the beginning of the end

One of the key moments for me in my exit process was letting myself think, “I can’t give it a fair chance to be true if I don’t give it a fair chance to be false. Mormonism could be wrong.I don’t want it to be, but it could be. Where does the evidence point?” I’d read several books and articles on Mormonism before I came to that realization. But everything I had read I adjusted to fit into “the church is true” paradigm.

The first book I read after that realization was Grant Palmer’s An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins. That was the beginning of the end for me. Once I freed my mind to stop mutilating the evidence, it began to be painfully obvious that the historical record did not make Joseph Smith’s claims look remotely plausible.

Sometime after I read Grant Palmer's book, I wrote down some thoughts about it:

The chapter on the Golden Pot was stretching it a bit. I didn't agree with Palmer's conclusion that Joseph took his story of getting the plates directly from the Golden Pot. But a good "take-home-question" is that Joseph could have easily plagiarized from various sources. It was instructive for me to see how Joseph's story really isn't that original. But the rest of the book is better; that book was key for me to say, "Now, wait a minute, what's up with THAT?"

Big issues for me were the priesthood restoration, the Kinderhoek plates, the Book of Abraham, the First Vision, and the witnesses' testimonies. I hadn't ever read about these issues before. I really wanted to find out more about all of those things, to see if there was more evidence or more explanations out there. I've since read more on the Book of Abraham (By His Own Hand Upon Papyrus), but haven't read much more on the other subjects.

Palmer (or was it other books I read?) argues that some of Smith’s borrowing is blatant, with changes, like quotes from Isaiah in 2 Nephi, and from Matthew in 3 Nephi (the Sermon on the Mount, one-upmanship style). These are obvious to anyone who has read the Bible. The plagiarisms that are less obvious, only because we haven't also read the other books and sources, are stuff that could have come from or been inspired by View of the Hebrews by Ethan Smith (no relation), Spalding, Cowdery, and Rigdon, among others.

Palmer ultimately concludes that the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham were written (with borrowing and a big imagination) by Joseph Smith. From what I've read, I agree. He does not conclude, though, that we have to "throw away" Mormonism because of that. Some people find there are great lessons in the books that people can learn, just as there are in the Bible, without actually believing that the people lived, the stories really happened, etc. Some people instead take it as a mythology, moral fables, etc.

(I’d rather not take away the lesson that it’s okay to chop someone’s head off because a voice told you to it, though. Or that you can know the truth of something by feeling good about it. Or that atheists are evil. Secret handshakes and all that, though—that is wacked out, just like the Book of Mormon says.)