DonBradley has a Q re: Taves' hypothesis

[_Lemmie]

Taves' book, Revelatory Events, is a pretty interesting addition to her paper. The book looks into the religious experiences of three people who created religious texts, one of whom is Joseph Smith. Her perspective is fascinating.

Thank you, orangganjil! That looks fascinating. From the publisher's site, her three subjects:

Ann Taves looks at Mormonism, Alcoholics Anonymous, and A Course in Miracles—three cases in which insiders claimed that a spiritual presence guided the emergence of a new spiritual path. In the 1820s, Joseph Smith, Jr., reportedly translated the Book of Mormon from ancient gold plates unearthed with the help of an angel. Bill Wilson cofounded AA after having an ecstatic experience while hospitalized for alcoholism in 1934. Helen Schucman scribed the words of an inner voice that she attributed to Jesus, which formed the basis of her 1976 best-selling self-study course.
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10887.html

[_Gadianton]

I finally read the Taves paper. Here's what I got out of it:

- The plates Smith forged were like a voodoo doll or better, like the stones the Brother of Jared touched and made into lights for the barges.

- There is no such thing as a group delusion. Joseph Smith can't be crazy because he fits with his community and family. As he steps into his role as a prophet, he's fulfilling his father's expectations. Note that this is especially damning to the mopologist case of lunatic, liar or lord.

- I'll need to sleep on it, but I'm thinking the two-sets-of-plates reading of this is cheaply opportunistic and reductionist.

Taves example of communion fits in a way, but to me is problematic, because a priest offering communion is tapping into thousand+ years of tradition. The parallel to Smith needs to be the guy making it up in the first place, which is far more ambitious. There are also no witnesses to the miracle of communion. Nobody has claimed to see the wafer turn into flesh.