For some reason it never occurred to me before.
It would likely be very much like the Community of Christ, formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints (RLDS). While they still consider the Book of Mormon to be scripture, they don’t make any claim of its historicity. The many changes to becoming mainstream protestant lead a number of people to leave. Even more worrysome for Salt Lake is that the contributions dropped like a rock.
And is the senior most apostle, and serves until he’s dead, which means that there have been long period with incapacitated presidents. There are rumors that the current president has Alzheimer.
There are already a large number of Mormon fundamentalists who are slowly leaving the church, so there is without a doubt that a large number of people would leave.
Not “very little” but rather nothing, zip, whatsoever.
The BoM has a number of references to things such as gold currency, Old World crops and animals, millions of people dying in giant battles, the use of steel, etc., etc., which would have left a footprint.
These people don’t really think it does.
It doesn’t seem to me that it would be from the story because there’s too long of a gap between the translation and when people knew he was using a seer stone and then when the phrase was more commonly used.
So if you are a Mormon, and read all about the lies and coverups by the LDS Church, can you (in good conscience) cling to the established line? I do not know how people could take Smith seriously , knowing what we now know about him. Do charlatans ever become honest?
When it comes to religion, human beings are capable of enormous feats of rationalization. In the case of Joseph Smith the obvious rationalization is that he was touched by God and abandoned the evil ways of his past.
As seen in the Mormon related forums, a number of possibilities can happen.
One is to stop believing, as you would guess. However, that runs into some problems for certain people who must keep up the pretense of believing because their marriage and/or is on the line. That can be painful.
Either for these reasons or because one decides they like the Mormon culture but don’t accept truth claims, they can decide to become a cultural or cafeteria Mormon, called either a borderland Mormon or a New Order Mormon which is more difficult than becoming a cafeteria Catholic because of the pressure to continuously state you believe in the literal history of the Church, the prophetic nature of smith and the historicity of the BoM.
Another is to simply refuse to believe the evidence as anti-Mormon lies or to discount it. This happens quite frequently, even with evidence which is starting to be acknowledged by the Church. “It doesn’t matter if Joseph Smith married a 14-year-old, he probably didn’t have sex with her.” sort of thing. “We don’t understand everything which God does, and it’s not important for our salvation.”
One of the more well-known historians of Smith and polygamy is a Mormon apologist named Brian Hales, an anesthesiologist. Hales refuses to accept the obvious and offers torturous defenses of Smith and the Church. I can only listen to him in small doses because he’s so aggravating. It’s the same as for liberals listening to Rush Limbaugh. You want to swear at the computer. “No, dammit! Just because we don’t have direct evidence of Smith having sex with his child-bride, that doesn’t mean that it’s evidence against it.”
There is also an apologetic Egyptologist Professor Kerry Muhlstein who blatantly contradicts every known fact about ancient Egypt in his defense of the Book of Abraham.
I honestly don’t get Muhlstein. As an Egyptologist, he knows better. Hales sounds like someone who is completely obstinate in his views, but always argues things which could theoretically be possible. Kerry simply spouts out the impossible.
As for your statement that Smith was a charlatan, I have to admit that was my prior belief. However, as I wrote earlier in this thread, some people have made a compelling case that Smith was a pious fraud. I haven’t researched it enough to make my own conclusions, but that is one possibility. Of course, he personally benefited so much that the scale would have to tip heavily over onto the fraud side.
There is a Utahn attorney with the interesting name of Denver Snuffer (yes, that’s his name – it’s not a Colorado serial killer) who claims to have seen Christ. His position is that Smith got most everything right, but the church screwed up afterward. He was excommunicated, but has still managed to attract a following.
The church is caught between followers of people such as Snuffer and those who have rejected the truth claims completely. This has required that they walk a very dangerous tightrope between becoming too conservative and losing more liberal members who reject the truth claims, and becoming too open and losing people to the fundamental movements.
I was pretty surprised when I realized that the church didn’t have a president born in the 20th century until 1994. (And that there’s still at least one current leader of the church with personal memories of people in polygamous marriages. Henry B. Eyring was born in 1933, and his grandfather had three living wives until the 1950s.)