Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon suffered a grand mal seizure in 2008 and was in a coma for seven days. After he regained consciousness, he claimed to have a clear memory of everything that he experienced while unconscious. His son advised him to write down a detailed account immediately while his memory was still fresh. He wanted to tell his story before he could be influenced by what others might think, especially the medical authorities. The result was his book, Proof of Heaven, A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife published in 2012.
Dr. Alexander described his first memory while in a coma as “Darkness, but a visible darkness–like being submerged in mud yet able to see through it.” He called it the “Realm of the Earthworm’s Eye View.” The “realm” smelled like feces, blood, and vomit and he was continuously rubbing against worm like creatures. Just as all seemed lost, he encountered a pure white light along with beautiful music and colors.
Although he had lost all perception of time, at some point he encountered a beautiful girl with “deep blue eyes” and “Golden-brown tresses” who would serve as his guide. For the “trip” they rode on the wing of a butterfly surrounded by millions of other amazing colorful butterflies. She spoke to him without using any words and gave him a message in three parts. First, “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.” Second, “You have nothing to fear.” And last, “There is nothing you can do wrong.” She also “told” him (again without any words) that eventually he would go back.
The format of the book was to alternate between the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the hospital where his body was residing and “heaven” where his spirit was visiting. This technique worked well and painted a vivid contrast between the world of science and medical technology that was keeping his body alive with the spirit world. This made the book very readable.
In the ICU doctors, nurses, and staff were struggling against an extremely dangerous threat to Eben’s life. It was determined that he was suffering from bacterial meningitis normally a death sentence with a 97% fatality rate. Doctors were totally baffled as to how he acquired the disease. Normally it is always the result of an injury to the spinal cord or some surgery that allowed the bacterial (E. coli) to enter the spinal fluid and attack the brain. The doctors called his situation “N of 1,” indicating his was the only case like this in history.
He was placed on a breathing ventilator, an IV of four of the most effective anti-bacterial drugs available, and numerous electronic monitoring devices. The only other thing that could be done was to wait and pray that the drugs would kill the E. coli bacteria before they destroyed his brain. Family members and friends maintained an around-the-clock bedside vigil holding his hand, imploring him to wake up, and reassuring him that he would he would recover. For every hour he remained in a coma his chance of survival was reduced dramatically.
After seven days the doctors gave up all hope and held a conference with his family and recommended suspension of all medical interventions. They warned that even if he came out of the coma, he would most likely be in a permanent vegetative state. Everyone was reluctantly in agreement except for Sylvia White. She was a longtime friend of his wife Holly and insisted on trying to revive him one more time. She went into his room and put her hand on his arm and was gently stroking it when his eyes opened. His first words were, “Thank you.” Dr. Alexander went on to make a complete mental and physical recovery.
Eben described his coma experiences as “The Core,” an encounter with the Divine. He makes more than thirty references to God or the Creator. At one point he calls him “Om” describing him as “a divine breeze,” a “higher vibration,” and a “dazzling darkness brimming with light.” He admits that he never actually saw God, and that God did not speak to him in words. Dr. Alexander realized that skeptics would use science and reason to explain his experiences as natural and not divine. He developed arguments to counter these anticipated attempts to explain what happened to him in a scientific way.
Eben uses two core arguments. First, consciousness is separate and independent from the brain (an old idea of duality). Second, once the neocortex of his brain was damaged, it would be impossible for him to experience what he recalled while in a coma. Since bacterial meningitis had destroyed his neocortex, his coma experiences had to take place in his conscious mind outside of his body and brain. In short he had a divine experience in Heaven with God.
I must remind the reader that Dr. Alexander is a neurosurgeon and not a neuroscientist. A neurosurgeon is to a neuroscientist what an automobile mechanic is to an automotive engineer. One does not need to understand all the technical details of how a combustion engine functions to repair it. The same is true about neurosurgeons. They do not need to understand all the technical details of neuroscience in order to operate and make “repairs.” This is not to suggest that neurosurgeons are not highly educated and skilled physicians who save the lives of thousands of patients every day. But it is to say that they spend most of their effort perfecting their surgical skills for operating on the brain. Neuroscientists in contrast spend all their time studying and researching how the brain functions. Most neuroscientists dispute Alexander’s claim that his experience was supernatural and proved the existence of God and heaven.
Even if you accept his premise that once the neocortex of his brain was damaged it would have been impossible for him to have had the experiences he had while in a coma, his conclusion that it was the result of a divine event does not follow. Since he did not have any concept of time while in a coma, his “divine” experience could have occurred before his neocortex was destroyed and obviously would be available for recall along with all his other memories. After all, he did make a full recovery without any lost of memory including his medical knowledge.
The reading list at the back of the book is very predictive of the book’s direction. For an example, consider the following titles: The Physics of Angels, The Mind of God, The Fingerprints of God, Evidence of Afterlife, and We Do Not Die Alone: Jesus Is Coming to Get Me in a White Pickup Truck. It is easy to see what audience Dr. Alexander had in mind for his book.
He employed all the usual tricks used by people attempting to protect faith from the constant and deadly attack from science. One example is to use as many Einstein quotes as possible in an attempt to give credibility by association rather than by solid scientific facts and logical arguments. Remember Einstein was a self-proclaimed deist and not a person of faith. And, of course he played the “Quantum Mechanics” card. I must remind the reader that quantum mechanics only applies to the micro (very small) world and no one has ever been able to demonstrate a quantum effect with any object larger than a “Buckyball,” a man-made item consisting of only forty atoms of carbon. Anytime Quantum Theory is used to explain some supernatural event, you can be certain that the advocate is going way out on the proverbially limb of improbability.
Stephen Hawking, a theoretical physicists held the chair of the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1979 to 2009, a position once held by Isaac Newton. He is the author of many best-selling books and observed that references to God increases the sales of a book whereas the inclusion of mathematical equations decreases sales. Dr. Alexander applied the Hawking rule quite well. He invoked God and the Creator more than thirty times, and did not employ a single equation in his book. He even modified a well-known notation from “N = 1” to “N of 1.” Proof of Heaven was ranked #1 on a recent New York Times best-selling list. His publisher even managed to get the book on the front page of Newsweek Magazine in October 2012. The book will undoubtedly be a big money maker.
Dr. Sam Harris, a well-respected neuroscientist had the following to say about the book, “The evidence he provides for his claim (Proof of Heaven) is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science.” Harris points out that “Alexander makes no reference to functional data that might have been acquired by fMRI, PET, or EEG,” and could have been used to support his case. Dr. Mark Cohen, a pioneer in the field of neuroimaging said the following about Alexander’s experience, “This poetic interpretation of his experience is not supported by evidence of any kind.” My conclusion is that Dr. Alexander would have been better served by appealing to the power of faith leaving science to the scientists. I found his arguments for a divine experience weaker than the chicken soup made from the shadow of a starving chicken. In the words of Dorothy Parker, “This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It is to be thrown with great force.”
Sources:
1. Proof of Heaven, A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (2012) by Dr. Eben Alexander
2. Blog, This Must be Heaven by Sam Harris
3. Bog: Epistemology, What is truth? by Needlefish Chronicles
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Saturday, February 16, 2013
The Passover Plot
The virgin birth of Christ and his crucifixion and resurrection constitutes the core of Christian doctrine and its acceptance is mandatory for all Christians. Seventy-three percent of all Americans claim to be Christians and accept Christian doctrine without question. There is however considerable historical evidence indicating that key elements of the story including the crucifixion are not true.
Hugh J. Schonfield, a distinguished and respected biblical scholar presented the following historical facts concerning Roman crucifixion laws, customs, and procedures in his 1965 book, The Passover Plot:
1. It had to be for a crime against Rome and was normally political in nature.
2. It was conducted publicly with large crowds of people in attendance.
3. It was against the law to remove a crucifixion victim from the cross for burial.
4. It was not the Romans’ custom to spare any prisoner’s life on the Passover.
5. It takes two to seven days for to die by crucifixion.
6. When vinegar is given to a weakened and dehydrated person such as someone being crucified, it “revives” them or gives them a short increase in energy or vitality.
7. The final step in the crucifixion procedure was to break the legs of the condemned person.
How does the New Testament’s story of the crucifixion of Christ compare to the above stated procedure? First, there is not any indication that Jesus violated any Roman law that could result in a sentence of crucifixion. And if the Jews wanted him dead, they could have charged him with heresy and he would have been stoned to death. Second, most scholars believe that he was crucified at Gethsemane, a private garden owned by Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple. Third, Pontius Pilate released Jesus’s body to Joseph of Arimathea. Fourth, as stated, the Romans never had a custom of sparing anyone’s life on the Passover. Fifth, Jesus was only on the cross two hours. Sixth, when asked for something to drink and was allegedly given vinegar and after he drank it, he “gave up the ghost,” instead of experiencing the normal and expected temporary revival or burst of energy. Seventh, they did not break Jesus’s legs at the end as was the Roman custom at that time.
The conclusion is obvious that Jesus was not crucified in the normal manner. Many Bible scholars and historians believe that his crucifixion was a hoax. Instead of giving Christ vinegar on the cross he was given belladonna which knocked him out making him appear dead. Afterwards, Joseph of Arimathea persuaded Pilate to release Jesus’ body to him for internment in his private tomb. Later it was an easy matter to stage his resurrection.
According to Michael Baigent in his book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Father Berenger Saunier discovered an ancient parchment document in 1891 at Rennes-le-Chateau, France hidden in the altar at his church. It indicated that Christ did not die on the cross but in fact lived to be at least 80 years of age, married, and fathered children thus leaving behind descendants. In 2012 Karen Leigh King, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the Harvard Divinity School deciphered a papyrus fragment written in Coptic which reads “Jesus said to them, 'My wife...” Her finding was taken seriously enough by the Vatican to declare it a fake.
In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd discovered ancient writings in what was then Jordan (the Dead Sea Scrolls) causing Christian apologists and defenders even more problems concerning the historical veracity of the King James’ version of the New Testament. In 1958, the “missing” fragment of the Gospel of Mark was found which contradicted John’s version of the raising of Lazarus from the dead essentially saying that it did not happen. Mark also failed to make any reference to the death and resurrection of Jesus. Apparently the resurrection was added to Mark’s Gospel by editors back in the fourth century. It should be noted that the Vatican has controlled the excavation, interpretation, and publishing of any resulting work concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In 1960, Pope John XXIII issued an apostolic letter titled “the precious blood of Jesus” that altered the basic tenet of Catholicism concerning the redemption and salvation of man. In this letter, Pope John XXIII stated that redemption is the result of the shedding of Jesus’s blood and is not dependent on his death and resurrection. If the Pope had proof that Jesus did not die on the cross, then he could use his authority as the final arbitrator of theological issues relating to faith and morals to simply change the doctrine to adapt to any historical record threatening church doctrine. This is the concept of the “infallibility” which claims that the Pope has divine guidance concerning matters of faith and morals and cannot be in error. One does not need to accept this notion to realize that Pope John XXIII did not change basic Catholic doctrine casually. At the very least it suggests that he had good reason to believe that Jesus did not die on the cross.
In light of all of this plus variously contradictions and differences in the four Gospels’ accounts of the resurrection, the conclusion is inevitable and that is the crucifixion of Jesus was a hoax. The Vatican obliviously knows this, otherwise Pope John XXIII would not have published his apostolic letter “the precious blood of Jesus.”
There is also considerable evidence available that Christ was not “crucified” on a cross. According to the Anglican theologian Bullinger, the word “cross” was translated from the Greek word “stauros” which never implied two pieces of wood placed across each other at any angle. The word “stauros” is best translated as a stake or pole. Many years ago my next-door neighbors, a Jewish family of five including three children nearing their teenage years vacationed to Russia where they spend one month taking in many historical sites including a number of old Russian Orthodox Churches such as the one located in St. Petersburg. The father related the reaction of his young children when they first witnessed the large depictions of Jesus on the Cross that adorned the church walls. They were shocked and horrified at the brutality and ugliness being portrayed. George Carlin asked the question, “If Christ had been killed in an electric chair, would Christians wear a replica of an electric chair around their neck today?”
Sources:
1. The Passover Plot (1965) by Hugh J. Schonfield
2. Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982) by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln
3. The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (1991) by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh
4. The Crucifixion Hoax (Blog) by Abdullah Smith
5. The Gospel Truth (Blog) by Needlefish Chronicles
Hugh J. Schonfield, a distinguished and respected biblical scholar presented the following historical facts concerning Roman crucifixion laws, customs, and procedures in his 1965 book, The Passover Plot:
1. It had to be for a crime against Rome and was normally political in nature.
2. It was conducted publicly with large crowds of people in attendance.
3. It was against the law to remove a crucifixion victim from the cross for burial.
4. It was not the Romans’ custom to spare any prisoner’s life on the Passover.
5. It takes two to seven days for to die by crucifixion.
6. When vinegar is given to a weakened and dehydrated person such as someone being crucified, it “revives” them or gives them a short increase in energy or vitality.
7. The final step in the crucifixion procedure was to break the legs of the condemned person.
How does the New Testament’s story of the crucifixion of Christ compare to the above stated procedure? First, there is not any indication that Jesus violated any Roman law that could result in a sentence of crucifixion. And if the Jews wanted him dead, they could have charged him with heresy and he would have been stoned to death. Second, most scholars believe that he was crucified at Gethsemane, a private garden owned by Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple. Third, Pontius Pilate released Jesus’s body to Joseph of Arimathea. Fourth, as stated, the Romans never had a custom of sparing anyone’s life on the Passover. Fifth, Jesus was only on the cross two hours. Sixth, when asked for something to drink and was allegedly given vinegar and after he drank it, he “gave up the ghost,” instead of experiencing the normal and expected temporary revival or burst of energy. Seventh, they did not break Jesus’s legs at the end as was the Roman custom at that time.
The conclusion is obvious that Jesus was not crucified in the normal manner. Many Bible scholars and historians believe that his crucifixion was a hoax. Instead of giving Christ vinegar on the cross he was given belladonna which knocked him out making him appear dead. Afterwards, Joseph of Arimathea persuaded Pilate to release Jesus’ body to him for internment in his private tomb. Later it was an easy matter to stage his resurrection.
According to Michael Baigent in his book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Father Berenger Saunier discovered an ancient parchment document in 1891 at Rennes-le-Chateau, France hidden in the altar at his church. It indicated that Christ did not die on the cross but in fact lived to be at least 80 years of age, married, and fathered children thus leaving behind descendants. In 2012 Karen Leigh King, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the Harvard Divinity School deciphered a papyrus fragment written in Coptic which reads “Jesus said to them, 'My wife...” Her finding was taken seriously enough by the Vatican to declare it a fake.
