Scott Gordon Attacks Tyler Livingston Over CES Letter

[Gadianton]

It doesn’t matter to me if powerful LDS leaders inculcate false binaries and extremes in LDS thought. That’s a problem they have to deal with, not me.

I think it's more of a problem the members have to deal with, and the members are who make up the Church.

A wise man recently said:

whereas President Nelson's followers are falling all over themselves to install Trump as dictator in '24

Rusty and Tad aren't, and are perhaps even mildly concerned.

[Physics Guy]

Are the Book of Mormon and the Bible really equally mythical? Perhaps, by some definitions of "myth". Places like Egypt and Jerusalem really existed, but Biblical stories like the Tower of Babel and Noah's Flood are as fictional as anything Smith made up. If the only question about Scripture is whether or not it is as literally true as the fundamentalists would have it to be, then the Bible and the Book of Mormon both get the same answer, No.

That's not the only question that interests me, though. To me it's important that the Biblical stories actually come from a very long time ago. They may only be stories, but they are authentically ancient stories. They offer a glimpse through the eyes of our ancestors, from a time when mud bricks seemed like such a wonderfully powerful technology that they would let us do anything. As an origin myth for the diversity of human languages, the Tower of Babel myth isn't especially inventive, but it does let me know that people way, way back then were aware that different human groups spoke different languages, and that they thought of this as a problem, and wondered why it was so.

What really impresses me about the Tower of Babel story is not the language diversity origin myth itself (God just did it) but the connection it makes between language and human capability. Somehow, so long ago, somebody set down the insight that we still need today: what's going to limit us isn't going to be our technology. It's going to be our ability to communicate with each other.

Noah's great global Flood didn't happen, either. All life on Earth does not descend from the Ark. The story does contain some keeper features, though. There's the insight that a lot of animal populations owe their existence to human cultivation. Humans really have changed the biosphere on a large scale—and this was already sufficiently apparent in ancient times that a story about humans preserving all animals wasn't too ridiculous to tell. And although it's easy to focus on the Flood itself, much of the story's drama is about Noah laboriously building an enormous ship on dry land, because he has an insider tip about an upcoming deluge. The Biblical story doesn't build this up as much as it could; the popular idea that Noah's neighbours all mocked him, for all his work on a ship on dry land, isn't in the Bible. It is in the Quran, though. It's a natural addition to the story. Sometimes crazy ideas turn out to be good; sometimes long shots pay off.

When your collection of myths is one that has been filtered and curated over many centuries, what survives tends to have valuable stuff in it, even if not every part of it is valuable. And even the crud that comes along with the good bits through history is still at least ancient crud, that tells us a bit about how things were at a distant waypoint along the path from primitive humanity to us.

Joseph Smith's fabrications, in contrast, are from 1830s New England. That place and time are of some historical interest, all right, but the stream of human culture had already broadened into a pretty wide delta by that point, and only a small fraction of today's human world has to be traced back through Smith's world. As a glimpse of a vanished world from which we all came, Mormon Scriptures are less valuable than the Bible.

Furthermore the fictional content in the Mormon Scriptures, even where they don't just echo the Bible, was curated by only one guy—or perhaps a small group of collaborators—and not by the wisdom of crowds over centuries. It's not the treasure of ages. It's just the treasure of Smith. Even if Smith had been doing nothing but sincerely writing down the best inspirations he had, he'd have been drawing on a much more limited source of inspiration than all the many lives that produced the Bible. In fact I don't think Smith was that sincere. He may have had a few good ideas, but I think he was mainly just trying to imitate the Old Testament so he could set up as Prophet. So I think he was less original than he could have been. He couldn't afford to be so original that people would notice how different his product was from the Bible.

The specifically Mormon Scriptures may be no less literally true than most if not all of the Bible or the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita. This is only a decisive point for fundamentalists, though. By other significant standards, the Books of Mormon and Abraham are really quite different from genuine ancient Scriptures. The Mormon Books don't preserve as many gems from the past, and they don't even show us real crud from the past.

[Kishkumen]

I think it's more of a problem the members have to deal with, and the members are who make up the Church.

Well, yes. They are definitely negatively affected by the teaching. What I was trying to convey was that the leaders have engineered it such that there are few (no?) outside voices that can offer a different point of view within the organization itself. You either parrot their views, or you don’t say anything, or you get thrown out, or you leave voluntarily. The last was the option I selected.

