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Originally Posted by SeattleUte
You know, of course Mike is right, with respect to post-1967 pronouncements. What did people expect the LDS Church to do after the papyri were proven to have as much to do with Abraham as does your latest issue of the Deseret News? Say, "okay, now we know, he was a fake and a fraud." Some people did that, indcluding the gentlemen who used to go around giving firesides that you could prove the truth of Mormonism as in a court of law, and who financied much of the original scholarship on the papyri. But most active LDS weren't going to just give up on the Church in light of this evidence. Most active LDS wouldn't change their belief if they found an authentic affidavit from the BofM witnesses confessing that this was all along the greatest literary fraud of at least the last 200 years.
For one thing, too much blood, too many lives, too much money, and too many careers, egos, etc., had been invested in the enterprise, without even getting into the subjective stuff such as spiritual affirmations, the Church's role in aiding happiness, etc. The LDS Church had become a culture that to many was intrinsically worth preserving, in other words. Most active LDS therefore either 1) ignored this evidence, simply blocked it out; or 2) came up with an explanation. The explanation didn't have to be plausible from a common sense perspective (e.g., which court of law gives credence to heavenly "revelations" as congizable evidence?) when you consider what active LDS were already willing to accept at face value, and their overpowering motivation to believe the explanation.
There was a third category--those who continued to maintain that Joseph did literally translate the papyri, i.e., a portion of it that hasn't been recovered. Such people are either not too bright or extremely intellectually dishonest. The latter group seems for the most part to have found employment at FARMS.
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