In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd discovered ancient writings in what was then Jordan (the Dead Sea Scrolls) causing Christian apologists and defenders even more problems concerning the historical veracity of the King James’ version of the New Testament. In 1958, the “missing” fragment of the Gospel of Mark was found which contradicted John’s version of the raising of Lazarus from the dead essentially saying that it did not happen. Mark also failed to make any reference to the death and resurrection of Jesus. Apparently the resurrection was added to Mark’s Gospel by editors back in the fourth century. It should be noted that the Vatican has controlled the excavation, interpretation, and publishing of any resulting work concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In 1960, Pope John XXIII issued an apostolic letter titled “the precious blood of Jesus” that altered the basic tenet of Catholicism concerning the redemption and salvation of man. In this letter, Pope John XXIII stated that redemption is the result of the shedding of Jesus’s blood and is not dependent on his death and resurrection. If the Pope had proof that Jesus did not die on the cross, then he could use his authority as the final arbitrator of theological issues relating to faith and morals to simply change the doctrine to adapt to any historical record threatening church doctrine. This is the concept of the “infallibility” which claims that the Pope has divine guidance concerning matters of faith and morals and cannot be in error. One does not need to accept this notion to realize that Pope John XXIII did not change basic Catholic doctrine casually. At the very least it suggests that he had good reason to believe that Jesus did not die on the cross.
In light of all of this plus variously contradictions and differences in the four Gospels’ accounts of the resurrection, the conclusion is inevitable and that is the crucifixion of Jesus was a hoax. The Vatican obliviously knows this, otherwise Pope John XXIII would not have published his apostolic letter “the precious blood of Jesus.”
There is also considerable evidence available that Christ was not “crucified” on a cross. According to the Anglican theologian Bullinger, the word “cross” was translated from the Greek word “stauros” which never implied two pieces of wood placed across each other at any angle. The word “stauros” is best translated as a stake or pole. Many years ago my next-door neighbors, a Jewish family of five including three children nearing their teenage years vacationed to Russia where they spend one month taking in many historical sites including a number of old Russian Orthodox Churches such as the one located in St. Petersburg. The father related the reaction of his young children when they first witnessed the large depictions of Jesus on the Cross that adorned the church walls. They were shocked and horrified at the brutality and ugliness being portrayed. George Carlin asked the question, “If Christ had been killed in an electric chair, would Christians wear a replica of an electric chair around their neck today?”
Sources:
1. The Passover Plot (1965) by Hugh J. Schonfield
2. Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982) by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln
3. The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (1991) by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh
4. The Crucifixion Hoax (Blog) by Abdullah Smith
5. The Gospel Truth (Blog) by Needlefish Chronicles
Monday, January 28, 2013
The Gospel Truth
Note: All dates in this Blog are CE “common eras” which are equivalent to AD.
The New Testament is the result of the efforts of fourth century politicians, church leaders, and editors all with vested interests to protect and advance. To understand what happened, it is necessary to carefully review its history. After Jesus “departed” the historical scene, various writings appeared some 30 to 75 years after the fact and were attributed to various people. Prior to that the New Testament history was oral, passed on from one person to another. After these oral histories were recorded, thousands of handwritten copies existed in various languages. These writings were translated from Greek to Latin and eventually to German, English and other languages. In all language translations, original intentions and meanings can be distorted or loss. For example when the Hebrew word “messiah” was translated to Greek it became “christos” or in English, Christ. Another example is the Hebrew word “almah” meaning a young unmarried woman was translated to the Greek word “parthenos” for virgin.
Some time in and around the year 36 early “Christians” were divided into two major factions with separate objectives. The first group was primarily political interested in maintaining the “right to the throne,” claiming that Jesus was the Messiah and a descendant of the House of David. The second, the “message” group was interested in establishing a religion and church based on the life of Christ as a deity. This second group was eventually dominated by Saul of Tarsus (5 - 67) who was also known as the Apostle Paul, the most influential early Christian.
The King James’ version of the New Testament is for the most part the result of a political process more than a theological or historical one. Early Christian word of mouth accounts were eventually reduced to writing by those without any first hand knowledge about the events they were writing about. Please keep in mind that Paul was born after Christ died and obviously never met him. Yet he wrote thirteen of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, which is about 32% of the text. It is important to also remember that for the most part the disciples were illiterate, ignorant fishermen who spoke Aramaic. Therefore it is not surprising that there is an honest historical dispute over who wrote what. If all of this is not enough to question New Testament’s veracity, the Emperor Diocletian destroyed almost all of the “original” written sources in the year 303.
By the year 325 (almost three-hundred years after his death) the issue of the nature of Christ was so much in doubt that the Council of Nicaea had to decide the matter by a vote. In the same year the Roman Emperor Constantine, a pagan follower of Sol Invictus (the sun God), “embraced” Christianity for political reasons as a means of consolidating his power by bringing Christians into the fold in an attempt to unify the Roman Empire. Constantine himself was not baptized until shortly before his death causing many Bible scholars to seriously doubt the sincerity of his conversion to Christianity. Interestingly, he changed Jesus’s birth date from January 8 to December 25 (the birth date of Sol Invictus) Remember that on average December 25 is the first day of winter to have more daylight than the day before and of course was an important issue to sun worshipers. It is ironic that every Christmas, Christians cry out to put Christ back into Christmas without realizing that it was Sol Invictus not Christ that had been ousted.
When in the year 331 Constantine ordered and financed the publishing of the New Testament, Christian leaders such as Bishop Athanasius and Saint Augustine were presented with the perfect opportunity to rewrite history to fit their agenda, and they took full advantage of their chance. As a result many texts were omitted, modified, or outright changed. Athanasius compiled a list of what material was to be included in the New Testament in the year 367. Excluded as not being canonical was the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Judas. Some scholars, based on references in ancient texts, believe that there were as many as twelve other gospels that have been lost or destroyed. The Council of Hippo and Saint Augustine approved Athanasius’ work in 393 resulting in the King James Bible.
The matter would have probably been settled except for the fact that Diocletian’s efforts to rid the world of all the early Church writings were not entirely successful. Apparently monks at various remote monasteries disobeyed orders to surrender their treasured holy writings and instead hid them in various ways. In 1947 a Bedouin shepherd discovered ancient writings in what was then Jordan called the Dead Sea Scrolls. This caused Christian apologists and defenders even more problems concerning the historical veracity of the King James Bible.
In 1958 the “missing” fragment of the Gospel of Mark was found which contradicts John’s version of the raising of Lazarus from the dead essentially saying that it did not happen. Mark also failed to make any reference to the death and resurrection of Jesus. Apparently the resurrection was added to Mark’s Gospel by editors back in the fourth century. It should be noted that the Vatican has controlled the excavation, interpretation, and publishing of any resulting work concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Since the Bible (the Old and New Testament) is presented as the history of the Jewish people and the life and death of Christ, it is only natural that it would command the interest of historians. They, of course, brought the tools and procedures of their profession with them. These tools included various means of determining the accuracy of any historical record. Historians distinguish between primary and secondary sources. A primary source is one where the author personally witnessed the events under consideration. A secondary source is one who did not personally witness an event but is relying on someone else claiming personal knowledge. In the legal world, secondary sources are called “hear say” and with a few careful exceptions are not allowed.
Sources can also be classified as known, unknown, or anonymous. Of course the most reliable sources are known primary sources. In the case of the King James Bible the authorship of the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) is in serious dispute. Most scholars believe that all the Gospels are based on Mark and most likely were not written by him. These unknown writers relied on oral histories that had been circulating in the area for many years. There is little or no evidence that the authors of the Gospels were known or primary sources of the information.
The degree that different accounts of any historical event are in agreement is very important to historians in determining their accuracy. In the case of the four Gospels there are sufficient factual differences to cause suspicion about their authenticity. For example, Mark did not report any appearances of the raised Jesus whereas the others provide three different accounts of Jesus' appearances after his resurrection. John 7:42 says that Christ was from the town of Bethlehem but Luke 1:26 cites Nazareth as his birth place. There are enough significant differences between the four Gospels to seriously question their value as reliable historical evidence.
Objectivity is another important consideration when evaluating historical writings. It is unreasonable to think that the authors of the New Testament would be objective. With this in mind historians are very interested in what secular historians wrote concerning the same period of time. In fact, they said very little and what is more significant is what they did not report. For example, Matthew 27:52 describes a mass resurrection of many saints at the same time as the resurrection of Christ. In his words, “And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose.” By anyone’s standards the resurrection of many long dead persons would be a most newsworthy story that would get passed along and eventually find its way into the records of historians of the time. However, this extraordinary event was not mentioned by any historian of the time.
The credibility of the King James’ version of the New Testament would be greatly enhanced if the writings of the leading historians of the time referenced events mentioned in the Gospels. However, support for the Gospels’ narrative of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ is both scant and oblique in the writings of contemporary secular historians.
Christian apologists are fond of citing the works of Flavius Josephus in support of the historical accuracy of the Bible. Flavius was a first century Jewish-Roman historian who even fought against the Romans during the First Jewish–Roman War. He was the leader of Jewish forces in Galilee until surrendering in 67 to Roman forces. His two most important writings were, The Jewish War (75) and Antiquities of the Jews (94). The Jewish War is his account of the Jewish revolt against Roman occupation from the years 66 to 70 whereas the Antiquities of the Jews recounts the persecution of the Jews by the Romans. According to John Remsburg, as quoted by Kenneth Harding, modern versions of the Antiquities of the Jews contains the following passage:
"Now, there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works; a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day."
Josephus was a renowned Jewish historian, a native of Judea, and a contemporary of the Apostles. He was also a prolific chronicler of persons and events of the first seventy years of the Christian era. It is strange that in his first book, The Jewish War written in the year 75, there is not any mention of Christ but the Antiquities of the Jews (a twenty-volume tone) written almost twenty years later “contains” the definitive passage cited above supporting the Gospels. The passage cited is obviously Christian in tone. It is also extremely brief in contrast to Josephus’ voluminous and exhaustive style. In one case he devoted almost forty chapters to the life of just one king. He wrote pages on petty robbers and obscure leaders of the time, but who could believe that he only wrote one paragraph about Christ? According to Kenneth Harding and other scholars it is a blatant Christian forgery that was added to the Antiquities of the Jews many years later.
New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman, a James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of four New York Times bestsellers, concurs saying that there are not any reliable historical accounts of the life and resurrection of Christ. Thomas Paine, one of the heroes of the American Revolution, wrote “the Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions there is no knowing which parts to believe or whether any.”
Of course the underlying “truths” of any document does not rest entirely on the judgements of historians and scholars. One can read and enjoy Shakespeare and gain valuable insights on human nature without actually knowing who he or she actually was. Christianity like all religions can be evaluated based on two criteria: Are they true and are they beneficial? In the words of Matthew 7:20 “Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” Questions about the usefulness or morality of the fruits of the tree of Christianity is a subject for another time.
From the earliest days of the Christian church there has always been two ways of reading the Bible, literally and allegorically. Saint Jerome suggested a literal interpretation for the illiterate masses and an allegorical one for more advanced minds. Evangelical Christians (especially in the United States) insist that the Bible is literally true. They are so strong and dogmatic in their belief that they devote enormous time and expense in denying evolution and insisting on teaching Creationism (as spelled out in Genesis) in schools as an alternative to evolution. They apparently have forgotten the words of Augustine who said “it would be hard to convince rational men to follow a religion that denied things one could see for oneself.”
Voltaire once said that “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” Later Karl Marx claimed that “Man makes religion, religion does not make man.” For me the conclusion is inevitable; all the evidence and reason strongly suggest that Christianity like all religions is man made.
Sources:
1. The Rocks Don’t Lie (2012) by David Montgomery
2. A History of God (1993) by Karen Armstrong
3. The Evolution of God (2009) by Robert Wright
4. The Gnostic Gospels (1979) by Elaine Pagels
5. The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (1991) by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh
6. Do Any First Century Historians Mention the Jesus of Christianity? by Kenneth Harding (2002)
The New Testament is the result of the efforts of fourth century politicians, church leaders, and editors all with vested interests to protect and advance. To understand what happened, it is necessary to carefully review its history. After Jesus “departed” the historical scene, various writings appeared some 30 to 75 years after the fact and were attributed to various people. Prior to that the New Testament history was oral, passed on from one person to another. After these oral histories were recorded, thousands of handwritten copies existed in various languages. These writings were translated from Greek to Latin and eventually to German, English and other languages. In all language translations, original intentions and meanings can be distorted or loss. For example when the Hebrew word “messiah” was translated to Greek it became “christos” or in English, Christ. Another example is the Hebrew word “almah” meaning a young unmarried woman was translated to the Greek word “parthenos” for virgin.
Some time in and around the year 36 early “Christians” were divided into two major factions with separate objectives. The first group was primarily political interested in maintaining the “right to the throne,” claiming that Jesus was the Messiah and a descendant of the House of David. The second, the “message” group was interested in establishing a religion and church based on the life of Christ as a deity. This second group was eventually dominated by Saul of Tarsus (5 - 67) who was also known as the Apostle Paul, the most influential early Christian.
The King James’ version of the New Testament is for the most part the result of a political process more than a theological or historical one. Early Christian word of mouth accounts were eventually reduced to writing by those without any first hand knowledge about the events they were writing about. Please keep in mind that Paul was born after Christ died and obviously never met him. Yet he wrote thirteen of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, which is about 32% of the text. It is important to also remember that for the most part the disciples were illiterate, ignorant fishermen who spoke Aramaic. Therefore it is not surprising that there is an honest historical dispute over who wrote what. If all of this is not enough to question New Testament’s veracity, the Emperor Diocletian destroyed almost all of the “original” written sources in the year 303.
By the year 325 (almost three-hundred years after his death) the issue of the nature of Christ was so much in doubt that the Council of Nicaea had to decide the matter by a vote. In the same year the Roman Emperor Constantine, a pagan follower of Sol Invictus (the sun God), “embraced” Christianity for political reasons as a means of consolidating his power by bringing Christians into the fold in an attempt to unify the Roman Empire. Constantine himself was not baptized until shortly before his death causing many Bible scholars to seriously doubt the sincerity of his conversion to Christianity. Interestingly, he changed Jesus’s birth date from January 8 to December 25 (the birth date of Sol Invictus) Remember that on average December 25 is the first day of winter to have more daylight than the day before and of course was an important issue to sun worshipers. It is ironic that every Christmas, Christians cry out to put Christ back into Christmas without realizing that it was Sol Invictus not Christ that had been ousted.
When in the year 331 Constantine ordered and financed the publishing of the New Testament, Christian leaders such as Bishop Athanasius and Saint Augustine were presented with the perfect opportunity to rewrite history to fit their agenda, and they took full advantage of their chance. As a result many texts were omitted, modified, or outright changed. Athanasius compiled a list of what material was to be included in the New Testament in the year 367. Excluded as not being canonical was the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Judas. Some scholars, based on references in ancient texts, believe that there were as many as twelve other gospels that have been lost or destroyed. The Council of Hippo and Saint Augustine approved Athanasius’ work in 393 resulting in the King James Bible.
The matter would have probably been settled except for the fact that Diocletian’s efforts to rid the world of all the early Church writings were not entirely successful. Apparently monks at various remote monasteries disobeyed orders to surrender their treasured holy writings and instead hid them in various ways. In 1947 a Bedouin shepherd discovered ancient writings in what was then Jordan called the Dead Sea Scrolls. This caused Christian apologists and defenders even more problems concerning the historical veracity of the King James Bible.
