“Faith” Is Not “Knowledge”, So Can’t Be “Countered”
The Telegraph’s (and Catholic Herald’s) Damian Thompson often makes excellent points. But this is definitely not one of them:
…Mitt Romney … belongs to the only world religion built on a foundation of pure counterknowledge: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To be sure, all religions make claims that the outside world believes to be false. But the Book of Mormon is unique.
Why? Because, unlike the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Koran, nothing in it actually happened. Nothing.
The “Jaredites” from the Middle East did not travel to America 2,000 years ago and found a civilisation that Mormon “historians” have the nerve to identify as the Olmecs. In fact, the Jaredites never existed.
Israelites did not arrive in the New World in 600 BC and split into Nephites and Lamanites; this is total fiction, devised by young Joseph Smith from New York in the 1820s. And – do I really need to point this out? – Jesus of Nazareth never set foot in America.
Mormonism is the only religion whose major claims (solemnly discussed in Mormon academic journals that have all the credibility of Star Trek fanzines) have been officially declared to be untrue by the Smithsonian Institution…
Nice try. But most of us were unaware that acceptable religion is officially referreed even by the Smithsonian. In fact, Mr Thompson is being extremely disingenuous with that provocative — even nasty — post, for as the Smithsonian link he provides tells us, point blank:
…The Book of Mormon is a religious document and not a scientific guide…
Also speaking of a religious document, just as it is a Roman Catholic priest’s absolute right to assert — with an entirely straight face — that it appears in the New Testament how Christ rose from the dead and appeared to his followers, despite that “major claim” of Christian “faith” not sounding very scientifically plausible. And despite its not appearing in any contemporary Roman history and there being no archeological evidence to support it. And as we know, it took some 300 years after Christ’s crucifixion for the mass of Romans to begin to accept that occurrence on “faith”.
Indeed, the Catholic church is always investigating (and sometimes accepting as “fact”) all sorts of other ”appearances” far more recent than Christ’s resurrection. For example, the Church accepts that Mary, St. Joseph, and St. John “appeared at the south gable end of the local small parish church, the Church of St. John the Baptist,” in Knock, Ireland in 1879. That event one presumes Mr Thompson agrees to be “fact” . . . because the Catholic church says it is.
But lots of other Christians consider it absolute bunk. Meaning “untrue”. Yet most also have the courtesy to respect the belief.
It is disgraceful — and I don’t use that word lightly — that Mr Thompson is unwilling to grant what he demands for his own Catholicism. Mormons could believe Jesus Christ had appeared as a 6 ft apricot, snowboarding near Lake Placid, and that would be entirely their right. Bottom line: if Mr Thompson wants wholesale understanding of his own Catholicism, he might start by at least showing some for the faith of others.
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UPDATE: Full disclosure (should you be new to this blog): I am a church-attending Roman Catholic.
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UPDATE 2, January 23: Greeting to those who’ve come this way via Article 6 and Utah Policy.
Well said.
What Chris said…
If anyone should be wary of criticising the religion of American politicians, it would be a Roman Catholic, particularly after Kennedy’s problems in the 1960 election.
Have you seen Article 6 the Movie?
You should be able to find it streaming somewhere. It’s done by a Mormon who investigates the parallels between the opposition to Romney on the basis of religion and that of Kennedy in 1960.
Also, I recommend Hugh Hewitt’s book A Mormon in the Whitehouse?: Ten Things Every Conservative Should Know about Mitt Romney. It turned me into a Romney supporter last Spring.
Disclosure: Christened as a Roman Catholic, grew up in and around Protestant Evangelicalism and Southern Baptists, and confirmed Church of England. (And the more I hear from Benedict, the more I think about investigating Catholicism more.)
Men of faith don’t have any problem believing in the Great Flood, that Noah really existed and that God spoke to him. Same with Moses delivering the Hebrew slaves. And so on. Why is it such a stretch for such “wise men” as mr. Thompson to believe in modern prophets or reveleation? God is no respecter of persons and loves all His children the same. Those who are wise as to their own prideful knowledge often discount God — to their own ultimate spiritual demise.
Hello James,
Btw, I haven’t seen Article 6 the movie. But in the last 24 hours I’ve gotten LOTS of visitors from Article 6 the blog!
So many, in fact, you’d almost have thought I’d mentioned Keira Knightley!
Thank you. Mr. Thompson can’t even get his most basic assertions factually correct (as you noted with the Smithsonian citation). I suspect Thompson was using a secondary reference that had once used the OLD Smithsonian statement, which was critical of the Book of Mormon, but revised when archeologists from BYU pointed out that it was unnecessarily negative, given the fact that Meso-American archeology is in a constant state of flux.
His statement that Jaredites allegedly came to the Americas 2000 years ago is 2000 years off. His dismissal of Mormon academics and their journals as being jokes is rather presumptive of a journalist who needs NO academic credentials for his job, attacking people who got PhDs kin Egyptology, Arabic, and various Ancient Languages from Oxford, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, etc.
The real mystery is that any reputable publication in the UK (that is not a tabloid that puts naked women on its cover) would even publish such patently offensive baloney without having someone who is a real expert at least read the thing and fact check it.
I suspect Thompson has not even cracked the covers of a Book of Mormon, but is just repeating rumors he read somewhere, written by another prejudiced ignoramus.
I loved your point about the miraculous nature of appearances ascribed to Christ and various saints. Unless Thompson has an email from Jesus attesting that he did not visit the Americas circa 34 AD, I daresay he is a bit presumptuous in forbidding Jesus to appear where and when He wishes. Any pretense that any Christian church has that Christ is the Savior of the World surely does not support an assertion that the inhabitants of another continent were unworthy of such a visit.
The real point here is that people who have their own religious faith need to be willing to acknowledge that other people can have their own, and that once we start ridiculing another person’s miracles, we are doing the work of the militant atheists like Richard Dawkins who would outlaw all religious teaching to children as harmful to the rational mind.
Anyone who sincerely wants to investigate the truth claims of the Book of Mormon has to do more than blow it off. Just as with the Bible, intellectual integrity requires that we at least read a material portion of it, and ask those who believe it is true how they arrive at their belief in the document. For Mormons, it is primarily a matter of reading the book, pondering its teachings about Christ and salvation, and then sincerely asking God whether or not it is approved by Him. The growth of Mormonism is a testament to the number of people who believe they have had a Pentecost experience confirming the Book of Mormon to be a companion work to the Bible.
It is generally after that point that Mormons get around to reading the scholarly studies that demonstrate, from a variety of disciplines, that the Book of Mormon bears strong marks of authenticity as an ancient Hebrew document, one that Smith was too uneducated to have written–indeed, that no scholar in 1830 could have written. The remarkable thing is that the evidence of this gets stronger as time goes on and the text is studied more carefully and the ancient world is understood more correctly.
One simple example is that the description Smith gave of the record as having been written on metal plates, apparently gold, was unique in the world of 1830, but such records have been found in the hundreds since then, many dating to 600 BC. The Book of Mormon talks of a bronze record taken by the refugees from Jerusalem, and one can see bronze religious records kept by the Umbrians in a recent National Geographic article about ancient Italy. Why would an intentional fraud make an assertion so palpably false at the time, but so palpably true later? It would get him nothing but criticism at the time. The verification only came after his death. Of course, 11 other men gave affidavits to having seen and even “hefted” the metal plates, and the critics have no explanation for why those men stood by their affidavits until their deaths, even under threat, and when they could have gone on the lecture circuit (as so many defectors from Mormonism did) with a denunciation of their prior testimony.