Radio Free Mormon: Magic and the Book of Mormon (We Need Dan Vogel's Help!)

[_Physics Guy]

I've always been skeptical of word print analysis because although most people have consistent styles when they're just writing in their own natural style, many people can easily adopt different styles whenever they want. It's just that usually there's no good reason to do this, so people don't. It might be true that some features of one's own style are unconscious and hard to lose, but it's not at all hard to just deliberately adopt a few gimmicks and use them frequently enough to show up as a distinctive style feature.

It might be harder to switch styles when you're dictating your text to someone who is writing it down in ink on paper. You can't just search the file to replace adjectives or remove superlatives. But I think that some amount of stylistic variation would still be easy to do, and that some kinds of word frequency analysis will give false positives for multiple authors just because although they may be standard tools in a related field they are not designed to check whether an author is adopting different voices.

[_I have a question]

We seem to be working on the basis that what happened is what the key players said happened.

Dynamo (the magician) promotes the idea that he walked on the water of the Thames whilst kayakers and police watched on. There's even a video of it. However, once you allow for Dynamo using stooges it opens up the reality that there was a plexiglass platform just under the water and the kayakers and police were not there coincidentally, they form part of the trick. Once you realise that, apart from the truly sleight of hand tricks he mixes in, Dynamo uses accomplices in all his illusions (including those "random" street encounters), he becomes an entertainer not a magician.

Once you allow yourself the idea that the people immediately involved with Joseph were complicit in "selling" the illusion that Joseph was reading words from a rock placed in his hat, it really doesn't matter how they did it. They could have sat around a table for a couple of years writing it for all we know. The only blip was when they tried to monetise it and Harris "lost" the 116 pages of completed manuscript. I'll bet that was an interesting meeting when they found out and realised they hadn't kept a copy and nobody could accurately remember what the pages contained.

[_Dan Vogel]

If you like magic and you have a Facebook account, you might like this little demonstration I put together a few years ago:

https://www.Facebook.com/dan.vogel.35/v ... _video_tab

[_consiglieri]

If you like magic and you have a Facebook account, you might like this little demonstration I put together a few years ago:

https://www.Facebook.com/dan.vogel.35/v ... _video_tab

Just watched, Dan! Love it! You are really good!

The second to last trick with the "jumping rubber band" is one I learned back in sixth grade.

You have made two improvements to the way I learned it. Strangely, I came up with both those improvements independently.

I don't think I learned them from anybody, though I could be wrong about this. Sixth grade was a long time ago.

The final trick of the penetrating rubber bands is great! One of my favorites!

I have a fun story behind it.

I was trying to learn this trick from a magic book back in the late 1980s. I thought it would be a great trick if it could fool anybody, but the way it was written in this book wouldn't fool my dog! It was obvious what was happening!

Serendipitously, David Copperfield had a TV special on right around this same time. I had given up on the rubber band trick by this point.

Imagine my surprise when Copperfield went out into the audience to do some close-up magic, and did this very trick!

Only he used a move to make it miraculous. This move was completely missing from the book. I know because I went back and double-checked.

After that, this became one of my favorite impromptu tricks!

The rest of your routine is a complete mystery to me.

I like your style, Dan!

Thanks for sharing!

[_Dan Vogel]

If you like magic and you have a Facebook account, you might like this little demonstration I put together a few years ago:

https://www.Facebook.com/dan.vogel.35/v ... _video_tab

Just watched, Dan! Love it! You are really good!

The second to last trick with the "jumping rubber band" is one I learned back in sixth grade.

You have made two improvements to the way I learned it. Strangely, I came up with both those improvements independently.

I don't think I learned them from anybody, though I could be wrong about this. Sixth grade was a long time ago.

The final trick of the penetrating rubber bands is great! One of my favorites!

I have a fun story behind it.

I was trying to learn this trick from a magic book back in the late 1980s. I thought it would be a great trick if it could fool anybody, but the way it was written in this book wouldn't fool my dog! It was obvious what was happening!