In 1958 the “missing” fragment of the Gospel of Mark was found which contradicts John’s version of the raising of Lazarus from the dead essentially saying that it did not happen. Mark also failed to make any reference to the death and resurrection of Jesus. Apparently the resurrection was added to Mark’s Gospel by editors back in the fourth century. It should be noted that the Vatican has controlled the excavation, interpretation, and publishing of any resulting work concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Since the Bible (the Old and New Testament) is presented as the history of the Jewish people and the life and death of Christ, it is only natural that it would command the interest of historians. They, of course, brought the tools and procedures of their profession with them. These tools included various means of determining the accuracy of any historical record. Historians distinguish between primary and secondary sources. A primary source is one where the author personally witnessed the events under consideration. A secondary source is one who did not personally witness an event but is relying on someone else claiming personal knowledge. In the legal world, secondary sources are called “hear say” and with a few careful exceptions are not allowed.
Sources can also be classified as known, unknown, or anonymous. Of course the most reliable sources are known primary sources. In the case of the King James Bible the authorship of the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) is in serious dispute. Most scholars believe that all the Gospels are based on Mark and most likely were not written by him. These unknown writers relied on oral histories that had been circulating in the area for many years. There is little or no evidence that the authors of the Gospels were known or primary sources of the information.
The degree that different accounts of any historical event are in agreement is very important to historians in determining their accuracy. In the case of the four Gospels there are sufficient factual differences to cause suspicion about their authenticity. For example, Mark did not report any appearances of the raised Jesus whereas the others provide three different accounts of Jesus' appearances after his resurrection. John 7:42 says that Christ was from the town of Bethlehem but Luke 1:26 cites Nazareth as his birth place. There are enough significant differences between the four Gospels to seriously question their value as reliable historical evidence.
Objectivity is another important consideration when evaluating historical writings. It is unreasonable to think that the authors of the New Testament would be objective. With this in mind historians are very interested in what secular historians wrote concerning the same period of time. In fact, they said very little and what is more significant is what they did not report. For example, Matthew 27:52 describes a mass resurrection of many saints at the same time as the resurrection of Christ. In his words, “And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose.” By anyone’s standards the resurrection of many long dead persons would be a most newsworthy story that would get passed along and eventually find its way into the records of historians of the time. However, this extraordinary event was not mentioned by any historian of the time.
The credibility of the King James’ version of the New Testament would be greatly enhanced if the writings of the leading historians of the time referenced events mentioned in the Gospels. However, support for the Gospels’ narrative of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ is both scant and oblique in the writings of contemporary secular historians.
Christian apologists are fond of citing the works of Flavius Josephus in support of the historical accuracy of the Bible. Flavius was a first century Jewish-Roman historian who even fought against the Romans during the First Jewish–Roman War. He was the leader of Jewish forces in Galilee until surrendering in 67 to Roman forces. His two most important writings were, The Jewish War (75) and Antiquities of the Jews (94). The Jewish War is his account of the Jewish revolt against Roman occupation from the years 66 to 70 whereas the Antiquities of the Jews recounts the persecution of the Jews by the Romans. According to John Remsburg, as quoted by Kenneth Harding, modern versions of the Antiquities of the Jews contains the following passage:
"Now, there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works; a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day."
Josephus was a renowned Jewish historian, a native of Judea, and a contemporary of the Apostles. He was also a prolific chronicler of persons and events of the first seventy years of the Christian era. It is strange that in his first book, The Jewish War written in the year 75, there is not any mention of Christ but the Antiquities of the Jews (a twenty-volume tone) written almost twenty years later “contains” the definitive passage cited above supporting the Gospels. The passage cited is obviously Christian in tone. It is also extremely brief in contrast to Josephus’ voluminous and exhaustive style. In one case he devoted almost forty chapters to the life of just one king. He wrote pages on petty robbers and obscure leaders of the time, but who could believe that he only wrote one paragraph about Christ? According to Kenneth Harding and other scholars it is a blatant Christian forgery that was added to the Antiquities of the Jews many years later.
New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman, a James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of four New York Times bestsellers, concurs saying that there are not any reliable historical accounts of the life and resurrection of Christ. Thomas Paine, one of the heroes of the American Revolution, wrote “the Bible is such a book of lies and contradictions there is no knowing which parts to believe or whether any.”
Of course the underlying “truths” of any document does not rest entirely on the judgements of historians and scholars. One can read and enjoy Shakespeare and gain valuable insights on human nature without actually knowing who he or she actually was. Christianity like all religions can be evaluated based on two criteria: Are they true and are they beneficial? In the words of Matthew 7:20 “Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” Questions about the usefulness or morality of the fruits of the tree of Christianity is a subject for another time.
From the earliest days of the Christian church there has always been two ways of reading the Bible, literally and allegorically. Saint Jerome suggested a literal interpretation for the illiterate masses and an allegorical one for more advanced minds. Evangelical Christians (especially in the United States) insist that the Bible is literally true. They are so strong and dogmatic in their belief that they devote enormous time and expense in denying evolution and insisting on teaching Creationism (as spelled out in Genesis) in schools as an alternative to evolution. They apparently have forgotten the words of Augustine who said “it would be hard to convince rational men to follow a religion that denied things one could see for oneself.”
Voltaire once said that “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” Later Karl Marx claimed that “Man makes religion, religion does not make man.” For me the conclusion is inevitable; all the evidence and reason strongly suggest that Christianity like all religions is man made.
Sources:
1. The Rocks Don’t Lie (2012) by David Montgomery
2. A History of God (1993) by Karen Armstrong
3. The Evolution of God (2009) by Robert Wright
4. The Gnostic Gospels (1979) by Elaine Pagels
5. The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (1991) by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh
6. Do Any First Century Historians Mention the Jesus of Christianity? by Kenneth Harding (2002)
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Epistemology, What is truth?
“Truth” is a difficult word to define. According to the dictionary it is defined as “a statement proven to be acceptable or true.” This is an example of arguing in a circle by claiming truth is something that is true. To avoid the various pitfalls inherent in defining abstractions, the following classification system of truths will be employed:
Absolute truth
Scientific truth
Legal truth
Authoritative truth
Intuitive truth
Faith-based truth
Absolute truth is also called mathematical truth. The method for determining mathematical truth is to the start out with a conjecture and then demonstrate by a series of logical steps that the conjecture is true. Once a conjecture is proven, it becomes a theorem and can then be used to prove other conjectures. Thus a mathematical proof is series of steps relying on theorems, mathematical logic, and axioms to show that some conjecture is true. Every step in the series must be true. Each step is like a link in a chain; break one link in the chain and entire chain fails.
Axioms are mathematical propositions that have not been proven, but are accepted to be self-evident. It has always been offensive to some mathematicians to admit that some fundamental proposition vital to the field had to be thought of as self-evident rather than proven along with all the other theorems. David Hilbert (1862 - 1943), a German mathematician, took on the task of proving all the axioms (Hilbert’s program), but Kurt Godel (1906 - 1978), an Austrian-American logician, proved by his two incompleteness theorems that there are propositions that are true but cannot be proven. To this extent, one must concede that there is always some element of uncertainty even in mathematics. Anecdotally speaking, it can be argued that axioms must be true since they are the foundation of the house of proven mathematics and the house has not collapsed. In conclusion, once a theorem is proved, it is proved forever and is not subject to change.
A scientific truth is an idea or proposition that has been vetted through a process called the scientific method and found to be true. Stated differently, it is a proposed explanation for some observable facts. After it is proven true based on the evidence, it is promoted to theory. Scientific theory is a proven hypothesis. As such, it is the highest level of certainty that can be achieved by science. The theory of relativity and the theory of gravity are two well-known scientific theories. Sometimes a theory is called law, as in the law of gravity.
Unfortunately, the word “theory” has a different meaning when used by lay people. In everyday speech John might say, “I have a theory that Mary wants to date me.” In this sense it is a suspicion, a feeling, or at best some conjecture (or hope). If someone says the “evolution is only a theory,” this is equivalent to saying “Mary only won a gold medal at the Olympics.” If someone thinks that there is a higher award than the gold medal in the Olympics, then they are ignorant of the facts. If they are aware of the facts and still persist in claiming “Mary only won a gold medal,” they are being dishonest. To say that some scientific fact is only a theory is to say that it is only the highest level of truth obtainable in science, and indicates the author of the statement is either ignorant or dishonest. Still, even with the high level of confidence that scientific theories are held, there is almost always some degree of uncertainty. This is the major difference between science and dogma.
The process of proving any given hypothesis uses two logical methods, inductive logic and deductive logic. The inductive method is a “bottom up” method in as much as it starts at the bottom by making observations and/or conducting experiments. Deductive logic starts with existing theories and then deduces from them some hypothesis which is then proved or disproved by observations and experiments.
A hypothesis is a formally developed idea backed by supporting data with sufficient credibility to gain the attention of the accepted authorities in the field of inquiry and is now ready for vetting or peer review. A hypothesis must also make some predictions that can be independently verified by someone else. The results are written as a paper and then submitted to the editors of a technical publication devoted to the field of interest most closely related to the subject under consideration. All major fields of interest have many professional organizations such as the American Institute of Physics, which in turn publish a number of journals such as Applied Physics Review. At any rate, the first challenge for a hopeful hypothesis is acceptance for publication. The editors do not want to risk their standing in the field by publishing some idea that is then proven to be false or worse yet lacks any serious merit or consideration. These editors normally use a group of experts to critically review submissions and if they feel that the hypothesis has merit it is then published.
Now the hypothesis undergoes major vetting. Scientists and other experts around the world will read the paper and, of course, vigorously challenge both the methods, data, and conclusions. These people are by nature skeptical of anything new. There is also considerable ego and personal jealousy involved. The more radical the idea is the more it will be resisted. Radical in this context refers to what extent the idea is in opposition to some widely long-held truth. It has been said that one of the most important ingredients of scientific advancement is the death of older scientists.
Early natural philosophers (now called scientists) understood that sound is a wave propagated through the atmosphere by bouncing off the molecules of the gasses that make up air. This was easily demonstrated by securing a bell inside a glass jar, and then tightening the lid on the jar. Shake the jar and the bell rings. If all the air is removed from the jar, a vacuum is created. Now if the jar is shaken, the bell will not ring. It actually still “rings” but without the medium of air the sound of the bell cannot be propagated.
Given the way sound works, it seemed reasonable to conjecture that light (also a wave) must have some medium for light to propagate itself through the atmosphere and through space. After all, at night we can observe the light coming in from the stars. Air as a medium has to be eliminated since the atmosphere only extends up about sixty miles from the surface of earth. Luminiferous aether (or simply aether) was concocted out of the whole cloth of intuition to provide the medium thought necessary to propagate light. It was thought to be invisible, undetectable, and ubiquitous. This was the accepted unchallenged truth going all the way back to Newton and earlier.
Albert Michelson became interested in light in 1877 while teaching chemistry at the United States Naval Academy where he conducted experiments concerning the speed of light. He, of course, never questioned the existence of aether. In fact his objective was to prove its existence as a theory instead of just a useful conjecture. His idea was that as the earth moved through aether on it way around the sun, the speed of light would be faster when the earth was moving away from the sun and slower when moving toward the sun. He thought that aether constituted a head wind while the earth was moving toward sun and a tail wind while moving away from it.
His technique was to split a bean of light into two beans, one in the same direction of the earth’s movement and one in the opposite direction. His hypothesis was that light would move slower when encountering the aether head wind. He persuaded Alexander Bell to fund the construction of an interferometer, a device that could time the speed of light. To his total surprise and disappointment he proved that the speed of light was constant (186,282 miles per second) and that aether did not exist. In 1907 Albert Michelson and his assistant Edward Morley received the Nobel Prize in physics for their work. This episode demonstrates an important feature of science; scientists learn just as much from failure as they do from a success. After all, Michelson’s goal was to prove that aether exists but he was wrong and proved the opposite.
Truth, of course, is very important to the criminal justice system. The objective is to serve justice by punishing the guilty and exonerating the innocent. In a sense a trial is a play performed by judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and witnesses for an audience of jurors. The judge is responsible for ensuring that the trial is conducted according to the laws (rules). The prosecutor presents and argues the evidence including witnesses in an attempt to convince the jury that the defendant is guilty. Defense attorneys have the responsibility to challenge the evidence and witnesses and at their option present their own evidence and witnesses in an attempt to convince the jury that the defendant is not guilty. The jury is the sole determiner of the facts of the case. They decide what evidence is true or false, and which witnesses are telling the truth and which ones are not. There are two critical points that should be noted; first the defendant is assumed to be innocent and second, the prosecutor has the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It should also be pointed out that a verdict of “Not Guilty” is not the same thing as innocent. In fact courts in England have a verdict of “Not Proven” instead of our “Not Guilty.”
Finding the truth in a civil legal case is similar to a criminal proceeding with two major differences. First, in a civil court case the defendant only has property, reputation, or money at risk rather than life or freedom as is the case in a criminal trial. Second, the standard for a verdict is by the preponderance of evidence. In other words, the evidence only has to slightly favor one side or the other for them to win.
Albert Einstein once famously said, “Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” This seems obvious and is accepted by most people, but in reality people are often convinced of the truth of some idea or concept based on some authority. Authority, of course, can be useful in judging the truth of something. This is especially true in cases where the matter in question is within the authority’s area of expertise. In many circumstances, laymen must rely on authorities in the field. The key point in Einstein’s quote concerns the word “blind.” The more consensuses there among the experts, the more confidence one can take in their conclusions.
Intuitive truth is a feeling that something is true. Although in many cases it may turn out to be true, intuition is not sufficiently reliable to be used without other supporting evidence. In science intuition is extremely useful in forming a hypothesis. Richard Feynman, an American Nobel Prize winner in physics, related an anecdote that may help explain why many people have more trust in intuition than is warranted. In college while he was working on a paper in the middle of the night, he suddenly had a terrible feeling that his grandmother died. A minute later his telephone rang. It was a wrong number! Feynman then pointed out that people only learn about and count the cases when intuition turns out to be true; they never remember or count the failures.
Mark Twain defined faith as believing something that you know is not true. Faith can also be described as accepting a hypothesis without requiring any evidence. Faith is similar to intuition and like authoritative truth is the least reliable of all the “truths.” The problem with intuition and faith is reasonable people can arrive at entirely contradictory conclusions without any way of resolving the conflict. In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
The seven varieties of truth discussed in this essay lie on a continuum of reliability in which mathematical and scientific truths are the most reliable and intuition and faith the least. While this scale is very useful in determining the truth of any idea, the following considerations can provide invaluable assistance to the process:
Burden of proof
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence
Miracles
Probability
Vested Interest
The author or originator of any hypothesis has the burden of proving it. This burden cannot be shifted to the skeptics. Failure to prove an idea false does not make it true. Shifting the burden is a popular method of argument for many advocates. For example, supporters of Creationism versus Evolution (Darwinism) employ burden shifting by attempting to discredit evolution on some point and them claiming Creationism true by default. Even if evolution was proven wrong, this would not make Creationism true. The fact that Creationists expend more effort on discrediting evolution and very little effort supporting Creationism with evidence is a strong indication that their claims have little merit. It should be noted that Intelligent Design and Creationism are one and the same. Creationism was repackaged as Intelligent Design in a failed legal attempt to force it into public schools as an alternative to Evolution.
The idea that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence provides a useful metric for evaluating the truth or falsity. For example in 1989 Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann made an extraordinary claim that they had created energy through a process of cold fusion. Keeping in mind that our sun is powered by the “hot” fusion of hydrogen atoms in a process requiring tremendous heat and pressure, it would be a major accomplishment to produce energy through fusion of atoms without the great heat and pressure. After a brief period of excitement in the scientific world the evidence failed to convince and Pons and Fleischmann were discredited.
