Interpreter drags out the big guns: Smoot Challenges the IFT

The catch-all forum for general topics and debates. Minimal moderation. Rated PG to PG-13.
_Doctor CamNC4Me
_Emeritus
Posts: 21663
Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 11:02 am

Re: Interpreter drags out the big guns: Smoot Challenges the

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

More proof Morms are always checking out the board for some good content:

site:mormondiscussions.com "inspired fiction" Book of Mormon

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=7104

I mean, waaaaaay back in 2008 this was discussed here. Smoot would've been what? Six-years-old?

I'm fairly certain Book of Mormon as inspired fiction has been talked about seriously since the Community of Christ decided to go that route.

- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.

Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
_Doctor Scratch
_Emeritus
Posts: 8025
Joined: Sat Apr 18, 2009 4:44 pm

Re: Interpreter drags out the big guns: Smoot Challenges the

Post by _Doctor Scratch »

I sort of expected there to be at least a side-swipe at Grant Hardy, but instead, Smoot actually sides with Hardy! If you don't need to believe in the LGT or in a literally true Book of Mormon in order to achieve salvation, then what is the point of this article? (Yes, yes, I know: the article is really more intended as an attack on the "New MI" way of thinking, etc.)
"[I]f, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
_Kishkumen
_Emeritus
Posts: 21373
Joined: Sat Dec 13, 2008 10:00 pm

Re: Interpreter drags out the big guns: Smoot Challenges the

Post by _Kishkumen »

People have been putting sayings in Jesus’ mouth since the first century AD. Show me a saying of Jesus that is certainly authentic among the many that are attributed to him. How would one demonstrate certain authenticity? It cannot be done.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
_Philo Sofee
_Emeritus
Posts: 6660
Joined: Wed Jul 04, 2012 9:04 am

Re: Interpreter drags out the big guns: Smoot Challenges the

Post by _Philo Sofee »

Kishkumen wrote:People have been putting sayings in Jesus’ mouth since the first century AD. Show me a saying of Jesus that is certainly authentic among the many that are attributed to him. How would one demonstrate certain authenticity? It cannot be done.


This is an important point actually, and one I side with Kish on. It all looks as if it was in hindsight retrospect to make Jesus such a pivotal and crucially indispensible part of humanity with eternal importance, rather than how his contemporaries, realistically, saw him. He was just another one of them. I believe it was the Catholic thologian Joseph Fitzmyer who demonstrated not only Aramaic and Hebrew, but Greek was a very real possible language Jesus was engaged with. Yet he wrote nothing. Not even something bad, and not anything good that we have hands on. But then, again, due to the nature of Christianity carping their stuff from Judaism in that day, we have literally nothing from any of the contemporaries mentioned in the Gospels. It was all destroyed or allowed to disintigrate and rot thus disappearing. Nag Hammadi has some possibilities, but those sayings of Jesus match very little with what the Gospels attribute to him. It's a terrific challenge, without question.
Dr CamNC4Me
"Dr. Peterson and his Callithumpian cabal of BYU idiots have been marginalized by their own inevitable irrelevancy defending a fraud."
_Everybody Wang Chung
_Emeritus
Posts: 4056
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2011 2:53 am

Re: Interpreter drags out the big guns: Smoot Challenges the

Post by _Everybody Wang Chung »

Smoot is young and trying to find where he fits in with the Mopologists and as a TBM. When people like him fall, they fall hard. When he falls, I hope he'll have an excellent support system available. Smoot is not going to find that support system among the Mopologists.

In Smoot's behalf, I'll note that he has a pretty tough row to hoe personally. He recently has come out in his Twitter account as bisexual. I'll wager his career will pay dearly for that admission going forward. He has also been, recently, a voice advocating for better treatment of LGBTQ individuals by the LDS hierarchy and the membership at large, and I applaud that.

Remember that many of us were once just like him. Thank heavens nobody filmed me when I was a zealous "defender." Much facepalming now.......
"I'm on paid sabbatical from BYU in exchange for my promise to use this time to finish two books."

Daniel C. Peterson, 2014
_moksha
_Emeritus
Posts: 22508
Joined: Fri Oct 27, 2006 8:42 pm

Re: Interpreter drags out the big guns: Smoot Challenges the

Post by _moksha »

Stephen Smoot wrote:The book not only must be chiefly read as a sacred history of God’s dealings with a remnant of the house of Israel in ancient America but must also actually be such a history for it to carry any meaningful theological and moral legitimacy.

The book The Princess Bride was quite enjoyable even without the author's pretense that he did not write the book and that the events were real. It was, after all, a hot fairy tale and ended up as a memorable movie. Fiction has its own legitimacy.
Cry Heaven and let loose the Penguins of Peace
_grindael
_Emeritus
Posts: 6791
Joined: Mon Aug 08, 2011 8:15 am

Re: Interpreter drags out the big guns: Smoot Challenges the

Post by _grindael »

They are TERRIFIED. Absolutely crapping in their drawers that more and more Saints are of the opinion that the Book of Mormon is pseudepigrapha, and will go the way of the Reorganization. And then how will they survive when Book of Mormon Central folds up shop? All that work down the drain!

And really, who is going to read through that mess of illogical ramblings? The average Saint? I don't think so. He should be thankful for the critics, they are probably the only ones who have read it. (Except this one who knows all about his phony maroni baloney).
Riding on a speeding train; trapped inside a revolving door;
Lost in the riddle of a quatrain; Stuck in an elevator between floors.
One focal point in a random world can change your direction:
One step where events converge may alter your perception.
Post Reply