I haven’t commented on Mormon apologist Michael R. Ash’s stuff for a while, for the simple reason that when someone’s wanking, it’s rude to interrupt. But he’s been going on like that for quite a while, and I’m afraid he’s going to hurt himself. He’s been covering the Book of Mormon bit by bit, and it’s the same old tactic Mopologists have always used: rather than find evidence for religious claims, just cast about for a nearest match, and say that this shows the claim is ‘plausible’. For example, Ash thinks the Tree of Life metaphor is plausible because early people used the same metaphor. (Really? Ancient people knew about trees?) Or look around for features of ancient boats for a nearest match so you can validate Jaredite barges. Find an NHM inscription somewhere, and try to match it to ‘Nahom’. As long as it looks close enough to something out there, you can claim a match, coincidence be damned.
But lately, he’s been writing about the Tower of Babel. Ah, Babel. It was one thing that did Mormonism in for me, as I’ve recounted here. The short version: The T of B presents a special problem for Mormons. It’s a myth about why there are different languages, but Mormons can’t really play it off as a myth because the author of the Book of Mormon wrote into it a character (the Brother of Jared) who was ostensibly at the Tower at that time. If you concede that Babel’s a myth, then the Book of Mormon can’t be taken completely literally, and this makes for shaky ground for Mormons.
I’ll be addressing the problems with Babel from a linguistic perspective in a later post. For now, let’s just point out that Mike Ash concedes that the Tower story might be mythical…
it’s possible that the confounding of tongues is an aetiological myth or legend that attempts to explain the divergence of languages. Anciently, such traditions were passed from generation to generation and, in a pre-scientific era, were never questioned for historical or scientific accuracy.
…but fails to see why that is a problem for the Book of Mormon.
While some believers may prefer either a literal or mythological approach to this topic, we should be careful to understand that a mythological approach doesn’t mean that the Nephites were fictitious. Ancient histories and scriptures can contain mythical elements as well as actual history.
Let me explain: If something is a ‘myth’, then that means ‘it didn’t happen’. So if your book claims that literal people were there for that event, then it’s wrong.
Not for Ash.
We don’t have the brother of Jared’s personal journal. We have Joseph’s translation (which was dictated in King James vernacular) of Moroni’s abridgment of Mosiah’s translation of Ether’s long-after-the-fact traditions. Perhaps the tower saga was part of the Jaredite lore which Ether interpreted according to his cultural heritage and recorded on his plates.
Ancient redactors (or abridgers) — which include Moroni and Mormon — were editors who often added to or adjusted elements to fit their view of the story or to square with the conclusions they were attempting to project.
Redacted by Mormon and Moroni? Well, what did they know? They were only prophets! They weren’t as smart as Mike.
In other words, even if he’s right, and if the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be, its message is still just a fourth- or fifth-hand account through a string of biased and uncomprehending middlemen. Which is convenient for Ash, because then he has a lot of latitude to massage the text into whatever he wants. But it opens the question of why anyone should believe such a muddle to be a factual record at all. I hope Mormons are paying attention, because what Ash is showing is that you have to dismantle the Book of Mormon in order to defend it.
But this Babel blunder does not weaken the Book of Mormon’s veracity in Ash’s estimation at all. Of course not. On the contrary, it actually strengthens it.
If the Book of Mormon was written by real ancient people it should contain ancient mythological elements.
See how it works? The more mistakes, the truer it gets! Let’s see if we can take it farther: Real people make mistakes, and real people lie. If the Book of Mormon contains mistakes and lies, that just proves that it was written by real people!
Real people from the 1800s, that is.
5 November 2010 at 5:36 am
Minor point, but you can't discount all elements of a myth by saying that "if something is a 'myth', then that means 'it didn't happen'." Just because the Iliad is a mythical epic doesn't mean that it has no historical basis.
That "a mythological approach doesn't mean that [some component of myth] is fictitious" is a reasonable and logical statement.
5 November 2010 at 6:23 am
That's not the problem. The problem is that Mormons believe the Book of Mormon to be literally true. And yet it claims to have characters that were present at fictitious events. They can't have it both ways.