It is important to understand what constitutes a miracle. The natural universe is that part of the universe that can be explained by the four basic laws of physics: gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force. These four laws are also referred to as the four energy sources in the universe. The supernatural universe is simply that entity that lies outside of the natural universe and is explained by some supernatural force or deity. In this context a miracle is some event or occurrence that cannot be explained by the basic laws of physics at this time. Attributing the cause of some event to a supernatural cause when there is a possible natural explanation, is a common error in argument. Daniel Dennett has a beautiful way of demonstrating this idea. If he is debating someone and they play what he calls the “faith card,” he responds by saying “you are wrong.” When his opponent asks, “Why?,” he answers “because Lucille says so.” He then explains that Lucille is a friend of his and she is always right.” Relying of God to support an argument is equivalent to citing Lucille. They both are conversation killers and do not contribute anything useful to the discussion. Attributing some unknown phenomenon to a supernatural entity does not advance human knowledge but retards the process of searching for answers. Isaac Newton would not have discovered the law of gravity had he accepted a supernatural explanation and stopped investigating. The history of scientific advancements is filled with examples of natural explanations that were once explained simply using the “God argument.”
Some people confuse a low probability of some event occurring as a miracle when it occurs. For example the chances of winning the Powerball lottery are one in 175,223,510. By comparison the odds of being struck by lightning are one in 280,000. People are struck by lightning and win lotteries all the time, the result of the laws of probability.
In politics there is an axiom called the “Power of the Desk” which has been described as “where you stand depends on where you sit.” For example knowing that someone is the head of an oil company provides a strong indication of their position on the environmental effects of burning fossil fuels. It would be unreasonable to think that oil companies could be a source of objective data on climate change. Also, one should be skeptical of any conclusions coming out of “research” funded by them. The tobacco industry funded "research" to determine if smoking was a health hazard and if nicotine was addictive. Predictably their “scientific” studies indicated that smoking did not cause diseases and was not addictive! Similarly the advocates of teaching Creationism as an alternative to Evolution are supporters of fundamentalist religious groups that hold the Bible as the literal truth. They turn the scientific method upside down by started out with a dogma and then look for ways to support it.
Everyone at some level is searching for the truth in every aspect of their lives. Understanding the various ideas in this essay can be useful as we make decisions in our day-to-day lives, but in the end it is an idiosyncratic process. Perhaps being consistent in the methods used is as important as the conclusions reached. Also, I think it is useful to view “truth” as a journey and not as a destination. Or as Robert Browning said, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"
Absolute truth
Scientific truth
Legal truth
Authoritative truth
Intuitive truth
Faith-based truth
Absolute truth is also called mathematical truth. The method for determining mathematical truth is to the start out with a conjecture and then demonstrate by a series of logical steps that the conjecture is true. Once a conjecture is proven, it becomes a theorem and can then be used to prove other conjectures. Thus a mathematical proof is series of steps relying on theorems, mathematical logic, and axioms to show that some conjecture is true. Every step in the series must be true. Each step is like a link in a chain; break one link in the chain and entire chain fails.
Axioms are mathematical propositions that have not been proven, but are accepted to be self-evident. It has always been offensive to some mathematicians to admit that some fundamental proposition vital to the field had to be thought of as self-evident rather than proven along with all the other theorems. David Hilbert (1862 - 1943), a German mathematician, took on the task of proving all the axioms (Hilbert’s program), but Kurt Godel (1906 - 1978), an Austrian-American logician, proved by his two incompleteness theorems that there are propositions that are true but cannot be proven. To this extent, one must concede that there is always some element of uncertainty even in mathematics. Anecdotally speaking, it can be argued that axioms must be true since they are the foundation of the house of proven mathematics and the house has not collapsed. In conclusion, once a theorem is proved, it is proved forever and is not subject to change.
A scientific truth is an idea or proposition that has been vetted through a process called the scientific method and found to be true. Stated differently, it is a proposed explanation for some observable facts. After it is proven true based on the evidence, it is promoted to theory. Scientific theory is a proven hypothesis. As such, it is the highest level of certainty that can be achieved by science. The theory of relativity and the theory of gravity are two well-known scientific theories. Sometimes a theory is called law, as in the law of gravity.
Unfortunately, the word “theory” has a different meaning when used by lay people. In everyday speech John might say, “I have a theory that Mary wants to date me.” In this sense it is a suspicion, a feeling, or at best some conjecture (or hope). If someone says the “evolution is only a theory,” this is equivalent to saying “Mary only won a gold medal at the Olympics.” If someone thinks that there is a higher award than the gold medal in the Olympics, then they are ignorant of the facts. If they are aware of the facts and still persist in claiming “Mary only won a gold medal,” they are being dishonest. To say that some scientific fact is only a theory is to say that it is only the highest level of truth obtainable in science, and indicates the author of the statement is either ignorant or dishonest. Still, even with the high level of confidence that scientific theories are held, there is almost always some degree of uncertainty. This is the major difference between science and dogma.
The process of proving any given hypothesis uses two logical methods, inductive logic and deductive logic. The inductive method is a “bottom up” method in as much as it starts at the bottom by making observations and/or conducting experiments. Deductive logic starts with existing theories and then deduces from them some hypothesis which is then proved or disproved by observations and experiments.
A hypothesis is a formally developed idea backed by supporting data with sufficient credibility to gain the attention of the accepted authorities in the field of inquiry and is now ready for vetting or peer review. A hypothesis must also make some predictions that can be independently verified by someone else. The results are written as a paper and then submitted to the editors of a technical publication devoted to the field of interest most closely related to the subject under consideration. All major fields of interest have many professional organizations such as the American Institute of Physics, which in turn publish a number of journals such as Applied Physics Review. At any rate, the first challenge for a hopeful hypothesis is acceptance for publication. The editors do not want to risk their standing in the field by publishing some idea that is then proven to be false or worse yet lacks any serious merit or consideration. These editors normally use a group of experts to critically review submissions and if they feel that the hypothesis has merit it is then published.
Now the hypothesis undergoes major vetting. Scientists and other experts around the world will read the paper and, of course, vigorously challenge both the methods, data, and conclusions. These people are by nature skeptical of anything new. There is also considerable ego and personal jealousy involved. The more radical the idea is the more it will be resisted. Radical in this context refers to what extent the idea is in opposition to some widely long-held truth. It has been said that one of the most important ingredients of scientific advancement is the death of older scientists.
Early natural philosophers (now called scientists) understood that sound is a wave propagated through the atmosphere by bouncing off the molecules of the gasses that make up air. This was easily demonstrated by securing a bell inside a glass jar, and then tightening the lid on the jar. Shake the jar and the bell rings. If all the air is removed from the jar, a vacuum is created. Now if the jar is shaken, the bell will not ring. It actually still “rings” but without the medium of air the sound of the bell cannot be propagated.
Given the way sound works, it seemed reasonable to conjecture that light (also a wave) must have some medium for light to propagate itself through the atmosphere and through space. After all, at night we can observe the light coming in from the stars. Air as a medium has to be eliminated since the atmosphere only extends up about sixty miles from the surface of earth. Luminiferous aether (or simply aether) was concocted out of the whole cloth of intuition to provide the medium thought necessary to propagate light. It was thought to be invisible, undetectable, and ubiquitous. This was the accepted unchallenged truth going all the way back to Newton and earlier.
Albert Michelson became interested in light in 1877 while teaching chemistry at the United States Naval Academy where he conducted experiments concerning the speed of light. He, of course, never questioned the existence of aether. In fact his objective was to prove its existence as a theory instead of just a useful conjecture. His idea was that as the earth moved through aether on it way around the sun, the speed of light would be faster when the earth was moving away from the sun and slower when moving toward the sun. He thought that aether constituted a head wind while the earth was moving toward sun and a tail wind while moving away from it.
His technique was to split a bean of light into two beans, one in the same direction of the earth’s movement and one in the opposite direction. His hypothesis was that light would move slower when encountering the aether head wind. He persuaded Alexander Bell to fund the construction of an interferometer, a device that could time the speed of light. To his total surprise and disappointment he proved that the speed of light was constant (186,282 miles per second) and that aether did not exist. In 1907 Albert Michelson and his assistant Edward Morley received the Nobel Prize in physics for their work. This episode demonstrates an important feature of science; scientists learn just as much from failure as they do from a success. After all, Michelson’s goal was to prove that aether exists but he was wrong and proved the opposite.
Truth, of course, is very important to the criminal justice system. The objective is to serve justice by punishing the guilty and exonerating the innocent. In a sense a trial is a play performed by judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and witnesses for an audience of jurors. The judge is responsible for ensuring that the trial is conducted according to the laws (rules). The prosecutor presents and argues the evidence including witnesses in an attempt to convince the jury that the defendant is guilty. Defense attorneys have the responsibility to challenge the evidence and witnesses and at their option present their own evidence and witnesses in an attempt to convince the jury that the defendant is not guilty. The jury is the sole determiner of the facts of the case. They decide what evidence is true or false, and which witnesses are telling the truth and which ones are not. There are two critical points that should be noted; first the defendant is assumed to be innocent and second, the prosecutor has the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It should also be pointed out that a verdict of “Not Guilty” is not the same thing as innocent. In fact courts in England have a verdict of “Not Proven” instead of our “Not Guilty.”
Finding the truth in a civil legal case is similar to a criminal proceeding with two major differences. First, in a civil court case the defendant only has property, reputation, or money at risk rather than life or freedom as is the case in a criminal trial. Second, the standard for a verdict is by the preponderance of evidence. In other words, the evidence only has to slightly favor one side or the other for them to win.
Albert Einstein once famously said, “Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” This seems obvious and is accepted by most people, but in reality people are often convinced of the truth of some idea or concept based on some authority. Authority, of course, can be useful in judging the truth of something. This is especially true in cases where the matter in question is within the authority’s area of expertise. In many circumstances, laymen must rely on authorities in the field. The key point in Einstein’s quote concerns the word “blind.” The more consensuses there among the experts, the more confidence one can take in their conclusions.
Intuitive truth is a feeling that something is true. Although in many cases it may turn out to be true, intuition is not sufficiently reliable to be used without other supporting evidence. In science intuition is extremely useful in forming a hypothesis. Richard Feynman, an American Nobel Prize winner in physics, related an anecdote that may help explain why many people have more trust in intuition than is warranted. In college while he was working on a paper in the middle of the night, he suddenly had a terrible feeling that his grandmother died. A minute later his telephone rang. It was a wrong number! Feynman then pointed out that people only learn about and count the cases when intuition turns out to be true; they never remember or count the failures.
Mark Twain defined faith as believing something that you know is not true. Faith can also be described as accepting a hypothesis without requiring any evidence. Faith is similar to intuition and like authoritative truth is the least reliable of all the “truths.” The problem with intuition and faith is reasonable people can arrive at entirely contradictory conclusions without any way of resolving the conflict. In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
The seven varieties of truth discussed in this essay lie on a continuum of reliability in which mathematical and scientific truths are the most reliable and intuition and faith the least. While this scale is very useful in determining the truth of any idea, the following considerations can provide invaluable assistance to the process:
Burden of proof
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence
Miracles
Probability
Vested Interest
The author or originator of any hypothesis has the burden of proving it. This burden cannot be shifted to the skeptics. Failure to prove an idea false does not make it true. Shifting the burden is a popular method of argument for many advocates. For example, supporters of Creationism versus Evolution (Darwinism) employ burden shifting by attempting to discredit evolution on some point and them claiming Creationism true by default. Even if evolution was proven wrong, this would not make Creationism true. The fact that Creationists expend more effort on discrediting evolution and very little effort supporting Creationism with evidence is a strong indication that their claims have little merit. It should be noted that Intelligent Design and Creationism are one and the same. Creationism was repackaged as Intelligent Design in a failed legal attempt to force it into public schools as an alternative to Evolution.
The idea that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence provides a useful metric for evaluating the truth or falsity. For example in 1989 Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann made an extraordinary claim that they had created energy through a process of cold fusion. Keeping in mind that our sun is powered by the “hot” fusion of hydrogen atoms in a process requiring tremendous heat and pressure, it would be a major accomplishment to produce energy through fusion of atoms without the great heat and pressure. After a brief period of excitement in the scientific world the evidence failed to convince and Pons and Fleischmann were discredited.
It is important to understand what constitutes a miracle. The natural universe is that part of the universe that can be explained by the four basic laws of physics: gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force. These four laws are also referred to as the four energy sources in the universe. The supernatural universe is simply that entity that lies outside of the natural universe and is explained by some supernatural force or deity. In this context a miracle is some event or occurrence that cannot be explained by the basic laws of physics at this time. Attributing the cause of some event to a supernatural cause when there is a possible natural explanation, is a common error in argument. Daniel Dennett has a beautiful way of demonstrating this idea. If he is debating someone and they play what he calls the “faith card,” he responds by saying “you are wrong.” When his opponent asks, “Why?,” he answers “because Lucille says so.” He then explains that Lucille is a friend of his and she is always right.” Relying of God to support an argument is equivalent to citing Lucille. They both are conversation killers and do not contribute anything useful to the discussion. Attributing some unknown phenomenon to a supernatural entity does not advance human knowledge but retards the process of searching for answers. Isaac Newton would not have discovered the law of gravity had he accepted a supernatural explanation and stopped investigating. The history of scientific advancements is filled with examples of natural explanations that were once explained simply using the “God argument.”
Some people confuse a low probability of some event occurring as a miracle when it occurs. For example the chances of winning the Powerball lottery are one in 175,223,510. By comparison the odds of being struck by lightning are one in 280,000. People are struck by lightning and win lotteries all the time, the result of the laws of probability.
In politics there is an axiom called the “Power of the Desk” which has been described as “where you stand depends on where you sit.” For example knowing that someone is the head of an oil company provides a strong indication of their position on the environmental effects of burning fossil fuels. It would be unreasonable to think that oil companies could be a source of objective data on climate change. Also, one should be skeptical of any conclusions coming out of “research” funded by them. The tobacco industry funded "research" to determine if smoking was a health hazard and if nicotine was addictive. Predictably their “scientific” studies indicated that smoking did not cause diseases and was not addictive! Similarly the advocates of teaching Creationism as an alternative to Evolution are supporters of fundamentalist religious groups that hold the Bible as the literal truth. They turn the scientific method upside down by started out with a dogma and then look for ways to support it.
Everyone at some level is searching for the truth in every aspect of their lives. Understanding the various ideas in this essay can be useful as we make decisions in our day-to-day lives, but in the end it is an idiosyncratic process. Perhaps being consistent in the methods used is as important as the conclusions reached. Also, I think it is useful to view “truth” as a journey and not as a destination. Or as Robert Browning said, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Baptists, The American Taliban
Discussing religion is always dangerous and filled with risks but as they say “fools rush in where angels dare to tread.” At the risk of appearing trite, I will begin at the beginning. I was born with a mental state that has been described as tabula rosa (blank slate). I have since modified this view and now believe that the human brain comes with pre-wired tendencies. For more on this subject please read Genome by Matt Ridley. At any rate, considering the human mind at birth (or even at conception) as a blank slate ready to record all life experiences is sufficient for my purposes here.
