[ExI] and speaking of exponential singularities...

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Tue Jul 19 06:49:11 UTC 2011


On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 4:20 PM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> On 7/18/2011 4:26 PM, Tom Nowell wrote:
>
> There's also the quite incredible gullibility/stupidity of people who devote
> their lives to hokum that a child could show was concocted by a scammer (as
> with $cientology), since the fraudulence of the thing is a matter of fairly
> recent historical record.
>
> Consider this charming episode reported by Christopher Hitchens in GOD IS
> NOT GREAT:

I LOVE Christopher Hitchens! I really do. But this particular passage
is rather loose with some of the facts.

> <In March 1826 a court in Bainbridge, New York, convicted a
> twenty-one-year-old man of being "a disorderly person and an impostor." That
> ought to have been all we ever heard of Joseph Smith, who at trial admitted
> to defrauding citizens by organizing mad gold-digging expeditions and also
> to claiming to possess dark or "necromantic" powers. However, within four
> years he was back in the local newspapers (all of which one may still read)
> as the discoverer of the "Book of Mormon."

I have tried to track down the source of this, and have been unable to
find any evidence that Joseph Smith was ever convicted of anything.
The records are simply incomplete. No question he was obviously hauled
into court dozens of times... The difference in time between the trial
1826 and the first publication of these alleged facts in 1873 stretch
credibility to some extent since people had been actively trying to
discredit Smith since at least 1830. There is no doubt that Joseph
Smith was employed by Josiah Stowell to do some "money digging"... and
searching for Spanish treasure and lost mines was a pretty common
endeavor in the country there abouts at that time. I am not a Joseph
Smith apologetic by any means, but I don't think the anti-Mormons have
come up with incontrovertible evidence in this particular case.

In other words, I think it is entirely credible that both sides are
making up facts to suit their case. The anti-Mormons are just as
religious (and suspect) as the Mormons in this stuff.

> …Smith refused to show the golden plates to anybody, claiming that for other
> eyes to view them would mean death.

Here Hitchens just completely falls off the facts band wagon... Sorry
Christopher. Joseph Smith showed the plates to three witnesses, and
later to eight other witnesses. No, Smith didn't display them to
everyone, but 11 witnesses is not NOBODY. Despite later disagreements
with Smith, none of the 11 witnesses of the golden plates from which
the Book of Mormon was allegedly translated has been shown to recant
their testimony. This is a huge problem for the anti-Mormon crowd.

> But he encountered a problem that will
> be familiar to students of Islam. He was extremely glib and fluent as a
> debater and story-weaver, as many accounts attest. But he was illiterate, at
> least in the sense that while he could read a little, he could not write. A
> scribe was therefore necessary to take his inspired dictation. This scribe
> was at first his wife Emma and then, when more hands were necessary, a
> luckless neighbor named Martin Harris. Hearing Smith cite the words of
> Isaiah 29, verses 11-12, concerning the repeated injunction to "Read,"
> Harris mortgaged his farm to help in the task and moved in with the Smiths.
> He sat on one side of a blanket hung across the kitchen, and Smith sat on
> the other with his translation stones, intoning through the blanket. As if
> to make this an even happier scene, Harris was warned that if he tried to
> glimpse the plates, or look at the prophet, he would be struck dead.

This part is essentially correct. Not sure about the struck dead
part... never heard that before, but he was told not to look for sure.

> Mrs. Harris was having none of this, and was already furious with the
> fecklessness of her husband. She stole the first hundred and sixteen pages
> and challenged Smith to reproduce them, as presumably—given his power of
> revelation—he could. (Determined women like this appear far too seldom in
> the history of religion.)

I know of no evidence that Mrs Harris was the person who stole the 116
pages. Christopher weaves his own story here, or repeats a woven story
told by someone else. Nevertheless, there is ample evidence that
someone stole those pages.

> After a very bad few weeks, the ingenious Smith
> countered with another revelation. He could not replicate the original,
> which might be in the devil's hands by now and open to a "satanic verses"
> interpretation. But the all-foreseeing Lord had meanwhile furnished some
> smaller plates, indeed the very plates of Nephi, which told a fairly similar
> tale. With infinite labor, the translation was resumed, with new scriveners
> behind the blanket as occasion demanded, and when it was completed all the
> original golden plates were transported to heaven, where apparently they
> remain to this day.

Again, this part is pretty much correct.

> Good on Mrs. Harris, a woman with the elementary commonsense apparently
> denied the pests who upset Tom Nowell!

I don't know where the Book of Mormon came from. Perhaps Joseph Smith
dictated it... but if so, it was quite a feat... Perhaps someone else
wrote it and gave it to Smith, or maybe Smith took the book from
someone else... There are things that are difficult to explain in the
world, and the origins of the Book of Mormon are in that category from
my point of view. Having studied aspects of the book for years, and
acknowledging that there is a lot in there that is just plain bunk,
(no elephants in the new world at the time, Amerindians are not
descendents of the Jews, etc. etc.) it holds together in ways that
just would not be possible for Joseph Smith to have constructed by
himself. One example of this is the chiasmas literary structures found
in certain parts of the book. These structures could not have been
known to Smith, or probably anyone else in the neighborhood at the
time. It's odd. The statistical word distributions pretty much prove
multiple authors. So who were they?

I suspect time travelers... aliens... something weird and strange... I
don't know what... But having read other things known to have been
written by Joseph Smith at the time, there just isn't any comparison.
He was a young, uneducated kid. I don't think he wrote the book. I do
not suspect God had anything to do with it whatsoever, but I can't
weave a story that makes any sense either. Strange shit sometimes
happens is the best I can do with it. I would love to be able to just
explain it away... but it's a hard nut.

-Kelly




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