A wise man recently said:

whereas President Nelson's followers are falling all over themselves to install Trump as dictator in '24

Rusty and Tad aren't, and are perhaps even mildly concerned.

Yes, the chickens have come home to roost. And it is a little late to be “concerned.”

[Kishkumen]

Are the Book of Mormon and the Bible really equally mythical? Perhaps, by some definitions of "myth". Places like Egypt and Jerusalem really existed, but Biblical stories like the Tower of Babel and Noah's Flood are as fictional as anything Smith made up. If the only question about Scripture is whether or not it is as literally true as the fundamentalists would have it to be, then the Bible and the Book of Mormon both get the same answer, No.

That's not the only question that interests me, though. To me it's important that the Biblical stories actually come from a very long time ago. They may only be stories, but they are authentically ancient stories. They offer a glimpse through the eyes of our ancestors, from a time when mud bricks seemed like such a wonderfully powerful technology that they would let us do anything. As an origin myth for the diversity of human languages, the Tower of Babel myth isn't especially inventive, but it does let me know that people way, way back then were aware that different human groups spoke different languages, and that they thought of this as a problem, and wondered why it was so.

What really impresses me about the Tower of Babel story is not the language diversity origin myth itself (God just did it) but the connection it makes between language and human capability. Somehow, so long ago, somebody set down the insight that we still need today: what's going to limit us isn't going to be our technology. It's going to be our ability to communicate with each other.

Noah's great global Flood didn't happen, either. All life on Earth does not descend from the Ark. The story does contain some keeper features, though. There's the insight that a lot of animal populations owe their existence to human cultivation. Humans really have changed the biosphere on a large scale—and this was already sufficiently apparent in ancient times that a story about humans preserving all animals wasn't too ridiculous to tell. And although it's easy to focus on the Flood itself, much of the story's drama is about Noah laboriously building an enormous ship on dry land, because he has an insider tip about an upcoming deluge. The Biblical story doesn't build this up as much as it could; the popular idea that Noah's neighbours all mocked him, for all his work on a ship on dry land, isn't in the Bible. It is in the Quran, though. It's a natural addition to the story. Sometimes crazy ideas turn out to be good; sometimes long shots pay off.

When your collection of myths is one that has been filtered and curated over many centuries, what survives tends to have valuable stuff in it, even if not every part of it is valuable. And even the crud that comes along with the good bits through history is still at least ancient crud, that tells us a bit about how things were at a distant waypoint along the path from primitive humanity to us.

Joseph Smith's fabrications, in contrast, are from 1830s New England. That place and time are of some historical interest, all right, but the stream of human culture had already broadened into a pretty wide delta by that point, and only a small fraction of today's human world has to be traced back through Smith's world. As a glimpse of a vanished world from which we all came, Mormon Scriptures are less valuable than the Bible.

Furthermore the fictional content in the Mormon Scriptures, even where they don't just echo the Bible, was curated by only one guy—or perhaps a small group of collaborators—and not by the wisdom of crowds over centuries. It's not the treasure of ages. It's just the treasure of Smith. Even if Smith had been doing nothing but sincerely writing down the best inspirations he had, he'd have been drawing on a much more limited source of inspiration than all the many lives that produced the Bible. In fact I don't think Smith was that sincere. He may have had a few good ideas, but I think he was mainly just trying to imitate the Old Testament so he could set up as Prophet. So I think he was less original than he could have been. He couldn't afford to be so original that people would notice how different his product was from the Bible.

The specifically Mormon Scriptures may be no less literally true than most if not all of the Bible or the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita. This is only a decisive point for fundamentalists, though. By other significant standards, the Books of Mormon and Abraham are really quite different from genuine ancient Scriptures. The Mormon Books don't preserve as many gems from the past, and they don't even show us real crud from the past.

Equally mythical? I feel like we can easily descend into a No True Scotsman argument here. Firstly, the Book of Mormon is in a sense like the Aeneid, in that it is a generic descendant of much older literary models. The Aeneid is also more artificial, arguably, than its models because it did not emerge from an oral tradition. It is literally a Roman adaptation of Greek tales or Greek-style tales into a Latin poem over seven centuries after the two canonical works it most obviously imitates. Its myths are a reworking of earlier myths.

The Book of Mormon is much the same. There are people who, of course, deride the Book of Mormon for not being truly ancient and not containing the rich storehouse of centuries of human intellectual and creative sediment the Bible has. Of course. But my point here has not to been to convince you that the Aeneid is even better than the Iliad and Odyssey. I am only saying that it is myth forged according to earlier models and myths, but like the Aeneid, it is also very much a product of its time and place. As literature, I doubt it will ever rank close to the Bible or the Aeneid.

