Bruce Charlton's Notions

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In his highly interesting book The American Religion (1993), Harold Bloom (himself perhaps the most famous US literary critic of the past several decades) famously described Joseph Smith (1805-1844; 'the Mormon Prophet') as an authentic religious genius.

But, although this comment showed that Bloom had understood the magnitude of Smith's achievement, this was something of a back-handed compliment!

Because Bloom did not, of course, believe that Joseph Smith was an authentically-inspired prophet - and therefore (given the scope of JS's achievement) Bloom was stating what must therefore be the case: that Joseph Smith was a genius in having himself created a remarkable new religion.

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(In passing, it is worth noting that Bloom, a Jew, clearly found the earlier and more Hebraic, Old Testament, millennial, Zion-building style of theocratic Mormonism more remarkable - and, one senses, more congenial - than what Mormonism became after polygamy was abolished and Deseret/ Utah joined the United States and was fully subjected to Federal government and laws.)

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So what was Joseph Smith's achievement such that Bloom (something of an expert on geniuses) called him an authentic genius?

1. Writing The Book of Mormon in a few months (plus associated scriptures and revelations).

2. Creating an entirely new Christian theology (what he termed the 'restored' Gospel).

3. Founding an extremely successful church - its distinctive priesthood, offices, rituals, and organization.

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In fact Smith's achievement was made even more extraordinary by his further innovation -

4. An explicit acknowledgement of his own fallibility and limitations; such that the church incorporated the expectation of continuous revelation and revision of the scriptures, theology and church organization.

This meant, in effect, that JS trusted his created forms actually to improve on what he had done.

And such was a pretty unusual, perhaps unique, trait among the founders of major religions.

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So, if Joseph Smith is not regarded as an inspired Prophet, then he must indeed have been a genius; someone combining scripture-writing abilities approximately equal to an author of one of the minor books of the Old Testament, with something close to the theological creativity and comprehensiveness of St Paul, and the church-organizing abilities of St Peter...

On the other hand, a close examination of the life and character of Joseph Smith does not seem to reveal the personality or abilities of that kind of genius...

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Most people who are not themselves Mormons do not recognize the scope and magnitude of Joseph Smith achievement, simply because they do not know enough about the subject.

For them there is 'nothing to explain'; and (like most of JS's contemporaries - and Mormonism was born and grew under the intense skeptical, mocking and aggressive scrutiny from the mass media and existing churches) Smith can be written off as merely a 'lucky' fool (lucky, that is, apart from being tortured, imprisoned and murdered) and/ or a cunning fraud (perhaps covertly motivated by seeking a harem).

But, if one is knowledgeable and honest enough to admit the astonishing achievement of Mormonism, then the more that can be said against Joseph Smith, the less likely it is that he really was 'a genius'; and therefore the more likely it is that he was just what he said he was: an inspired, but fallible, prophet.

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In a nutshell, I regard the matter of the evidential nature of the Book of Mormon (BoM) as a microcosm of the nature of Mormonism, which is itself a microcosm of Christianity.

That is to say there is evidence on both sides - evidence that the Book of Mormon is true - in the sense of being what it says it is; and other evidence that it is not true.

So that there are grounds for belief and also grounds to reject belief - and ultimately there is a choice to be made.

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As Terryl Givens has said, the whole way that the production, the existence, of the Book of Mormon explains itself, and the way the BoM was explained-by Joseph Smith - with such concrete exactness and wealth of specific detail (the size, weight, location of the gold plates, the instruments of translation, the convoluted history of the visitations and manuscript etc.) presents a stark dichotomy: either such an elaborate and concrete story is basically true (with some inevitable human errors and distortions), or it is an elaborate and deliberate fraud (a fiction grossly elaborated from a mere handful of unremarkable facts).

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And - because the BoM is the root and basis of the LDS church, the same argument applies to Mormonism - it is either essentially what it says it is, or else an elaborate and deliberate fraud.

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The evidence is not all on one side, there is a significant balance of evidence; not equal balance - whatever that would mean - but the mass of unbelievers cannot accurately or honestly say there is nothing (or nothing significant) to be said in favour of the reality of the BoM and Mormonism itself; nor can Mormons accurately or honestly state that the evidence for the book and the faith is overwhelming and could only be rejected irrationally or maliciously.

Even those who conclude that the BoM is a fraud cannot legitimately claim it is an obvious fraud; even those who claim the BoM is the most important book in the world cannot legitimately claim that its production and nature are transparently and compellingly consistent with that status.

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Furthermore, I feel that - at this point in history and in The West - the situation for Christianity is closely analogous to Mormonism.

CS Lewis put this crisply (although I would qualify his statement a little) when he said that Jesus Christ can only be regarded as either what he said he was; or else a deliberate fraud or insane.

My qualification is that the idea of Christ being insane is not much more plausible than that Joseph Smith was insane: considered as men (because those who deny the divinity of Christ regard him as a man) both functioned at far too high a level to be truly insane.

Those who regard Jesus as insane are required to believe that Christianity was fabricated by the Apostles - who would have had to be men of genius (and John and Paul certainly were); those who regard Joseph Smith as insane would be required to believe something similar - that Joseph Smith was surrounded by geniuses who did the real work of writing the BoM, devising a radically new theology, devising and organizing a new kind of church and so on - attributing the heavy lifting to the likes of Sidney Rigdon, Brigham Young and perhaps Parley Pratt and with Joseph Smith as a charismatic, inspired but unwitting and crazed 'front' for these covert operations.

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So, in both instances it comes down to elaborate and deliberate fraud versus truth.

And neither mainstream Christians nor Mormons should be offended by hypothetical fraudulent explanations of their churches - since fraud is the only intellectually rigorous explanation for not believing.

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Now, of course, there is no reason why a Christian who has faith in the self-claimed divinity of Christ and is certain that Jesus was not a fraud; there is no reason why such a person is in any way compelled by consistency (or the similarity of the cases) to believe that 'therefore' the self-claim of Joseph Smith that he was a prophet was genuine.

It is logically possible that Jesus was genuine and Joseph Smith was a fraud. (Which is, of course, the mainstream Christian view.) And the opposite (i.e. JS genuine and JC a fraud) is not possible - because the fraudulence of Christ would invalidate all of Joseph Smith's visionary and prophetic claims.

