there were so many troubling revelations about what Smith did, he came off kind of likeable. Probably because it was so admirable that he had such a fertile imagination to come up with the BofM of the top of his head – still there is much imagination, even with the “it came to pass’s” and the “children of men’s” – to think he could have sat and dictated it into a hat like that was pretty remarkable. And then the way he rolled with the times, starting out with just needing a book to keep his family afloat, and then having it evolve naturally into this religion. That was pretty impressive, the way Brodie presented it.
Well now I am not* as* impressed, as I read the Spalding-Rigdon theory, which makes the most logical plain sense. The fertile imagination was highly supplemented by the imagination of other intelligent imaginative people like Spalding and Rigdon and maybe Cowdry, and the “new, restored religion” was Rigdon’s dream - he just needed the convincing charisma of a man like Smith to pull it off. The theology - some of it is good - came from the Cambellite religion. So it really was a group effort - thats why it was so surprising to thinkof it coming from one man.
And that makes Smith more of a plain old lying con man - sorry, Pahoran; I know that won’t sit well with you, and that’s okay, I respect that --, and of course a* false prophe*t - as his brother William, Rigdon, Cowdry, and other close associates often called him.
What mattered to Joseph was his religious mission, centered in his early religious experiences.
I disagree. I think what mattered to Joseph was being the star of his religion, having the attention and esteem of many people, not to mention an ever-improving lifestyle, a fine home, secular as well as religious power, and his out-of-control appetite for having lots of women to bed, who felt they had to be his extra wives because he said that God said so. What mattered to him is what the facts of his life spell out.
As to religious experiences, Joseph’s childhod was not marked by and piety or by religious experiences, but by magic arts, tricking people and story-telling - so say ALL who knew young Joseph, and there are no known exceptions, outside his immediate family. It was Rigdon who had the religious experiences (though I would not say he was pious.)
Brodie did not – because she could not – grant that those early experiences were real, even to him, and so she inevitably turned out a hatchet job. It was entertainingly written; but it was still a hatchet job.
I read all the reviews on Amazon, and I saw none that agree with you there, unless they were LDS. I am sure on LDS sites there are plenty to agree with you, but its the bias speaking. Her book was not a hatchet job.
So what if Brodie did not grant that Smith’s early experiences are real? If one follows is objective, one must first eliminate the supernatural, and look for natural explanations And if there are none, then look at supernatural. Brodie found so many plausible natural explanations, there was no need to consider supernatrual.]
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