[Physics Guy]

I was actually going to mention the Aeneid as a "secondary epic", and compare the Book of Mormon to it, but I thought better of trotting out my faded memory of that lecture—or my even more faded memory of the Aeneid—in a thread with a classicist.

We could call the Aeneid Homeric fan fiction. Heck, I guess we even have to call it that. It is that. But as T.S. Eliot is supposed* to have said, "All artists borrow, but great artists steal." By the time they're done with the things they copy, it's their version that people remember. I still remember a few lines of the Aeneid in Latin. Its derivative nature doesn't seem to hurt it at all. I reckon Vergil stole Troy.

Joseph Smith was undoubtedly an unusually talented guy. I don't think anyone calls Smith a Vergil, though. The Book of Mormon is indeed not going to rate as world-class literature, and it's not an authentic witness to any real ancient culture. It may well still be well worth reading for other reasons. The official LDS line, that it's an authentic ancient text from a New World Israelite culture, is making it out to be something it's not, though. That's only going to distract from any other value it has.

So why is it that the people who believe most in the Book of Mormon, and read it most reverently, feel obliged to make false claims about it, emphasising its supposedly angelic provenance, rather than leading off with its wonderful contents, and letting it speak for itself? There are paintings that make everyone look for the artist's signature, so they can find more paintings by that person, whoever they were; and there are paintings that no-one would notice at all, until they notice the little scrawl of "Picasso". Art frauds puts forged signatures onto unremarkable works, because if they could make their own remarkable works, they wouldn't need to be frauds. The fake ancient provenance of Mormon Scriptures is a bad sign, to me. I'd take them more seriously if more Mormons admitted they weren't ancient at all.

*In fact it seems that what Eliot actually wrote was clunkier than that, but popular misquotation was the greater artist, and stole the line from him.

[Kishkumen]

I was actually going to mention the Aeneid as a "secondary epic", and compare the Book of Mormon to it, but I thought better of trotting out my faded memory of that lecture—or my even more faded memory of the Aeneid—in a thread with a classicist.

We could call the Aeneid Homeric fan fiction. Heck, I guess we even have to call it that. It is that. But as T.S. Eliot is supposed* to have said, "All artists borrow, but great artists steal." By the time they're done with the things they copy, it's their version that people remember. I still remember a few lines of the Aeneid in Latin. Its derivative nature doesn't seem to hurt it at all. I reckon Vergil stole Troy.

Joseph Smith was undoubtedly an unusually talented guy. I don't think anyone calls Smith a Vergil, though. The Book of Mormon is indeed not going to rate as world-class literature, and it's not an authentic witness to any real ancient culture. It may well still be well worth reading for other reasons. The official LDS line, that it's an authentic ancient text from a New World Israelite culture, is making it out to be something it's not, though. That's only going to distract from any other value it has.

So why is it that the people who believe most in the Book of Mormon, and read it most reverently, feel obliged to make false claims about it, emphasising its supposedly angelic provenance, rather than leading off with its wonderful contents, and letting it speak for itself? There are paintings that make everyone look for the artist's signature, so they can find more paintings by that person, whoever they were; and there are paintings that no-one would notice at all, until they notice the little scrawl of "Picasso". Art frauds puts forged signatures onto unremarkable works, because if they could make their own remarkable works, they wouldn't need to be frauds. The fake ancient provenance of Mormon Scriptures is a bad sign, to me. I'd take them more seriously if more Mormons admitted they weren't ancient at all.

*In fact it seems that what Eliot actually wrote was clunkier than that, but popular misquotation was the greater artist, and stole the line from him.

Genesis is fake ancient. So is Daniel. Millions of believers in those scriptures accept them at face value as though they were more ancient and written by their purported authors. The Book of Mormon operates in the same tradition. The idea of antiquity is as important as the fact in this larger tradition. I don’t think it is all that important that the Book of Mormon is not the Bible, just as it is not important that the Aeneid is not Homer. To be in a tradition is not to be identical to the forebears.

[Marcus]

Addressing the question of whether the Book of Mormon can be considered as in the same category as the Bible, PG's argument makes the most sense for me:

Are the Book of Mormon and the Bible really equally mythical? Perhaps, by some definitions of "myth". Places like Egypt and Jerusalem really existed, but Biblical stories like the Tower of Babel and Noah's Flood are as fictional as anything Smith made up. If the only question about Scripture is whether or not it is as literally true as the fundamentalists would have it to be, then the Bible and the Book of Mormon both get the same answer, No.