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BUT the evidential position for Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith is similar to the modern mind, using evidence we have today and with that evidence regarded as we regard it today: which is to say there is reasonable and plausible evidence on both sides of the question, and that the ultimate decision of truth or fraud must be a choice and a matter of faith, intuition, inspiration, personal conviction.

The evidence does not decide the question for us - we must necessarily choose and we must know that we are doing the choosing; and yet we will (like it or like it not) believe and live by our choice; because upon our choice hinges the basic frame and understanding of our future life - our basic motivation and sense of purpose.

(Or, alternatively, our state of essential nihilism - characterized by underlying alienation, incomprehension and demotivation.) 

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I think Mormons are considerably more aware of this reality of modern existence as both consciously chosen and yet believed with certainty than are Mainstream Christians - and that this is one of the strengths of Mormonism.

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From the middle 1990s for a decade, I was reading and re-reading Emerson with tremendous avidity - not only in a literary way, but as a guide for life.

Having not looked at him for several years, and not since I became a Christian, I have returned to re-read some favorite bits and pieces in the past couple of weeks - and was struck by two things.

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1. Emerson is a really good writer; I mean really good. The quality of his prose is unique and unsurpassed (that is, other writers are equally good, but in different ways) - I find it elating, intoxicating, almost too powerful to bear for any length of time.

2. Emerson's anti-Christian agenda is now blazingly clear and obvious to me, from almost everything he ever wrote and said; as is his staggering egotism/ pride, and these are linked. Emerson's work is a vast and unbounded, extended assertion of himself, his potential and his adequacy against anyone or any thing (including God) that tries to constrain or direct it.

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(Emerson was raised as a Unitarian and became a prominent Unitarian minister - and Unitarianism is already anti-Christian in its profoundest implications - although the first generation of Unitarians refused to acknowledge this, and generational inertia meant that the fundamental anti-Christanity of Unitarianism took a while to emerge. So, Emerson was never a Christian, although perhaps he supposed he was - but nonetheless he found the rebel sect of Unitarianism to be already stultifying, empty and spiritually dead: which was a just criticism since it amounted to merely a system of secular ethics and an ungrounded and unjustifiably exclusive usage of Christian scriptures and form loosely associated with an impersonal theistic God. Naturally this rapidly slid into exactly the kind of eclectic 'spirituality' - that we now term New Age - which Emerson pioneered with such glorious eloquence.) 

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I conclude that Emerson is, exactly has his contemporaries saw him, a terribly perilous writer! - precisely because he is such a great writer, and has so many stunning insights - yet ultimately these are put to the service of a doctrine of such extreme, such total self-centredness that I struggle to comprehend it.

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Perhaps Emerson's greatest and most valuable (and most often repeated) insight is that each person must appropriate the world for himself and in his own terms; a living religion (that is to say any true religion) simply cannot be just a following of rules and rituals.

To put it as Emerson did in an early work, to be properly alive, each individual must experience (again and again, day by day, indeed hour by hour) their own personal revelation - they must experience direct and divine communications of reality.

For Emerson this imperative was pretty-much the entire aim of life - so that the ideal life became in one sense that moment of revelation timelessly filling all; in another sense (because, experience seemed to show that these moments did come to an end) an incessant search for the next moment of revelation - life as a sequence of such moments.

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But Emerson's error, which led him into paradox and the evil advocacy - if not practice - of Pride as a principle of life - as indeed the only principle of life; was to reject the past, to reject the unity of humanity, to perceive himself (his soul) as the only thing that was really real - to argue for a subjectivism so extreme as to amount almost to solipsism. 

In his burning desire to shed the constraints of history and society, which seemed to be shackling his imagination, and focus all meaning on his own individual moments of revelation (the total affirmation of Me! Here! Now!); Emerson destroyed the basis of humanity, of sharing, shape and purpose - and consequently his influence (among those who actually read what he wrote and try to live by it) has been substantially pernicious.

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What was needed and what was necessary was to accept Emerson's assertion of the absolute necessity of personal revelation, albeit perilous, as an addition (or restoration) to Christianity.

This absolute and inflexible demand for modern, personal revelation, I perceive as the point of unity between Emerson and the other great long-term spiritual influence born in the United States at almost exactly the same time: Joseph Smith, the Mormon 'living prophet' of modern, latter day revelation.

Joseph Smith could have endorsed Emerson's cry by which he opened his first great published work Nature -


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The religious difference between Emerson and Smith is essentially that Emerson took this demand to behold God face to face, and enjoy an original relation to the universe as his sole aim and principle, while Smith added it (and its products, such as the Book of Mormon and his other collected revelations) to existing Christianity.

Smith thus achieved what Emerson, in his scandalous 1838 address to Harvard Divinity School, had declared was impossible:

I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason, — to-day, pasteboard and fillagree, and ending to-morrow in madness and murder.  

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Even as Emerson wrote his speech, Joseph Smith had already built a new city (the first of three) as headquarters for the saints in Kirtland, Ohio; and the years since the above words were spoken, Smith's 'Cultus' - with its 'new rites and forms' added-to, modifying, re-interpreting existing modes of Christianity - was (contrary to Emerson's characterization of it as 'vain') indeed 'established'; and has continued to grow into a major world religion - and has been neither a dead religion of pasteboard and fillagree (rather, a tremendously motivating religion which sustains great devoutness and other-worldliness), nor has it ended in madness and murder.

But, on the other hand, a stripped-down New Age version of Emerson's spirituality of individualism and subjectivism has merged with mainstream secular Leftism, and grown and grown to become the dominant mode of thought in the West almost entirely discarding Emerson in the process.

(And quite naturally so, since Emerson was not necessary to the development of New Age spirituality - rather he was a prophet, herald or advance guard of it.).

But what a fascinating divergence from such close roots and similar demands are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph Smith - both emerging in the North Eastern corner of the USA in the 1830s!

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Excerpted from Joseph Smith: Rough stone rolling, by Richard Lyman Bushman (Gouverneur Morris Professor of History Emeritus, Columbia University) - 2005: pages 84-88

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The Book of Mormon is a thousand-year history of the rise and fall of a religious civilization in the Western Hemisphere beginning about 600 BC... A briefer history of a second civilization, beginning at the time of the Tower of Babel and extending till a few hundred years before Christ, is summarized in thirty-five pages near the end...

Contemporaries thought of the book as a "bible," and that may be the best one-word description...

