sock puppet wrote:This possibility, the pious fraud one, has always troubled me deeply, more so than if JSjr was just your basic scammer. My interest in Mormon roots is not merely academic. I'm not fascinated by this character named JSjr any more than I am Jim Jones from 1978. There have always been and will always be Pied Pipers with charisma that others will be charmed into following.
My interest stems from the fact that I was BIC and essentially programmed to be a young LDS automaton. I did not get out of that rut until I was in my early 20s. To come to terms with and not regret my stolen youth, the one that the LDS teachings and culture stifled, I've wanted to learn about the Mormon scam and why it might be that 4 generation of my ancestors got hoodwinked into it and into remaining in it. Perhaps in understanding that I'll be less resentful towards the complicity of my ancestors with the LDS promoters to create that situation into which I would be BIC and in a deep LDS rut growing up, a rut that is difficult to escape for several reasons.
If JSjr was so ego centric and narcissistic as to believe his concoctions about existence and the future were real, then why didn't my ancestor that joined in the LDS church in Nauvoo see it for what was really going on? The fraud part of a pious fraud is, in my opinion, easier to spot than the conscious-less scalawag that himself knows it is all a farce.
So a pious fraud theory does nothing for my inquiry, because they are not merely academic. I suppose if I was the CaliforniaKid, a never mo that for some reason finds the Mormon movement interesting, I might be intrigued by the possibility that JSjr's fraud was of the pious variety. It may very well have been. He certainly seems to have had the requisite level of narcissism. Even if JSjr sincerely believed the crap he was spewing, it does not make that crap "true".
I'm in the same boat, although I didn't break out of it until my late 20's.
Apologists often ask the question about what were Joseph's motivations if not because of his sincerity (seemingly oblivious to how much wealth he did in fact have accumulated by the time he was assassinated). I think he was pretty sincere, although quite deluded and quite willing to embellish his stories for dramatic effect.
I think looking at it from the perspective of memes is helpful. There were the original ideas that Joseph Smith received from his environment of Christianity and folk magic. With his own creativity and charisma, he took those ideas and morphed them into the magic he was performing in the 1820's, with the hope that this would lead to making some money in book sales. The memes then evolved into something that became religiously compelling. They then morphed into something else when Smith's movement merged with Sidney Rigdon's, and then continued to spread and evolve into what we have today.
Yes, the world is full of scammers, narcissists, and dupes. But there are specific ideas or memes that people find compelling. Those memes evolve and spread. We know what the specific memes are of the various flavors of modern Mormonism. But when we trace the memes back to the decade before the church was even founded, what do they look like then? Apologists insist with a black-and-white view that Joseph Smith's life was accurately depicted in the dioramas and that his beliefs are basically identical to what the church now teaches. I find that view naïve. Mormonism evolved. I want to look at the evidence we have including the surviving memes and all of the old writings and reconstruct what was believed back then.