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my parents for sparing me from what Richard Dawkins calls child abuse, i.e., religious indoctrination. I cannot recall my parents ever mentioning the subject of religion. If they were philosophical thinkers, they did not share their epistemological conclusions with me. I was left happily to my own devices to discover my own inner world.
Of course no man or child is an island. I grew up in a small southern town where the water was filled with fluoride and the air with racism and Baptist dogma. They were everywhere and I thought that everyone in the world was Baptist until my older sister proved to be more than the public school system could handle and was dispatched to a private Catholic school. At about the same time I discovered my uncle was Jewish and my religious world was “complete.”
At public school most of my pals were Baptists and it was under their influence (and their parents) that I was recruited into attending Sunday school and church services. I was not much moved by the experience and was bored by the entire matter and began to look for any excuse to duck out on it. Of course, they did not give me up easily and dispatched church deacons and fellow students who had a way of making me feel guilty about my erratic attendance and questionable devotion to their religious views.
By the time I was a teenager my interest and enthusiasm was almost nil and probably would have died completely if I had not started dating a very pretty girl a fellow classmate from my high school. At the time I thought that church attendance was noblesse oblige and it was a major faux pas not to conform. I incorrectly assumed that my girl friend felt the same way. Today even after fifty-six years, she still rightfully blames me for getting her involved with the Baptists.
Once a year our Baptist Church brought in a visiting evangelist whose job was to inject enthusiasm and fear into those who might be wavering in their faith and to build up the church membership rolls. These charismatic performers and master manipulators vacillated between waxing poetic about the love of God and the threat of eternal damnation. They claimed that every time the holy spirit knocks on your heart and you reject the invitation to accept Christ, your heart turns a little harder until eventually it turns to stone at which point you would be lost forever without any chance for salvation. It was during one of these emotional sessions while the choir sang Will You Be Ready?, we went forward and accepted Christ and after being baptized became Baptists.
Around this same time my cousin was invited by one of her school friends to attend Sunday school and services at a local Congregationalist Church. Sometime later she decided to be baptized and become a member. The Congregationalists had higher ethical standards than the Baptists and required parental approval. Her father thought that she should defer important decisions like this until she was older and more mature and refused to give his permission. Years later while in graduate school she converted to Catholicism and married a Catholic. Today she is the mother of nine children and divorced.
After I enlisted in the Air Force, I discovered one benefit of being a Baptist when as part of my duties as an administrative clerk I had the duty of collecting biographical data from newly arriving airman at the base including their religious “preferences.” Things seem to be going well until the base chaplain who happened to be a Baptist called me to complain that he was meeting a number of Baptists who were actually Presbyterians or Episcopalians. It turned out that many Presbyterians and Episcopalians did not know how to spell their religion and simply wrote “Baptist” for their religious preference.
I remained a nominal Baptist until the Air Force sent me back to college to complete my undergraduate degree. It was there at age twenty-four that I discovered and read Ayn Rand and Bertram Russell and became an atheist. I wrote a letter to the Southern Baptist Convention tendering my resignation and found out you cannot resign. I was informed that the only way I could be removed from the Baptist rolls was to join another religion. Today I consider myself a “cured” Baptist.
Joining the Baptist Church was the most embarrassing thing that I ever did. In my defense I would like to reference the fact that the part of human brain responsible for critical thinking is not fully formed until around the age of twenty-five. Recently the president of the Southern Baptist Convention issued a declaration that wives should submit to their husbands on all matters of faith and family. Perhaps bronze-age thinking such as this prompted Kinky Friedman (one-time candidate for Governor of Texas) to remark that the problem with Baptists is they don’t hold them under water long enough.
According to Wikipedia in 2002, there were more than thirty-three million Baptists in North America of which sixteen million are Southern Baptist. Due to their literal interpretation of the Bible they are anti-science and very conservative. They deny evolution and global warming. They oppose guy rights and women’s rights and tend to hold racist views. Their history includes support for slavery and segregation of the schools. They also supported miscegenation laws and were anti-immigration.
The Baptists are the most vocal in their condemnation of other religions and their teachings’ especially Catholicism. It was not unusual to find Baptists in the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan and some even served as the Grand Wizard. Their fundamentalist views has led many to describe them as well as the other evangelicals as the American Taliban. Baptist have among their ranks people such as Fred Phelps, Pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas who makes a practice of disrupting funerals of our fallen military heroes carrying signs declaring, “God hates Fags.”
I continued as a self-proclaimed atheist for many years until I embarked on a self-discovery program of reading, thinking, and writing as a way of clarifying my positions. I read books on theology, religion, physics, biology, and psychology. I found that I could not reconcile atheism with science. I learned that is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God. Atheists and theists are both willing to accept their position without any proof or evidence instead relying on appeals to authority and/or faith. Mark Twain defined faith as believing in things that you know are not true.
My conclusion is deism is the only position that I can reconcile with the sum total of my education (formal and informal) and experiences. Deism allows for the possibility that a supernatural force set in motion a process that created the universe and everything in it but is not involved in the day-to-day operations except through the application of the laws of physics. The “God” of deism does not monitor our behavior, perform miracles, answer prayers, provide for our salvation or modify the laws of nature in our favor.
Related Blog: Why Religion?
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to my parents for sparing me from what Richard Dawkins calls child abuse, i.e., religious indoctrination. I cannot recall my parents ever mentioning the subject of religion. If they were philosophical thinkers, they did not share their epistemological conclusions with me. I was left happily to my own devices to discover my own inner world.
Of course no man or child is an island. I grew up in a small southern town where the water was filled with fluoride and the air with racism and Baptist dogma. They were everywhere and I thought that everyone in the world was Baptist until my older sister proved to be more than the public school system could handle and was dispatched to a private Catholic school. At about the same time I discovered my uncle was Jewish and my religious world was “complete.”
At public school most of my pals were Baptists and it was under their influence (and their parents) that I was recruited into attending Sunday school and church services. I was not much moved by the experience and was bored by the entire matter and began to look for any excuse to duck out on it. Of course, they did not give me up easily and dispatched church deacons and fellow students who had a way of making me feel guilty about my erratic attendance and questionable devotion to their religious views.
By the time I was a teenager my interest and enthusiasm was almost nil and probably would have died completely if I had not started dating a very pretty girl a fellow classmate from my high school. At the time I thought that church attendance was noblesse oblige and it was a major faux pas not to conform. I incorrectly assumed that my girl friend felt the same way. Today even after fifty-six years, she still rightfully blames me for getting her involved with the Baptists.
Once a year our Baptist Church brought in a visiting evangelist whose job was to inject enthusiasm and fear into those who might be wavering in their faith and to build up the church membership rolls. These charismatic performers and master manipulators vacillated between waxing poetic about the love of God and the threat of eternal damnation. They claimed that every time the holy spirit knocks on your heart and you reject the invitation to accept Christ, your heart turns a little harder until eventually it turns to stone at which point you would be lost forever without any chance for salvation. It was during one of these emotional sessions while the choir sang Will You Be Ready?, we went forward and accepted Christ and after being baptized became Baptists.
Around this same time my cousin was invited by one of her school friends to attend Sunday school and services at a local Congregationalist Church. Sometime later she decided to be baptized and become a member. The Congregationalists had higher ethical standards than the Baptists and required parental approval. Her father thought that she should defer important decisions like this until she was older and more mature and refused to give his permission. Years later while in graduate school she converted to Catholicism and married a Catholic. Today she is the mother of nine children and divorced.
After I enlisted in the Air Force, I discovered one benefit of being a Baptist when as part of my duties as an administrative clerk I had the duty of collecting biographical data from newly arriving airman at the base including their religious “preferences.” Things seem to be going well until the base chaplain who happened to be a Baptist called me to complain that he was meeting a number of Baptists who were actually Presbyterians or Episcopalians. It turned out that many Presbyterians and Episcopalians did not know how to spell their religion and simply wrote “Baptist” for their religious preference.
I remained a nominal Baptist until the Air Force sent me back to college to complete my undergraduate degree. It was there at age twenty-four that I discovered and read Ayn Rand and Bertram Russell and became an atheist. I wrote a letter to the Southern Baptist Convention tendering my resignation and found out you cannot resign. I was informed that the only way I could be removed from the Baptist rolls was to join another religion. Today I consider myself a “cured” Baptist.
Joining the Baptist Church was the most embarrassing thing that I ever did. In my defense I would like to reference the fact that the part of human brain responsible for critical thinking is not fully formed until around the age of twenty-five. Recently the president of the Southern Baptist Convention issued a declaration that wives should submit to their husbands on all matters of faith and family. Perhaps bronze-age thinking such as this prompted Kinky Friedman (one-time candidate for Governor of Texas) to remark that the problem with Baptists is they don’t hold them under water long enough.
According to Wikipedia in 2002, there were more than thirty-three million Baptists in North America of which sixteen million are Southern Baptist. Due to their literal interpretation of the Bible they are anti-science and very conservative. They deny evolution and global warming. They oppose guy rights and women’s rights and tend to hold racist views. Their history includes support for slavery and segregation of the schools. They also supported miscegenation laws and were anti-immigration.
The Baptists are the most vocal in their condemnation of other religions and their teachings’ especially Catholicism. It was not unusual to find Baptists in the ranks of the Ku Klux Klan and some even served as the Grand Wizard. Their fundamentalist views has led many to describe them as well as the other evangelicals as the American Taliban. Baptist have among their ranks people such as Fred Phelps, Pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas who makes a practice of disrupting funerals of our fallen military heroes carrying signs declaring, “God hates Fags.”
I continued as a self-proclaimed atheist for many years until I embarked on a self-discovery program of reading, thinking, and writing as a way of clarifying my positions. I read books on theology, religion, physics, biology, and psychology. I found that I could not reconcile atheism with science. I learned that is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God. Atheists and theists are both willing to accept their position without any proof or evidence instead relying on appeals to authority and/or faith. Mark Twain defined faith as believing in things that you know are not true.
My conclusion is deism is the only position that I can reconcile with the sum total of my education (formal and informal) and experiences. Deism allows for the possibility that a supernatural force set in motion a process that created the universe and everything in it but is not involved in the day-to-day operations except through the application of the laws of physics. The “God” of deism does not monitor our behavior, perform miracles, answer prayers, provide for our salvation or modify the laws of nature in our favor.
Related Blog: Why Religion?
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Joseph Smith, Prophet or Charlatan
Preface
Recently I was talking to a local librarian about Joseph Smith and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) and she asked me, “Why are you so interested in this subject?” (Note: The LDS church is often referred to as the Mormon church by non-Mormons.) I could tell from her facial expression that she thought that I was more than just a bit obsessive with the subject. My answer; I am interested in Mormonism for three reasons: First, the Republican candidate for president is a Mormon, and I think that what people believe gives more than a hint as to how they will act. Second, it is one of the fastest growing religions claiming over fourteen-million members worldwide as of 2010. Third, the history of the Mormon church provides a rare opportunity to learn firsthand just how a major religion actually got started. Joseph Smith was born in 1805 and the church is less than two-hundred years old. Unlike older religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam there is a rich and vast source of documents including public records, personal letters, diaries, written histories, and newspaper articles available to researchers.
The major source for what follows is the book, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith written by Fawn McKay Brodie and first published in 1945, and later revised and republished in 1971 in order to take advantage of new materials discovered since the first edition was published. Brodie’s book is perhaps the most definitive and authoritative work on the subject. Few people could be more qualified for the task of writing the history of Joseph Smith than Brodie. She was born in Ogden, Utah in 1915 and was raised as a Mormon with deep family ties to the church. Her paternal uncle, David O. McKay, was the ninth president of the LDS church. Her maternal grandfather, George H. Brimhall, was president of Brigham Young University, and her father, Thomas Evans McKay, was a bishop in the church.
Fawn received a BA in English literature from the University of Utah in 1934. She also earned a MA degree from the University of Chicago in 1936. She eventually became a tenured professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in spite of not having a doctoral degree based on a number of published scholarly historical works including Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South and Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History.
After No Man Knows My History was published, her father, Thomas McKay, refused to read it and she was excommunicated from the Mormon church in May of 1946. In 1981 while she was in the hospital dying of cancer, she was visited by her brother who was still active in the church. She asked and received his priesthood blessing, but she also left a written signed note indicating that she was not requesting reentry into the church. She died on January 10, 1981 at the age of 65.
Early Life and History of the area
Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church, was born on December 23, 1805 at Sharon, Vermont, a small rural farm area located at the foothills of the Green Mountains. His parents were Joseph Smith Sr, and Lucy Mack. They had six other sons including one who died at birth. (Note. References to Joseph Smith throughout this essay refer to the “Prophet” unless otherwise indicated.) Joseph had two older brothers, Alvin (born 1798) and Hyrum (born 1800) and eventually three younger brothers, Samuel (born 1808), William (born 1811) and Don Carlos (born 1816).
The family moved from Sharon, Vermont to Norwich, Vermont, then to Lebanon, New Hampshire, and again in 1816 to Palmyra, New York. The Smiths were very poor farmers. At some point the senior Smith invested all his money in a scheme to export ginseng to China. Unfortunately, his partner made off with all his money leaving the Smith family destitute.
Second Great Awaking
The years around 1816 were a time of tremendous religious fervor and excitement in western New York including Palmyra. The Smiths were big believers in dreams, visions, and prophecies and were extremely religious. Lucy was the religious leader of the family and constantly switched from one sect to another. She eventually joined the Presbyterian Church but could not persuade the senior Smith to join. Young Joseph never showed much interest in organized religion.
This period in United States history was called the “Second Great Awaking.” The religious intensity was fueled by a host of itinerant preachers and prophets and was so great that western New York was referred to as the “Burned-over” district. This colorful group included Isaac Bullard who wore a bearskin girdle and thought that washing was a sin and claimed to go seven years without bathing. He preached free love and communism. Ann Lee, the “mother of the shakers” called herself the reincarnated Christ and preached celibacy and taught the gift of speaking in tongues. Jemima Wilkinson also claimed to be Christ incarnate and swore that she would never die, but in fact died on July 1, 1819. In 1812 Abel Sargent along with his twelve female apostles traveled around the area pretending to raise the dead and selling the idea that if one were sufficiently holy, one could live without eating. One convert tried it, but died after nine days. In 1828 Joseph Dylk claiming to be the true Messiah went around shouting, “I am God,” and gained a large following. It was in these times of extreme religious intensity that the young Joseph Smith grew up.
He was described by his neighbors as a likable ne’er-do-well, notorious for telling tall tales, practicing necromantic arts, and digging for buried treasures. Daniel Hendrix who eventually was the typesetter for the Book of Mormon said that Smith “could never tell a common occurrence in his daily life without embellishing it.” Sometime when he was about fourteen years of age, while he was praying in the woods, he had a vision of seeing God who told him that “all their creeds were an abomination in his sight.” Smith took the creeds in question to be all known organized religions.
Some time around 1825 Joseph Smith met Josiah Stowel who convinced him to travel to the Susquehanna Valley, Pennsylvania to help him locate a lost silver mine. Stowel had heard about Smith’s talent for locating buried treasures, but they in fact found very little of value. Smith and the other members of the party boarded with Isaac Hale in Harmony, Pennsylvania It was there that he met Isaac’s attractive twenty-one-year-old daughter, Emma. Isaac was not favorable impressed by Joseph, describing him as a “careless young man - not very well educated, and very saucy and insolent to his father.” Joseph fell deeply in love with Emma and asked Hale for her hand in marriage but was refused. Undeterred Joseph and Emma were secretly married on January 18, 1827. Afterwards the newly married couple left Harmony and returned to New York to live with his parents.