The table of contents has a biblical feel. It lists fifteen books with titles like "The Book of Jacob," "The Book of Mosiah," "The Book of Helaman," and so on through Nephi, Enos, Jarom, Alma, Mormon, Ether, and Moroni, just as the Bible names its divisions after Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, and Micah. But unlike the Bible, these books are not divided into histories and prophetic books. History and prophecy are interwoven, sermons and visions mingling with narrative.

The Book of Mormon tells the story of a family founding a civilization. The main story opens in Jerusalem on the eve of the Babylonian captivity. 4 Lehi, one of many prophets foretelling the city's doom, is told to flee the city with his wife and children and one other family. Drawn by the lure of a promised land, they are led into the wilderness of the Arabian peninsula. Like Abraham leaving Ur and Moses departing Egypt, Lehi is told God has a place for them. Lehi's band wanders in the wilderness for eight years (not forty like the children of Israel), until somewhere along the seacoast (seemingly the Arabian Sea) they are told to construct a ship. After a protracted voyage, they reach their promised land. The name America is never used, but readers universally thought Lehi's company had arrived in the Western Hemisphere...

The book explains itself as largely the work of Mormon, a military figure who leads the Nephites, from about 327 to 385 CE, in the twilight of their existence as a nation. Mormon is one of more than a score of powerful personalities to emerge in history. Precociously eminent, he is appointed at fifteen to lead the Nephite armies. (He gives no reason for his elevation except that "notwithstanding I being young was large in stature.") In the same year, "being somewhat of a sober mind," he is "visited of the Lord," making him both prophet and general. From then until the Lamanites cut him down, still fighting in his seventies, Mormon and his people are swept this way and that by the tides of battle...

Mormon undertakes to compile a history... One gets a picture of Mormon surrounded by piles of [inscribed historical] plates, extracting a narrative from the collection, and not completely aware of all there is. At various points while hurrying through the records, he interjects a comment about how much he is leaving out, as if overwhelmed by his abundant sources. Mormon makes no effort to hide his part in constructing the book. The entire Book of Mormon is an elaborate framed tale of Mormon telling about a succession of prophets telling about their encounters with God. Read in the twenty-first century, the book seems almost postmodern in its self-conscious attention to the production of the text.

Mormon introduces a large number of characters and places into his saga. Nearly 350 names are listed in the pronunciation guide at the back of modern editions -- Paanchi, Pachus, Pacumeni, Pagag, Pahoran, Palestina, Pathros. Quite out of nowhere, Mormon describes a system of weights and measures in senines, seons, shums, and limnahs, following a numerical system based on eight rather than the conventional ten. He moves the armies, the prophets, and the people about on a landscape, taking time to sketch in the geography of the Nephite nation. Naturally, Mormon the general gives special attention to armaments, military tactics, and battles. Architecture, animals, and trade are dealt with. Although the book is above all a religious history of prophesying, preaching, faithfulness, and apostasy, Mormon evokes an entire world...

A writer in 1841 commented that "it is difficult to imagine a more difficult literary task than to write what may be termed a continuation of the Scriptures." Yet Joseph Smith dictated the bulk of the Book of Mormon from early April to late June 1829. When forays for food, travel from Harmony to Fayette, and applications to printers are deducted, the amount of time available for translating most of the book's 584 pages was less than three months.

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I have been interested in Mormonism for about six years, since before I converted to Christianity and rejoined my baptismal Church (of England). I have (co-) completed three small research projects on Mormon fertility http://mormonfertility.blogspot.co.uk/ with another ongoing and further planned.

Naturally, just about the first thing I did when I got interested in Mormonism was to try and read The Book of Mormon. It was not at all what I expected, and left me completely bewildered.

Since I knew that missionaries gave out this book to prospective converts, I expected that it would set out the Mormon religion, but it does not. It was mostly (so far as I could tell) what purported to be historical annals - and it was hard to see what this had to do with Mormonism as I understood it.

I put the book aside and looked instead at Doctrine and Covenants - which was much more the kind of thing I expected: a setting-out of the religion in terms of a series of revelations.

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But I have returned to the Book of Mormon from time to time, and now feel a bit clearer about it; or rather, I am now clear that it is qualitatively unlike any other book.

In terms of its literary quality, it is good. Not, of course, in the same league as the Authorized Version of The Bible - but then what is? Nothing approaches anywhere near the AV in terms of non-fiction English prose - but The Book of Mormon is vastly superior to most modern translations of the Bible.

Of course, it is hard to read, and I have not read it all - but then again the Old Testament is hard to read and I have not read it all.

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But The Book of Mormon is a remarkable book, qua book.

What it most resembles in my experience is JRR/ Christopher Tolkien's 1977 The Silmarillion. The BoM presents an extremely intricate and self-consistent world across a large historical timescale presented as Annalistic history in an uncompromizing and unmediated fashion.

Another superficially plausible comparison would be Ossian (1760 onwards) compiled by James Macpherson (probably) from numerous oral sources of song and stories in the Scottish Highlands. This became a foundational text of romanticism and nationalism - with an influence stretching across Europe and the Atlantic, and lasting a couple of generations.

So, considered as a work of subcreative invention, as the depiction of 'a world' - and from an agnostic perspective as to its provenance - The Book of Mormon is of world historical stature - or, at least, it should be thus considered.

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Adding to this fascination is the circumstances of its production - given in great detail by Bushman. It seems clear that The Book of Mormon was produced by Joseph Smith, dictated by him, in a single and seemingly unrevised draft, in the space of just a few months and with no apparent sources.

Joseph Smith dictated the bulk of the Book of Mormon from early April to late June 1829... the amount of time available for translating most of the book's 584 pages was less than three months.

When it is taken into account that Joseph Smith was no Tolkien, nor even a Macpherson - being uneducated and uncultured, having a rather chaotic personality, and with no access to educated and cultured people, or to literary and scholarly resources - this was, to say the least of it, an absolutely amazing, unprecedented, and unrepeated feat.

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The usual ways of dismissing the significance of The Book of Mormon do not remotely hold water; or, at least, if the kind of explanations used to explain-away the Book of Mormon were accepted in mainstream literary history, then nothing would be left standing!

I personally am quite happy to accept that - in some way and at some level - Joseph Smith was genuinely divinely inspired (an inspiration not necessarily complete, and not necessarily without error) - and that of course explains the whole thing.

