Author: Jonathan Neville

Here’s a wonderful video that explains why we can all work together, regardless of our differences. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJbc3duPy9A

Unity in diversity.

Source: About Central America

One “tell” of cognitive dissonance is deliberately avoiding the fact that causes cognitive dissonance. 

In our day, many LDS apologists promote the idea that Joseph Smith didn’t really translate the plates. They say he merely read words that appeared on a stone he put in the hat (the stone-in-the-hat theory, or SITH).

Because Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery directly refuted SITH, the modern apologists simply ignore what Joseph and Oliver said.

That’s one way to avoid cognitive dissonance. But is that a viable approach?

A better approach is to accept what Joseph and Oliver taught and assess contrary evidence accordingly.

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The history of SITH can be traced to the 1834 book Mormonism Unvailed, which described SITH much like our modern LDS apologists do.

The translation finally commenced. They were found to contain a language not now known upon the earth, which they termed “reformed Egyptian characters.” The plates, therefore, which had been so much talked of, were found to be of no manner of use. After all, the Lord showed and communicated to him [Joseph] every word and letter of the Book. Instead of looking at the characters inscribed upon the plates, the prophet was obliged to resort to the old “peep stone,” which he formerly used in money-digging. This he placed in a hat, or box, into which he also thrust his face. Through the stone he could then discover a single word at a time, which he repeated aloud to his amanuensis, who committed it to paper, when another word would immediately appear, and thus the performance continued to the end of the book. See https://archive.org/details/mormonismunvaile00howe/page/18

Recall the introduction to the Gospel Topics Essays, which quotes D&C 88:118 and explains that “Seeking “out of the best books” does not mean seeking only one set of opinions, but it does require us to distinguish between reliable sources and unreliable sources.”

What more reliable source about the translation could there be than Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery?

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On three notable occasions post-Mormonism Unvailed, Joseph Smith provided an explanation of the translation that leaves no room for SITH. Because Joseph’s teachings have been omitted from the Gospel Topics Essay on Book of Mormon Translation, the Saints books, and the writings of the SITH sayers, few current Latter-day Saints know about these important teachings.

How, and where did you obtain the book of Mormon?

Moroni, the person who deposited the plates, from whence the book of Mormon was translated, in a hill in Manchester, Ontario County, New York, being dead; and raised again therefrom, appeared unto me, and told me where they were, and gave me directions how to obtain them. I obtained them, and the Urim and Thummim with them, by the means of which, I translated the plates; and thus came the Book of Mormon. (Elders’ Journal, July 1838)[1]

With the records was found a curious instrument, which the ancients called “Urim and Thummim,” which consisted of two transparent stones set in the rim of a bow fastened to a breast plate. Through the medium of the Urim and Thummim I translated the record by the gift and power of God. (“Church History,” [aka the Wentworth Letter], Times and Seasons, March 1, 1842)[2]

With the records was found a curious instrument which the ancients called “Urim and Thummim,” which consisted of two transparent stones set in the rim on a bow fastened to a breast plate. Through the medium of the Urim and Thummim I translated the record, by the gift and power of God. (“Church History,” [aka the Wentworth Letter], Times and Seasons, March 1, 1842)[3]

Source: About Central America

Reminds me of the way M2C and SITH teaches that Joseph and Oliver were wrong.

Source: About Central America

The outstanding historian David McCullough passed away this week. In February 2005 in Arizona at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, McCullough gave a speech titled “Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are.”

His observations pertain to the study of LDS Church history. Young and new Latter-day Saints have difficulty understand our history because important events and historical records have been mowed over by modern theories and interpretations, particularly regarding SITH and M2C.

In the excerpts below (in blue) I offer some applications to LDS history (in red). Emphasis added.

The speech was adapted and reprinted in 2008, here: 

https://www.americanheritage.com/history-and-knowing-who-we-are

Excerpts:

Former President Harry S. Truman once remarked that the history we don’t know is the only new thing in the world. 

For young and new Latter-day Saints, it’s a “new thing” for them to learn that Joseph Smith translated the plates with the Urim and Thummim that came with the plates. Another ‘”new thing” is learning that the hill Cumorah in New York state is actually the hill Cumorah (and hill Ramah) of the Book of Mormon.

