C. S. Lewis once said that Jesus of Nazareth was either a liar, a lunatic or Lord - concluding that since he didn’t believe the first two he had to be the last. You don’t need to think too hard to see the flaw in that, so I’ve change ‘Lord’ into simply ‘genuinely believing what they promoted’ and applied it to two more recent religious founding figures; Joseph Smith who founded Mormonism and L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology fame.
For those who argue that there’s no real difference between believing in what they’re saying and being insane, I can see your point - but if you expand that then every sincere religious believer would be classified as insane.
Yeah, when I say insane I mean genuinely batshit bonkers, out of your mind smearing shit on the walls standards. I can’t accept that a vast proportion of humanity should be institutionalised (that would just explain too much, quite frankly). Where the line between that and common or garden self delusion is drawn is up to you to decide.
Smith was an out and out con man. His followers were and are sincere. (For the most part.) Hubbard made up as outrageous a religion as possible as part of a bet and managed to get really rich off of it. I suppose that is a con man too. I suppose that many of its adherents are sincere, but the formal organization and there “fair game” policies against critics and former members make neo-nazis look like principled good citizens by comparison. Godwin!!!
This is exactly what I believe. If Smith is a little shakier than Hubbard, but it’s too convenient how clearly he took things from the King James Bible claiming the angel told him directly. It’s very clear he combed through it to get alternate interpretations, and did not just take dictation as he claimed. There are probably other proofs that he was conning people, but that’s the one that convinced me. I can buy that he really did think he saw some golden plates and translated them looking through some gems. I can buy that he wanted to have multiple wives so bad that he invented a God who wanted that for him. It’s the smaller things that i have trouble believing he actually believed.
Smith, it’s harder to say for sure. I went with con man in the poll, but I’d buy that there were elements of nuttiness and, eventually, belief that he convinced himself of.
Tough call. I’ll say conscious frauds, although I think by the end of his life Hubbard was so doped up and so cocooned by crazy sycophants that he might’ve believed the gibberish that he was writing. So I’m voting for both the “fraud” and “crazy” options for L. Ron. I know less about Joseph Smith, but I was reminded recently that his story was that an angel showed him golden plates that Smith couldn’t show to anybody else. Come on. It’s kind of amazing anybody fell for that.
It’s not very different. Smith’s version is a little more brazen, maybe, if I understand it right: I think he said he knew where the tablets were but couldn’t take them down from the hill, and later he said he had them in his possession but couldn’t show them to anyone else. Later the angel repossessed them. Considering Smith was once arrested for trying to bilk money out of people in return for looking for phony treasure, it was pretty ballsy of him to try this line out on anybody.
Smith was an out and out fraud-not only did he make up the BOM, bt he also claimed to have translated an old egyptian papyrus (before anyone could read ancient egyptian).
Needless to say, his “translation” was totally wrong.
As for L Ron Hubbard…that guy was insane. Its amazing how he took so many people (since the claims of $cientology are totally false …demonstarbly so).
I think Smith probably believed what he was saying, although i suspect he didn’t at first. He actually did quite a bit od studying up on various religions, and worked at making a working, practical religion.
L. Ron was, i am convinced, full of it. He was a clever guy and, I’m convinced, a con man. He did try to put together a complex, working system, but it seemed to be a system for generating lots of revenue and buttressing itself against the outside world. Reading accounts of ex-Scientologists, I’m convinced that he didn’t try to benefit the members of his Church. The Rehabilitation Project Force is downright evil, as is the psychological suffering he caused.
The weird thing is, I think he starte believing a lot of his hype. At one point he took his fleet around looking for places where he was apparently convinced that he had buried treasure in past lives.
Its kind of hard to believe Smith’s relevation could’ve been anything but a conscious lie. He made pretty clear claims about things that happened to him involving various concrete physical objects over a lengthy period of time. It wasn’t just a vague voice in his head or one time vision of an angel.
Compare Paul, who seems to have just had a one-off vision of Jesus. Its fairly easy to think that might have just been a hallucination. Similarly Mohammad thought he saw an angel after he’d isolated himself in a cave, and then had later visions while he was having seizures. These seem more like internal experiences then outward events, and so at least if you want to be generous, are explainable as hallucinations the Prophet honestly believed rather then outright fabrications.
Scientology seems to have grown out of L. Ron Hubbard’s weird psychological theories. My impression was that he believed these, and then kept adding weirder and weirder stuff onto them until he’d moved from bogus science to religion.
But you don’t have to be crazy to believe what someone tells you. Any religious believer (except for the ones in the correct religion, of course!) could simply be gullible. But to start a religion based on your own personal experience of God, that’s not an option. If either Smith or Hubbard believed what they said, they were either lying or crazy (or right!)
I think Hubbard was both lying and crazy. So crazy that he eventually believed it himself.
Smith was definitely a liar and a fraud. Before he became a prophet, he met a girl who claimed to use a “seeing stone” to find treasure. She taught him how to do it and he used her seeing stone to find his own seeing stone. He then went into business as a treasure hunter/finder of lost objects with his seeing stone, but he never found anything. That seeing stone is what he claimed allowed him to translate the Golden Plates.
Note that the seeing stone didn’t come from the angel. It wasn’t part of the revelation, and it wasn’t anything God told him about. And he used it to translate the plates after the angel took the plates back and his wife lost the transcription. In other words, he wasn’t even looking at the supposed plates when he translated them. Again, God didn’t tell Smith to use his seeing stone to both read and translate the plates. That was apparently just the ordinary way of translating ancient texts for Joseph Smith.
