Both of us were big boys. We both dished it out. I took it. I survived. I’ve taken stuff from others. I’m doing just fine.
I know myself well enough to know that what is said about me isn’t true. Grindael, I’m sure, was made of the same cloth.
But like I said, I regret having not been the peacemaker. I was too harsh in response to the the things he said in regards to the church and its founding prophet.
Anyway, I always felt that grindael's various discussions on the subject lent the most credence to the idea that the 'item' always under cloth, and conveniently never quite there to see with actual eyes, was sand, or at best, a brick or an odd piece of house décor.
That, of course, would be one way of viewing it. Others would disagree. So you and I are both left to choose since there is no absolute proof.
During this thread I’ve given my thoughts/reasons for looking seriously at the traditional story of the plates and their existence…along with the angel…as being true.
You take a different position. That’s fine. And it’s even understandable.
Both of us were big boys. We both dished it out. I took it. I survived. I’ve taken stuff from others. I’m doing just fine.
I know myself well enough to know that what is said about me isn’t true. Grindael, I’m sure, was made of the same cloth.
But like I said, I regret having not been the peacemaker. I was too harsh in response to the the things he said in regards to the church and its founding prophet.
Regards,
MG
Still not a true description of the situation. Not at all.
An example of mentalgymnast's trolling of grindael:
When grindael excitedly announced that he had been chosen to present his research at the Whitmer conference and shared with us some of his work, this was one (just one of many!) of the trolling comments that mentalgymnast posted on his announcement thread that evening:
mentalgymnast wrote:
by the way, loser, we are already well aware that you don't believe in the Divine calling of Joseph Smith...so what's your point in preaching to the choir? You already know you're gonna just get high fives. So what's your point? Much ado about nothing, isn't it?
You're a loser, grindael. Ya, I know I just called you a loser. But the shoe fits.
There is nothing in your justification, mg, that explains the above attack.
Both of us were big boys. We both dished it out. I took it. I survived. I’ve taken stuff from others. I’m doing just fine.
You are anonymous, grindael left here because of the in real life damage you were attempting against his reputation. He explained that in his final letter. You egregiously attacked someone here, whose in real life research was tied to this board. You trolled.
Thanks for commenting on this, malkie. Though, unfortunately, I've never had the chance to meet MG, this assessment mirrors my experience with him on this board.
Seriously. His last 6 (SIX!!) in a row show the narcissism IHQ described exactly.
But, he says he's done, so we can get back to the topic. Although, he's said that at least twice before on this thread, so i'm only mildly hopeful.
In any case, i'll repost what i said about Kish's previous comments again about Smith's situation, his posts offer considerable insight into the discussion we were having, in my opinion:
I recall several discussions on our previous site about whether plates, real or fake, actually existed. I always found them fascinating, mostly because when I grew up, they absolutely integral to a Mormon youth's testimony of the 'truthfulness' of 'the Gospel,' but now, it turns out they weren't even used! What a bizarre flip!
Anyway, I always felt that grindael's various discussions on the subject lent the most credence to the idea that the 'item' always under cloth, and conveniently never quite there to see with actual eyes, was sand, or at best, a brick or an odd piece of house décor.
In looking for grindael's post about sand(!), I found this excellent discussion by Kishkumen of the place the story of the plates has in our history, which I hope he doesn't mind if I re-post. It's too good to lose to the vagaries of internet forum upkeep:
Mormonism is a very Western belief system. Indeed, every aspect of it you examine is easily interpreted as a manifestation of one or many currents of Western culture and history. It combines them in a unique way, but to say that Mormonism is simply phony is to ignore all of the ways it expresses those larger and older currents. Let's take, for example, the gold plates. Here is the single most obvious lie Joseph Smith ever told. It is also one of the most damning. Nothing about it is credible.
But the story of the discovery of the gold plates is rooted in narratives that go back to very ancient history indeed. This is what I was getting at in my last Sunstone talk that Taves neither liked nor, frankly, understood very well, as she pushed her own agenda about what "Religious Studies" is. Taves preferred to understand the gold plates through the lens of the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation, when Joseph would have been much more familiar with folk magic and Freemasonry than Catholicism. She might still land on Catholicism if she were to understand Freemasonry and magic better, but that is a topic for another day.