Picking up on a related theme, the late Daniel Boorstin, an eminent historian, Librarian of Congress, and griend of mine, wrote that planning for the future without a sense of the past is similar to planting cut flowers and hoping for the best.

Today, the new generation of young Americans are like a field of cut flowers, by-and-large historically illiterate. This does not bode well for our future.

The same is true for young and new Latter-day Saints, who are easily confused by SITH and M2C because they are illiterate on those topics.

After delivering a talk at the University of Missouri, I spoke with a young woman who said that until my talk she had not known that all of the original 13 colonies were on the east coast. How could a student at a fine university not know this, I wondered.

Ask most young Latter-day Saints about the hill Cumorah or the Urim and Thummim and they have no clue about what Joseph and his contemporaries.

…

All of us who are educators, parents, and writers bear a great responsibility: We must communicate to the younger generation that Americans — as individuals, but also collectively as a nation — cannot truly know who we are or where we are going unless we know where we have been.

We should value what our forebears — and that includes our own parents and grandparents — have done for us; otherwise our history will simply slip away. If we inherit an old oil painting and no one tells us that it is a priceless work of art, then we’ll probably lose interest in it, either sticking it in a closet or selling it. Of course, history is not static like a painting, but eternally fascinating, because events and people can be freshly examined with new techniques and perspectives. Each generation, we peel back biases that have blinded those before us. The more we know about the past enables us to ask richer and more provocative questions about who we are today.

We also must tell the next generation one of the great truths of history: that no past event was preordained. Every battle, election, and revolution could have turned out differently at any point along the way, just as a person’s own life can change unpredictably. Nothing occurs in a vacuum, a fact that is not as self-evident as it might sound, particularly to a young person.

And we would do well to remind young people that nobody ever lived in the past. Jefferson, Adams, and Washington did not walk around thinking, “Isn’t it fascinating living in the past?” They lived in the present, of course, just as we do today, every bit uncertain of the future as we are. How easy it is for historians and biographers — or any of us — to look backward in time and judge the actions of others. Yet we are not making those tough decisions in real time with definite uncertainties.

…

Family, teachers, friends, rivals, and competitors have all shaped us. So, too, have those who lived long before us. Think about symphony composers, painters, poets, and writers of great literature: We walk around every day quoting Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Pope without even knowing it. We believe that its our way of speaking, but it’s actually what we have been given.

Naturally, Joseph Smith translated the plates using his own lexicon, which is exactly what we expect of any translator.

The laws that govern us, the freedoms we enjoy, the institutions that we often unfortunately take for granted, represent the hard work of others stretching back far into the past. Acting indifferent to this fact does not just smack of ignorance, but rudeness. How can we claim indifference to learning about those people who made it possible for us to become citizens of the world’s greatest country? The freedoms we enjoy are not just a birthright, but something for which millions have struggled, suffered, and died.

Character and Destiny

None of the writers and signers of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia during that fateful summer of 1776 were superhuman; each had flaws, failings, and weaknesses. Some ardently disliked others. All said and did things he regretted. Yet the fact that these imperfect human beings rose to the occasion and performed as they did testifies to their humanity. It is our ability then and now to rise to the occasion and exhibit our strengths—not our failings, weaknesses, and sins—that define us as Americans.

…

The desire to find out what’s not working, fix it, and then maybe get it to work is an American quality and our guiding star. The founding fathers had no prior experience in revolutions or nation-making. The faces of these men, framed by powdered hair and marked by awkward-looking teeth, stare out from old paintings and the money in our wallets, like elder statesmen. But, when George Washington took command of the continental army at Cambridge in 1775, he was 43-years-old, the oldest of the lot. Jefferson penned the Declaration at 33, while John Adams signed it at 40. Benjamin Rush — a founder of the antislavery movement in Philadelphia and one of the most interesting founding fathers — was only 30 years old.

…

Our Failure, Our Duty

There’s no secret to teaching history well or making it interesting. Barbara Tuchman summed up what every teacher, parent, and writer should know in two words: “Tell stories.” E.M. Forster gave a wonderful definition of “story.” If you say that the king died and then the queen died of grief, then that becomes a story, because it calls for empathy on the part of both the storyteller and the listener. We need historians who have the heart and humanity necessary to help students imagine the lives of people who have lived in the past and were just as human as we are today.

