Dan Vogel wrote:Marg,I appreciate you doing your best to describe your experience. I evaluate it that you are honest, truly had the experience but not for a second do I think there were angels in reality. Your explanation was very obscure and I have no doubt the experience occurred solely in your mind and was a function of how you interpreted it. Given what I've read of the Book of Mormon witnesses, for example both Cowdery and D. Whitmer I don't believe they had the experiences they described. I think they made it up with Smith's help. I don't think they were under stress of any kind and it's too coincidental that 2 of them should claim to experience the same thing at the same time. Harris though was probably a highly hypnotizable person, and wanted to believe. When someone wants to believe something badly, they can convince themselves..and that's what I think Harris did.
I can see that you are making these judgments on little information. You find it easy to believe Harris could be hypnotized. That's probably because you know more about him than the other two. You know he had a predisposition for visionary experience, and continued to have them afterwards. What you don't know is that Cowdery and Whitmer have a similar history. Cowdery came to Joseph Smith as a rod worker. He also had already had a vision of the Lord showing him the plates. He asked to have the gift of translation himself. In the same month that he saw the angel and plates, he received his own revelation calling him to be an apostle. Despite what Mormon apologists say about him, he wasn't a level-headed teacher, later lawyer, but he was quite obsessed about the plates, according to Lucy. David Whitmer, Cowdery's brother-in-law, reportedly said "in many respects" he was "a peculiar man."
The thing about people who have been hypnotized Dan is they do know what occurred. So for example if someone was on stage and the hypnotist told the person hypnotized that the person next to him was an angel, while hypnotized they would act as if that person was truly an angel. If I was hypnotized I'd probably have a problem with that because I have no particular conception of an angel. When out of the hynotized state, theyd remember the experience but they'd fully appreciate that the person wasn't an angel and that they were hypnotized. Being hypnotized is simply a function of not using the conscious mind and allowing the subconscious to operate instead. I think Harris probably was in an hynotized state, it's a good possibility. However once he came out of it, if he was, he then played along. And I think there was pressure to do so by Smith because he would have been rejected as a key witness and Harris really wanted badly to believe in it all and be part of the organization.
Now if Cowdery was a highly hypnotizable person the same would apply to him.
by the way what is Cowdery's best explanation of the dictation process. I found nowhere where he mentions Smith using a stone with head in the hat. He mentioned the interpreters were used, yet the interpreters allegedly weren't available.
David Whitmer had already seen what he believed were three angels sowing in his field, the angel on the road between Harmony and Fayette, and thought he felt the presence of the angel under his father's shed. On the same day of his vision, an angel appeared to him while plowing. Later in life, he founded a church and received his own revelations.
No Dan. David Whitmer claimed he had seen 3 angels sowing in his field. It does not mean he saw anything. How coincidental on the same day of the Book of Mormon vision an angel appeared to him while working. I can understand him later in life founding a church after he appreciated just how gullible people can be. Had he truly been sincere, and thought God was behind the Mormon church he would have stayed with it.
I just love how D. Whitmer explains his leaving.
"If you believe my testimony to the Book of Mormon, if you believe that God spake to us 3 witnesses by his own voice, then I tell you that in June 1838 God spake to me agains by his own voice from the heavens."
This is how I interpret his words ..If you are gullible enough to believe that nonsense I said regarding God in my testimony for the Book of Mormon then you should be gullible enough to believe me now.
So Dan, is Cowdery's explanaton of the dictation process the same as D. Whitmer's? I can't find much of what Cowdery said.
One of the strongest indicators for susceptibility to hypnosis is a predisposition for physical kinds of religious experience. None of which, however, makes one an unrealiable witness for things that happen in everyday life. A court of law would not include it, contrary to your speculations.
I've not heard that before. Where did you read that? What I heard from a hypnotist friend is that often people who are hypnotized want to be and want the attention. People who are hypnotized know what is going on but their defences are down so they go long with what they are asked. But later they remember it all.