(I believe that the idea of the Book of Mormon as having been demonically-inspired, is decisively refuted by the subsequent history of the CJCLDS Church.)

But for those who do not acknowledge the reality of divine inspiration as a possibility; the 'case' of The Book of Mormon is, or ought to be, a matter of extreme interest - rather as if The Silmarillion had been serially dictated, off the top of his head, by a semi-literate rustic gardener such as Sam Gamgee.

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I spent an interesting few hours looking through some old books about Mormons which were in the collection at The Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne - a prestigious provincial club and library dating founded in 1793.

What I found surprised me in several ways. There were plenty of books on "The Mormons" dating from about 100 years ago - which was the first surprise; the second surprise was how very, very strongly anti-Mormon they were; the third surprise was the utterly outrageous things they said.

The oldest account was of Lord Redesdale's visit of 1873 (published in his Memoirs of 1915):

Brigham Young was all-powerful, bearing a more undisputed mastery than king or tsar or kaiser. He was a law unto himself, and had his Vehmgericht, or rather was also a secret court unto himself. True, there was no Folterkammer, no eiserne Jungfrau, but those old methods were out of date ; the revolver and the bowie-knife were swifter and as sure ; Jordan was the oubliette. There has been some attempt to deny the existence of the Danites or Destroying Angels who were Brigham Young's executioners. That is futile, for the men, as I can testify, were as well known in Salt Lake City as the Prophet, and the Old Man of the Mountain himself was not more faithfully or more bloodily served by his hashishin than was the Lion of the Lord by his band of bravos. There were whole-sale murders like the Mountain Meadow Massacre, but there were also other crimes, secret murders actuated by private spite, jealousy or lust, the stories of which are well known to those behind the scenes in Zion. It was not healthy for a man to incur the wrath of the Prophet or of the leading Saints. It was not conducive to long life to love a maid or wed a wife upon whom the eyes of one of the holy ones might have fallen.

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The Mystery of Mormonism by Stuart Martin (1920) presents itself as a balanced view - in between the official church history and the more sensational anti-Mormon books.

Its introduction ends like this:

Since Mormonism was born in that small wood its story has been mostly tragic, with here and there a gleam of heroism lighting up the dull, terrible sadness of pitiful, wasted effort and misguided action. The scars of its sufferings are plainly marked upon Mormonism ; and, if the creed is to live, its final adjustment to the demands of the civilisation of the twentieth century has yet to be made. The author has tried to indicate what that adjustment demands of Mormonism, and how the finer men and women of the Church shrink from the coming crisis. When the adjustment takes place — as it inevitably will, though most likely by slow degrees — the Mormonism of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young will be strangled in Utah, and the last vestige of its abominations will disappear.

The final word is as follows:

As for the religious part of Mormonism, its doom is clear. It is the author's belief that before long it will be attacked, and it will crumble before the attack. Its wave of fervour is nearly spent, and in the day when it is finally attacked by its opponents this organisation, which has been a thorn in the flesh of the great American Republic since it was founded in 1830, will vanish as a creed. In that day Mormonism — the Mormonism which has quarrelled with every neighbour it has had, the Mormonism the history of which is one black page in the story of the United States — will cease to exist. Rent by internal schisms, attacked by forces as relentless as Knowledge and as powerful as Time, it will ultimately totter to a gaping grave ; to a tomb dug by itself. When that day comes, the last vestige of the abominations of Mormonism, as its founders intended it to be, will disappear from the earth, and the name of Joseph Smith will be but the memory of a man who, in his delusion, founded a gigantic fraud.

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That may sound pretty extreme - however Brigham Young and the Mormon Empire by Frank J Cannon and George L Knapp (1913) goes even further. This has Brigham Young engaged in wholesale castration and assassination related to his "modern gospel of human sacrifice".

That's correct: human sacrifice.

After that there isn't really any further to go.

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Still, the other books had their moments.

I Woodbridge Riley's The founder of Mormonism: a psychological study of Joseph Smith Jr (1902) has the following heading for its final section: "Was He Demented or Merely Degenerate" (he seems to suggest both at once).

R Kauffman and RW Kauffman take a different angle in The Latter Day Saints: a study of the Mormons in the light of economic conditions (1912) - they see the Mormon phenomena from a socialistic perspective in terms of just another instance of capitalistic exploitation, on a gigantic scale. But for the Kauffman's that is all any religion ever is.

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If the books written about the Mormons were indescribably hostile and foolish - books written by visitors to Salt Lake City tended to be very positive.

Charles B Spahr wrote an interesting account of America's Working People (1899,1900) in which he visited New England, Chicago, The South and various other places to report on conditions. He was very impressed, on the whole, by what he saw in Salt Lake City:

The general level of morality is unquestionably high. Inquiry at police headquarters confirmed the Mormon claim that the Mormon population hardly figured at all among those arrested for crime or disorder, or among those who ministered for gain to criminal and vicious tastes.

But the statistics were the least trustworthy signs of the high morality. The real evidence of it was in the care for the poor, the temperance, the thrift, and the public spirit, that were apparent.

There was, however, one point upon which the impression revived was distinctly unfavourable, and this was the supremely important matter of sexual morality. (...) But what I heard from frank and conscientious Mormons in deprecation of these charges, even more than what I heard from Gentiles in their support, convinced me that the sin of polygamy in the fathers was bearing its fitting fruit in an epidemic of sexual immorality among the children. (...)

Nevertheless the impressions I received in the streets and from the testimony of scandal-hating people, without regard to creed, convinced me that sexual morality in Utah was much lower than in any other American community I had visited, and but little higher than in Continental Europe.

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That point point about sexual morality being a weak point (the one-and-only weak point) of Mormons a century ago, makes for an interesting contrast with modern times. And it is perhaps an encouragement to modern Mormons.

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A Church of England Priest the Rev. HW Haweis published Travel Talk in 1896 in which he reported on a vist to Salt Lake City of 1893:

...what I saw and what everyone may see spoke for itself. I saw a happy and contented people, a clean and sanitary city (...) neat houses and prosperous farms, well-behaved children, venerable elders, agreeable and cultivated ladies... 

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The fascinating thing is that we now know that the travellers' eye witness accounts were correct, and the surprising numbers of people who wrote specialist (referenced, supposedly scholarly) books about 'The Mormons' - several of which were distributed some 5000 miles way to Newcastle upon Tyne England - were wrong; very wrong, absurdly and wickedly wrong.

