Green Oasis

Here’s part of a FAIR article on the historicity of the Book of Mormon as quoted in a recent Meridian article:

The important question here is not whether or not scientific evidence can prove or disprove the Book of Mormon. The real question becomes: Does it really matter?

Other Christian religions seem to make room for members who see, for example, the creation story of Adam and Eve as a profound metaphor, in a way of explaining the ultimate truth of the creation without requiring any definite belief in the literalness of the story as it comes down to us in Genesis. Can’t the faithful LDS view the Book of Mormon as other Christians view the Bible — inspirational stories and myths, which may not be literally true?

Sure, I could get behind that. I don’t know how inspirational I would find most of the Book of Mormon, but that is no different than the Bible. If I could go to an LDS church and openly admit that I thought the Book of Mormon probably wasn’t historically true, I might be more tempted to stick around. That sounds like the beginning of honest, enlightened discourse. The Meridian article goes on:

The answer to that question is no.

Tease! Don’t toy with my emotions like that.

If someone comes to the conclusion that the Book of Mormon is not historical at all, is there a place for him in the Church? Probably. We cast a very broad net. That person cannot go around teaching his heterodox views on the subject, but if he is willing to keep them to himself, he can be a contributing active member of the Church, simply bracketing the historicity issue.

In other words, come pay your tithing and babysit in the nursery but keep your heretical ideas to yourself. Anyone who makes us think about our beliefs is an apostate or an anti-Mormon. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: visitors welcome, check your brains at the door.

Nice. And you wonder why I wanted to leave once I started really thinking about my beliefs.

Don’t ask me why I thought it would be fun and profitable to research Jaredite genealogy. Perhaps it was to determine if “descendant of” meant something different than “son of”. For whatever reason, I sat down one day years ago to trace out the genealogies in the Book of Ether. I made a table similar to the following:

After compiling the table, I scanned over the results and realized that I must have written down the information for generation 24 wrong: the two names conflicted. So I checked Ether 1:12: Shiblon. So I thought my mistake must have been at Ether 11:4. Turning to that verse, my heart skipped a few beats: Shiblom! I hadn’t written it wrong, there was an error in the Book of Mormon!

This moment was an important transition for me. Prior to this discovery, I believed that it was entirely possible that the Book of Mormon was the inerrant, letter-perfect word of God. In a moment, I realized that this could not possibly be true.

I believed that the Bible had errors of translation, but the Mormon Article of Faith 8 implied that the Book of Mormon was immune from this problem: “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.” There was no caveat regarding translation errors in the Book of Mormon.

Of course there were scriptures like Mormon 8:17 which indicated that there might be some problems.

And if there be faults [in the Book of Mormon] they be the faults of a man. But behold, we know no fault; nevertheless God knoweth all things; therefore, he that condemneth, let him be aware lest he shall be in danger of hell fire.

I had always assumed that this was false modesty or that Moroni was talking about the human frailties recounted in the Book of Mormon stories. I hadn’t considered that there would be such a glaring spelling error.

This may seem silly that I was disturbed over such a little thing as a probable scribal error. The two names do sound a lot alike. I could easily imagine Joseph Smith rattling off names while his scribe mistook “Shiblom” for “Shiblon”, an honest mistake.

But please remember my beliefs at this time. I believed that God had ensured the letter-perfect transmission of the Book of Mormon from ancient prophets to me. It doesn’t take much evidence to destroy an absolute belief like that, so this spelling inconsistency took on mammoth importance in the story of my faith. While I retained my faith, it was the first step down from absolutist, fundamentalist Mormonism.

If there was one error in the Book of Mormon, then there could be others. If God didn’t ensure that everything was perfect about the Book of Mormon, maybe he didn’t ensure that every General Conference talk was perfect either. Maybe some of the things the prophets had said were just their personal opinions.…

I think you can see where this is going. That seed of doubt bore fruit years later in my utter rejection of the Mormon claims to divine investiture.