The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.
Our digital communication network has been engineered so that copies flow with as little friction as possible. Indeed, copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a super-distribution system, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire. We see evidence of this in real life. Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave. Even a dog knows you can't erase something once its flowed on the internet.
This super-distribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy, particularly those involved with exports -- that is, those industries where the US has a competitive advantage. Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.
Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?
I have an answer. The simplest way I can put it is thus:
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
Well, what can't be copied?
There are a number of qualities that can't be copied. Consider "trust." Trust cannot be copied. You can't purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you'll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.
There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy. I think the best way to examine them is not from the eye of the producer, manufacturer, or creator, but from the eye of the user. We can start with a simple user question: why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free? When anyone buys a version of something they could get for free, what are they purchasing?
From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.
In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values. I call them "generatives." A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.
Eight Generatives Better Than Free
Immediacy -- Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released -- or even better, produced -- by its creators is a generative asset. Many people go to movie theaters to see films on the opening night, where they will pay a hefty price to see a film that later will be available for free, or almost free, via rental or download. Hardcover books command a premium for their immediacy, disguised as a harder cover. First in line often commands an extra price for the same good. As a sellable quality, immediacy has many levels, including access to beta versions. Fans are brought into the generative process itself. Beta versions are often de-valued because they are incomplete, but they also possess generative qualities that can be sold. Immediacy is a relative term, which is why it is generative. It has to fit with the product and the audience. A blog has a different sense of time than a movie, or a car. But immediacy can be found in any media.
Personalization -- A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound perfect in your particular living room -- as if it were preformed in your room -- you may be willing to pay a lot. The free copy of a book can be custom edited by the publishers to reflect your own previous reading background. A free movie you buy may be cut to reflect the rating you desire (no violence, dirty language okay). Aspirin is free, but aspirin tailored to your DNA is very expensive. As many have noted, personalization requires an ongoing conversation between the creator and consumer, artist and fan, producer and user. It is deeply generative because it is iterative and time consuming. You can't copy the personalization that a relationship represents. Marketers call that "stickiness" because it means both sides of the relationship are stuck (invested) in this generative asset, and will be reluctant to switch and start over.
Interpretation -- As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000. But it's no joke. A couple of high profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache, and others make their living doing exactly that. They provide paid support for free software. The copy of code, being mere bits, is free -- and becomes valuable to you only through the support and guidance. I suspect a lot of genetic information will go this route. Right now getting your copy of your DNA is very expensive, but soon it won't be. In fact, soon pharmaceutical companies will PAY you to get your genes sequence. So the copy of your sequence will be free, but the interpretation of what it means, what you can do about it, and how to use it -- the manual for your genes so to speak -- will be expensive.
Authenticity -- You might be able to grab a key software application for free, but even if you don't need a manual, you might like to be sure it is bug free, reliable, and warranted. You'll pay for authenticity. There are nearly an infinite number of variations of the Grateful Dead jams around; buying an authentic version from the band itself will ensure you get the one you wanted. Or that it was indeed actually performed by the Dead. Artists have dealt with this problem for a long time. Graphic reproductions such as photographs and lithographs often come with the artist's stamp of authenticity -- a signature -- to raise the price of the copy. Digital watermarks and other signature technology will not work as copy-protection schemes (copies are super-conducting liquids, remember?) but they can serve up the generative quality of authenticity for those who care.
Accessibility -- Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up. And in this mobile world, you have to carry it along with you. Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our "possessions" by subscribing to them. We'll pay Acme Digital Warehouse to serve us any musical tune in the world, when and where we want it, as well as any movie, photo (ours or other photographers). Ditto for books and blogs. Acme backs everything up, pays the creators, and delivers us our desires. We can sip it from our phones, PDAs, laptops, big screens from where-ever. The fact that most of this material will be available free, if we want to tend it, back it up, keep adding to it, and organize it, will be less and less appealing as time goes on.
Embodiment -- At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a screen. But perhaps you'd like to see it in hi-res on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. Feels so good. What about dwelling in your favorite (free) game with 35 others in the same room? There is no end to greater embodiment. Sure, the hi-res of today -- which may draw ticket holders to a big theater -- may migrate to your home theater tomorrow, but there will always be new insanely great display technology that consumers won't have. Laser projection, holographic display, the holodeck itself! And nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. This formula is quickly becoming a common one for not only musicians, but even authors. The book is free; the bodily talk is expensive.
Patronage -- It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators. Radiohead's recent high-profile experiment in letting fans pay them whatever they wished for a free copy is an excellent illustration of the power of patronage. The elusive, intangible connection that flows between appreciative fans and the artist is worth something. In Radiohead's case it was about $5 per download. There are many other examples of the audience paying simply because it feels good.
Findability -- Where as the previous generative qualities reside within creative digital works, findability is an asset that occurs at a higher level in the aggregate of many works. A zero price does not help direct attention to a work, and in fact may sometimes hinder it. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention -- and most of it free -- being found is valuable.