So, yes, the gold plates were made up. But they were tailor made for a culture of sacred and magical books that was not only informed by the Bible (and this is the dominant influence, to be sure), but also by the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, Letters from Heaven, the gold plate of Enoch, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, and the Books of Numa. Folk and esoteric religion was already open to the kind of claim Joseph was making, even if it did not actually happen in the way he said it did. For centuries people have been writing sacred or magical texts, putting the name of a famous person on them, and sending them out into the world to become someone else's scripture.
Is the Book of Mormon to be specially rejected while the fabrications and the forgeries of the Bible, circulated under names such as Daniel and Paul, are fine? Are scriptures to be rejected as important expressions of our history and culture because they were written by unknown priests, forgers, and men such as Joseph Smith? Do beliefs become bereft of value when their origins are as dubiously accurate as their contents are unhistorical?
kish wrote:
...It seems to me that you are forgetting that he was an established trickster who was engaging in treasure-digging schemes. His skills and his subject matter come directly from that milieu. The Book of Mormon starts off as a treasure that he and other treasure seers were looking for. The translation springs out of that, and it cannot be divorced from it. He had first to convince others that he recovered the plates. Then he eventually commits to translating them himself. Knowing that this all originated in a ruse, we should instead think it would have been strange for him to do other than he did.
Seriously. His last 6 (SIX!!) in a row show the narcissism IHQ described exactly.
But, he says he's done, so we can get back to the topic. Although, he's said that at least twice before on this thread, so i'm only mildly hopeful.
In any case, i'll repost what i said about Kish's previous comments again about Smith's situation, his posts offer considerable insight into the discussion we were having, in my opinion:
I recall several discussions on our previous site about whether plates, real or fake, actually existed. I always found them fascinating, mostly because when I grew up, they absolutely integral to a Mormon youth's testimony of the 'truthfulness' of 'the Gospel,' but now, it turns out they weren't even used! What a bizarre flip!
Anyway, I always felt that grindael's various discussions on the subject lent the most credence to the idea that the 'item' always under cloth, and conveniently never quite there to see with actual eyes, was sand, or at best, a brick or an odd piece of house décor.
In looking for grindael's post about sand(!), I found this excellent discussion by Kishkumen of the place the story of the plates has in our history, which I hope he doesn't mind if I re-post. It's too good to lose to the vagaries of internet forum upkeep:
and
You posted this a number of days ago and didn’t get any response. Maybe you’ll do better this time around. As it is, and as I’ve said, at the end of the day there are going to be those that find the story of the plates plausible and those that don’t.
And we have complete freedom and agency (a nod to the discussion in this thread that ran parallel and/or in tandem with the discussion about the plates) to choose which way to go on this and many other things.
Some would forego that agency and have direct evidence. And without that evidence they will not believe.
Good luck in your ongoing hope to see if your contribution can get the ball rolling again as you would like to. Maybe Kishkumen will have something to add to what he said previously.
You posted this a number of days ago and didn’t get any response. Maybe you’ll do better this time around. As it is, and as I’ve said, at the end of the day there are going to be those that find the story of the plates plausible and those that don’t.
And we have complete freedom and agency (a nod to the discussion in this thread that ran parallel and/or in tandem with the discussion about the plates) to choose which way to go on this and many other things.
Some would forego that agency and have direct evidence. And without that evidence they will not believe.
Good luck in your ongoing hope to see if your contribution can get the ball rolling again as you would like to. Maybe Kishkumen will have something to add to what he said previously.
Regards,
MG
Back to the thread:
Another very significant point is that grindael, through his research and work, made his in real life information available. You, an anonymous troll, were harming him in real life with your attacks here on his character and reputation. He stated that in his good-bye post, noting that this in real life effect was one of the main reasons he was leaving. There is no excuse for how you behaved, and your 'two to tangle' excuses don't cut it, and it's not an 'old hurt.'
You did real damage to a human being.
And it's too late, sadly, for him to apologize to grindael here.
[Mental] says he's done, so we can get back to the topic. Although, he's said that at least twice before on this thread, so i'm only mildly hopeful.
In any case, i'll repost what i said about Kish's previous comments again about Smith's situation, his posts offer considerable insight into the discussion we were having, in my opinion:
I recall several discussions on our previous site about whether plates, real or fake, actually existed. I always found them fascinating, mostly because when I grew up, they absolutely integral to a Mormon youth's testimony of the 'truthfulness' of 'the Gospel,' but now, it turns out they weren't even used! What a bizarre flip!