Palmyra and the surrounding areas was the site of many mounds of old Indian graves. It was usual for people to dig in these hills and find various Indian artifacts including the occasional silver trinket. Many people living in and around this area were very interested in Indian history and artifacts. It was about this time that Joseph heard a story about a Golden Bible being found in a tree in Canada. He was also fascinated by Indian history and was familiar with Ethan Smith’s (no relation) book, View of the Hebrews.
On September 21, 1823, Smith had a vision from the angel Moroni who revealed the location of a stone box containing the golden plates, two seer stones (Urim and Thummim), and a sword. Moroni further revealed to Smith that the plates contained an ancient record of divine origin, but he would not be allowed to remove the plates until he was ”purified and instructed in the things of the kingdom.” He was advised to return in exactly one year for further instructions and evaluation. He did this for four years before he was allowed to remove the plates. Finally on September 21, 1827, he was permitted to remove the plates with the warning, that if anyone other than Smith viewed them, they would die. There was much gossip about his find although there was never any mention at that time about anything of a religious nature.
Joseph told his father about his encounter with the angel Moroni in 1823 who assured his son that it was the work of God. However, in his Autobiography, Joseph did not mention anything about the years from 1823 to 1827. But they certainly were not years of penance and purification. It was around this time that young Smith was involved in the practice of “crystal-gazing,” an alleged way of locating buried treasures by looking into his hat containing a special stone that allowed him to see buried objects.
In March 1826, in the town of Bainbridge, New York, Joseph Smith was charged for being a “disorderly person and an imposter.” After a trial he was found guilty of disturbing the peace. Sixty-one of his neighbors signed an affidavit accusing him of being “destitute of moral character and addicted to vicious habits.”
Although Joseph could read, he could not write, necessitating the use of a scribe to record the words as he interpreted the plates. Emma was his first scribe. Their general procedures was to suspend a sheet on a rope in the kitchen with Emma on one side preventing her from seeing the plates, and Joseph on the other side deciphering the "Egyptian-looking" language from them. Joseph would put the seer stones in his hat and then place his face into the hat thus shielding the seers stones from any light which then revealed the writing that he read out to Emma who recorded it. At some point Joseph and Emma moved into a house owned by her father Isaac who was somewhat reconciled to Joseph who had promised to give up treasure hunting and live the life of a farmer.
In April 1828 Martin Harris moved to Harmony and took over the responsibility of taking Joseph’s dictation using the same procedure employed in Smith’s Palmyra kitchen. Martin had recently inherited a valuable farm and was considered wealthy for the times and area. His wife Lucy was extremely suspicious of the entire saga of the golden plates due to Joseph’s notorious reputation. She felt that her husband was weak-minded and naive, and feared that Joseph was perpetrating a scheme to swindle him out of his inheritance. She insisted that she accompany Martin to Harmony with unpleasant results.
Martin finally convinced Lucy to return home, but she continued to pressure him to give up the project and leave Harmony and rejoin her. Martin took up where Emma left off and eventually they completed 116 pages. At this point Martin talked Joseph into allowing him to take the completed 116 pages back home in an attempt to win Lucy’s support for the project. Unfortunately for Joseph the plan did not work. Lucy stole the manuscript, hid it, and refused to return it. To this day it has never been recovered and is assumed destroyed.
Martin and Joseph were frantic with fear, anger, and regret. They pleaded with Lucy to return the “missing” pages. She refused stating that if the golden plates really existed, Joseph could simply repeat the process and recreate the pages. Joseph realized that he was caught in a trap set by Lucy knowing that he could not interpret exactly the golden plates again. Since he did not know the whereabouts of original copy, it was possible that it could reappear at anytime in the future allowing for a comparison with the newly created pages. If they were not identical, the Book of Mormon would be exposed as a fraud.
Joseph Smith agonized and prayed over the problem, and finally received a "revelation" from God. It seems that Satin had intervened in an attempt to sabotage God’s plan, but God had anticipated Satin’s plot and had a backup plan. He directed Joseph to a site where a replacement golden plate was buried thus allowing for the true version to be interpreted and transcribed. The original pages were the work of the devil. With Satan thwarted, the work continued.
On April 7, 1829, Joseph replaced Martin Harris with Oliver Cowdery who proved to be more reliable and proficient. Also about this time John the Baptist appeared and directed that Smith and Cowdery baptize each other. John also bestowed the Hebraic priesthood of Aaron on Smith. In early July the 275,000- word manuscript was completed and 5,000 copies were printed and went on sale on March 26, 1830. On April 6, of the same year, the Church of Christ was established with six members. They included Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, Samuel H. Smith, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Peter Whitmer. Over the years the name of the church was changed many times and has been known as the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, the Church of Jesus Christ, and the Church of God. Finally in 1838 by revelation, the title, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) was official established.
The Book of Mormon described by Mark Twain as “chloroform in print,” contained the phrase “And it came to pass” 2,000 times. Out of the first 200 sentences, 140 of them began with the word “And.” Out of the 275,000 words, 25,000 were taken from Isaiah and another 2,000 from the New Testament. It also clearly reflected the anti-Catholic sentiment of the times by describing the Catholic church as the “whore of all the earth.” The Book of Mormon also displayed an uncanny resemblance to Ethan Smith’s book, View of the Hebrews.
Luckily for Smith another book, American Antiquities, written by Josiah Priest was published three years after the Book of Mormon. It was essentially the identical story told by Ethan Smith but had the advantage of appearing after Smith’s work thus disarming the critics claiming he had copied Ethan’s earlier book.
There is a very interesting connection between the Book of Mormon and Freemasonry. Joseph Smith and his older brother Alvin were Freemasons, an extremely admired and popular group at this time in the country, until the William Morgan affair. Morgan was a disgruntled Freemason who threatened to publish a book exposing their secrets. He was arrested in 1826 and then allegedly kidnapped and murdered by the Masons. As a result the American people turned against Freemasonry and anti-Masonry was running rampant at the time the Book of Mormon was being written. There was even a political party formed called the Anti-Masonic Party. Not surprisingly Smith included considerable anti-Masonry sentiments in his book. He also borrowed and included considerable Masonic rituals and “secret combinations” in it. Later in 1838, Joseph Smith took Morgan’s widow, Lucinda Pendleton as his third plural wife.
At the time of the writing of the Book of Mormon Joseph Smith did not realize that Jean-François Champollion had deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822. Most people at this time including Smith thought that the Egyptian language was indecipherable, a “fact” that gave Smith great confidence that his translating results could not be challenged. He even wrote out a sample page of the characters that he allegedly copied from the plates and gave it to Martin Harris. Martin then took the sample to New York City and met with Charles Anthon, a professor of Greek and Latin at Columbia University.
Anthon declared the sample “Egyptian” letters to be “a hoax upon the learned” or “a scheme to cheat the farmer out of his money.” Harris pleaded with Anthon with the story of a “sealed book,” who replied “I cannot read a sealed book.” When Martin Harris reported Anthon’s disconcerting findings back to Smith, he used his quick-thinking and knowledge of Bible scriptures to his advantage. He immediately quoted Daniel 12:4 where it was written “But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end.” Harris took the entire affair to be a divine prophecy and was completely convinced that Smith was indeed a true prophet.
Smith’s ability to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs was called into question again in 1835 when he translated some writing from a mummy and Egyptian papyri purchased from a traveling exhibition. He claimed that it was the writing of Abraham which he then translated into the Book of Abraham. Later the materials were examined by eight scholars who concluded that they were not the writings of Abraham but simply ordinary funerary documents.
In 1843 Robert Wiley, Bridge Whitton, and Wilbur Fugate played an elaborate hoax on Smith. They fashioned sheets of copper into the shape of a bell along with some plates and then etched some strange-looking characters onto them and used acid to make them appear old. They then buried the bell along with some Indian bones in a mound located near Kinderhook, Illinois. Wiley then spread a rumor that he had a dream about buried treasure three nights in a row and recruited assistants including three Mormons to search for it. Of course they found the bell and plates and took them to Smith who translating them claiming that it was the word of a decedent of Ham. At some point Smith realized that he was the victim of a hoax and never did publish his “translation.”
In spite of the earlier claim that if anyone other than Joseph Smith viewed the Golden Plates they would die, Smith realized that other reliable witnesses would strengthen his claim as a true prophet. In June or July of 1829 he turned to his three most-enthusiastic believers, Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, and David Whitmer to “reveal” the plates. The event occurred out in the woods and after hours of prayer, a number of failures, and many exhortations, the three witnesses finally “saw” an angel holding the Golden Plates. It is important to note that eventually all three of the witnesses broke with the church.
Later at the end of the 1830 version of the Book of Mormon, there was a list of eight other witnesses to the Golden Plates. This group was made up mostly of Smith or Whitmer family members. Representing the Smith family was the senior Smith, and his son’s Hyrum, and Samuel. The Whitmer family included Christian, Jacob, Peter, and John. Hiram Page was also a witness. Mark Twain remarked that “I could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire Whitmer family has testified.”
The Book of Mormon
The narrative of the Book of Mormon begins in the ancient city of Jerusalem around the year 600 BC. It tells the story of Lehi who took his family and some other followers and left Jerusalem. Their journey took them across the Arabian peninsula where they eventually reached the promised land of America by ship. Lehi, just like the senior Smith, had six sons. They were Lamen, Lemuel, Sam, Nephi, Jacob, and Joseph. After Lehi died, Nephi and Lamen started two warring nations called the Nephites and the Lamanites. The Nephites were religious, God-fearing, honest, and hard-working people. The Lamanites are depicted as lazy, violent, and ferocious people who wandered in the wilderness like savages.
According to the Book of Mormon Jesus was born on the continent of America in the fourth century. After Jesus’ resurrection in the fourth century the Nephites became believers in Jesus Christ. In 385 AD the Nephites were almost totaled destroyed by the Lamanites. Mormon and his son Moroni was the last of the Nephite prophets, and they created the “Book of Mormon” by recording their history on gold plates with the final entry written in 421 AD. Moroni then, following God’s instructions, buried the plates in a hill called Cumorah located outside of Palmyra where in the future they would be found and translated.
Sidney Rigon (born 1793) was a Baptist minister who in 1826 became the minister of a Baptist church in Mentor, Ohio. One member, Parley Pratt was visiting Palmyra and learned of the Book of Mormon. He was baptized into Joseph’s Church of Christ in September 1830. Pratt showed Rigon a copy of the Book of Mormon and he also converted. In December 1830, Smith received a revelation directing him to move the New York church to Kirtland, Ohio. Therefore, in 1831 Smith, Pratt, and Rigon moved the church to Kirtland. At the same time they established an outpost in Independence, Missouri in Jackson County which Smith regarded as Zion. Smith also received a revelation from God indicating that the biblical Garden of Eden was actually located just outside of Independence, in Jackson county.
The Mormon church grew very fast in Kirtland but also created considerable resentment with their non-Mormon (gentile) neighbors due to many of their practices. They referred to theirselves as “Saints,” and experimented with a system designed by Rigon called the United Order. All their members were required to sign the title to their property over to the church. Also all fruits of their labor were deposited with the bishop who then disbursed them out based on need. Eventually Smith replaced the United Order with a mandatory tithe of ten percent. They also limited their contact with gentiles and would only do business with other Mormons. They were unpopular in Independence for the similar reasons plus their abolitionist views.
By 1831 the majority of incoming Mormons had located in Independence, but by 1838 their numbers in Kirtland grew from 100 in 1833 to 2,000. By 1836 they had constructed numerous church buildings including a temple perched on a hill overlooking the Chagrin river. In 1837 Smith started a bank he called the Kirtland Safety Society Bank, but when the legislature rejected his applications for a bank charter, he changed the name to the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company. Since they had already printed the bank notes, they simply stamped the prefix “Anti” before the word “bank” and the suffix “ing” after it. In the beginning Smith collected silver from depositors and placed it in boxes marked $1,000. He then issued notes backed by silver. Later they filled boxes with rocks and issued more notes. It was not very long before no one would accept the notes and there was a run on the bank as depositors rushed to redeem their notes for silver. As a result the bank failed and Smith was fined for operating an illegal bank. Many lawsuits followed along with much hostility toward Smith and the Mormons.
A faction in the church developed when a young girl claiming to be a seer with the ability to read the future using a black seer stone challenged Smith for influence. Some of the oldest and most-prominent members including David Whitmer, Martin Harris, and Oliver Cowdery pledged their loyalty to her. Smith fought back by putting the dissenters on trial. The situation became very violent causing many of the elders including Brigham Young and Smith to flee to Missouri. On January 6, 1838, the printing office and school house was torched by an arsonist.
In April 1840 Joseph Smith and his followers relocated to Illinois where they purchased the town of Commerce which they then renamed Nauvoo. The Mormon’s new “city” grew rapidly becoming one of the largest towns in Illinois. They published two newspapers, laid the cornerstone for a new temple, and formed a militia of 2,000 men called the Nauvoo Legion. Smith was even made a Lieutenant General by the Illinois Governor Carlin. They also establish a Masonic Lodge in October 1841.
Although Smith had been practicing plural marriage for some time in secret, it was in Nauvoo that he started teaching it to the other leaders of the church claiming it was a revelation from God. John C. Bennett, Smith's closest adviser, a counselor in the First Presidency, and Mayor of Nauvoo sparked a controversy when he was caught in the act of adultery. In 1844 William Law, an important merchant and adviser to Smith broke with the Mormon church and started a reformed church he called the True Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He also started a newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, and threatened to expose the practice of plural marriage in the Mormon church.
Smith retaliated by dispatching part of his militia, the Nauvoo Legion, to attack the Nauvoo Expositor destroying the presses and burning every copy of the newspaper on hand. This turned out to be a major blunder on his part. Governor Thomas Ford ordered the arrest of Joseph, his brother Hyrum and two of his followers. They surrendered after Ford guaranteed their safety and were taken to a jail in Carthage located about fifteen miles from Nauvoo where they were protected by state militia. However, after Ford withdrew the militia, the jail was stormed by a mob who murdered Joseph and Hyrum. This was only the beginning of a program of expulsion for the Mormons and after Brigham Young was selected as a successor to Joseph Smith he led them on a long trek to Utah where he founded the church in Salt Lake City.
Smith’s widow, Emma, was not a supporter of plural marriage or Brigham Young. She believed that her son Joseph Smith III was the designated and legitimate heir to her husband. After the elders selected Brigham Young as the new president, she left the church founded by Joseph Smith and lived as unaffiliated Latter-Day Saint. On April 6, 1860, Joseph Smith III was named the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and in 1872 the word “Reorganized” was added to the name. Today it is known as the Community of Christ.