As for why it appears to fall into the category of scripture, Smith himself put quite a bit of effort into that. Again, can't say it better than PG here:

Joseph Smith's fabrications, in contrast, are from 1830s New England. That place and time are of some historical interest, all right, but the stream of human culture had already broadened into a pretty wide delta by that point, and only a small fraction of today's human world has to be traced back through Smith's world. As a glimpse of a vanished world from which we all came, Mormon Scriptures are less valuable than the Bible.

Furthermore the fictional content in the Mormon Scriptures, even where they don't just echo the Bible, was curated by only one guy—or perhaps a small group of collaborators—and not by the wisdom of crowds over centuries. It's not the treasure of ages. It's just the treasure of Smith. Even if Smith had been doing nothing but sincerely writing down the best inspirations he had, he'd have been drawing on a much more limited source of inspiration than all the many lives that produced the Bible. In fact I don't think Smith was that sincere. He may have had a few good ideas, but I think he was mainly just trying to imitate the Old Testament so he could set up as Prophet. So I think he was less original than he could have been. He couldn't afford to be so original that people would notice how different his product was from the Bible.

Using a whataboutism argument for why the Book of Mormon should be considered mythmaking scripture completely bypasses the actual history we have of its evolution and of its author, and leaves us with a very incomplete understanding.

[Kishkumen]

As for why it appears to fall into the category of scripture, Smith himself put quite a bit of effort into that.

Every author who writes in a particular genre puts a lot of effort into making it conform to expectations for the genre. That's a non-issue.

Using a whataboutism argument for why the Book of Mormon should be considered mythmaking scripture completely bypasses the actual history we have of its evolution and of its author, and leaves us with a very incomplete understanding.

I am confused by your use of "whataboutism" in this context. My argument hinges on comparing Mormon scripture to other examples of . . . scripture, and then showing how the Book of Mormon conforms to the genre or fits within that tradition. That's just how discussions of genre are conducted.

[Marcus]

As for why it appears to fall into the category of scripture, Smith himself put quite a bit of effort into that.

Every author who writes in a particular genre puts a lot of effort into making it conform to expectations for the genre. That's a non-issue.

And every author who attempts to imitate a particular genre puts a lot of effort into making it conform to expectations for the genre. That makes the imitation an issue. Starting with the assumption it is legitimate scripture without considering the possibility it is not scripture is a bad starting assumption that can only weaken the resulting analysis.

Here's an example of what I mean by 'whataboutism':

...My perception of [the B of M's] nonhistorical nature has not changed from that time way back when when in terror I realized I really could no longer believe it...

Does it bother you that Genesis, Job, Daniel, and Revelation are not history? Does it bother you to know that while Jesus most likely lived, and that Pilate most definitely did, we really don’t know how much of what Mark wrote actually happened?

And a definition:

Whataboutism is an argumentative tactic where a person or group responds to an accusation or difficult question by deflection. Instead of addressing the point made, they counter it with “but what about X?”.

The arguments so far haven't gone beyond multiple statements containing similar 'whataboutisms' to explain why the B of M should be considered actual 'scripture.' Just assuming it is isn't sufficient, especially when we know so much about the history of the author. I'd be interested in an argument as to why it should be considered scripture, rather than just an attempt to imitate scripture, which the historical record overwhelmingly suggests that it is.

[Gadianton]

In one way of looking at it, the sermons of David Koresh were also scripture for those who followed him. For children raised within the compound, the world of those sermons was every bit as real as the world of a child attending Catechism or a child singing "Book of Mormon Stories" in primary. You can't say the subjective mythological quality of Koresh's visionary landscapes were any less profound for his followers than for people raised in a large conventional church with rich history and tradition. Possibly even more, given the isolation and constant exposure.

On this level, the Book of Mormon, the Bible, and the sermons of Koresh are equal. My question would be, is there an objective way to compare the Book of Mormon and the sermons of David Koresh? Can the Book of Mormon be shown in some objective way to be mythology of better quality than Koresh's sermons? I have no suggestions on how to do it. But suppose we come up with a method, then that study would be a calibration of the method in order to compare the Book of Mormon with the Bible. If there is a consistent way to show the Book of Mormon superior to Koresh's sermons while equal to the Bible, then that would be what we're shooting for.