HOW QUICKLY THE GENERATIONS TRANSFORM!

From Angels to Demons?

In another forum, one contributor, observing the rapid moral decay of our society, made the following observation:

"How quickly the generations transform."

That comment triggered the following:

As some readers will be aware, the founder of the LDS Church, the uneducated rube, 25-year-old Joseph Smith, stumbled out of the woods in frontier New York telling a fantastic tale of divine visitations, angels and golden plates, and, at the ripe old age of 25, published the Book of Mormon - a purported “translation” of said gold plates (actually a transcription) - a hefty piece of work purportedly a historical/religious history of a branch of the House of Israel who arrived somewhere in the Americas (probably the land occupied by present-day America) about 600 BC, and survived until 400 AD when they destroyed themselves in a great civil war. 

Of course, from the moment it came off the press in 1830, the great question associated with that intricately interwoven and substantial piece of obvious literary/theological artistry has been, where in fact did it come from?  Who wrote the words contained in it?

There are, in my opinion, really only two possible explanations that have stood the test of time during the intervening, contentious almost 200 years since the Book of Mormon's publication: was this substantial tome (1) nothing more than the product of the inerudite, callow, albeit creative mind of the rustic, unschooled (3-4 years of country schooling), marginally illiterate bumkin Joseph Smith (his wife, Emma, said that, when she married him, he could hardly string a few words together to form a coherent sentence), or (2) did it come by the miraculous means Joseph and many supporting witnesses claimed it did?

Having been born into the LDS faith - my forebears were among those who had a hand in laying the foundations of the organization - I was aware of the Book of Mormon from an early age, but only became a serious enquirer in my late teens. For some peculiar reason, I never did mindlessly accept as a given the church’s traditional story of the origins of the book as set forth by the LDS Church. Instead, I focused on the challenge to the reader contained in the book's final pages:

"And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things." - Book of Mormon, Moroni 10:4-5

Being aware of the controversy surrounding the book, and the profound ramifications of its being either the truth or a lie - in terms of the claims it makes for itself it has to be one or the other - and to the end of discovering for myself the truth of the matter, I have been a lifelong student, not only of the book itself, but of the historical milieu that produced it - the life and times of Joseph Smith and those associated with him in the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and in establishing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Suffice it to say that, in the context of everything I have studied over many years, I have satisfied my own mind that the only remotely plausible explanation for the Book of Mormon is to be found in the account of miraculous events provided by Joseph Smith himself and attested to by many contemporary witnesses. I believe things happened back then just as Joseph Smith and his associates claimed they did.

But I digress...  Back to my friend’s observation:

 "How quickly the generations transform."

In my earlier years as a reader of the Book of Mormon I can remember thinking it dubious that the society spoken of in that record degraded so rapidly from good to evil over "the space of not many years":

"For he [Nephi] had been forth among the people who were in the land northward, and did preach the word of God unto them, and did prophesy many things unto them; And they did reject all his words, insomuch that he could not stay among them, but returned again unto the land of his nativity. 

"And seeing the people in a state of such awful wickedness, and those Gadianton robbers filling the judgment-seats—having usurped the power and authority of the land; laying aside the commandments of God, and not in the least aright before him; doing no justice unto the children of men;  Condemning the righteous because of their righteousness; letting the guilty and the wicked go unpunished because of their money; and moreover to be held in office at the head of government, to rule and do according to their wills, that they might get gain and glory of the word, and, moreover, that they might the more easily commit adultery, and steal, and kill, and do according to their own wills— 

"Now this great iniquity had come upon the Nephites, in the space of not many years; and when Nephi saw it, his heart was swollen with sorrow within his breast ..."

- Book of Mormon, Helaman 7:2-6 about 23-21 BC

Limited in life experience in those earlier days, I found it hard to believe that people - a whole society - "in the space of not many years" could degrade so rapidly, transforming themselves from a righteous society into a pervasively wicked one. 

Come on, man! Really? Surely (don't call me Shirley), people just don't change that fast, do they?  

DO THEY?

Of course, in my adult and now superannuated stages of life, having myself observed first-hand what has more recently been happening among our people - what my friend has also commented on - the rapid intellectual, moral and spiritual deterioration of our society "in the space of not many years" - I have now long been disabused of my naivete. As a student of scripture, both ancient and modern, I remember thinking in my middle age - traveling up and down in the earth and seeing nothing around me remotely resembling the horrific end time events predicted in scripture - that I would surely never live to see such things happen, that I would be long in my grave before the tumult of the end of days would explode on the world.

Again, with my eyes open to what is happening around me today, I have been disabused of my naivete. Supergenarian that I am, with not much length left in the wick, I have nevertheless determined to fasten my seatbelt...  

Things change... and the more they change, the faster they change...

Anything can happen now, and it can happen fast...

"For this is a day of warning, and not a day of many words."

 - Doctrine & Covenants, Section 63:58

(Imagine me quoting that!) ;-)

But, apart from my being cured of a sanguine view of the world, as I just now quoted and read through the above passage from the BoM's Book of Helaman, I was struck by the similarity of what was happening among those people more than 2000 years ago and what is happening in our society today. What is written there - ancient history - an insightful observer could have written about our society today: 

...robbers filling the judgment-seats—having usurped the power and authority of the land; laying aside the commandments of God, and not in the least aright before him; doing no justice unto the children of men;  Condemning the righteous because of their righteousness; letting the guilty and the wicked go unpunished because of their money; and moreover to be held in office at the head of government, to rule and do according to their wills, that they might get gain and glory of the word, and, moreover, that they might the more easily commit adultery, and steal, and kill, and do according to their own wills—" 

Can one imagine a more precise and accurate description of what is happening in America today? 

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more it changes, the more it stays the same. Nothing new under the sun.

Were these words ginned up just 200 years ago in frontier America out of the imagination of a countrified hayseed sometime before his 25th birthday - a farmhand who described himself as "doomed to a scanty maintenance" through manual labor - a young man who was a complete cipher by sophisticated standards, who knew little or nothing of the wider world but somehow managed to publish an explosive literary/religious/theological work that has worldwide distribution - more than 200 million copies in 115 languages - placing it among the few most read books in the history of the world? Or were those words, as Joseph Smith claimed, written 2000 years ago by a writer chronicling the death rattles of a corrupt, terminal society? 

You tell me... 

Right vs. wrong, truth vs. lies, reality vs. fantasy, law vs. lawlessness, order vs. chaos, patriotism vs. treason, liberty vs. tyranny, light vs. darkness, good vs. evil, happiness vs. misery, God vs. the Godless…

What’ll it be?

If you can be fooled, you will be.

These are the times that try men’s souls…

Torquemada

p.s. Any reader who has not read the Book of Mormon and would like a copy only has to ask. All I ask in return is that, if I send it, you promise to read it. Waste not, want not…