The giant aggregators such as Amazon and Netflix make their living in part by helping the audience find works they love. They bring out the good news of the "long tail" phenomenon, which we all know, connects niche audiences with niche productions. But sadly, the long tail is only good news for the giant aggregators, and larger mid-level aggregators such as publishers, studios, and labels. The "long tail" is only lukewarm news to creators themselves. But since findability can really only happen at the systems level, creators need aggregators. This is why publishers, studios, and labels (PSL)will never disappear. They are not needed for distribution of the copies (the internet machine does that). Rather the PSL are needed for the distribution of the users' attention back to the works. From an ocean of possibilities the PSL find, nurture and refine the work of creators that they believe fans will connect with. Other intermediates such as critics and reviewers also channel attention. Fans rely on this multi-level apparatus of findability to discover the works of worth out of the zillions produced. There is money to be made (indirectly for the creatives) by finding talent. For many years the paper publication TV Guide made more money than all of the 3 major TV networks it "guided" combined. The magazine guided and pointed viewers to the good stuff on the tube that week. Stuff, it is worth noting, that was free to the viewers. There is little doubt that besides the mega-aggregators, in the world of the free many PDLs will make money selling findability -- in addition to the other generative qualities.
These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can't be replicated with a click of the mouse.
In short, the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.
Careful readers will note one conspicuous absence so far. I have said nothing about advertising. Ads are widely regarded as the solution, almost the ONLY solution, to the paradox of the free. Most of the suggested solutions I've seen for overcoming the free involve some measure of advertising. I think ads are only one of the paths that attention takes, and in the long-run, they will only be part of the new ways money is made selling the free.
But that's another story.
Beneath the frothy layer of advertising, these eight generatives will supply the value to ubiquitous free copies, and make them worth advertising for. These generatives apply to all digital copies, but also to any kind of copy where the marginal cost of that copy approaches zero. (See my essay on Technology Wants to Be Free.) Even material industries are finding that the costs of duplication near zero, so they too will behave like digital copies. Maps just crossed that threshold. Genetics is about to. Gadgets and small appliances (like cell phones) are sliding that way. Pharmaceuticals are already there, but they don't want anyone to know. It costs nothing to make a pill. We pay for Authenticity and Immediacy in drugs. Someday we'll pay for Personalization.
Maintaining generatives is a lot harder than duplicating copies in a factory. There is still a lot to learn. A lot to figure out. Write to me if you do.
When I was a teenager, I was confronted by a skeptic (a Unitarian, actually) concerning an apparent discrepancy in 1 Kings 7:23. This passage deals with Solomon's Temple and the products of Hiram the Bronzeworker:
And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.
1 Kings 7:23
The huge cast bronze basin in 1 Kings 7:23 was 10 cubits1 in diameter and its circumference was 30 cubits, which is mathematically inaccurate. Almost any schoolboy knows that the circumference of a circle is not the diameter times 3, but rather, the diameter times a well-known constant called "pi".
The real value of pi is 3.14159265358979, but is commonly approximated by 22/7.
This is assumed, by many, to be an "error" in the Old Testament record, and is often presented as a skeptical rebuttal to the "inerrancy" of the Scripture. How can we say that the Bible is inerrant when it contains such an obvious geometrically incorrect statement? How do we deal with this?
24-Hour Hot Line
It is interesting that whenever we find such a thing, we should simply take it to the Throne and claim the commitment Jesus made His disciples:
But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you. - John 14:26
Is this really true? Then why don't we resort to it more often?
In this case, the Lord ultimately brought to our attention some subtleties usually overlooked in the Hebrew text.2
A Spelling Lesson
The common word for circumference is qav. Here, however, the spelling of the word for circumference, qaveh, adds a heh (h).
In the Hebrew Bible, the scribes did not alter any text which they felt had been copied incorrectly. Rather, they noted in the margin what they thought the written text should be. The written variation is called a kethiv; and the marginal annotation is called the qere.
To the ancient scribes, this was also regarded as a remez, a hint of something deeper. This appears to be the clue to treat the word as a mathematical formula.
Numerical Values
The Hebrew alphabet is alphanumeric: each Hebrew letter also has a numerical value and can be used as a number.
The q has a value of 100; the v has a value of 6; thus, the normal spelling would yield a numerical value of 106. The addition of the h, with a value of 5, increases the numerical value to 111. This indicates an adjustment of the ratio 111/106, or 31.41509433962 cubits. Assuming that a cubit was 1.5 ft.,3 this 15-foot-wide bowl would have had a circumference of 47.12388980385 feet.
This Hebrew "code" results in 47.12264150943 feet, or an error of less than 15 thousandths of an inch! (This error is 15 times better than the 22/7 estimate that we were accustomed to using in school!) How did they accomplish this? This accuracy would seem to vastly exceed the precision of their instrumentation. How would they know this? How was it encoded into the text?
Implications
Beyond simply these engineering insights of Solomon's day, there are more far-reaching implications of this passage.
1) The Bible is reliable. The "errors" pointed out by skeptics usually derive from misunderstandings or trivial quibbles.
2) The numerical values of the letters are legitimate and apparently can carry significance.
This, in itself, is a major controversy among some. There are some who maintain that the numerical assignments in the Hebrew alphabet were borrowed from the Greek alphabet in a later period, and the influence of Pythagoras, et al. (580-500 B.C.) However, the Babylonians also employed "gematria" (the numerical values of letters and words) during the time of Sargon II. The wall at Khorsabad was supposed to have been built according to the numerical value of Sargon's name.4 The Hebrew use of an alphanumeric alphabet also predates these assumptions.
