Mormon Heretic

Alice Cooper at the Scream Awards in 2007

If you’re Mormon, you’ve probably heard the myth that Alice Cooper was a Mormon.  Most of you have probably dismissed the myth as complete hogwash.  Well, it turns out there is an element of truth to the myth.  For example, his father’s middle name is Moroni and his grandfather was an apostle!  Yes it is true!

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I don’t ever think I’ve done 2 posts in one day before, but I want to address this other issue that we have been discussing in the Strangite post.  I’d like to discuss both Biblical and Book of Mormon archaeology.  Most people believe the Bible is on solid archaeological footing, but that isn’t actually true.  Many books have questionable authorship, and many places remain unidentified.  In a previous post, I discussed Questions about the Exodus: there isn’t a shred of evidence that it actually happened.  During Passover celebrations in 2001, Rabbi David Wolpe created international headlines in Israel by proclaiming to his Jewish congregation in Los Angeles, “the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.”

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As I mentioned previously, I really enjoyed the Strangite session of the Mormon History Association meetings a few weeks ago.  Vickie Speek, John Hamer, and Mike Karpowicz gave some fascinating presentations on this little known group.  Following the session, they answered additional questions, and I thought it would be interesting to provide a transcript of the Q&A session.  But before I get into the transcript, I should tell you a brief history of the Strangite Church.

James Strang, prophet of the Strangite Church

James Strang was baptized into the church just a few months before Joseph Smith was killed in 1844.  He said he had a letter from Joseph proclaiming that Strang was to lead the church.  The letter is currently owned by Yale University; in the past few decades, they have declared Joseph Smith’s signature on the letter a forgery.

Evidently Strang was a dynamic leader.   Read more…

When I think  of the Baja California Peninsula, I think of the Baja 1000 off-road race where people take lots of vehicles and cross the deserts in all sorts of vehicles.  However, the father-son team of David and Lynn Rosenvall believe the Baja Peninsula (south of California in Mexico–its most famous city you may recognize is Tijuana) could be the location of Book of Mormon lands.  I’ve been promising to do a post on this theory, and it is time to review it in more detail.

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This is the 3rd post reviewing By the Hand of Mormon, by Terryl Givens.  I’ve taken a bit on an interest in wordprint studies.  Givens explains wordprint studies on page 156.

Computational stylistics is based on the premise that all authors exhibit subtle, quantifiable stylistic traits that are equivalent to a literary fingerprint, or wordprint.  The method has been used to investigate other instances of disputed authorship, from Plato to Shakespeare to the Federalist papers.  Read more…

It’s time to get back to Terryl Givens book, By the Hand of Mormon.  While acknowledging archaeological data isn’t as strong as other aspects of the Book of Mormon, Givens seems to feel Mormon academics have made some impressive contributions.  Givens starts with Hugh Nibley on page 118:

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We have a Childrens Bible that my children love.  It has 25 Bible stories: David and Goliath, Daniel in the Lion’s den, Abraham, Joseph, etc.  I asked my children about some Book of Mormon stories such as Ammon and the sheep, Nephi’s boat, and realized that my children weren’t familiar with these stories.  So, I decided to write my own version of the most important Book of Mormon stories that I thought my kids could understand.  I used the Childrens Bible as my guide, and tried to tell the stories in about 100 words or so, and thought it would be fun for my kids to draw pictures of the stories.

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I’ve been enjoying Terryl Givens book, By the Hand of Mormon.  He has a positive view of Mormon scholarship, and goes into detail of both literary and archaeological scholarship. Wikipedia has some interesting information on Givens:

His second book, By the Hand of Mormon, is seen as his most important contribution to Mormon studies to date because it is the first academic survey of the significance of the Book of Mormon to believer and skeptic alike to be published by a major academic press (Oxford University Press). In it, Givens argues that the Book of Mormon has been important primarily for its existence and extra-textual historical claims rather than for its contents. Givens also makes a case for what he calls “dialogic revelation” as a novel contribution of the Book of Mormon. In current projects, he seems to be moving in the direction of broader engagement with religious themes across time and the western religious and philosophical traditions.

Critical response

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Kathryn Daynes tells a really interesting story about an infertile couple in her book More Wives than One.  The Church Handbook of Instruction was leaked onto the internet a few years ago, and the church sued to stop it’s publication.  The only reference I could find indicates that the Church strongly discourages members from participating in surrogate motherhood.  I know someone who was considering becoming a surrogate mother prior to her marriage.  While part of me respects such a decision, I always thought that participating in surrogate parenting was a strange idea.  I remember a NJ woman refused to give up the baby she had carried for another couple about 10-20 years ago, so there can be some real challenges for people who choose to participate in parenting via this route.  You hear about weird mixups like this one, and you understand the church’s decision on why it is a bad idea.    As I read the following story, it seems Brigham Young probably didn’t have a problem with surrogate parenting.

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This is part 2 of my in-depth look into Solomon Spalding’s only known novel, “Manuscript Found.”  I’ve previously discussed the Spalding Theory of Book of Mormon origins, and given an introduction to Spalding’s only known manuscript discovered by LL Rice in Hawaii.  The original manuscript is located at Oberlin College in Ohio.

One of the most striking features to me concerning the document is the extremely poor spelling.  I would hope that Spalding would be a “tolerable schollar” (his spelling on page 43.)  At first, I started circling all the words that he misspelled, but I got tired of it after a while because there were so many.  Here’s a sampling of some.

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From time to time, I get an email from George Potter.  He has a website called the Nephi Project.  I heard him speak a few years ago on research he has done in Yemen.  His research is pretty well-respected, and it appears he has a very good candidate for Nephi’s Harbor, and he may have found the River Laman in Saudi Arabia that is mentioned by Lehi in the Book of Mormon.  (I really need to write a review of his and another researcher’s work–they are really good.)  Potter thinks that Lehi and his family followed the frankincense trail to Yemen before setting sail for the New World.

George has recently shifted his focus from the Old World to the New World.  George is a proponent that the Book of Mormon lands are in Peru.  His latest newsletter dated Oct 13, 2009, says,
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I was surprised at the recent burst of activity on my post back in April titled, Debunking the Spaulding Manuscript Theory. One of my commenters (Roger) seem to believe the Spaulding Theory still has merit.  I even had Craig Criddle stop by.   He is a leading proponent of the theory and published a peer-reviewed article at Oxford in support of this theory.  (You need a subscription to read it, but the abstract can be found there.)

Roger took issue Brodie’s characterization that Spaulding’s manuscript was “devoid of religious material”, and made several references to religious writings in this comment.  So, if Roger is right, it seems there should be quite a few religious similarities between this Spaulding manuscript, and the Book of Mormon, right?

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This is a post to talk about a lesser known Mormon hero.  My wife has many pioneer ancestors.  In reading The Forgotten Kingdom, by David Bigler, he makes a few references to Reddick Allred, who is a distant uncle of my wife.  I wanted to highlight a good, Mormon man, relatively unknown, who just did the best he could.

Chapter 5 deals with the Handcart disasters so many Mormons are familiar with.  The Martin and Willie Handcart companies started for Utah too late in the year, and ended up stranded in early blizzards in Wyoming.  Reddick Allred was part of the rescue team.  Here’s what the book says on page 115,

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