Cold Steel
I recently read Going Clear by Lawrence Wright, a thoroughly good book that I would highly recommend. Though it deals with Scientology, Wright broadens his discussion in the Epilogue to encompass other religious movements - including the LDS Church.
I would be fascinated to hear your thoughts on the following quote from pages 375-377...
One might compare Scientology with the Church of Latter Day Saints, a
new religion of the previous century. The founder of the movement, Joseph
Smith, claimed to have received a pair of golden plates from the angel
Moroni in upstate New York in 1827, along with a pair of magical “seeing
stones,” which allowed him to read the contents. Three years later, he
published The Book of Mormon, founding a movement that would provoke
the worst outbreak of religious persecution in American history. Mormons
were chased all across the country because of their practice of polygamy and
their presumed heresy. Smith himself was murdered by a mob in Carthage,
Illinois. His beleaguered followers sought to escape the United States and
establish a religious theocracy in the territory of Utah, which they called
Zion. Mormons were so despised that there was a bill in Congress to
exterminate them. And yet Mormonism would evolve and go on to become
one of the fastest-growing denominations in the twentieth, and now the
twenty-first, centuries. Members of the faith now openly run for president of
the United States. In much of the world, this religion, which was once
tormented because of its perceived anti-American values, is now thought of
as being the most American of religions; indeed, that’s how many Mormons
think of it as well. It is a measure not only of the religion’s success but also
of the ability of a faith to adapt and change.
And yet Joseph Smith was plainly a liar. In answer to the charge of
polygamy, he claimed he had only one wife, when he had already
accumulated a harem. A strange but revealing episode occurred in 1835,
when Smith purchased several Egyptian mummies from an itinerant
merchant selling such curiosities. Inside the mummy cases were scrolls of
papyrus, reduced to fragments, which Smith declared were the actual
writings of the Old Testament patriarchs Abraham and Joseph. Smith
produced what he called a translation of the papyri, titled The Book of
Abraham. It still forms a portion of Mormon doctrine. In America at the
time, Egyptian was still thought to be indecipherable, but the Rosetta Stone
had already been discovered, and Jean-François Champollion had
successfully rendered the hieroglyphic language into French. In 1966, the
Joseph Smith papyri were discovered in the collection of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. It was soon shown that the passages that Smith “translated”
were common funerary documents with no reference to Abraham or Joseph
whatsoever. This fraud has been known for decades, but it has made little
difference in the growth of the religion or the devotion of its adherents.
Belief in the irrational is one definition of faith, but it is also true that
clinging to absurd or disputed doctrines binds a community of faith together
and defines a barrier to the outside world.
Cedars