Caveats
These numerical values of letters and words can, however, easily lead to mysticism, such as the subjective speculations of the Kabbalah of Judaism - or the mystical conjectures deriving from the Pythagorean Brotherhood - and this is spiritually hazardous and contrary to Scripture.5
When Pythagoras returned from travel and study in Babylon, India and Egypt, he founded a secret cult in southern Italy based on the numerical explanations for the phenomena of the universe. The Pythagoreans considered numbers to be the elements and origin of everything. While he is credited with the theory of the functional significance of numbers in the objective world and music, the bulk of his intellectual tradition belongs to mystical wisdom rather than scientific scholarship. (The famed Pythagorean theorem regarding the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle probably developed later in the Pythagorean school he founded.)
Pythagorean doctrine applied number relationships to music theory, acoustics, geometry, and astronomy, and deeply influenced the development of classical Greek philosophy and medieval European thought, including the astrological belief that the number harmony of the universe decidedly affects all human endeavor. This numerical mysticism also was embraced with the rise of Gnostic heresies, which plagued the early church and which also flowered in the medieval church. Numerical mysticism is also deeply involved in Freemasonry and other occultic practices.
The Bible warns against the occult. Spiritual warfare is a reality,6and there is great power in the occult.7 We have serious enemies, that are extremely resourceful and malevolent. The Bible warns of a personal devil and myriads of demons, who should be regarded as cunning enemies,8 and who are active in the affairs of Planet Earth.9 In fact, the whole world lies in the power of the Evil One. 10
The devil's tactics include masquerading as an "angel of light" and a servant of righteousness.11 False teachers and false prophets are linked to evil spirits, and there are "doctrines of demons."12 Demons work through people by giving them psychic abilities.13 Supernatural manifestations are to be tested by the Word of God.14
Another craze has been recently stimulated by the publication of "Bible Codes" involving equidistant letter sequences. The dangers in these provocative "codes" will be the subject of subsequent articles in this series.
* * *
Excerpted from Cosmic Codes: Hidden Messages From the Edge of Eternity, scheduled for release this summer. (This may also be the subject of a prime-time TV special.)
Hebrew ammah ("mother of the arm"), the forearm, was the nominal distance from one's elbow to the fingertip; the term "cubit" is from the Latin cubitus, the lower arm.
The answer to this difficulty was discovered by Shlomo Edward G. Belaga and appeared in Boaz Tsaban's Rabbinical Math page and is also reported in Grant Jeffrey's The Handwriting of God, Frontier Research Publications, Toronto Ontario, 1997. Available through K-House; See below.
There were several "official" cubits in the ancient world, varying from about 18 inches to almost two feet. Some authorities assume 20.24 inches for the ordinary cubit, and 21.888 inches for the sacred one. We have used 18 in. in this discussion.
Vincent F. Hopper, An Encyclopedia of Religion, Philosophical Library, New York 1945, p.62.
Colossians 2:8; et al.
Ephesians 6:10-18; 2 Corinthians 2:11; 1 Peter 5:8.
Read the implications of our finite universe and the shocking discoveries of quantum physics at the very boundaries of reality and learn their significance to our origin and personal destinies!
COULD something like it happen again? That is invariably the first question that comes to mind when recalling that Hitler was given power in Germany 75 years ago last week. With the world now facing such great tensions and instability, the question seems more obvious than ever.
Hitler came to power in a democracy with a highly liberal Constitution, and in part by using democratic freedoms to undermine and then destroy democracy itself. That democracy, established in 1919, was a product of defeat in world war and revolution and was never accepted by most of the German elites, notably the military, large landholders and big industry.
Troubled by irreconcilable political, social and cultural divisions from the beginning, the new democracy survived serious threats to its existence in the early postwar years and found a semblance of stability from 1924 to 1928, only to be submerged by the collapse of the economy after the Wall Street crash of 1929.
The Nazis’ spectacular surge in popular support (2.6 percent of the vote in the 1928 legislative elections, 18.3 percent in 1930, 37.4 percent in July 1932) reflected the anger, frustration and resentment — but also hope — that Hitler was able to tap among millions of Germans. Democracy had failed them, they felt. Their country was divided, impoverished and humiliated. Scapegoats were needed.
It was easy to turn hatred against Jews, who could be made to represent the imagined external threat to Germany by both international capitalism and Bolshevism. Internally, Jews were associated with the political left — Socialist and Communist — which was made responsible by Hitler and his followers for Germany’s plight.
Increasingly, Hitler seemed to a good third of the German electorate the only hope to putting the country back on its feet, restoring pride and bringing about national salvation. By 1930 it was effectively impossible to rule Germany without Nazi backing. But while Nazi electoral gains could block democracy, they were insufficient to bring Hitler to power.
From 1930 onwards, therefore, the German state was locked in stalemate. Democratic forms remained. But democracy itself was in effect dead, or at least dying. The anti-democratic elites tried to broker solutions, but failed on account of Hitler’s intransigence. Ultimately, because he could find no other authoritarian solution, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as head of government, or chancellor, on Jan. 30, 1933. What followed led to disaster for Germany, for Europe and for the world.
These distant events still have echoes today. In Europe, in the wake of increased immigration, most countries have experienced some revival of neo-fascist, racist movements. Not so long ago, Serbian nationalism, inflamed by President Slobodan Milosevic, set off war and ethnic cleansing within the continent.
