I watched the South Park episode about Mormonism again tonight. It got me thinking about the Mormon faith, so I started with Joseph Smith and wikied my way out in the usual fashion. Of course, we all know he claimed to have found golden plates with the Book of Mormon written on them in the mountains of New York, and that he translated them with the help of God, then they were taken back by the angel Moroni, so no one ever saw them but Smith and some friends. I went off into a branch of study on one of his many potential successors, a man named James Strang, who claimed to have dug up the brass plates of Laban, mentioned in the Book of Mormon, near Voree, Wisconsin. He said God guided him there and helped him translate the plates into English. Unlike Smith, Strang actually produced the plates for anyone who wanted to see and feel them. Strangely, members of the Latter Day Saints see Smith as a prophet and Strang as a forger and fraud.Do a search for James Strang if you want all the finer details of his life and eventual assassination, because what I want to talk about here is the hilarious irony of reading the comments of a devout Mormon about this breakaway leader. Looking for more information about what happened to the plates after Strang's death, I came across a Latter Day Saints blog, where someone was trying to give an impartial analysis of the plates' writing system. In the comments, a poster went into a protracted rant against Strang, stating that the LDS Church and all its affiliated branches, except the Strangites themselves, consider him a charlatan, who was just trying to imitate their beloved prophet Joseph Smith.
The thing that most amused me was that this person put the word "witnesses" in quotation marks, as though to suggest Strang's assistants in digging up his plates were not qualified to witness anything. I guess the LDS doesn't consider them as credible as the 11 mysticism-loving, treasure-seeking friends that Smith supposedly showed the Golden Plates to after he found them. Something seems very backwards in praising the man who showed a handful of people his plates, while denouncing the one who went out of his way to show off the plates he had found. Don't get me wrong, they're both follower-hungry zealots, but at least Strang had the decency to offer something tangible as proof of lost tribes of Israelites roaming North America. He didn't ask people to test their faith and intelligence by just believing he saw and translated magic plates because he and some friends said so.
Actually, providing physical proof was probably Strang's undoing, and why his church only has a few hundred members today, compared to Smith's millions. People could see that his plates were fashioned from brass that looked like it came from a tea kettle, and that the writing system was similar to one he used in his own diary. Smith smartly created divine rules about the plates to keep him from having to show them to anyone, said he could translate them without having them present, made up new imaginery plates when the first 116 pages he translated got lost, and then presented eyewitness testimony from close friends as the only real proof of their existence. As statements from the LDS poster confirm, real artifacts are of less significance to the faithful than something spiritual in nature. It's apparently better to have a vision of a golden plate, than to hold a brass one in your hands.
This kind of conflict isn't anything really special when it comes to religious sects. It's just another case of one outlandish faith questioning another for its own supernatural beliefs. This one is just more ironic because the LDS calls foolishness and forgery at someone for trying to pull exactly the same scam their founder did, just with a little bit more credibility in the way of evidence. In addition to rebuking the plates veracity, there is also some suggestion that the LDS eventually wound up with the plates, after a church member asked to borrow them from one of Strang's descendants. The church refutes them, but they're not crazy enough to let them exist as an iconic relic to an opposing faction. I imagine they were destroyed by the Mormon Church, right along with all the other contradictory documents and artifacts they've collected over the years. I'd write a couple paragraphs about the Hofmann forgeries to follow that up, but the murder-suicide aspect makes it kind of a downer for this forum. Go look it up if you're interested.
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