Logic and Dan Peterson arguments.

[Philo Sofee]

Analytics
DCP seems to take the fact that some people believe in irrational things as a license to believe in those things, too. He then goes down the rabbit hole of searching out books that justify what he wants to believe rather than figure out the truth.

Very interesting. That is definitely the impression he leaves isn't it...... I saw years ago Peterson is not interested in the truth, but only in defending someone else's interpretation of it with the assumption that the interpretation is true.

[Moksha]

It's a loan word. Skousen has explained that in Early Modern English, the appropriate correspondence is "ShamWow." LIDAR readings of the Delmarva Peninsula are anticipated to show use of the "ShamWow" no more than a millenia, maybe two, after Book of Mormon times. (That's close enough for archaeology, right? Science is so... malleable.)

If we consider the shine on those Tapirs of Unusual Size at Delmarva, we could propose that the Nephites had brought the ShamWows from Jerusalem.

[Analytics]

Analytics
DCP seems to take the fact that some people believe in irrational things as a license to believe in those things, too. He then goes down the rabbit hole of searching out books that justify what he wants to believe rather than figure out the truth.

Very interesting. That is definitely the impression he leaves isn't it...... I saw years ago Peterson is not interested in the truth, but only in defending someone else's interpretation of it with the assumption that the interpretation is true.

As long as your beliefs don’t contradict “objective public proofs,” you can believe whatever you want.

[Physics Guy]

What is a "true prophet" or "reasonably clever fraud"? Are they actually mutually exclusive categories such that you can be one or the other but you can't possibly be both? It does seem to me that to being either a "true prophet" or a "reasonably clever fraud" requires a person to be pretty creative, for example. But how do you decide which category to put this creative idea in? How does the society a person lives in affect the person in question?

"Prophet" doesn't have a clear job description these days, that's true, and I guess it was always a bit vague. The kind of prophet that Joseph Smith presented himself to be, though, wasn't supposed to be creative at all. That kind of prophet just passed on messages from God. For most of the messages that Smith claimed to pass on from God, in fact, Smith didn't even present himself as the first person to whom the message had come. He was merely restoring previously transmitted messages, as a second-hand prophet.

Even if that was the image of prophethood that Smith presented, I guess our own definitions of prophethood can still be broader than that. Perhaps we can redefine prophethood as a creative role, in which a human mind is supplying most of the head of grain—whether it's worthless husk or crunchy goodness—around a possibly tiny kernel from God. Perhaps in Smith's own case playing the role of an uncreative mouthpiece kind of prophet was itself an example of prophetic creativity.

But I'm afraid that this is the kind of thing I mean by not taking alternatives seriously. If you're committed to seeing Joseph Smith as some kind of prophet, to the point of being willing to let "prophet" mean whatever it has to mean to keep on applying to Smith, then you can probably find a perspective from which all of Smith's acts and statements line up as just what you'd expect from a prophet. When you've tailored the glove to the hand, it will fit.

It seems more telling to me that the role of the traditional, uncreative, mouthpiece prophet is more convenient for a con artist than that of a newfangled creative prophet who makes up their own stuff (with perhaps a tiny spark of divine inspiration). Making out that the message comes directly from God, not from the prophet at all, gives the message more authority, while also shifting responsibility for the message away from the prophet, to God. Hey, don't blame me, I'm just the messenger—but you'd better believe and obey, because it's a message from God.

So if Joseph Smith were a creative kind of prophet, then sure, he could have exercised his creativity to pose as an uncreative mouthpiece-prophet. But he could also have exercised his creativity to do all kinds of other things; that particular thing would have been an arbitrary choice on his part. If Smith were a fraud, on the other hand, then posing as an uncreative mouthpiece-prophet is one of the obviously best things he could have done. It wouldn't have been an arbitrary choice at all.

If the point is that all Scripture is and always was largely made up by humans, then Smith could have delivered an inspired modern-day revelation that wasn't dressed up in any fake ancient culture. Or he could have written an honest piece of alternative historical fantasy, "Once upon a time there were some Nephites." Instead he went to a lot of trouble to insist that he hadn't made up the Nephites at all, that they had really been real and had really left records which he had merely translated.

We could say, "No, see, when Smith insisted straight-faced and at length that the Nephites were real, that was all part of his creative product, it was like putting photo-realistic cover art on a fantasy novel." Well, okay, a creative artist might conceivably have carried the project that far, like a method actor giving an interview in character. It seems extreme though, and arbitrary. If the Book of Mormon really came directly from God then it's quite important to establish this provenance, but if Smith made it up, and if pretending to have translated ancient plates was just part of framing his art, then Smith put a weird amount of emphasis on his frame. Whereas the insistence on having translated real ancient texts is perfectly natural, if Smith was pulling a con.