This strikes me as an early example of political correctness based on and in the mass media. 

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One more matter. When I became interested in Mormonism a few years ago I got the impression that the Mountain Meadows Massacre was something which had been hidden and suppressed until recently; and it was an atrocity that modern Mormons were supposedly having to come to terms with.

Not so. It features in all these early anti-Mormon books and the Rev Haweis goes so far as to remark on the "everlastingly quoted Mountain Massacre".

So, not such new news, after all...

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All in all - my morning in the library confirms CS Lewis's advice on the value of Reading Old Books.

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At the cutting-edge of experienced-life - 

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As I have written (see references below): Christianity is incredible, and Mormonism is incredible-squared. In that sense it is perfectly reasonable to reject either or both - because there is no requirement for us to assent to the incredible.

However, rejecting Christianity and Mormonism simply because they are incredible makes no sense either - because that rejection itself leads to incredible conclusions.

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To focus on Mormonism - it really is incredible that Joseph Smith (of all people!) should be a prophet of God and that the provenance of the Book of Mormon was as described (gold plates, angels, translating devices etc), and that Joseph's BoM translation really derives from a lost ancient manuscript.

So it might, superficially, seem straightforward to disbelieve these things. Let's call this the skeptical alternative. But what then?

Of course, most people who reject Mormonism as incredible have a rooted negative prejudice against it, do not know the whole story, and/ or they have wildly false or distorted ideas about Mormonism.

But if you approach the subject of Mormonism with a benign and sympathetic attitude, are honest and informed; then we can see that the skeptical alternative is also clearly incredible; because it requires on the one hand that Joseph Smith was both a genius and also a calculated fraud, who led a water-tight conspiracy; and furthermore that the CJCLDS grew from a foundation of fraud and conspiracy to become the (overall) highly positive and wholesome influence it is today.

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But yet again, the skeptical alternative - while incredible and unprecedented - is not impossible.

It is possible to imagine or suppose that a fraudulent genius and a watertight conspiracy did indeed, by chance and against the original intent, lead to great good - why, not?

This belief goes against common sense and reasonable expectation, but it could be true. 

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But then, if we are honest and rigorous enough to apply this kind of negative, skeptical alternative reasoning to other domains of life - such as other religions, the history of politics, science etc.; then we will find that they also crumble away into what could be fiendish conspiracies.

In particular, we will be compelled to notice that Mormonism grew under the microscope of the mass media, and is vastly documented compared with other world religions and major Christian denominations.

We may reflect that absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence when it comes to these other religions, and that much of the 'evidence' about early Mormonism is both ignorant and dishonest - as well as rootedly hostile...

In the end, no matter where we turn, or how we twist and twist about - we cannot escape incredibilities: we really can't. Not if we are honest and rigorous. 

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The above is not by any means a proof of the validity of Mormonism - it is not intended as such, and I do not believe that there can be any such proof even in principle.

And what applies to Mormonism in small, applies to Christianity in large - the Christian story is packed with incredibilities and inconsistencies; yet to reject Christianity as incredible entails believing in some combination of delusion and conspiracy of a kind that is itself incredible, because grossly contradictory to actual behaviour and historical consequences.

It is that same skeptic's dilemma - Christianity could be based on delusion and fraud- that is not-impossible - it is just highly incredible. That path offers no escape from incredibility.

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My point is that the impulse to avoid believing incredible things is mistaken, a basic error; because it is impossible. The notion of an incredibility-free belief system is an illusion and a snare.

Indeed, the urge to avoid incredibilities leads to the deep-rooted dishonesty and wilful self-blindness typical of the person who prides and advertises himself on being A Skeptic that relies only on Evidence.

(I mean the kind of man [we all know them - you may be one of them!] who applies skepticism only where and when it suits him, and blandly denies the incredibility of his own favoured incredibilities.)

But neither the skeptic not the credulous ever can or will avoid believing not just one but many incredibilities.

Incredible beliefs are simply a fact of life. 

*

This can be taken in two ways - either as meaning that we cannot believe anything because we could believe anything; OR that this is the way things are meant to be - and that it is a necessary and desirable part of the human condition that foundational belief require an act of choice from each of us as individuals.

To believe that fundamental beliefs cannot and should not be wholly-dictated by objective public 'evidence' and 'reason' but necessarily require an act of personal choice is, of course standard mainstream Christianity - it is what is meant by Faith.

Skeptics assume that the only alternatives are either being convinced by conclusive and credible evidence to reach credible conclusions on rational grounds; or else just believing whatever incredibility you want and calling it 'faith'...

But Christians deny that these alternatives exhaust all possibilities, and also deny that the skeptical possibility is coherent (for the reasons given above).

*

So what should we do, each, as individuals? Does everyone have to believe in Mormonism because it is incredible, or because everything else is at least equally incredible? Obviously not!

The Mormon answer is that each interested person as an individual has the possibility of investigating the evidence - and each must (and inevitably will) then make a choice. But people should not believe in Mormonism unless that choice is validated-by, or indeed comes-from, divine revelation.

Evidence is relevant, but never conclusive. Each person who professes Mormonism needs to, and must have, faith.

And exactly the same ought to apply to any Christian denomination. To be any kind of Christian (rather than just doing things that Christians do) requires faith; and that faith is based on individual choice; and that choice - to be valid - is not arbitrary but divinely inspired.

*

Is this a process without any possibility of error? No.

Can we be sure and confident that divine validation has happened? Yes.

But might we then change our mind about things we used to be certain about, or doubt our own certainty? Yes.

Does this then mean that truth is relative and arbitrary and we can believe anything or nothing? No.

*

Truth is real, humans are fallible, certainty is possible, faith is necessary.

These just are the facts, and we must work with them - we have no alternative: we must choose, and we will choose and indeed we have already chosen (although not irrevocably).

* *

References

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/mormonism-poised-between-incredibilities.html

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/mainstream-christianity-is-incredible.html

 

Here is the story behind this discovery. 

It seems wonderful to see the face of a man whom I regard as a real prophet. This image is far more impressive than the portraits done at the time. It now seems a little easier to imagine how he did what he did, and why so many felt inspired to believe and follow him.