Today, too, skillful politicians around the globe have proved adept at manipulating populist sentiment and using democratic structures to erect forms of personalized, authoritarian rule. President Vladimir Putin has gradually moved Russia, a country increasingly flexing its muscles internationally again, in that direction. Venezuela, under President Hugo Chávez, has also showed distinct authoritarian tendencies, though these have been at least partly blocked through his defeat in the December referendum to change its Constitution.
In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe has turned democracy into personal rule, ruining his country in the process. In Pakistan, democracy largely provides a facade for military rule, even if President Pervez Musharraf has now put aside his uniform. Most worryingly, perhaps, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has used populist support in a pluralist system to push Iran into a hazardous foreign policy, though he does remain formally subordinate to the “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
None of these examples, however, poses a close parallel to what happened in Germany in 1933. Neo-fascist movements in Europe can certainly terrorize minorities. And they have had success in stirring such resentment about immigrants that mainstream political parties have taken account of the swell of feeling.
However, short of some unforeseeable eventualities like major war or, perhaps less unlikely, another meltdown of the economic system, neo-fascist movements will remain on the fringes of politics. And none of these parties, unappealing though their internal policies are, can today conceive of preparing for a war of conquest with the ultimate aim of a grasp at world power.
Elsewhere, there are — and always will be — nasty forms of authoritarianism (some supported by democratic governments). But neither in their acquisition of power nor in their use of it do modern authoritarian rulers much resemble Hitler. International organizations and institutions that did not exist in interwar Europe — the United Nations, the European Union, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund — also provide some barriers to the sort of calamity that engulfed Germany.
Moreover, democracies under pressure can still pose obstacles to creeping authoritarianism. Vladimir Putin looks as if he will indeed step down as president and not risk a breach of the Constitution (though effective power will probably remain in his own hands), while Hugo Chávez has been forced (maybe temporarily) to give up his ambitions to become a president for life. Even once Hitler had been appointed chancellor, it took the Reichstag fire, a month later, to begin the destruction of the last vestiges of democracy and pave the way to his full control.
Mercifully, what happened in Germany in 1933, and its aftermath, will remain a uniquely terrible episode in history. What took place then reminds us even so of the illusory assumption that democracy will always be a favored choice of a population torn apart by war, facing enormous privations and burning with resentment at national humiliation through perceived foreign interference. It also reminds us — if such a reminder is necessary — of the need for international cooperation to restrain potential “mad dogs” in world politics before they are dangerous enough to bite.
Ian Kershaw, a professor of modern history at Sheffield University, is the author of the forthcoming “Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution.”
AUSTIN, Minn. — If you have to come down with a strange disease, this town of 23,000 on the wide-open prairie in southeastern Minnesota is a pretty good place to be. The Mayo Clinic, famous for diagnosing exotic ailments, owns the local medical center and shares some staff with it. Mayo itself is just 40 miles east in Rochester. And when it comes to investigating mysterious outbreaks, Minnesota has one of the strongest health departments and best-equipped laboratories in the country.
And the disease that confronted doctors at the Austin Medical Center here last fall was strange indeed. Three patients had the same highly unusual set of symptoms: fatigue, pain, weakness, numbness and tingling in the legs and feet.
The patients had something else in common, too: all worked at Quality Pork Processors, a local meatpacking plant.
The disorder seemed to involve nerve damage, but doctors had no idea what was causing it.
At the plant, nurses in the medical department had also begun to notice the same ominous pattern. The three workers had complained to them of “heavy legs,” and the nurses had urged them to see doctors. The nurses knew of a fourth case, too, and they feared that more workers would get sick, that a serious disease might be spreading through the plant.
“We put our heads together and said, ‘Something is out of sorts,’ ” said Carole Bower, the department head.
Austin’s biggest employer is Hormel Foods, maker of Spam, bacon and other processed meats (Austin even has a Spam museum). Quality Pork Processors, which backs onto the Hormel property, kills and butchers 19,000 hogs a day and sends most of them to Hormel. The complex, emitting clouds of steam and a distinctive scent, is easy to find from just about anywhere in town.
Quality Pork is the second biggest employer, with 1,300 employees. Most work eight-hour shifts along a conveyor belt — a disassembly line, basically — carving up a specific part of each carcass. Pay for these line jobs starts at about $11 to $12 an hour. The work is grueling, but the plant is exceptionally clean and the benefits are good, said Richard Morgan, president of the union local. Many of the workers are Hispanic immigrants. Quality Pork’s owner does not allow reporters to enter the plant.
A man whom doctors call the “index case” — the first patient they knew about — got sick in December 2006 and was hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic for about two weeks. His job at Quality Pork was to extract the brains from swine heads.
“He was quite ill and severely affected neurologically, with significant weakness in his legs and loss of function in the lower part of his body,” said Dr. Daniel H. Lachance, a neurologist at Mayo.
Tests showed that the man’s spinal cord was markedly inflamed. The cause seemed to be an autoimmune reaction: his immune system was mistakenly attacking his own nerves as if they were a foreign body or a germ. Doctors could not figure out why it had happened, but the standard treatment for inflammation — a steroid drug — seemed to help. (The patient was not available for interviews.)
Neurological illnesses sometimes defy understanding, Dr. Lachance said, and this seemed to be one of them. At the time, it did not occur to anyone that the problem might be related to the patient’s occupation.
By spring, he went back to his job. But within weeks, he became ill again. Once more, he recovered after a few months and returned to work — only to get sick all over again.
