Stem wrote:Interesting thanks. I suppose my interjection was meant to suggest much of what you say and describe above. The Book and the religion have too much for me to just pass off as fraud and leave it at that. If that were the case I suppose I'd have left long ago and not spent so much of my free time reading about it and talking with others about it. Sometimes my defensive habits come back and I want to justify myself all over again.
I sympathize with you, and I really don't think you have any obligation to justify yourself. If you are kooky, then I am even kookier. Mormonism is a captivating puzzle that pulls many people into its orbit, even scholars who never considered joining and likely never will.
Stem wrote:I admit though, I have a little bit of an "What the F?" reaction to your theory though. It feels far too complicated, too many links between people and ideas that remains too theoretical to me. I want it to be nothing more than Joseph and a friend or two trying their darndest to come up with scripture due to their own genuine concern for humanity.
I don't think that what you are writing concerning the motives of Joseph Smith is at all inconsistent with what I just said. All I have done is to port in a lot of background material. The movements I mention were all about "genuine concern for humanity." They had genuine, sincere utopian ambitions. Bacon's New Atlantis provides a nice, albeit much earlier, parallel to some of what the Book of Mormon attempts. It is a not so obviously but nevertheless actually Rosicrucian inspired utopian vision. The Book of Mormon is similarly not so obviously but actually Masonic with a utopian vision that nonetheless must account for the fall of Native American Hebrew Christians from utopia to utter degradation and horror.