Anyway, I always felt that grindael's various discussions on the subject lent the most credence to the idea that the 'item' always under cloth, and conveniently never quite there to see with actual eyes, was sand, or at best, a brick or an odd piece of house décor.
In looking for grindael's post about sand(!), I found this excellent discussion by Kishkumen of the place the story of the plates has in our history, which I hope he doesn't mind if I re-post. It's too good to lose to the vagaries of internet forum upkeep:
Mormonism is a very Western belief system. Indeed, every aspect of it you examine is easily interpreted as a manifestation of one or many currents of Western culture and history. It combines them in a unique way, but to say that Mormonism is simply phony is to ignore all of the ways it expresses those larger and older currents. Let's take, for example, the gold plates. Here is the single most obvious lie Joseph Smith ever told. It is also one of the most damning. Nothing about it is credible.
But the story of the discovery of the gold plates is rooted in narratives that go back to very ancient history indeed. This is what I was getting at in my last Sunstone talk that Taves neither liked nor, frankly, understood very well, as she pushed her own agenda about what "Religious Studies" is. Taves preferred to understand the gold plates through the lens of the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation, when Joseph would have been much more familiar with folk magic and Freemasonry than Catholicism. She might still land on Catholicism if she were to understand Freemasonry and magic better, but that is a topic for another day.
So, yes, the gold plates were made up. But they were tailor made for a culture of sacred and magical books that was not only informed by the Bible (and this is the dominant influence, to be sure), but also by the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, Letters from Heaven, the gold plate of Enoch, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, and the Books of Numa. Folk and esoteric religion was already open to the kind of claim Joseph was making, even if it did not actually happen in the way he said it did. For centuries people have been writing sacred or magical texts, putting the name of a famous person on them, and sending them out into the world to become someone else's scripture.
Is the Book of Mormon to be specially rejected while the fabrications and the forgeries of the Bible, circulated under names such as Daniel and Paul, are fine? Are scriptures to be rejected as important expressions of our history and culture because they were written by unknown priests, forgers, and men such as Joseph Smith? Do beliefs become bereft of value when their origins are as dubiously accurate as their contents are unhistorical?
kish wrote:
...It seems to me that you are forgetting that he was an established trickster who was engaging in treasure-digging schemes. His skills and his subject matter come directly from that milieu. The Book of Mormon starts off as a treasure that he and other treasure seers were looking for. The translation springs out of that, and it cannot be divorced from it. He had first to convince others that he recovered the plates. Then he eventually commits to translating them himself. Knowing that this all originated in a ruse, we should instead think it would have been strange for him to do other than he did.
You posted this a number of days ago and didn’t get any response. Maybe you’ll do better this time around. As it is, and as I’ve said, at the end of the day there are going to be those that find the story of the plates plausible and those that don’t.
And we have complete freedom and agency (a nod to the discussion in this thread that ran parallel and/or in tandem with the discussion about the plates) to choose which way to go on this and many other things.
Some would forego that agency and have direct evidence. And without that evidence they will not believe.
Good luck in your ongoing hope to see if your contribution can get the ball rolling again as you would like to. Maybe Kishkumen will have something to add to what he said previously.
Regards,
MG
Back to the thread:
And it's too late, sadly, for him to apologize to grindael here.
[Mental] says he's done, so we can get back to the topic. Although, he's said that at least twice before on this thread, so i'm only mildly hopeful.
In any case, i'll repost what i said about Kish's previous comments again about Smith's situation, his posts offer considerable insight into the discussion we were having, in my opinion:
I recall several discussions on our previous site about whether plates, real or fake, actually existed. I always found them fascinating, mostly because when I grew up, they absolutely integral to a Mormon youth's testimony of the 'truthfulness' of 'the Gospel,' but now, it turns out they weren't even used! What a bizarre flip!
Anyway, I always felt that grindael's various discussions on the subject lent the most credence to the idea that the 'item' always under cloth, and conveniently never quite there to see with actual eyes, was sand, or at best, a brick or an odd piece of house décor.
In looking for grindael's post about sand(!), I found this excellent discussion by Kishkumen of the place the story of the plates has in our history, which I hope he doesn't mind if I re-post. It's too good to lose to the vagaries of internet forum upkeep:
and
Your response tends toward making me think you’re not really serious. You would probably just as well curtail any further discussion on the topic.
I doubt you really have anything further to add.
But that’s OK. It lets things stand as they are. And it was a good discussion. Except for a number of annoyances (hint hint) along the way.