By then, November 2007, other cases had begun to turn up. Ultimately, there were 12 — 6 men and 6 women, ranging in age from 21 to 51. Doctors and the plant owner, realizing they had an outbreak on their hands, had already called in the Minnesota Department of Health, which, in turn, sought help from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Though the outbreak seemed small, the investigation took on urgency because the disease was serious, and health officials worried that it might indicate a new risk to other workers in meatpacking.
“It is important to characterize this because it appears to be a new syndrome, and we don’t truly know how many people may be affected throughout the U.S. or even the world,” said Dr. Jennifer McQuiston, a veterinarian from the disease centers.
In early November, Dr. Aaron DeVries, a health department epidemiologist, visited the plant and combed through medical records. The disease bore no resemblance to mad cow disease or to trichinosis, the notorious parasite infection that comes from eating raw or undercooked pork. Nor did it spread person to person — the workers’ relatives were unaffected — or pose any threat to people who ate pork.
A survey of the workers confirmed what the plant’s nurses had suspected: those who got sick were employed at or near the “head table,” where workers cut the meat off severed hog heads.
On Nov. 28, Dr. DeVries’s boss, Dr. Ruth Lynfield, the state epidemiologist, toured the plant. She and the owner, Kelly Wadding, paid special attention to the head table. Dr. Lynfield became transfixed by one procedure in particular, called “blowing brains.”
As each head reached the end of the table, a worker would insert a metal hose into the foramen magnum, the opening that the spinal cord passes through. High-pressure blasts of compressed air then turned the brain into a slurry that squirted out through the same hole in the skull, often spraying brain tissue around and splattering the hose operator in the process.
The brains were pooled, poured into 10-pound containers and shipped to be sold as food — mostly in China and Korea, where cooks stir-fry them, but also in some parts of the American South, where people like them scrambled up with eggs.
The person blowing brains was separated from the other workers by a plexiglass shield that had enough space under it to allow the heads to ride through on a conveyor belt. There was also enough space for brain tissue to splatter nearby employees.
“You could see aerosolization of brain tissue,” Dr. Lynfield said.
The workers wore hard hats, gloves, lab coats and safety glasses, but many had bare arms, and none had masks or face shields to prevent swallowing or inhaling the mist of brain tissue.
Dr. Lynfield asked Mr. Wadding, “Kelly, what do you think is going on?”
The plant owner watched for a while and said, “Let’s stop harvesting brains.”
Quality Pork halted the procedure that day and ordered face shields for workers at the head table.
Epidemiologists contacted 25 swine slaughterhouses in the United States, and found that only two others used compressed air to extract brains. One, a plant in Nebraska owned by Hormel, has reported no cases. But the other, Indiana Packers in Delphi, Ind., has several possible cases that are being investigated. Both of the other plants, like Quality Pork, have stopped using compressed air.
But why should exposure to hog brains cause illness? And why now, when the compressed air system had been in use in Minnesota since 1998?
At first, health officials thought perhaps the pigs had some new infection that was being transmitted to people by the brain tissue. Sometimes, infections can ignite an immune response in humans that flares out of control, like the condition in the workers. But so far, scores of tests for viruses, bacteria and parasites have found no signs of infection.
As a result, Dr. Lynfield said the investigators had begun leaning toward a seemingly bizarre theory: that exposure to the hog brain itself might have touched off an intense reaction by the immune system, something akin to a giant, out-of-control allergic reaction. Some people might be more susceptible than others, perhaps because of their genetic makeup or their past exposures to animal tissue. The aerosolized brain matter might have been inhaled or swallowed, or might have entered through the eyes, the mucous membranes of the nose or mouth, or breaks in the skin.
“It’s something no one would have anticipated or thought about,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist who is working as a consultant for Hormel and Quality Pork. Dr. Osterholm, a professor of public health at the University of Minnesota and the former state epidemiologist, said that no standard for this kind of workplace exposure had ever been set by the government.
But that would still not explain why the condition should suddenly develop now. Investigators are trying to find out whether something changed recently — the air pressure level, for instance — and also whether there actually were cases in the past that just went undetected.
“Clearly, all the answers aren’t in yet,” Dr. Osterholm said. “But it makes biologic sense that what you have here is an inhalation of brain material from these pigs that is eliciting an immunologic reaction.” What may be happening, he said, is “immune mimicry,” meaning that the immune system makes antibodies to fight a foreign substance — something in the hog brains — but the antibodies also attack the person’s nerve tissue because it is so similar to some molecule in hog brains.
“That’s the beauty and the beast of the immune system,” Dr. Osterholm said. “It’s so efficient at keeping foreign objects away, but anytime there’s a close match it turns against us, too.”
Anatomically, pigs are a lot like people. But it is not clear how close a biochemical match there is between pig brain and human nerve tissue.
To find out, the Minnesota health department has asked for help from Dr. Ian Lipkin, an expert at Columbia University on the role of the immune system in neurological diseases. Dr. Lipkin has begun testing blood serum from the Minnesota patients to look for signs of an immune reaction to components of pig brain. And he expects also to study the pig gene for myelin, to see how similar it is to the human one.
“It’s an interesting problem,” Dr. Lipkin said. “I think we can solve it.”
Susan Kruse, who lives in Austin, was stunned by news reports about the outbreak in early December. Ms. Kruse, 37, worked at Quality Pork for 15 years. But for the past year, she has been too sick to work. She had no idea that anyone else from the plant was ill. Nor did she know that her illness might be related to her job.
