The Mystery of Godliness

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_Maksutov
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Re: The Mystery of Godliness

Post by _Maksutov »

Themis wrote:
bomgeography wrote:Many critics have come up with theories about the origins of the Book of Mormon from he individually wrote it to he had a team of writers help him write it. That he copied from different books of his time to the point that he copied from Shakespeare. None of these theories have stuck and people need to come up with more ideas.


You need better ideas. The science is very clear Haplo type x arrived well before Book of Mormon times, and that it's relation to the middle east is tens of thousands of year ago. It's also obvious you have little understanding of DNA science.


There is no fact that he cannot dismiss in favor of the burning in his bosom. :wink:
"God" is the original deus ex machina. --Maksutov
_bomgeography
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Re: The Mystery of Godliness

Post by _bomgeography »

I like your way thinking. :wink:
_Themis
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Re: The Mystery of Godliness

Post by _Themis »

bomgeography wrote:I like your way thinking. :wink:


Your main problem is you have shown yourself to be very dishonest. Not even the believing members will back you up, so you have no credibility with almost anyone.
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_honorentheos
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Re: The Mystery of Godliness

Post by _honorentheos »

Themis wrote:
bomgeography wrote:The Book of Mormon is the bedrock of the church nobody in its almost 200 years have been able to crack its foundation the it is a written record of Christ visiting the indigenous people of America.


I could say that about the Koran, and it has over a billion followers. At least it was written over a thousand years ago.

His comment isn't true. The foundational claims of the Book of Mormon which made sense to it's original 19th c. audience have been exposed as false. The modern LDS Church has modified the background context repeatedly to address this. We're even seeing respected LDS historians and thinkers suggesting one need only focus on the book in an allegorical way rather than as history.

The Quran has it's mythological aspects, and one may wonder how accurately it really reflects the recitations of the Prophet Muhammad. But no one doubts the existing of Muhammad even if they may doubt that he was spoken to by Gabriel or that there are angels at all. But in the archeological sense, the Quran is far superior to the Book of Mormon and will be so until Mormons accept it's value for explaining human history is limited to the 19th c. American frontier.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
_Physics Guy
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Re: The Mystery of Godliness

Post by _Physics Guy »

The other thing about the Qu'ran is that even the traditional account of its revelation is pretty down-to-earth. Muhammed would go into a trance and speak words. Wherever the words came from, there was no rock in a turban, no urim or thummim, no golden plates. There was no rigmarole about the miraculous text being a miraculous translation of an ordinary text. The language of the Qu'ran itself isn't ham-handed imitation of a well-known previous scripture; instead the Qu'ran defines classical Arabic.
_Maksutov
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Re: The Mystery of Godliness

Post by _Maksutov »

Physics Guy wrote:The other thing about the Qu'ran is that even the traditional account of its revelation is pretty down-to-earth. Muhammed would go into a trance and speak words. Wherever the words came from, there was no rock in a turban, no urim or thummim, no golden plates. There was no rigmarole about the miraculous text being a miraculous translation of an ordinary text. The language of the Qu'ran itself isn't ham-handed imitation of a well-known previous scripture; instead the Qu'ran defines classical Arabic.


Trance mediums have dictated many of our modern scriptures as well, except we refer to them as "channeled texts". Angels have fallen out of favor but aliens are in. :wink:
"God" is the original deus ex machina. --Maksutov
_ClarkGoble
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Re: The Mystery of Godliness

Post by _ClarkGoble »

Sorry haven't had time to comment for a few days - I have little time for personal study and I used it for a couple of T&S posts and a few comments at the Mormon Dialog forum. Catching up. Let me know if I missed your comments you wanted answer. Earnestly not avoiding responses.

honorentheos wrote:Would you mind explicitly identifying the neoplatonic views of the Pratts you mention? I can't claim more than a very introductory understanding of neoplatonism so while I hate to ask that you fill in the gaps for me, I guess that's exactly what I'm hoping you'll do.


Neo-Platonism is the name scholars typically give the type of platonism existing from roughly 1st century AD to 400 AD. It's not a term people in that era themselves used. It's more to distinguish it from how scholars reconstruct either Socrates or Plato's own views. People like Iamblicus or Plotinus would have just seen themselves as platonists.

To flesh things out a bit its probably best to explain Plato's views. First he divided things into the world of the sense and the forms themselves. Forms are the ideas of things - so horseness as opposed to particular horses. Forms are also made up of other forms -- so horse is made out of mammal, four legs, and so forth. Basically all abstract ideas are these form. What Plato argues is that these abstract ideas are more real than the world of the senses.