5 November 2010 at 7:40 am
Surely there's a typographical error in the Book of Mormon. Hasn't the final 'c' been left off 'Moroni"?
5 November 2010 at 4:50 pm
This is classic.
If the Book of Mormon was written by real ancient people it should contain ancient mythological elements.
Haha, like, from the Bible?
If the Book of Mormon was written by real religious people in the early nineteenth century U.S. it should contain ancient mythological elements from the Bible as well as plenty of religious superstition.
As detailed in a past issue, while I believe in actual Jaredites, Nephites and Lamanites, I also believe we can better appreciate the scriptures when we realize that ancient societies — including prophets — recorded their narratives according to their own understanding of the world around them.
Yes I also believe we can better appreciate Mormonism when we realize that deeply religious people interpret the world according to the narratives that they've been given.
Surely the story about the barges and stones is completely non-mythical though, right?
6 November 2010 at 12:13 am
Daniel, you say that "Mormons believe the Book of Mormon to be literally true." Could you explain what you mean by this.
6 November 2010 at 4:56 am
By that, I mean that Mormons think that the things in the Book of Mormon really happened — that Nephi, Moroni, and so on were real people, and the things they did are described more or less factually (not metaphorically) in the Book of Mormon.
They are also fond of quoting Joseph Smith, saying that the Book of Mormon is 'the most correct of any book on earth'.
6 November 2010 at 12:38 pm
But Mormons also believe that the Bible stories really happened yet they typically accept that it (the Bible) also contains myths. So I'm not sure I see your point if they see the same thing in the Book of Mormon.
6 November 2010 at 2:34 pm
What criteria do Mormons use to distinguish mythical embellishments from fact? Is it consistently applied? Why does the line between the two keep moving as the years go by and more scientific information is available? What elements of the Bible do you think Mormons "typically accept" as mythical? How long do you suppose it has been that way and why?
6 November 2010 at 2:49 pm
"Hi! We're missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and we have a very special myth we'd like to tell you about!"
On the day LDS missionaries use this door approach, I will happily retract my criticism.
8 November 2010 at 8:39 pm
@anaonymous
-first off…both the Bible and BoM are both completely mythical and ficticious. So its easy to use BS for more BS.
2nd the mormons have what are called "articles of faith" which describe certain religious foundations of the mormon church. In one of the articles they claim that the "bible to be the word of God as long as it is translated correctly." IOW, they can't (or arnt suppose to) believe that there are made-up myths in the Bible bc any error is based on mistranslation, NOT superstition.
3rd: the BoM specifically states that the Jaredites, from the first person POV of Jared, mentions the TOB incident (bc he prayed that his people would not have a corrupted language). So if there actually was no TOB incident, than why is Jared giving a personal account of something that never happened? (answer: bc there never was a Jared in the first place)
9 November 2010 at 2:30 am
Actually, SMC, the Brother of Jared story isn't written in the "first person POV of Jared", it's narrated by Moroni.
I think that's supposed to be Ash's point: Moroni is supposed to be giving a reader's digest version of Ether's story, which is itself supposed to post-date the Brother of Jared story by a few thousand years.
It's possible to treat Ether's retelling as mythic, while still believing that Ether and Moroni were real people who wrote an actual record for JS to translate.
I'm not saying I agree with this view, but it doesn't seem so far fetched to me. After all, I know that the Aeneid is mythic, but it's still an ancient text written by a real person named Virgil.
9 November 2010 at 2:06 pm
@Alarik:
Your right it is narrated by Moroni…but that doesnt mean that my case is any less valuable
If the TOB story was complete bogus, than why arent the mormon leaders saying this Ash moron who writes for a bias newspaper?
BTW I was a mormon for 18 years and I never had a lesson or a speech where I found out the TOB was an untrue myth, in fact I recall a cartoon that depicts the exodus of the Jaredites with the TOB scene in it. Never in the video did it say that any of this was "mythic." So I have 2 say that this Ash guy is giving a VERY far fetched explaination.