Her most recent job was “backing heads,” scraping meat from between the vertebrae. Three people per shift did that task, and together would process 9,500 heads in eight or nine hours. Ms. Kruse (pronounced KROO-zee) stood next to the person who used compressed air to blow out the brains. She was often splattered, especially when trainees were learning to operate the air hose.
“I always had brains on my arms,” she said.
She never had trouble with her health until November 2006, when she began having pains in her legs. By February 2007, she could not stand up long enough to do her job. She needed a walker to get around and was being treated at the Mayo Clinic.
“I had no strength to do anything I used to do,” she said. “I just felt like I was being drained out.”
Her immune system had gone haywire and attacked her nerves, primarily in two places: at the points where the nerves emerge from the spinal cord, and in the extremities. The same thing, to varying degrees, was happening to the other patients. Ms. Kruse and the index case — the man who extracted brains — probably had the most severe symptoms, Dr. Lachance said.
Steroids did nothing for Ms. Kruse, so doctors began to treat her every two weeks with IVIG, intravenous immunoglobulin, a blood product that contains antibodies. “It’s kind of like hitting the condition over the head with a sledgehammer,” Dr. Lachance said. “It overwhelms the immune system and neutralizes whatever it is that’s causing the injury.”
The treatments seem to help, Ms. Kruse said. She feels stronger after each one, but the effects wear off. Her doctors expect she will need the therapy at least until September.
Most of the other workers are recovering and some have returned to their jobs, but others, including the index case, are still unable to work. So far, there have been no new cases.
“I cannot say that anyone is completely back to normal,” Dr. Lachance said. “I expect it will take several more months to get a true sense of the course of this illness.”
Dr. Lynfield hopes to find the cause. But she said: “I don’t know that we will have the definitive answer. I suspect we will be able to rule some things out, and will have a sense of whether it seems like it may be due to an autoimmune response. I think we’ll learn a lot, but it may take us a while. It’s a great detective story.”
Mitt Romney's presidential candidacy has put the Mormon issue back on the public agenda. The former Massachusetts governor reminded voters on December 6 that America's constitution prohibits a religious test, and asked to be judged independently of his Mormon faith. But as Groucho told Chico in A Night At the Opera, there nonetheless is a Sanity Clause. Voters may reject a candidate whose religious views are crazy, for example, someone who thinks he talks to God. Does Romney believe that he himself will become God, as Mormon doctrine teaches?
Americans express disquiet about Romney's religion; 27% of respondents to the 2007 Pew Center poll held an unfavorable view of Mormons, about the same as of American Muslims (29%), against only 9% for Jews and 14% for Catholics. These numbers suggest that Americans are not as dumb as they look.
Just what is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, commonly called the Mormons? Joseph Smith Jr, the forger, treasure-hunter, magician, polygamist and self-styled priest-king of the American continent, invented an American version of Europe's ethnically-founded idolatry. Each European tribe that rebelled against Christianity styled itself the Chosen People. Smith concocted a tale in which Americans actually were the Chosen People, and America was the Promised Land of the ancient Hebrews and Jesus Christ. In short, Smith took to the extremes of fantasy and forgery an impulse towards national self-worship that always lurks somewhere in American Christianity.
Smith was the Sorcerer's Apprentice of American religion. The New England Puritans had set out to become a New Chosen People in a New Promised Land, and instead had become complacent and prosperous Unitarians. In the then frontier provinces of northern New York, where poor farmers came to try their luck after leaving the thin soil of New England, the notion of American Chosenness continued to resonate. In Smith's purloined account, America actually was the New Israel, the home of emigrating Hebrew tribes, and the site of Jesus' return to Earth.
American popular culture makes a running joke of Smith's 1827 claim to have discovered golden tablets containing the history of an Israelite migration to North America including a cameo appearance by Jesus Christ. Thanks to the animated satire "South Park", Americans know that Smith "translated" golden tablets that no-one else could see by looking at "seer stones" inside his hat. That is the power of mass media; one half-hour cartoon can undo the work of a million missionaries.
Belief in the Book of Mormon is one of the strangest collective delusions in history. The circumstances of its forgery are transparent and exhaustively documented. After supposedly finding golden tablets composed by the aptly-named Angel Moroni, Smith "translated" 16 pages of them using his treasure-hunting stones. A friend showed the manuscript to his suspicious wife, who hid or destroyed it. Smith could not exactly reproduce the "translation" which he had dictated free-style, and stood in danger of exposure were he to produce a different version. Instead he received a new revelation to translate not those golden tablets, but yet another set of tablets that no one else could see.
Historians have demonstrated that a sizable chunk of the supposed Book of Mormon was copied from a novel by a certain Reverend Solomon Spalding, who concocted the notion of an ancient Hebrew migration to North America as an entertainment. Most of the remainder was lifted from a 1769 edition of the King James Bible, with printer's errors intact. A history of the patriarch Abraham that Smith later "translated" from ancient Egyptian papyri was shown to be an ordinary Egyptian funerary document. A useful summary of the facts has been published online by Father Brian Harrison of the Pontifical University of Puerto Rico. [1] An exhaustive report is found in the book Mormon America, by Richard and Joan Ostling (Harper 2007).