By the time of the neoplatonists there had been quite a few other schools of thought. Plato's student Aristotle is the best example but other important groups were the Stoics, the Epicureans and so forth. Aristotle was a materialist and forms to him were just the structures in matter but not separable from matter. He talked of the essences of things but meant that more akin to how we'd talk of the essential characteristics of a category. What neoplatonism ends up being is a kind of platonism that had responded to the criticisms of these other schools. In particular the Stoics and Aristotleans. So neoplatonic cosmology was basically lifted from the Stoics which is the idea of a world-mind that organizes the universe in a kind of organic fashion. The main difference is that for the neoplatonists this is immaterial whereas for the Stoics it was a material substance that fills the universe.

The neoplatonists held there were three levels. Matter, Soul and Intellect. Past intellect you get to the One which was more or less God in a deist sense. Existence happens by emanations that start with the One and become less and less perfect until we reach matter.

The early Christians, especially Augustine, were highly influenced by the neoplatonists yet had some essential different doctrines. Primarily creation ex nihlo and the Trinity. To the neoplatonists proper everything is ultimately one and it just seems like multiple kinds of stuff because we don't see how it is related.

Getting to the Pratts, Parley in particular, they had a neoplatonic notion that creation happens literally out of the substance of god. Now one should also distinguish even the early Parley Pratt from some types of neoplatonism, especially that that considered matter evil. For Parley the resurection was essentially important even before the revelations on spirits as matter sometimes around 1842. It's that revelation that pushes them away from neoplatonism.

While most of the ties to neoplatonism come from this earlier view of Mormonism there are various parallels that historians have noted. Quinn ties the three degrees of glory to the degrees in Plotinus for instance. Unfortunately Quinn was largely doing a scattergun parallel target hunt pretty similar to what Nibley used to do. The more careful analysis looks not only at figures like Emerson but also at particular translations of neoplatonic works as well as the dialogs of plato available to pre-Nauvoo Mormonism. Often appeals to particular phrasing in those texts is used. (Which isn't necessarily to argue that Joseph read those books - more than there was a cultural influence there)

If there is one thing about Joseph Smith that seems to come through in the writings and revelations, it's that of a Newtonian, material world of cause-and-effect. I can't make the jump on my own to the place where I'm entertaining early Mormonism as sharing roots with the Transcendentalists.


As I said that's more 1842, around the height of Emerson's popularity (although there are hints before that of a materialist outlook). A good source if you're interesting are some of [url juvenileinstructor.org/?s=neoplatonism]Steve Flemming's posts at Juvenile Instructor[/url]. The big parallels are the idea of a pre-existence (alien to traditional Christian thought at the time of Joseph), the divine feminine, a certain perspective on unity, three heavens (somewhat -- I think Steve doesn't qualify this enough in terms of how neoplatonists understood this), deification, effect of ritual for knowledge of god etc.
_honorentheos
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Re: The Mystery of Godliness

Post by _honorentheos »

Thanks, ClarkGoble.

So what would be the difference between claiming the Pratts and other early Mormons were influenced by Neo-platonism or their having simply rationalized a type of thought that believed in a spiritual, supernatural world transposed over the material one? Is it necessary they be connected to Plotinus through a direct line of thinking back to late antiquity?
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
_ClarkGoble
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Re: The Mystery of Godliness

Post by _ClarkGoble »

honorentheos wrote:So what would be the difference between claiming the Pratts and other early Mormons were influenced by Neo-platonism or their having simply rationalized a type of thought that believed in a spiritual, supernatural world transposed over the material one? Is it necessary they be connected to Plotinus through a direct line of thinking back to late antiquity?


The main argument for direct influence is that it was common in the culture and some of the phrases Joseph and others use are particular to 19th century texts. Obviously there are easy places of influence via the American Transcendentalists like Emerson. Steve Fleming dealt with this in his doctoral thesis where he mentions many phrases common to Thomas Taylor's translations of Proclus and Plato. Steve has quite a few posts on the subject [url=http://juvenileinstructor.org/joseph-smith-and-the-persistence-of-late-neoplatonism-or-a-possible-source-for-“telestial”/]over at Juvenile Instructor[/url]. However the work here is still very preliminary although farther along than what one finds in say Quinn.
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