…

Listening to the Past

Samuel Eliot Morison wrote that we should read history because it helps us behave better. So, too, we ought to read history because it breaks down dividers between the disciplines of science, medicine, philosophy, art, and music, which is all part of the human story. History enables us to understand the interconnections. Understanding the 18th century, for example, depends on familiarity with its vocabulary, because their words often mean something different than they do today. In a letter that John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail, “We can’t guarantee success in this war, but we can do something better. We can deserve it.” The word “deserve” has such a different meaning today when all that matters is success, getting ahead, and rising to the top.

Adam’s letter indicates that while God controls the outcome of the war, the colonists can control how they behave. They can “deserve” success. That line practically lifted me out of my chair when I first read it. Three weeks later I found the same word in George Washington’s correspondence. It occurred to me that they both were quoting somebody else. I pulled down Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations from the bookshelf and scanned entries from the 18th century. Bingo, I found it in Joseph Addison’s play, Cato . Adams, Washington, and others were quoting the language of the time, a kind of secular creed if you will. It is impossible to fathom their behavior without knowing why honor mattered so much that they put their lives and fortunes on the line for it. Those were not just words.

We hear talk frequently these days about the difficult, dangerous times we live in. Yet our nation has lived through darker times, although this is not evident listening to those who broadcast the news. The year 1776 was perhaps the darkest time in our history. Or what about the first months of 1942 after Pearl Harbor when German submarines sank our oil tankers in plain sight off the coats of Florida and New Jersey? Our recruits drilled with wooden rifles. Our air force did not exist, and the navy was badly hurt. The Nazi machine looked unstoppable. After Pearl Harbor, when Winston Churchill crossed the Atlantic and gave a magnificent speech, saying that we had not journeyed this far because we were made of sugar candy. It’s as true today as it ever was.

History is not just a subject that ought to be taught or read because it will make us a better citizen, although it will. Nor should we encourage young people to embrace history only because it creates more thoughtful and understanding human beings. Nor should we only share stories about the past because we will behave better. History should be taught for pleasure. The joy of history, like art or music or literature, consists of an expansion of the experience of being alive. And that is what education is largely about.

Source: About Central America

In an article in Atlantic, Jonathan Haidt observes the disintegration of society because of social media. He explains the problem of “Structural Stupidity” that arises when a consensus becomes immune from, and impervious to, contrary views, even from within the community.

It’s the opposite of Joseph Smith’s observation that “by proving contraries, truth is made manifest.” https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-israel-daniel-rupp-5-june-1844/1 

Haidt predictably places his thumb firmly on the Left side of the scale, justifying and rationalizing the themes of the political left, but his description of the problem is useful and relevant nonetheless.

Our M2C and SITH citation cartels have created structural stupidity in much the way that Haidt describes here.

Structural Stupidity

Since the tower [of the metaphorical Babel] fell, debates of all kinds have grown more and more confused. The most pervasive obstacle to good thinking is confirmation bias, which refers to the human tendency to search only for evidence that confirms our preferred beliefs. Even before the advent of social media, search engines were supercharging confirmation bias, making it far easier for people to find evidence for absurd beliefs and conspiracy theories, such as that the Earth is flat and that the U.S. government staged the 9/11 attacks. But social media made things much worse.

The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument. John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that,” and he urged us to seek out conflicting views “from persons who actually believe them.” People who think differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain. People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider, almost as if they are shooting darts into their own brain….

So what happens when an institution is not well maintained and internal disagreement ceases, either because its people have become ideologically uniform or because they have become afraid to dissent?

This, I believe, is what happened to many of America’s key institutions in the mid-to-late 2010s. They got stupider en masse because social media instilled in their members a chronic fear of getting darted. … 

But when an institution punishes internal dissent, it shoots darts into its own brain.…

American politics is getting ever more ridiculous and dysfunctional not because Americans are getting less intelligent. The problem is structural. Thanks to enhanced-virality social media, dissent is punished within many of our institutions, which means that bad ideas get elevated into official policy. …

Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people. For example, university communities that could tolerate a range of speakers as recently as 2010 arguably began to lose that ability in subsequent years, as Gen Z began to arrive on campus. Attempts to disinvite visiting speakers rose. Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/

The end

Source: About Central America

“Read the books they want to ban.”

Source: About Central America

Mormon Book Reviews did a highly informative interview about the Joseph Smith photo. Well worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5aUTj-VvRM

Source: About Central America