From the hard-luck farmers of upstate New York and assorted frontier ragtag, Smith formed a synthetic nation that worshipped itself with the same fervor that the half-Christianized European barbarians devoted to their own ethnicity. It was a remarkable achievement, and it is hard to quarrel with American professor Harold Bloom's praise of Smith as "an extraordinary religious genius".
What distinguished the Latter Day Saints from the quasi-pagans of European Christendom, though, is a characteristically American frankness that had no inhibitions about idolatry. Everyone could become God, Smith preached in 1844:
I am going to tell you how God came to be God. God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted Man ... If you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form - like yourselves, in all the person, image and very form as a man ... We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and will take away and do away with the vail, so that you may see ... The mind or the intelligence which man possesses is coequal with God himself.
Convinced of his own divinity, Smith took his do-it-yourself Chosen People on a parodic Exodus, to a new settlement in Illinois. There he organized military forces and in 1844 was proclaimed by the church council "King, Priest and Ruler over Israel on earth", explaining, "I am above the kingdoms of this world, for I have no laws." It was also revealed to him that he was entitled to multiple wives. Smith's imperial ambitions provoked a confrontation with local authorities and his eventual murder. His disciple, Brigham Young, continued the mock-Exodus to Utah, which remains the Mormon center.
According to a recent survey, 99% of the students at the church's Brigham Young University believe that Smith was a prophet, despite overwhelming and authoritative evidence that he was a con man. To understand the Mormons we must look below the surface of belief. Why we believe something cannot be separated from what we believe.
How do we distinguish revealed religion from an idolatrous cult? The first question to ask is, what is revealed? Judaism and Christianity are founded on an event - the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt, and the spiritual Exodus, namely Christ's Resurrection. Jews are persuaded of the love of the Creator God because they left slavery in Egypt for redemption in Canaan under circumstances that they understood to be miraculous. We cannot prove they were miraculous, but we know that they were improbable. Nowhere else in all the myths of all the peoples does a despised slave-people emerge to freedom, and nowhere else is the national salvation of a specific people understood as the intervention of the God of all humankind, for the eventual redemption of all of humankind. Christianity makes the Exodus spiritual and offers it to all who believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The existential truth of Jewish belief stems from the singular event that created the Jewish nation, according to its historic memory. Christians believe that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ makes the Exodus universal; Jesus Christ becomes the Passover lamb whose sacrifice redeems all humankind from death; its existential truth lies in victory over death.
Mormonism offers quite a different sort of revelation: a book purportedly translated through Smith's top hat. In that respect, Mormonism resembles Islam more than Christianity. As Franz Rosenzweig said of Islam and the Koran, "The book sent down from Heaven - can there be a more complete renunciation of the concept that God Himself descends, and gives Himself to humankind, to reveal Himself? He sits enthroned in His highest heaven and sends humankind - a book."
What attracts people to the cult of the book? The answer is that we covet the Kingdom of God. Christianity requires each Gentile to abandon the nation of his birth, and as an individual to join a new nation, the People of God, the Israel of the Spirit. But the barbarians who invaded the territory of the Roman Empire during the 1,000 years from AD 200 to 1200 came to the cross not as individuals but as tribes. From the half-Christianization of the barbarians came the desire of each nationality to be chosen in place of the universal church, the spiritual Israel, and to be immortal not in the Kingdom of Heaven but in its own skin. (See Why Europe chooses extinction Asia Times Online, April 8, 2003.)
As Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn said in a 2005 lecture at Hebrew University,
Identification of one's own people as the chosen, and hence one's own country as the Promised Land, is one of the sources of European nationalism ... it was only in the 19th century that nationalism assumed that threatening perverted form of an ideology of power which idolized one's own people, one's own nation, and which led to the great catastrophes of the 20th century.
In contrast to the ethnic idolaters of Europe, the Puritan founders of New England set out to be a new Chosen People in a new Promised Land, famously expressed in John Winthrop's "city on a hill" sermon of 1631. Like Cardinal Richelieu's Francophile Catholic Church, or Henry XIII's Church of England, the Puritans desired to be a Chosen People of the flesh, not only of the spirit. But unlike the Europeans, they sought to build the city on a hill from a green field, with none of the ethnic attachments that dragged down the Old World.
American Christianity often fails to understand its inner tension between the earthly and heavenly kingdoms. Abraham Lincoln's famous epigram said it best: Americans are an "almost chosen people". Mormonism helps clarify the issue, for it is a freakish variant of the "Judaizing heresy" that underlay the founding of America: the conceit that America was a new chosen people in a new promised land. This worldliness ultimately led the Puritans to Unitarianism, a sort of pseudo-Judaizing that ends up in agnosticism - for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists.
The trouble is that people don't want to be an "almost chosen people", pilgrims on this Earth hoping for the Kingdom of Heaven. They want the kingdom in a suburban subdivision with a shopping mall, and they want to be chosen, by which they mean they want these comforts as an eternal grant. They want to build Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land, or in a pinch, in Utah's barren and forbidding one.
That is why Americans fall away from Christianity, to indifference, or occasionally to cults such as the Latter Day Saints. Americans keep returning to the Christian message, roughly once every couple of generations, in awakenings that later become ossified. Today's bland mainline Protestants, whose members are leaving in droves for the newer evangelical denominations, arose in large part out of the great awakenings of the 19th century.