NOTE ADDED: Here are a selection of first hand, contemporary descriptions of Joseph Smith. There is a fair bit of variation; but observers seem to converge on the fact that he was unusually tall, had blue eyes, a fair complexion, large nose, light brown hair, and an athletic physique.  

*

Incredible: 1b - Hard to believe. New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

**

It strikes me that Mormonism is an incredible religion, in the two-sided sense that it both hard to believe and hard not to believe!

I realize that to most non-Mormons this is untrue - in the sense that they find Mormonism one-sidedly hard to believe and easy to disbelieve - hard to accept and extremely easy to dismiss.

But, when not due to sheer ignorance, that attitude is often due to them being blinded by negative prejudice; because there are remarkable facts about Mormonism which it is hard to believe are not due to its being true.

There are at least four two-sidedly incredible aspects of Mormonism - that is they are both hard to believe, and hard not to believe.

*

1. Joseph Smith.

On the one hand, it is hard to believe that such an ordinary and flawed person as Joseph Smith should have been a prophet of God; on the other hand it is hard to believe that anybody except a prophet of God could have done what he did.

2. The book of Mormon

On the one hand, the convoluted story of how the book of Mormon came to be written is bizarre, unprecedented - in a word incredible; on the other hand, it is very hard to believe that a book of such length, quality, complexity could have been dictated verbatim and unrevised in extremely difficult conditions and in just a few months.

3. The organization of the LDS church

On the one hand, the piecemeal emergence of the Mormon church, the adoption of elements from various traditions, the revisions and corrections of doctrine and so on - all seem like ad hoc improvisations and strain credibility; on the other hand, the results were incredible: a church which commanded great strength and devoutness and expanded exponentially for 180 years and successfully scaled up from a few hundreds to many millions.

4. Mormon theology

Contradicts so much of the theology of the historical Christian church, and so profoundly, that it is very hard to believe that almost all Christians could have been so wrong about so many things for such a long time; on the other hand, the Mormon theology is so simple, systematic and also Biblically coherent that it is incredible that Christians could have failed to discover it for so many centuries.

**

I could go on - but I hope the point has been made that if Mormonism is given its due, then incredibilities abound, and are rather exactly poised!

It is incredible that something as incredible as Mormonism could be true: it is also incredible that something as coherent, as long-term successful, and as good as Mormonism could be false.

*

*

The King Follett sermon or 'discourse' was a speech made by Joseph Smith shortly before he was killed. The speech was not written but extemporized, and was taken down by various observers - and therefore the primary record is a parallel text by multiple hands:

http://www.boap.org/LDS/Parallel/1844/7Apr44.html

King Follett is non-canonical for the LDS church - being very obviously a kind of 'thinking aloud', a philosophical speculation on the apparent implications of Mormon theology (in other words, the Prophet was not prophesying at this moment).

*

I find it a wonderful speech - and it elucidates for me the interplay between what is assumed and fixed in Mormonism, and what are possible consequences of these assumptions, but which are not of the essence.

This is the standard edited text.

https://www.lds.org/ensign/1971/04/the-king-follett-sermon?lang=eng 

which is engagingly dramatized here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xzn3Ab75pg


*

The discourse reveals that the aspects of Mormon theology which seem strangest (and attract most horror and ridicule) are in fact a (speculative) consequence of following up several steps of implications from the primary assumptions of the nature of God and His relationship to Man.

Probably, all metaphysical systems contain infinities - in Classical Christian theology the infinities are given to God - creation from nothing, omnipotence/omniscience, omnipresence and the like. The basic metaphysic is one of statis.

For Mormonism the God of the Bible has none of these attributes; and God is our loving Father primarily and as literally as possible.

The infinities are pushed back and back, until they are out of the realm of our concern altogether - an infinite regress of other Gods in other universes unknown - which are logically implied, but are nothing to do with us in this world, with one God. The monotheism is what matters to us, here now and forever; the polytheism is an answer to a philosophical question. 

*

Another thing to look out for in King Follett is the dynamic nature of Mormonism (in contrast to stasis). The condition for God and for Man is one of eternal progression (another abstract infinite - no bound can be put to progression, exaltation, glory - in a particular sense, not even for God).

But since dynamism is nonsense if everything changes - progression also implies a stasis, against which progress is measured. Thus the necessary eternal existence of matter and laws of the universe 'within which' God works and progresses. Instead of creation from nothing, the Mormon view is that the primary things 'always' existed (from eternity) and always will exist, being re-organizable but indestructible.

In sum, this represents the final stage in a truly amazing theological achievement - one which quite simply, and therefore triumphantly, solves many of the most obvious and troubling - and, I believe, ineradicable - theoretical problems due to the conflict between classical philosophy and Christianity.

*

The diagnosis is that Leftism is (almost) everywhere by now, such that it is the water in which we swim - not least because its basis is in the modern mass media which is everywhere and is the water in which we swim.

A few years ago I wrote Thought Prison which analyzed political correctness (or the New Left, the post-sixties Left of identity politics, group preferences and quotas and the sexual revolution); and traced it back at least to the Great Schism when catholic Christianity divided between East and West.

My interpretation was that the only way to be rid of this cancer was to revert to the pre-modern condition. Another interpretation is that this cannot be done, so the West is doomed.


A further possibility, which has been creeping-up on me for two years or more, is that Leftism is so pervasive that it cannot (even in principle) be deleted, there can be no re-set, because since Leftism is by now almost everywhere and what is more deeply interwoven (including into much of the best and most effective art and thought) so that to try and delete it would be like trying to excise a cancer which has already metastasised all over the body.

If we successfully cut out the Leftism/ cancer- what remained would probably not be viable and would certainly not be desirable.

Is there some other possibility? Maybe.


My idea came from the Mormon Restoration in relation to preceding Christianity. The basis of this is the Mormon belief that from about 100 AD onwards, Christianity underwent a 'Great Apostasy'. As a term, this sounds a lot more negative and damning than it is actually interpreted by Mormons.

The way the idea works in practice, is the assumption that Christianity took a wrong turn after the death or disappearance of the Apostles. For example, it lost some vital doctrines (such as pre-mortal existence) and gained some false emphases and unhelpful metaphysics.

This was not self-correcting; so there needed to be a new prophet chosen by God (i.e. Joseph Smith) who would lead a Restoration that provided recovered/ new scriptures (e.g. The Book of Mormon) and doctrinal clarification (e.g. the Doctrines and Covenants); together with a re-booted priesthood and a church organization suited to the needs of these 'latter days'.