The issue of plural marriages or “celestial” marriages was a major source of dissension both within and outside of the church. Smith was romantically linked to Nancy M. Johnson as early as 1832 and she eventually became one of his wives. In 1835 he seduced a seventeen-year-old orphan Fannie Alger who was living in the Smith home at the time. Benjamin F. Johnson, patriarch and brother of two of Smith’s wives was aware of the affair as was Oliver Cowdery who called it “a dirty, nasty, and filthy affair.” In early 1833 Fannie Alger became Smith’s first plural wife. Between the years of 1843 and 1844, he took six wives from women who lived in his home. Emma Smith was totally opposed to the idea of plural wives in general and fervently against her husband’s participation. Hyrum Smith urged him to put the revelation he received from God in writing in an attempt to appease Emma. After Emma read what Joseph had written, she finally gave in reluctantly, saying, “The Revelation says I must submit or be destroyed.” However she always thought that the revelation was the work of the devil.
One of the more interesting cases of Mormon plural marriages involved Parley P. Pratt, one of Smith’s earliest followers and highest-ranking church officials. He was appointed to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1835. During his life he had twelve wives, thirty children, and 256 grandchildren. He married his twelfth wife, Eleanor McLean, in San Francisco. Eleanor was still married to Hector McLean of Arkansas who deeply resented the entire affair especially the baptism of his children along with Eleanor into the Mormon church. In May 1857, Pratt was brought to trial on charges of stealing the McLean children’s clothing. At the time parents could not be charged with kidnapping their own children. He was acquitted but after the trial, Hector McLean hunted him down and murdered him on May 13, 1857 in the town of Van Buren, Arkansas. Today it is estimated that more than 30,000 people are descendants of Parley Pratt including Willard Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate for President of the United States.
After Smith’s death, plural marriage became more entrenched in the doctrine of the church and their way of life. Brigham Young had fifty-five wives and by the time of his death more than fifty-seven children. Polygamy continued to be part of the official church doctrine and a way of life for Mormons until the 1890 Manifesto was issued by the church president, Wilford Woodruff in September 1890. It officially banned the practice of plural marriages. The decision by Woodruff was primarily a political one because the United States Congress would not allow Utah statehood until polygamy was eliminated from the territory. Utah was admitted into the union on January 4, 1896.
The 1890 Manifesto did not have any effect on existing plural marriages and some members quietly continued the practice, although in much smaller numbers. Also, dissenters established polygamous communities in Canada and Mexico, In fact, Romney’s father, George was born at one such colony in Mexico in 1907. Leaders of the LDS church admit that the ending the practice of plural marriages after the manifesto was gradual. Ultimately divisions in the church over the issue of polygamy led to a split with the formation of what is called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS).
The FLDS church continued to have major legal difficulties culminating with the arrest of Warren S. Jeffs, the president of the FLDS church, for sexual conduct with minors in August 2006. He was convicted at a trial in St. George, Utah of two counts of rape as an accomplice in September 2007 and was sentenced to ten years in prison. Later his conviction was overturned because of incorrect jury instructions. He was then tried in Texas and found guilty of sexual assault of two girls, ages 12 and 15 years and was sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years. Today it is estimated that there are from six to seven-thousands members of the FLDS church with communities located at Colorado City, Arizona, Hildale, Utah, Eldorado, Texas, and Bountiful, British Columbia.
Conclusion
Joseph Smith and the church he created, is a wonderful story deeply rooted in American history. Just as we broke the yoke of British rule, Smith threw aside the bronze-age theology of a small group of Semitic dessert people in favor of an American story of native Indians and brave settlers. No longer was it necessary to travel to distant and foreign places to experience the holy land; it was as close as Missouri and available to every American. Mormonism also captured the spirit of individualism and egalitarianism that was prevalent at the time he lived. This was a religion of the people unburdened by the dictates of priests, where all members had unfettered direct access to God including the opportunity of receiving revelations. This was a religion without any professional clergy. Every male became a priest at the age of 12. “Only” woman and blacks were excluded from the priesthood.
In spite of the endearing and appealing story of the LDS church, my conclusion is that it was not divinely inspired, but is just the work of a very clever conjurer and charlatan. I base my conclusion in part on the following:
1. The character and history of Joseph Smith especially his propensity and skill at telling tall tales and convincing people that they were true.
2. The numbers of people who allegedly viewed the Golden Plates without any ill effects, in spite of Moroni’s declaration that anyone other than Smith viewing them would die immediately.
3. The obvious similarity of the Book of Mormon to published books including the Bible and Ethan Smith’s book, View of the Hebrews.
4. Smith’s inability to recreate the “missing” 116 pages that were stolen by Lucy Harris.
5. Professor Anthon’s conclusion that the samples of text furnished by Smith were a hoax.
6. Genetic analysis of the DNA of American Indians has conclusively demonstrated that they are not descendants of the ancient Jews.
7. Comparative linguistic analysis of Hebrew and Indian dialects failed to show any similarities.
8. Smith’s “translation” of the text from an Egyptian mummy that he claimed was the writing of Abraham was shown by language experts to be nothing but a common Egyptian funeral service.
9. Smith fell for the hoax perpetrated by Robert Wiley, Bridge Whitton, and Wilbur Fugate in 1843 when they buried fake objects and then led several Mormons to the site. They recovered them and took them to Smith for translation. He claimed that it was the word of a decedent of Ham.
Sources:
1. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, Fawn Brodie, 1971
2. Massacre at Mountain Meadow, Ronald Walker, 2008
3. Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer, 2003
4. The Mormon People, Matthew Bowman, 2012
Recently I was talking to a local librarian about Joseph Smith and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) and she asked me, “Why are you so interested in this subject?” (Note: The LDS church is often referred to as the Mormon church by non-Mormons.) I could tell from her facial expression that she thought that I was more than just a bit obsessive with the subject. My answer; I am interested in Mormonism for three reasons: First, the Republican candidate for president is a Mormon, and I think that what people believe gives more than a hint as to how they will act. Second, it is one of the fastest growing religions claiming over fourteen-million members worldwide as of 2010. Third, the history of the Mormon church provides a rare opportunity to learn firsthand just how a major religion actually got started. Joseph Smith was born in 1805 and the church is less than two-hundred years old. Unlike older religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam there is a rich and vast source of documents including public records, personal letters, diaries, written histories, and newspaper articles available to researchers.
The major source for what follows is the book, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith written by Fawn McKay Brodie and first published in 1945, and later revised and republished in 1971 in order to take advantage of new materials discovered since the first edition was published. Brodie’s book is perhaps the most definitive and authoritative work on the subject. Few people could be more qualified for the task of writing the history of Joseph Smith than Brodie. She was born in Ogden, Utah in 1915 and was raised as a Mormon with deep family ties to the church. Her paternal uncle, David O. McKay, was the ninth president of the LDS church. Her maternal grandfather, George H. Brimhall, was president of Brigham Young University, and her father, Thomas Evans McKay, was a bishop in the church.
Fawn received a BA in English literature from the University of Utah in 1934. She also earned a MA degree from the University of Chicago in 1936. She eventually became a tenured professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in spite of not having a doctoral degree based on a number of published scholarly historical works including Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South and Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History.
After No Man Knows My History was published, her father, Thomas McKay, refused to read it and she was excommunicated from the Mormon church in May of 1946. In 1981 while she was in the hospital dying of cancer, she was visited by her brother who was still active in the church. She asked and received his priesthood blessing, but she also left a written signed note indicating that she was not requesting reentry into the church. She died on January 10, 1981 at the age of 65.
Early Life and History of the area
Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon church, was born on December 23, 1805 at Sharon, Vermont, a small rural farm area located at the foothills of the Green Mountains. His parents were Joseph Smith Sr, and Lucy Mack. They had six other sons including one who died at birth. (Note. References to Joseph Smith throughout this essay refer to the “Prophet” unless otherwise indicated.) Joseph had two older brothers, Alvin (born 1798) and Hyrum (born 1800) and eventually three younger brothers, Samuel (born 1808), William (born 1811) and Don Carlos (born 1816).
The family moved from Sharon, Vermont to Norwich, Vermont, then to Lebanon, New Hampshire, and again in 1816 to Palmyra, New York. The Smiths were very poor farmers. At some point the senior Smith invested all his money in a scheme to export ginseng to China. Unfortunately, his partner made off with all his money leaving the Smith family destitute.
Second Great Awaking
The years around 1816 were a time of tremendous religious fervor and excitement in western New York including Palmyra. The Smiths were big believers in dreams, visions, and prophecies and were extremely religious. Lucy was the religious leader of the family and constantly switched from one sect to another. She eventually joined the Presbyterian Church but could not persuade the senior Smith to join. Young Joseph never showed much interest in organized religion.
This period in United States history was called the “Second Great Awaking.” The religious intensity was fueled by a host of itinerant preachers and prophets and was so great that western New York was referred to as the “Burned-over” district. This colorful group included Isaac Bullard who wore a bearskin girdle and thought that washing was a sin and claimed to go seven years without bathing. He preached free love and communism. Ann Lee, the “mother of the shakers” called herself the reincarnated Christ and preached celibacy and taught the gift of speaking in tongues. Jemima Wilkinson also claimed to be Christ incarnate and swore that she would never die, but in fact died on July 1, 1819. In 1812 Abel Sargent along with his twelve female apostles traveled around the area pretending to raise the dead and selling the idea that if one were sufficiently holy, one could live without eating. One convert tried it, but died after nine days. In 1828 Joseph Dylk claiming to be the true Messiah went around shouting, “I am God,” and gained a large following. It was in these times of extreme religious intensity that the young Joseph Smith grew up.
He was described by his neighbors as a likable ne’er-do-well, notorious for telling tall tales, practicing necromantic arts, and digging for buried treasures. Daniel Hendrix who eventually was the typesetter for the Book of Mormon said that Smith “could never tell a common occurrence in his daily life without embellishing it.” Sometime when he was about fourteen years of age, while he was praying in the woods, he had a vision of seeing God who told him that “all their creeds were an abomination in his sight.” Smith took the creeds in question to be all known organized religions.
Some time around 1825 Joseph Smith met Josiah Stowel who convinced him to travel to the Susquehanna Valley, Pennsylvania to help him locate a lost silver mine. Stowel had heard about Smith’s talent for locating buried treasures, but they in fact found very little of value. Smith and the other members of the party boarded with Isaac Hale in Harmony, Pennsylvania It was there that he met Isaac’s attractive twenty-one-year-old daughter, Emma. Isaac was not favorable impressed by Joseph, describing him as a “careless young man - not very well educated, and very saucy and insolent to his father.” Joseph fell deeply in love with Emma and asked Hale for her hand in marriage but was refused. Undeterred Joseph and Emma were secretly married on January 18, 1827. Afterwards the newly married couple left Harmony and returned to New York to live with his parents.
Palmyra and the surrounding areas was the site of many mounds of old Indian graves. It was usual for people to dig in these hills and find various Indian artifacts including the occasional silver trinket. Many people living in and around this area were very interested in Indian history and artifacts. It was about this time that Joseph heard a story about a Golden Bible being found in a tree in Canada. He was also fascinated by Indian history and was familiar with Ethan Smith’s (no relation) book, View of the Hebrews.
On September 21, 1823, Smith had a vision from the angel Moroni who revealed the location of a stone box containing the golden plates, two seer stones (Urim and Thummim), and a sword. Moroni further revealed to Smith that the plates contained an ancient record of divine origin, but he would not be allowed to remove the plates until he was ”purified and instructed in the things of the kingdom.” He was advised to return in exactly one year for further instructions and evaluation. He did this for four years before he was allowed to remove the plates. Finally on September 21, 1827, he was permitted to remove the plates with the warning, that if anyone other than Smith viewed them, they would die. There was much gossip about his find although there was never any mention at that time about anything of a religious nature.
Joseph told his father about his encounter with the angel Moroni in 1823 who assured his son that it was the work of God. However, in his Autobiography, Joseph did not mention anything about the years from 1823 to 1827. But they certainly were not years of penance and purification. It was around this time that young Smith was involved in the practice of “crystal-gazing,” an alleged way of locating buried treasures by looking into his hat containing a special stone that allowed him to see buried objects.
In March 1826, in the town of Bainbridge, New York, Joseph Smith was charged for being a “disorderly person and an imposter.” After a trial he was found guilty of disturbing the peace. Sixty-one of his neighbors signed an affidavit accusing him of being “destitute of moral character and addicted to vicious habits.”
Although Joseph could read, he could not write, necessitating the use of a scribe to record the words as he interpreted the plates. Emma was his first scribe. Their general procedures was to suspend a sheet on a rope in the kitchen with Emma on one side preventing her from seeing the plates, and Joseph on the other side deciphering the "Egyptian-looking" language from them. Joseph would put the seer stones in his hat and then place his face into the hat thus shielding the seers stones from any light which then revealed the writing that he read out to Emma who recorded it. At some point Joseph and Emma moved into a house owned by her father Isaac who was somewhat reconciled to Joseph who had promised to give up treasure hunting and live the life of a farmer.
In April 1828 Martin Harris moved to Harmony and took over the responsibility of taking Joseph’s dictation using the same procedure employed in Smith’s Palmyra kitchen. Martin had recently inherited a valuable farm and was considered wealthy for the times and area. His wife Lucy was extremely suspicious of the entire saga of the golden plates due to Joseph’s notorious reputation. She felt that her husband was weak-minded and naive, and feared that Joseph was perpetrating a scheme to swindle him out of his inheritance. She insisted that she accompany Martin to Harmony with unpleasant results.
Martin finally convinced Lucy to return home, but she continued to pressure him to give up the project and leave Harmony and rejoin her. Martin took up where Emma left off and eventually they completed 116 pages. At this point Martin talked Joseph into allowing him to take the completed 116 pages back home in an attempt to win Lucy’s support for the project. Unfortunately for Joseph the plan did not work. Lucy stole the manuscript, hid it, and refused to return it. To this day it has never been recovered and is assumed destroyed.
Martin and Joseph were frantic with fear, anger, and regret. They pleaded with Lucy to return the “missing” pages. She refused stating that if the golden plates really existed, Joseph could simply repeat the process and recreate the pages. Joseph realized that he was caught in a trap set by Lucy knowing that he could not interpret exactly the golden plates again. Since he did not know the whereabouts of original copy, it was possible that it could reappear at anytime in the future allowing for a comparison with the newly created pages. If they were not identical, the Book of Mormon would be exposed as a fraud.
Joseph Smith agonized and prayed over the problem, and finally received a "revelation" from God. It seems that Satin had intervened in an attempt to sabotage God’s plan, but God had anticipated Satin’s plot and had a backup plan. He directed Joseph to a site where a replacement golden plate was buried thus allowing for the true version to be interpreted and transcribed. The original pages were the work of the devil. With Satan thwarted, the work continued.
On April 7, 1829, Joseph replaced Martin Harris with Oliver Cowdery who proved to be more reliable and proficient. Also about this time John the Baptist appeared and directed that Smith and Cowdery baptize each other. John also bestowed the Hebraic priesthood of Aaron on Smith. In early July the 275,000- word manuscript was completed and 5,000 copies were printed and went on sale on March 26, 1830. On April 6, of the same year, the Church of Christ was established with six members. They included Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, Samuel H. Smith, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Peter Whitmer. Over the years the name of the church was changed many times and has been known as the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, the Church of Jesus Christ, and the Church of God. Finally in 1838 by revelation, the title, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) was official established.
