Believe, Believe, Believe!

 “The Non-Believers Guide to the Book of Mormon” by C.B. Brooks, M.D., 2017

I used to work with a decent Mormon lawyer.  He had bad breath, rarely ate anything at work except popcorn and made his 6 kids listen to Bible or Book verses very early each morning.  Odd, but a kind man overall.  I knew little about Mormonism except the basics – long underwear, polygamy, Warren Jeffs, violence, shunning, Romney.  So I read this short book.

Brooks recounts the “Book of Mormon” – a made-up, endless history of wars, kings, judges, prophets, angels and scribes, filled with anti-black racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, anti-indigenous nonsense, theocracy and magic. It’s like a badly-cribbed, verbose and more confusing version of the Bible, 588 pages long, covering over a 1,000 years.  It describes the wandering “in the wilderness” and later transport by boat (Ark?) of the original Mormons - the Nephites – from Palestine to a promised land across the sea - probably north America.  This occurred 100s of years before the birth of Christ.  None of the numerous historical battles, places and oddly-named persons in the various ‘Books’ have any archival, archeological or historical proof over these 100s of years. Then there are the long time jumps, character jumps and endless repetition of hellfire against unbelievers.  There is even one holy son called Moron.

In the ‘promised land’ wars are constant between ‘evil’ Lamanites and the light-skinned Nephites, until in a climactic battle (almost like a reverse Armageddon), the former win, leaving Mormon’s son Moroni as the last living Nephite to carry on the true religion.  This is 400 A.D.  As you can see, the persecution logic is large. Then there are more ‘climactic’ battles.  In actual fact, the Mormons were run out of several states. Joseph Smith was killed in Illinois in 1844 after he declared martial law and burned an opposition newspaper.  A small group was led to Nevada by Brigham Young in 1846, settling most Mormons in northern Nevada around the Great Salt Lake.     

In 1823 Joseph Smith had a ‘vision’ that the angel Moroni told him where to find hidden plates inscribed in history.  In 1830 Smith published what he 'found' in the Book of Mormon.  These concocted tales were dictated by a creative Joseph Smith to several ‘scribes’ from his reading of these ancient, sacred metal ‘plates.’  These plates were written in a foreign language that he translated...  Such skill.  Their words eventually end up on paper after the dictation, as he pretends to read them from behind a screen.  They make Joseph Smith their real author - a true fiction writer of sorts. He’s like a crazed Christian Tolkien, creating a world out of his imagination while riffing off the Bible.  No one ever actually saw the ‘plates’ upon which this whole religion is based except the claim by Smith.  The ostensible ‘witnesses’ saw them in a ‘vision.’

The narrative is really a photo-positive of the mentality of a young, white, rural, ordinary man saturated with Biblical verbosity in the 1830s, during the ‘Second Great Awakening.’  It’s a ‘colonial-settler’ tale with a nativist angle, as the evil and hated Lamanites seem to combine all the lazy and hedonic features of Jews, black slaves, citified drunks, hidden Catholics, Gentiles and red Indians.  Smith was seemingly given to fraud and found a gullible rich man to start his church with. At one time Smith was charged with fraud.  His first occupation was getting farmers to pay him to ‘find treasure’ on their land with a magic stone.  Yet he was not fond of digging, as he was somewhat lazy, so that career was doomed.

Well, it was polygamy in the 1800s.

There is a passage in one of the many Book of Mormon’s ‘Books’ that denounces polygamy, but somehow that one was ignored, or turned around, and polygamy became sacred practice to the early Mormons.  It was finally forbidden by the main Church in 1904 after immense pressure by the U.S. government.  Breakoff sects like Jeffs’ Fudamentalist LDS still wed children to old, powerful men in the group, including himself, so the practice continues.  Jeffs is now in jail for child abuse but runs the cult from his jail cell.

The Mormons have a conflicted relationship with wealth.  The Book both praises prosperity like a modern prosperity doctrine, and denounces the pursuit of riches of various upper-class, dissolute men.  At one point in the Book it embraces a classless paradise, but that theme soon disappears.  Today the LDS Church is immensely wealthy, as members tithe large amounts, give free labor and carry out mission trips to recruit more members, partially dominating Salt Lake City and the state of Nevada.  The Church runs a good number of businesses as well.  They invest or control Jet Blue, Black & Decker, Marriott Hotels, Deseret News and Bonneville Media for starters, along with a slew of real estate companies, a catering company and an insurance/finance company. 

Jesus’ name makes an appearance in one book visiting north America later, as some kind of ‘redeemer’ was anticipated.  There is lots of hatred of cities like Jerusalem and other presumed Sodoms, and their opposite, lots of wonderful ‘wildernesses.’  The hint that genealogy might be important to Mormons is embedded in the Book because of it’s long, long, long line of ‘sons’ who inherit power – but not daughters or wives or mothers.  From this came the Church’s FamilySearch website and Ancestry.com’s DNA harvesting.  There is the magic underwear, seer stones, a God-given compass, the afore-mentioned ‘plates’ (?) and folk magic.  There’s lots of punitive Old Testament thundering against unbelievers and lack of faith, as those without faith will be punished – and are.  So there!

Booker concludes that Smith was a bit of a con artist, but the depth of the fraud seems like Smith suffered from bi-polar disorder, otherwise known as manic depression.  Booker, an actual medical doctor, bases this on an analysis of the style of the text, which he read completely. Mania produces delusions and hallucinations, auditory and visual, frenetic energy, rambling thinking and grandiose, pompous and exalted views. This kind of behavior can create a laser-like obsession, allowing someone to write such a tome.  Manic hyper-sexuality and impulsivity might also relate to the origin of the polygamist doctrine.  Smith’s family history was visited by insanity, visions and suicide, as bi-polar disorder is partly inherited.  That’s Booker's logic.

If this seems like a humdinger of a sad and ridiculous religion, in which its members actually believe this bunkum to be true, you’d be right. It’s almost right up there with Scientology.  May Day has a section of atheist, agnostic, unchurched, secular and free-thinker books.  Come and get ‘em!

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Cults and Cultists,” “Nonverts,” “Religulous” (Maher); “Weird Conservative Feminism,” “This Land,” “Godless – 150 Years of Unbelief” or the words “religion” or “Mormon.”

The Cultured Marxist

November 25, 2023