But Mormonism does not reject the previous 1700 years of Christianity - is not hostile to pre-Mormon Christians - does not try to delete it from consciousness or usage - does not try to restart Christianity on the basis of the 'primitive church': quite the opposite.

Of all the serious Christian denominations of which I am aware, Mormons are by far the most positive about other denominations; and up to the very highest level will quote and learn from and revere good counsel from any source and any point in Christian history (and, indeed, from outside of Christianity). This has always been the case from Joseph Smith onwards, and is not a matter of theory - this is a very warm-hearted and spontaneous thing.


In sum, from a Mormon perspective, the Restoration was necessary, but that does not mean that everything which went before could or should be discarded - rather pre-Mormon Christianity (and other modern Christian churches) is subject to addition, subtraction and a different emphasis: but it is not by any means deleted, rather it is willingly, actively and happily used - but selectively.

In a word pre-Mormon Christianity is transcended; or in another word re-framed; or re-interpreted and built-upon what went before.


By analogy, I think it may and should be possible to do the same with Leftism.

Perhaps it is possible not to fight Leftism head-on, in an 'us or them', all or nothing battle unto death; but for Leftism to repent; and for post-Leftism to re-frame, re-interpret, transcend and build-upon Leftism - pick it up and take it in a very different direction (recognizing that it was in error).

After all, this is what we personally do as individuals when we become Christians. No matter how deeply sinful or misguided our lives have been; we do not try to delete our pre-Christian lives; instead we repent what needs repenting, and start from where we happen to be.

That this is possible is core Christian doctrine. Christ came to save sinners; and takes us exactly as we are now: we are saved by accepting Christ; not post-dated until after some micro-surgical process of totally-deleting all our many and deep and ramifying sins.

From that point, we are Christians,but the creative and joyful work begins of embarking on a life of becoming more Christ-like, a life of theosis: striving to become ever-better Sons and Daughters of God. 


Where we in the West happen to be, is inside a state of extremely comprehensive and multi-generational Leftism - which is anti-Good (that is: evil), deeply sin-full.

We need to repent, and start afresh; but this will be by building-upon the good of the past,starting immediately, and without supposing that we can first extirpate the evils of the past.  

We must, in The secular Leftist West culture, acknowledge that we were wrong; we must start living as best we can in light of what is right - but this is (or should be) an essentially positive and creative agenda: just like becoming a new Christian.

Recent readers of this blog may not be aware of my profound debt to Mormon theology and metaphysics; becuase I did most of my writing on this subject up to about five years ago, culminating in the 'mini-book' Speculations of a Theoretical Mormon.

If asked to pick the single most important achievement of Mormonism - I would pick the emphasis on marriage and the family as being at the heart of Life Everlasting in Heaven, and the basis of our theosis in mortal life.

This Christian insight was largely missed by mainstream Christianity for its first 1800 years (related to the systematic neglect and denigration of the Fourth Gospel); therefore requiring further major divine revelations primarily via the prophet Joseph Smith and some of his descendants in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

This major theological achievement - of putting eternal marriage and the family structure at the core of resurrected life, and of building this from basic metaphysical assumptions - is largely distinguishable from Smith's other and much better known attainments of producing The Book of Mormon, and of organising a church which has grown exponentially (at the same rate as mainstream Christianity) to about fifteen million current members.

The Mormon position on the family has been usefully summarised in a 1995 Proclamation.

This is a contribution to Christianity that I regard as core to my faith; and I have never seen it adequately expressed anywhere else than in Mormonism - except in the works of William Arkle, who independently, and by intuition, converged-on a very similar understanding (but more than a century later).

Since I greately value Arkle's work, this strikes me as an important confirmation. But the major confirmation of Mormon theology has been in my own life, heart, and thinking - ever since I first encountered and understood it back in 2008. 

 

The Christology and Trinitarian disputes of the early Christian Church came from the clash of two irreconcilable desires of early church intellectuals, the theologians, who had been trained in pagan (Greek and Roman) metaphysical philosophy.

First, they wanted to be able to state that there was one God - because they had a prior commitment to philosophical arguments that led to the inference of one God as the basis of unity and coherence in reality; and secondly, they wanted to be able to state that Jesus was God.

Jesus was God, so there were at least two gods; but there could only be one God - for philosophical reasons, based on pre-Christian assumptions.

In simple logic, one of these two sides ought to give-way - and for a Christian the obvious side that needed to give way was that there was only one god. Christ implies polytheism. But for a convinced Classical philosopher, this could not be true...

This is the Christian dilemma.



In other words, Christians actually are, and ought to be, regarded as poly-theists - as Jews and Muslims have always correctly asserted! Christian polytheism was the position reached by Mormonism some 1800 years later.

Mormon theology is simple, clear, coherent, and honest (and beautiful) - and it is Christian: Christ-centred and based on the divinity of Christ.

Thus, Mormons (eventually...) solved the Christian dilemma by holding-fast to the divinity of Christ, and chucking-out monotheism.

In doing so, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith created the first explicitly pluralistic metaphysical philosophy - a couple of generations before it was set down academically by his fellow American William James.


But the early Christian intellectuals were, apparently, as much psychologically-wedded to the truth of philosophical monotheism as they were committed to belief in the divinity of Christ. They demanded to fit the divinity of Christ into the pre-existing pagan philosophical scheme. Yet this cannot be made to make sense...

So these early theologians eventually devised a none-sensical mish-mash of words, to assert that there was only one God and that Jesus was God.

Both-together and ignoring-contradictions.


In such wise they 'solved' the Christian dilemma by denying that there was a contradiction. The dilemma was 'solved' by (complexly, not simply) denying there ever had been a dilemma...

They devised a 'mantra' - a form of words (the Athanasian Creed), and then insisted that all Christians would assert this form-of-words (or, later and elsewhere, something analogous) as the core truth of the faith. To the extent that many/ most Christians describe themselves primarily as Trinitarians!

The mantra was strictly nonsense; but the nonsense was relabelled mystery, or a higher truth beyond common sense and logic - and that has been the situation in mainstream Christianity ever since.


Well this is what happened - but did it work?

It 'worked' within the Christian churchs, mostly; by sociologically-solving the particularly vicious Christological disputes among the intellectual leadership within the Christian churches. Those who remained, agreed-to-agree on the validity of the mantra.