9 November 2010 at 3:36 pm
"If the TOB story was complete bogus, than why arent the mormon leaders saying this Ash moron who writes for a bias newspaper?"
I'm not sure I understood that sentence. Ash doesn't represent the Church, but he's not an outlier either. As you'd expect, the slightly more intellectual segment of Mormonism tends to be a little more liberal when it comes to interpreting scripture.
I bet if you wrote to HQ, you'd get a statement something along the lines of "The Church has no official position on the historicity of the Tower of Babel" followed by a vague affirmation of the inspiration of scripture in general.
I'm not suggesting that Ash is right, or that he represents the Church. I'm just saying that his explanation seems coherent. I know a lot of Mormons who subscribe to a similar view.
9 November 2010 at 4:31 pm
I meant to say that if the myth was complete bogus than why are we getting this info from the opinion of a writer from a bias paper and not from and not from the prophets themselves…i simply forgot to proofread
BTW I got this from the church's website from an ENSIGN article I added ellipses to shorten it):
"…or some in the modern world, the historicity of the tower of Babel story… is often discounted…. But Latter-day Saints accept the story as it is presented in Genesis. Further, we have the second witness of the Book of Mormon. The title page of the Book of Mormon explains that the book of Ether “is a record of the people of Jared, who were scattered at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people, when they were building a tower to get to heaven.” The book of Ether itself then tells of when “Jared came forth with his brother and their families, … at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people, and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth”
Here's the link :
http://lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?hideNav=1&locale=0&sourceId=4a5557b60090c010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD
I found NOTHING on either LDS.org or mormon.org that shows any support for your opinion…the view that you and your friends have are apparantly not shared with anyone on either of these websites. So yes, the opinion of you and your friends are very fringe in your church. And I have personally never known a mormon with the opinion
that the TOB was a myth.
9 November 2010 at 5:52 pm
BTW has anyone wondered, if the TOB was just a myth to explain the Jaredites but for some reason we accepted the Jaredites as a real ethnic group in the Americas…how can two cultures an ocean apart possibly share the same myth?
10 November 2010 at 1:33 am
SMC: I never said you'd find it on lds.org, just that it's not an uncommon view among members of the Church.
If all Mormons believed that the Tower of Babel was a true story, than Ash wouldn't have had to write the article to begin with. The problem is that, on the surface, the Book of Mormon stories seem to preclude treating the ToB as a myth.
All Ash has done is provide a way of reconciling those two ideas, so that Mormons so-inclined can still believe the Book of Mormon is a real historical record, while rejecting the ToB story.
As Daniel pointed out, this brings additional problems (where do you draw the line? What's true, what's myth, what's expanded or redacted?)
That's a different issue though.
10 November 2010 at 4:19 am
That's a great find, SMC. It'll be disavowed eventually, I suppose, but it does show where the mainstream thinking was at the time.
I don't think I'd call Ash a 'liberal' Mormon. He's actually a radical, or at least he's promoting radical new interpretations of LDS doctrine.
But wherever the wind blows, I suppose. I don't really care if MoDoc radicalises. I just care what's true. If only apologists had the same concern. For them, loyalty to the church trumps loyalty to reality.
11 January 2011 at 6:02 pm
I found this entry interesting. I agree with Ash that conceeding a mythical status of the TOB isn't problematic for the Book of Mormon.
I think the reason people don't use the vocabulary of 'myth' as you used when refering to it is because it has so many negative connotations which you draw upon to sensationalise your account.
I am a mormon and have no problem with accepting the book of mormon as not 'literally true.'
Myth is not about the truth or wether something happened in actual fact its a alteration of what happened. The history of science is full of myths. Newton getting hit on the head with an apple. We have so many modern myths that are based on what happened or what people thought happened. A myth is not simply a fiction.
11 January 2011 at 10:39 pm
I wish I could live long enough to see all of Mormonism (and other literal religions) become a "mythical status". It's inevitable. How long are Mormons (and Christians) willing to wait for the second coming?
While I dislike the intellectually dishonesty of apologetic ad hoc explanations that keep the myth alive, I do like how fundamentalist religions are becoming more progressive. This means less unjustified inequality.