Serendipitously, David Copperfield had a TV special on right around this same time. I had given up on the rubber band trick by this point.

Imagine my surprise when Copperfield went out into the audience to do some close-up magic, and did this very trick!

Only he used a move to make it miraculous. This move was completely missing from the book. I know because I went back and double-checked.

After that, this became one of my favorite impromptu tricks!

The rest of your routine is a complete mystery to me.

I like your style, Dan!

Thanks for sharing!

Thanks. You are kind. That was seven years ago. One of them fooled me because I can't remember how I did it. I was in 8th grade when I discovered magic at Disneyland's magic shop. I was really into Houdini for a while. I read everything I could find. That's where I was introduced to spiritualist mediums and Houdini's exposures of them. I rarely to tricks anymore, but it was an important part of my education.

[_huckelberry]

When I read Quinn's book on Magic world view it created in my mind theories for the production of the Book of Mormon which I thought might explain basic problems,or perhaps not quite.

Quinn presents a lot of information without specifying possible conclusions. I have been surprised at hearing believers state he shows Joseph's magic connects are ok because part of culture. I do not think that observation shows much one way or the other. Is the magic good, bad, effective or irrelevant to the Book of Mormon?

I thought the simplest take away from the book was realizing how much material was available in the neighbor. The neighborhood was not as backwoods as I had previously imagined.

I have leaned heavily towards Fawn Brodies reading of Joseph's honesty. She sees him as mixing honest earnest belief with his fakery. This allows him to operate without knowing conspirators and to maintain the image of earnest honesty which people report exeriencing from him. Combination of fakery and belief tells the story ok but is a clearly unstable combination. Brodie suggest either or both starting as a game and being conviced and led by other people's ,including families, belief and desire or his own personal psychological character.

For me Quinns book suggested an additional factor helping this odd emulsion to happen. Magic and religion do not have clear boundries.Quinn sees examples of where the Smith family practice overlapped the two. There exists a body of thought which takes magic as real. There is a realm of power which can be accessed by people. Often this is believed to be by ritual or correct performance or that such are starting points. Some individual may believe that tricks are a starting point.

It crossed my mind that a belief in Magic could be the bridge Joseph walked from tricks to believing that he had accessed actual understanding and power beyond others. Magic show could be the way to introduce others and convince them to join him in this belief. Perhaps it is only a partial distinction but magic belief is more an idea that there is an impersonal power running things which a person can access by following the correct rules and rituals while religion look to person relation to deity. Mormonism contains and teaches a peculiar combination of both.

Joseph Smith striking teaching is that we can become gods by following the correct procedures and learning from them as our father God did before us. I have been unable to remove from my mind the idea that Joseph may have absorbed or created this idea from the material of magic belief.

My copy of Mormonism and Magic World View has long ago disappeared so I am not checking any particular. I remember that Quinn showed ways Joseph could have been in contact with those ideas about a real magic.

[_Dan Vogel]

Nobody else likes magic?

[_Shulem]

Nobody else likes magic?

I like magic. It's a miracle!

[_huckelberry]

Nobody else likes magic?

I can think of a memorable magic trick. I saw it in a smallish theater. The performer did some casual explorations of mind reading which though not spectacular were informal and relaxing. He was then standing on the well lighted stage and asked a volunteer to help. He held his hands up , palms out thumbs parallel together and asked his thumbs to be tightly bound together with tape. After this was accomplished and the volunteer being convinced the binding was secure he picked up a brass ring and tossed it to the audience. With that he was standing in the light arms up thumbs taped together. He asked that usual sort of question, anything unusual about the ring? No. Ok toss it back to me. Clear as a bell one sees him standing there with thumbs bound, ring in the air sails straight through those thumbs and ends its flight in the arm pit. Seen clear as a bell, with my own two eyes I saw the ring going through the bound thumbs, Magic! Must be real!

Well I did later figure out the event. That slowed my passing belief in magic but left a respect for the simplicity of the trick, a thing of beauty.