Enough said.
JCB or Caterpillar? (Thinking of Rio here).
I’m reminded of Wyndham Lewis’s comment on fascism versus communism from the point of view of an artist; that the communists would force you to produce nothing but “social realist” paintings whereas Mussolini would probably let you do what you liked in exchange for knocking off the occasional picture of a gladiator.
BYU seems to be an example of theocratic statism rather than conservatism; it’s the exact opposite of a university.
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The fact that we don’t know anymore the name of the guy who concocted a story doesn’t mean that he didn’t exist; folk tales don’t write themselves, and it doesn’t make them any realer. Maybe 2400 years ago people were raising the same complaints about Buddhism.
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Was that included in the $5K?
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Well, as a carpenter, he was in construction. But maybe more along the lines of Dewalt or Porter Cable than big machinery.
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University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus. So not even a school primarily or exclusively for art.
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Folk is a process, not an acoustic band without a steel guitar. Although @Enkita was right that “folk” is too loosey-goosey a term for something as rigorously legalistic and diligently studied as Judaism, Judaism came about organically nonetheless. There is no one guy who was solely responsible.
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Indeed, it took two guys just to put together Grimm’s Fairy Tales. 
I think philologists everywhere would take issue with @d_r 's “great man” theory of mythogenesis.
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Do you believe that the stories in ancient religious texts actually happened, or do you believe someone made them up? If the latter, then I don’t see any difference to LDS other than time and prejudice.
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I think that the people who wrote down the events in the New Testament believed they actually happened.
Those events were written down from oral traditions that were passed down for about a century after the time period they describe, and then committed to paper.
On the other hand, the Book of Mormon was either copied directly from holy golden plates (which have since vanished) by Joseph Smith using a holy stone to translate them, or made up from whole cloth by Joseph Smith.
The Book of Mormon is 100% true or 100% forged. There’s no in-between.
The Gospel according to, say, John, has a whole range of possibilities, from “Recounting accurately exactly what John saw” to “John told the story accurately, but it got twisted in the retelling and what was written down is inaccurate” to “John told the story on his deathbed and had half-forgotten the actual events by the time he told them” to “John made it all up” to “John never existed,” and every point in between.
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Why does it have to be one or the other? I trust an entire culture’s honest attempt to try and make sense of the incomprehensible more than I trust one person’s con job, even though I believe neither of those things are literally correct, and the first one is only barely figuratively correct.
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This whole argument makes less sense to me the more it is made. If a guy claims to have a revelation and writes it down, that’s a fake. But if people might or might not have seen things correctly, then repeat them to one another over time while introducing more and more mistakes and uncertainty, that’s realer? Come on.
Let’s put it a different way.
Remember those neutrinos that “travelled faster than light” a few years back?
If it had been real, it would have revolutionized physics, and so there was a lot of hype about it, both positive and negative.
They tried to reproduce the results, and it turns out the whole thing was a calibration issue.
So the faster-than-light neutrino results weren’t real, but they weren’t fake, either.
On the other hand, when Andrew Wakefield reported a correlation between the MMR vaccine and autism, “had multiple undeclared conflicts of interest, had manipulated evidence, and had broken other ethical codes.” (Citation: Wikipedia) Those results weren’t real, they were deliberately faked.
If you look at the former, you’ll find good science, and when you correct it to take into account the equipment issues, you’ll get real, true results. However, the latter is never going to be anything but bullshit, because it was anti-scientific by its very nature: assuming a conclusion and working backwards to make the facts fit.
For the same reasons, I think that an oral history with an unknown level of distortion is more real than a deliberate forgery. I mean, look at Troy. For centuries, it was thought to be nothing more than a legend, but we’ve actually found a city where Troy is supposed to be, that was destroyed when Troy was supposed to have been destroyed. Do I think that Achilles was dipped into the Styx river by his mother, thus becoming invulnerable to any attack not targeted at his heel? No. But the Iliad does have historical truth in it, more than, say, L. Ron Hubbard’s stories of Xenu.
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Both Scientology and LDS claim to be part of an earlier tradition which they are just updating. In that regard Smith and Hubbard are not much different than Muhammad, though the latter used a handful of scribes instead of an old Underwood.
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Scientology believes earlier religious traditions are holograms blasted into the eyes of early spirits and “implanted” into their memories.
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However, the probabilities of the two options are rather different. At least first century CE has artefacts, archaeology, inscriptions, independent texts from Jewish and Roman sources, and a whole lot of other source material. The evidence for Joseph Smith’s history of North America in the BoM is zero. God knows I’m as big an atheist as they come but it’s clear that something important happened in 1st century CE which followed a long intellectual and social history at the Eastern end of the Mediterranean, and which had enormous social and historic consequences. It deserves studying. So does the rise of the Mormons, but we can be abundantly clear that their genesis was of a very different order.
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100% agreed.
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Surely “profits from the gullibility of people who can be persuaded to think that” rather than “believes”?
I do think that both Scientology and the Mormons may actually be making use of a gullibility test. People who can swallow these ideas are far more likely to part with money than people who say “you think what? Magic underwear? Magic goggles?”
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Surely. It’s a fun argument with my spouse who’s ex-Mormon and argues that she was raised in a cult.
I see a difference because of the heirarchical structure over the more whackadoodle elements, but I certainly see her points as well.
My statement above was that it’s not really taught at the higher levels as being “based on” tradition (unlike the lower levels where they claim you can be a Christian AND a Scientologist) so much as all the earlier traditions were fabricated and inflicted on us.
Moroni aside, it was funny when we got into a discussion of doctrine through text and a friend mistyped “oh, so you’re a Moron.”
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