But what of the wider world? Did the Trinitarian mantra convince ordinary people, non-intellectuals, those without a stake in the hierarchy? If Mormons eventually took the simple-coherent polytheist-path to solve the Christian dilemma; what about the the simple-coherent monotheist path? Did anybody reject the Trinitarian mantra and take the monotheist path?

Well, it seems that nobody knows the exact historical details - but my assumption is that Islam was the actual monotheist solution to the problem of the Christian dilemma. In Islam the oneness of God was retained, at the cost of the divinity of Christ; who instead became regarded as a great prophet.

Simple, clear, coherent, and honest.

But, obviously, not Christian.


The rapid and permanent rise of Islam seems to show the deep and intractable failure of the Trinitarian mantra - and how vital it is that the basic explanation at the core of a religion makes straightforward common-sense.

There is no more powerful a critique against the fundamental error in building Christianity on meaningless metaphysics and evasive theology than the rise and success of Islam. Islam is the failure of the Trinitarian mantra: Islam is the consequence of trying to evade the Christian dilemma.


The above analysis is one (but not the only) reason why I am a believer in Mormon Christian metaphysics and theology.

 An example came to mind from the ancient Greek (pre-Socratic) philosophers; among whom there seem to have been two recognized possibilities concerning the nature of reality - which have (as is the way of things) persisted to the present day as being almost the only possibilities underlying a superficial diversity. 

The first is the assumption that: that which is real does not change. Thus reality is eternally-static, is 'outside of Time'. Truth is this reality; therefore truth does not change but is eternal. 

Therefore order is primary and fixed; and movement, time, disorder - chaos or dis-order is a kind of temporary, surface illusion - or delusion.

The other assumption is that reality is always changing, every-thing is in flux. Therefore reality is chaos, and truth can never be known because it is always changing. Nothing can ever be known, because reality is chaotic, without pattern. 

Therefore claims to know truth or to describe reality are mistaken, delusional, illusory patterns - merely a product of limited perspective over a limited timescale.

These two recognized possibilities - stasis versus dynamism, or order versus chaos - are seen to underline all the mainstream religious/ philosophical/ ideological 'options'.  

But they are not the only metaphysical possibilities - because since the 19th century at least one other has been suggested - and this is the possibility I have been describing on this blog over the past eight or nine years. 

This is that reality is divine creation; and truth is harmony with divine creation. Creation is understood as dynamic and also permanent; because creation originated with God and is continuing. 

The permanence of creation lies in the permanence of God, and of other Beings that inhabit God's creation. 

The dynamism of creation derives from its being ongoing, consisting of the eternal elements that are Beings and also continually added-to in an open-ended fashion. 

Now that there is this third possibility for metaphysics; it is easier to see why neither of the earlier options was satisfactory; because both of them required Men to violate very fundamental intuitions. 

The assumption that reality was static order required Men to believe that all change was illusory - yet, paradoxically, there could not be any source of illusion in an ordered static reality. 

On the other hand; the assumption of universal flux and no possible knowledge is self-refuting from a version of the 'Cretan Liar' paradox: if knowledge of reality is not possible then we could never know that knowledge of reality was impossible. 

So far; I have not been able to discover any such fundamental paradox in what might be termed my metaphysics of divine creation; operating in context of what might be termed an animistic universe (in which living, conscious, personal Beings are primary). 

And, since it does a good job of explaining what I feel most needs to be explained: I am sticking with it!

***

Note added: Furthermore; since I believe that this is the best metaphysics (of which I know); I think that Christianity should depend upon it; rather than (as has been the case since shortly after the death of Jesus) a static-changeless metaphysics that (among other things) makes it impossible to explain (without paradox or hand-waving distractions) the necessity and work of Jesus Christ, the presence of evil, and the reality of human agency.  

Fortunately! - many of the most important aspects his metaphysics was first understood, and developed by the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith, and the (not very many!) metaphysical theologians in that church. So a lot of the heavy-lifting has already been done.

What remained was to integrate this with 'Romantic' philosophical ideas (including a restoration of aliveness and consciousness of all of divine creation - including 'minerals', as well as plants) - and the most useful to me here have been insights from Blake, Coleridge, Steiner, Barfield and Arkle.   

*

From very early in the history of Christianity and right through the middle ages, two of the biggest problems for loving Christians were:

1. What happens to unbaptized children? Do they go to Hell?

and

2. What happened to the pagans who lived before Christ - do they necessarily go to Hell? 

*

Both of these are linked, and both were a problem because it was assumed that there was no possibility of salvation outwith the sacraments administered by the church, and no possibility of salvation without knowledge of Christ.

This inference has always been resisted by many Christians, since it would imply that God was more cruel, less merciful than ordinary human beings.

But the reason we know about all this, is that the problem was felt particularly acutely among Christian intellectuals who greatly valued - indeed venerated - the Classical learning of the ancient Greeks and pre-Christian Romans - especially the Emperor Trajan who was variously asserted to be in Heaven.

*

It seems evident that the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith also felt these problems acutely, and (by his revelations and by logic) inferred that the problem was an artificial one produced by:

1. The false understanding of original sin.

2. The false assertion that there was no salvation outwith the church (specifics depending upon which particular denomination was doing the asserting).

3. A false understanding of the role of sacraments such as baptism and holy communion.

*

The different take of Mormonism can be seen from two striking passages in the Book of Mormon (taken from http://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm?lang=eng ). 

Alma 39:

15 And now, my son, I would say somewhat unto you concerning the ^acoming of Christ. Behold, I say unto you, that it is he that surely shall come to take away the sins of the world; yea, he cometh to declare glad tidings of salvation unto his people.

This passage is a key one in understanding the distinctive doctrines of Mormonism. The idea that it was as easy for people before the coming of Christ to attain salvation as for people after the coming of Christ.

That pre-Christians knew enough for salvation; and that therefore (from the perspective of salvation) the problem of the virtuous pagan disappears.

(This is assuming that there is no such thing as original sin as conceptualized by the medieval church - for which see below.)

*

This becomes more apparent in what seems to be the most vehemently argued of any section of the Book of Mormon - Chapter 8 of the Book of Moroni:

4 And now, my son, I speak unto you concerning that which grieveth me exceedingly; for it grieveth me that there should ^adisputations rise among you.