Is the Book of Mormon anti-Masonry or anti-Spurious Masonry?

[dan vogel]

Come see me and the Backyard Professor tonight at 6 pm Mountain Time.

I will be responding to Cheryl Bruno and Nick Literski's mostly feeble rebuttal of my incomplete review of their book Method Infinite. I will also discuss their ill-conceived attempt to make the Book of Mormon pro-Masonic and anti-spurious Masonic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVNx8NcCoJE

[Philo Sofee]

Coming soon to a forum near you (just a few hours now).

[BeNotDeceived]

The B of M is a work of fiction, does it really matter?

[dan vogel]

The B of M is a work of fiction, does it really matter?

Yes. I'm not trying to simply debunk Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. I'm trying to be a scholar of early Mormonism, so accuracy matters.

[drumdude]

The B of M is a work of fiction, does it really matter?

I don’t know about you, but the church (as a whole) being a work of fiction makes it much more fascinating to me than if it was true.

Mormonism is a unique glimpse into how religions are created by man. A process which normally is shrouded behind thousands of years of lost history.

There’s still so much to discover about it.

[Physics Guy]

Mormon history is one case study in the formation of a religion. It's probably going to show some forms of some common features in religion formation, but you can't overgeneralise from a small sample. Religions can be different in ways one doesn't expect.

Knowing a fair amount about a bunch of Christian denominations, for instance, I was once all set to learn that other religions had different volumes of hairsplitting theology, different deep dives into individual spiritual psychology, different structures of ecclesiastical authority. I was then baffled when I seemed to find that Islam has virtually no theology and makes personal righteousness a straightforward matter of obeying a few concrete rules. And I was surprised to learn that all the Muslim religious officials of which I had heard are really more lawyers than clerics, because Islam seems to violate the basic Christian assumption that religion is about the inner lives of individuals, and focus mainly on how society is supposed to work.

I can't say that I know all that much about any form of Islam, now, but at least I've learned not to think of it as a competing brand in the same product category as Christianity. Islam is a quite different kind of thing from Christianity in many significant ways. From a sufficiently zoomed-out distance one can still find common themes among different religions, but there are a lot of opportunities to misunderstand religions badly by taking one of them as a template for all.

[BeNotDeceived]

The B of M is a work of fiction, does it really matter?

Yes. I'm not trying to simply debunk Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. I'm trying to be a scholar of early Mormonism, so accuracy matters.

I understand. I started watching some of your You-Tube videos a few years ago as I was going down the rabbit hole of learning how I've been deceived my whole life and a member of a con-man's contrived religion pulled out of a hat (pun intended) which is now nothing more than a highly corrupt multi-hundred billion dollar real estate corporation masquerading as a religion while enjoying tax-exemption. 'Ole Joe would be extremely proud of what his fraudulent religion has become today. Thanks for all of your hard work in helping expose the ugly truths about the LDS 'church' but more specifically, the character (or lack thereof) of Joe Smith, one of the biggest con men of the 19th century and a highly iniquitous individual who deserves a special place on the other side for what he's done.

[dan vogel]

The B of M is a work of fiction, does it really matter?

I don’t know about you, but the church (as a whole) being a work of fiction makes it much more fascinating to me than if it was true.

Mormonism is a unique glimpse into how religions are created by man. A process which normally is shrouded behind thousands of years of lost history.

There’s still so much to discover about it.

I agree.

[Moksha]

Religions can be different in ways one doesn't expect.

The importance of delineating between common ordinary everyday fraud and super righteous extraordinary fraud needs to be rigorously stressed! Mormon history can be sullied with nothing less!