The Book of Mormon described by Mark Twain as “chloroform in print,” contained the phrase “And it came to pass” 2,000 times. Out of the first 200 sentences, 140 of them began with the word “And.” Out of the 275,000 words, 25,000 were taken from Isaiah and another 2,000 from the New Testament. It also clearly reflected the anti-Catholic sentiment of the times by describing the Catholic church as the “whore of all the earth.” The Book of Mormon also displayed an uncanny resemblance to Ethan Smith’s book, View of the Hebrews.
Luckily for Smith another book, American Antiquities, written by Josiah Priest was published three years after the Book of Mormon. It was essentially the identical story told by Ethan Smith but had the advantage of appearing after Smith’s work thus disarming the critics claiming he had copied Ethan’s earlier book.
There is a very interesting connection between the Book of Mormon and Freemasonry. Joseph Smith and his older brother Alvin were Freemasons, an extremely admired and popular group at this time in the country, until the William Morgan affair. Morgan was a disgruntled Freemason who threatened to publish a book exposing their secrets. He was arrested in 1826 and then allegedly kidnapped and murdered by the Masons. As a result the American people turned against Freemasonry and anti-Masonry was running rampant at the time the Book of Mormon was being written. There was even a political party formed called the Anti-Masonic Party. Not surprisingly Smith included considerable anti-Masonry sentiments in his book. He also borrowed and included considerable Masonic rituals and “secret combinations” in it. Later in 1838, Joseph Smith took Morgan’s widow, Lucinda Pendleton as his third plural wife.
At the time of the writing of the Book of Mormon Joseph Smith did not realize that Jean-François Champollion had deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822. Most people at this time including Smith thought that the Egyptian language was indecipherable, a “fact” that gave Smith great confidence that his translating results could not be challenged. He even wrote out a sample page of the characters that he allegedly copied from the plates and gave it to Martin Harris. Martin then took the sample to New York City and met with Charles Anthon, a professor of Greek and Latin at Columbia University.
Anthon declared the sample “Egyptian” letters to be “a hoax upon the learned” or “a scheme to cheat the farmer out of his money.” Harris pleaded with Anthon with the story of a “sealed book,” who replied “I cannot read a sealed book.” When Martin Harris reported Anthon’s disconcerting findings back to Smith, he used his quick-thinking and knowledge of Bible scriptures to his advantage. He immediately quoted Daniel 12:4 where it was written “But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end.” Harris took the entire affair to be a divine prophecy and was completely convinced that Smith was indeed a true prophet.
Smith’s ability to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs was called into question again in 1835 when he translated some writing from a mummy and Egyptian papyri purchased from a traveling exhibition. He claimed that it was the writing of Abraham which he then translated into the Book of Abraham. Later the materials were examined by eight scholars who concluded that they were not the writings of Abraham but simply ordinary funerary documents.
In 1843 Robert Wiley, Bridge Whitton, and Wilbur Fugate played an elaborate hoax on Smith. They fashioned sheets of copper into the shape of a bell along with some plates and then etched some strange-looking characters onto them and used acid to make them appear old. They then buried the bell along with some Indian bones in a mound located near Kinderhook, Illinois. Wiley then spread a rumor that he had a dream about buried treasure three nights in a row and recruited assistants including three Mormons to search for it. Of course they found the bell and plates and took them to Smith who translating them claiming that it was the word of a decedent of Ham. At some point Smith realized that he was the victim of a hoax and never did publish his “translation.”
In spite of the earlier claim that if anyone other than Joseph Smith viewed the Golden Plates they would die, Smith realized that other reliable witnesses would strengthen his claim as a true prophet. In June or July of 1829 he turned to his three most-enthusiastic believers, Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, and David Whitmer to “reveal” the plates. The event occurred out in the woods and after hours of prayer, a number of failures, and many exhortations, the three witnesses finally “saw” an angel holding the Golden Plates. It is important to note that eventually all three of the witnesses broke with the church.
Later at the end of the 1830 version of the Book of Mormon, there was a list of eight other witnesses to the Golden Plates. This group was made up mostly of Smith or Whitmer family members. Representing the Smith family was the senior Smith, and his son’s Hyrum, and Samuel. The Whitmer family included Christian, Jacob, Peter, and John. Hiram Page was also a witness. Mark Twain remarked that “I could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire Whitmer family has testified.”
The Book of Mormon
The narrative of the Book of Mormon begins in the ancient city of Jerusalem around the year 600 BC. It tells the story of Lehi who took his family and some other followers and left Jerusalem. Their journey took them across the Arabian peninsula where they eventually reached the promised land of America by ship. Lehi, just like the senior Smith, had six sons. They were Lamen, Lemuel, Sam, Nephi, Jacob, and Joseph. After Lehi died, Nephi and Lamen started two warring nations called the Nephites and the Lamanites. The Nephites were religious, God-fearing, honest, and hard-working people. The Lamanites are depicted as lazy, violent, and ferocious people who wandered in the wilderness like savages.
According to the Book of Mormon Jesus was born on the continent of America in the fourth century. After Jesus’ resurrection in the fourth century the Nephites became believers in Jesus Christ. In 385 AD the Nephites were almost totaled destroyed by the Lamanites. Mormon and his son Moroni was the last of the Nephite prophets, and they created the “Book of Mormon” by recording their history on gold plates with the final entry written in 421 AD. Moroni then, following God’s instructions, buried the plates in a hill called Cumorah located outside of Palmyra where in the future they would be found and translated.
Sidney Rigon (born 1793) was a Baptist minister who in 1826 became the minister of a Baptist church in Mentor, Ohio. One member, Parley Pratt was visiting Palmyra and learned of the Book of Mormon. He was baptized into Joseph’s Church of Christ in September 1830. Pratt showed Rigon a copy of the Book of Mormon and he also converted. In December 1830, Smith received a revelation directing him to move the New York church to Kirtland, Ohio. Therefore, in 1831 Smith, Pratt, and Rigon moved the church to Kirtland. At the same time they established an outpost in Independence, Missouri in Jackson County which Smith regarded as Zion. Smith also received a revelation from God indicating that the biblical Garden of Eden was actually located just outside of Independence, in Jackson county.
The Mormon church grew very fast in Kirtland but also created considerable resentment with their non-Mormon (gentile) neighbors due to many of their practices. They referred to theirselves as “Saints,” and experimented with a system designed by Rigon called the United Order. All their members were required to sign the title to their property over to the church. Also all fruits of their labor were deposited with the bishop who then disbursed them out based on need. Eventually Smith replaced the United Order with a mandatory tithe of ten percent. They also limited their contact with gentiles and would only do business with other Mormons. They were unpopular in Independence for the similar reasons plus their abolitionist views.
By 1831 the majority of incoming Mormons had located in Independence, but by 1838 their numbers in Kirtland grew from 100 in 1833 to 2,000. By 1836 they had constructed numerous church buildings including a temple perched on a hill overlooking the Chagrin river. In 1837 Smith started a bank he called the Kirtland Safety Society Bank, but when the legislature rejected his applications for a bank charter, he changed the name to the Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company. Since they had already printed the bank notes, they simply stamped the prefix “Anti” before the word “bank” and the suffix “ing” after it. In the beginning Smith collected silver from depositors and placed it in boxes marked $1,000. He then issued notes backed by silver. Later they filled boxes with rocks and issued more notes. It was not very long before no one would accept the notes and there was a run on the bank as depositors rushed to redeem their notes for silver. As a result the bank failed and Smith was fined for operating an illegal bank. Many lawsuits followed along with much hostility toward Smith and the Mormons.
A faction in the church developed when a young girl claiming to be a seer with the ability to read the future using a black seer stone challenged Smith for influence. Some of the oldest and most-prominent members including David Whitmer, Martin Harris, and Oliver Cowdery pledged their loyalty to her. Smith fought back by putting the dissenters on trial. The situation became very violent causing many of the elders including Brigham Young and Smith to flee to Missouri. On January 6, 1838, the printing office and school house was torched by an arsonist.
In April 1840 Joseph Smith and his followers relocated to Illinois where they purchased the town of Commerce which they then renamed Nauvoo. The Mormon’s new “city” grew rapidly becoming one of the largest towns in Illinois. They published two newspapers, laid the cornerstone for a new temple, and formed a militia of 2,000 men called the Nauvoo Legion. Smith was even made a Lieutenant General by the Illinois Governor Carlin. They also establish a Masonic Lodge in October 1841.
Although Smith had been practicing plural marriage for some time in secret, it was in Nauvoo that he started teaching it to the other leaders of the church claiming it was a revelation from God. John C. Bennett, Smith's closest adviser, a counselor in the First Presidency, and Mayor of Nauvoo sparked a controversy when he was caught in the act of adultery. In 1844 William Law, an important merchant and adviser to Smith broke with the Mormon church and started a reformed church he called the True Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He also started a newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, and threatened to expose the practice of plural marriage in the Mormon church.
Smith retaliated by dispatching part of his militia, the Nauvoo Legion, to attack the Nauvoo Expositor destroying the presses and burning every copy of the newspaper on hand. This turned out to be a major blunder on his part. Governor Thomas Ford ordered the arrest of Joseph, his brother Hyrum and two of his followers. They surrendered after Ford guaranteed their safety and were taken to a jail in Carthage located about fifteen miles from Nauvoo where they were protected by state militia. However, after Ford withdrew the militia, the jail was stormed by a mob who murdered Joseph and Hyrum. This was only the beginning of a program of expulsion for the Mormons and after Brigham Young was selected as a successor to Joseph Smith he led them on a long trek to Utah where he founded the church in Salt Lake City.
Smith’s widow, Emma, was not a supporter of plural marriage or Brigham Young. She believed that her son Joseph Smith III was the designated and legitimate heir to her husband. After the elders selected Brigham Young as the new president, she left the church founded by Joseph Smith and lived as unaffiliated Latter-Day Saint. On April 6, 1860, Joseph Smith III was named the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and in 1872 the word “Reorganized” was added to the name. Today it is known as the Community of Christ.
The issue of plural marriages or “celestial” marriages was a major source of dissension both within and outside of the church. Smith was romantically linked to Nancy M. Johnson as early as 1832 and she eventually became one of his wives. In 1835 he seduced a seventeen-year-old orphan Fannie Alger who was living in the Smith home at the time. Benjamin F. Johnson, patriarch and brother of two of Smith’s wives was aware of the affair as was Oliver Cowdery who called it “a dirty, nasty, and filthy affair.” In early 1833 Fannie Alger became Smith’s first plural wife. Between the years of 1843 and 1844, he took six wives from women who lived in his home. Emma Smith was totally opposed to the idea of plural wives in general and fervently against her husband’s participation. Hyrum Smith urged him to put the revelation he received from God in writing in an attempt to appease Emma. After Emma read what Joseph had written, she finally gave in reluctantly, saying, “The Revelation says I must submit or be destroyed.” However she always thought that the revelation was the work of the devil.
One of the more interesting cases of Mormon plural marriages involved Parley P. Pratt, one of Smith’s earliest followers and highest-ranking church officials. He was appointed to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1835. During his life he had twelve wives, thirty children, and 256 grandchildren. He married his twelfth wife, Eleanor McLean, in San Francisco. Eleanor was still married to Hector McLean of Arkansas who deeply resented the entire affair especially the baptism of his children along with Eleanor into the Mormon church. In May 1857, Pratt was brought to trial on charges of stealing the McLean children’s clothing. At the time parents could not be charged with kidnapping their own children. He was acquitted but after the trial, Hector McLean hunted him down and murdered him on May 13, 1857 in the town of Van Buren, Arkansas. Today it is estimated that more than 30,000 people are descendants of Parley Pratt including Willard Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate for President of the United States.
After Smith’s death, plural marriage became more entrenched in the doctrine of the church and their way of life. Brigham Young had fifty-five wives and by the time of his death more than fifty-seven children. Polygamy continued to be part of the official church doctrine and a way of life for Mormons until the 1890 Manifesto was issued by the church president, Wilford Woodruff in September 1890. It officially banned the practice of plural marriages. The decision by Woodruff was primarily a political one because the United States Congress would not allow Utah statehood until polygamy was eliminated from the territory. Utah was admitted into the union on January 4, 1896.
The 1890 Manifesto did not have any effect on existing plural marriages and some members quietly continued the practice, although in much smaller numbers. Also, dissenters established polygamous communities in Canada and Mexico, In fact, Romney’s father, George was born at one such colony in Mexico in 1907. Leaders of the LDS church admit that the ending the practice of plural marriages after the manifesto was gradual. Ultimately divisions in the church over the issue of polygamy led to a split with the formation of what is called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS).
The FLDS church continued to have major legal difficulties culminating with the arrest of Warren S. Jeffs, the president of the FLDS church, for sexual conduct with minors in August 2006. He was convicted at a trial in St. George, Utah of two counts of rape as an accomplice in September 2007 and was sentenced to ten years in prison. Later his conviction was overturned because of incorrect jury instructions. He was then tried in Texas and found guilty of sexual assault of two girls, ages 12 and 15 years and was sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years. Today it is estimated that there are from six to seven-thousands members of the FLDS church with communities located at Colorado City, Arizona, Hildale, Utah, Eldorado, Texas, and Bountiful, British Columbia.
Conclusion
Joseph Smith and the church he created, is a wonderful story deeply rooted in American history. Just as we broke the yoke of British rule, Smith threw aside the bronze-age theology of a small group of Semitic dessert people in favor of an American story of native Indians and brave settlers. No longer was it necessary to travel to distant and foreign places to experience the holy land; it was as close as Missouri and available to every American. Mormonism also captured the spirit of individualism and egalitarianism that was prevalent at the time he lived. This was a religion of the people unburdened by the dictates of priests, where all members had unfettered direct access to God including the opportunity of receiving revelations. This was a religion without any professional clergy. Every male became a priest at the age of 12. “Only” woman and blacks were excluded from the priesthood.
In spite of the endearing and appealing story of the LDS church, my conclusion is that it was not divinely inspired, but is just the work of a very clever conjurer and charlatan. I base my conclusion in part on the following:
1. The character and history of Joseph Smith especially his propensity and skill at telling tall tales and convincing people that they were true.
2. The numbers of people who allegedly viewed the Golden Plates without any ill effects, in spite of Moroni’s declaration that anyone other than Smith viewing them would die immediately.
3. The obvious similarity of the Book of Mormon to published books including the Bible and Ethan Smith’s book, View of the Hebrews.
4. Smith’s inability to recreate the “missing” 116 pages that were stolen by Lucy Harris.
5. Professor Anthon’s conclusion that the samples of text furnished by Smith were a hoax.
6. Genetic analysis of the DNA of American Indians has conclusively demonstrated that they are not descendants of the ancient Jews.
7. Comparative linguistic analysis of Hebrew and Indian dialects failed to show any similarities.
8. Smith’s “translation” of the text from an Egyptian mummy that he claimed was the writing of Abraham was shown by language experts to be nothing but a common Egyptian funeral service.
9. Smith fell for the hoax perpetrated by Robert Wiley, Bridge Whitton, and Wilbur Fugate in 1843 when they buried fake objects and then led several Mormons to the site. They recovered them and took them to Smith for translation. He claimed that it was the word of a decedent of Ham.
Sources:
1. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, Fawn Brodie, 1971
2. Massacre at Mountain Meadow, Ronald Walker, 2008
3. Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer, 2003
4. The Mormon People, Matthew Bowman, 2012
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