I recently had interaction with a close familiarity (family/friend) and was reminded of how the Mormon priority order is Church, career, God, family. Yes, for an organization that proclaims family comes first, it actually comes last, right after God.
Let me take the long road to explain.
In the "Mad Hatter's" LDS Topic essay on the Book of Mormon Translation, LDS historians write:
"Joseph placed the seer stone in a hat, pressed his face into the hat to block out extraneous light, and read aloud the English words that appeared on the instrument."Get that? God sent actual English words inside a darkened hat, on a rock Joe Smith dug up inside a well. Words from God, which appeared and written down onto paper directly are the text of the fundamental foundation scripture of Mormonism. Words which have been shown by science and sociologists to be horribly wrong.
This is equivalent to throwing God under the bus, all in order to protect Joseph Smith's silly, early 19th century, unschooled notions that he could translate gold plates, Egyptian papyri and more.
English words appeared on the stone within the hat. Joseph didn't need to know any languages. And the racist, anachronistic, archaeologically incorrect statements of the Book of Mormon (and book of Abraham) came directly from Elohim. God is the author of some very disturbing words. Even the spelling, according to some BYU Scholarly sources. "Oliver Cowdery is reported to have testified in court that these tools enabled Joseph 'to read in English, the reformed Egyptian characters, which were engraved on the plates' ".
In the Ensign, Russel M. Nelson confirmed that Joseph saw English words --nay, English letters-- off the seer stone inside a hat, "Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat...when he came to proper names he could not pronounce, or long words, he spelled them out, and while I was writing them, if I made any mistake in spelling, he would stop me and correct my spelling although it was impossible for him to see how I was writing them down at the time." (said David Whitmer and Emma Smith on Joseph's translating).
Thus, the Book of Mormon words AND letters came directly from God. When the Book of Mormon talks about horses and dark-skin curses, that is directly from God. This is not a Joseph Smith problem. God will someday (conveniently in the afterlife) correct the archaeology, the anachronisms, the off-kilter linguistics, and all other language problems of that most corrected book.
They disavowed racism and acknowledge science is correct on the horses, wheel, wheat, steel and DNA lacking evidence to the claims of the Book of Mormon. Did God feed the wrong information to Joseph?
So it was God's fault. If he would deign to correct something like spelling but not horses or simple astronomy, then what exactly is going on?
The LDS church claims the Book of Mormon is the "most correct book on earth" (see BoM introduction). Where does this place God?
Under the bus.
The Mormon God is a racist.
The Mormon God is a sexist.
The Mormon God is a homophobe.
The Mormon God is a horrible astronomer.
and more.
Look at it this way, LDS--either Joseph and scribes and descriptions of translation are wrong, or God is wrong. Either way, the Book of Mormon is full of errors from God or from Joseph Smith. You pick, and with that choice, you have to decide whether this is just a silly fraud or some miraculous err-proned work of God.
It's not me. It's your work. But then, I have been criticized by those close to me that I am offensive when I point out these facts. I guess, if they will throw god under the bus to protect Joseph Smith, then I'm just god's backup going under that same bus.
Everything will go under the bus to protect Joe. Especially family.
It will take a Big-ass bus to run over me. A big ole orange school bus full of spit-wads, fat-kid farts and four-eyed geeky boogers.
(the 4-eyed kids are us exmos)
My new life in Florida.
Lake Eola, Orlando, 2015
My old Mountain West life, while beautiful, was Black n White.