There is nothing at all "American" about "American religion", contrary to the assertions of Bloom and Yale Professor David Gelernter. What distinguishes America is the absence of ethnicity: America is a state without a nation. But human mortality is everywhere the same, and humankind responds to it within a delimited range of choices.
American must endure the same tension between Christian salvation in the Kingdom of Heaven and the emulation of Jewish salvation in this world. The trouble is that Christians cannot imitate Jews, not at least, for very long. The "Judaizing heresy" of the Puritans was inherently unstable. The Puritans lapsed into Unitarianism by the time of the American Revolution. It was left to the Calvinists like Jonathan Edwards to lead the great awakening of the 1730s century, and Methodists and Baptists to lead the great awakening of the 1820s. Smith offered an alternative to re-awakened Christianity in the form of a frontier parody of Judaism, complete with priests, temples, an Exodus and a raft of silly rituals taken from Freemasonry.
The Puritans saw themselves as a new Chosen People in metaphor only. It was a metaphor they failed to sustain. No more than its European forebears was American Christianity able to overcome the desire of half-converted Christians to be a Chosen People in this world. The difference between America and Europe is that in the absence of ethnic idolatry, American Christianity has been able to regenerate itself every second generation, in the form of a new great awakening, while the Europeans lapsed into an ethnic morass from which they have not emerged.
If the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a tyranny tempered by incompetence, as the old joke goes, the Mormon Church is a megalomania atrophied by age. Although the Latter Day Saints claim 13 million members, less than one-third are active. Unlike American Christian denominations, the Mormons have had small success in Africa and Asia, the centers of Christian evangelization. As punishment for their sins, the Mormons must live in their promised land in the Rockies. One can see their present-day concerns in the selection at Utah video stores, for example, local-market movies about the forbidden love between a Mormon boy and a Methodist girl.
Mitt Romney should be judged on his own merits, not on the dubious history of his church. Perhaps he believes not a syllable of Smith's ravings, but remains a Latter Day Saint out of deference to his family. Contrary to his December 6 appeal, however, the voters have every right to ask.
Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part article.
The origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ "Bible"—the Book of Mormon—are open to devastating criticism. One would think, for instance, that if part of the miraculous translation from the golden plates was lost in the initial stage, it should not have been too difficult for a genuine "seer" to translate the missing portion again as long as he still had the plates and the miraculous translation stones (the "Urim and Thummin") in his possession. The following incident alone should be sufficient to persuade all but the most credulous that there was something fishy about the whole business.
As Mormon historian Ivan J. Barrett recounts it, the first 116 pages of English transcript, taken down by the scribe Martin Harris at Smith’s dictation, were lost irretrievably after Harris took them home to show to his skeptical wife. Mrs. Harris apparently lost, destroyed, or concealed the manuscript. She refused to disclose what had happened to it, and Harris returned empty-handed to the furious prophet. Smith’s behavior in the face of this setback is exactly what we should expect from a none-too-subtle hoaxer who has claimed loudly to possess an infallible, supernatural translating technique and now sees that he risks exposure by being unable to reproduce the original translation.
Does he start all over again, humbly trusting in the power of God to vindicate the truth of his claims? Not at all. He receives yet another "revelation" from God commanding him not to retranslate the first part, because "Satan" has inspired "thieves" to alter the stolen manuscript. If he produces another true and identical version of the first l 16 pages, they will publish their "altered" version as the original in order to discredit him.
Fortunately, it turns out that the missing portion can be dispensed with anyway: The Lord "reveals" that it is only an "abridgement" by the ancient historian Mormon of a fuller narrative written by the still-earlier patriarch Nephi. Nephi’s plates are also conveniently there in Joseph’s collection, so he translates them instead (Barrett, Joseph Smith and the Restoration: A History of the Church to 1846, pp.84–87).
If Smith had been sincere in claiming the ability to produce another identical translation of "Mormon’s abridgement," he would not have been frightened to do so. To succeed in discrediting a genuine revelation, his enemies would obviously have needed to produce the original 116 pages for public inspection, and to alter it with such consummate skills that impartial scrutinizers would be unable to detect the slightest signs of erasure, thinning of paper, or difference in handwriting.
Perhaps the most irrefutable evidence for the fraudulent character of the Book of Mormon came to light in the mid-1970s through the research of three young Americans, Wayne Cowdrey, Howard Davis, and Donald Scales.
From a very early date, the relatives and acquaintances of a retired Congregationalist minister, Rev. Solomon Spalding, who died in 1816, had complained against the Latter-Day Saints that the Book of Mormon was really a plagiarized version of an unpublished novel, Manuscript Found, which the deceased clergyman had written and circulated among his friends. A number of affidavits were sworn to this effect, but their publication and propagation was sporadic and poorly organized. The LDS church launched a massive counterattack that capitalized on the fact that the original draft of Manuscript Found could not be produced to verify the affidavits.
Naturally, the Mormons claimed that these were malicious, satanically inspired falsehoods. All that remained was an earlier Spalding novel, Manuscript Story, which shows some definite stylistic similarities to the Book of Mormon but also some marked differences. Eventually, most anti-Mormon writers stopped appealing to the Spalding theory as an explanation for the Book of Mormon because the available evidence seemed incapable of being substantiated.
But Cowdrey, Davis, and Scales pieced together a long chain of events connecting Smith and Spalding. The chief link in the chain was an itinerant evangelist named Sidney Rigdon, who had a close friend who worked at the print shop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from which Spalding’s second manuscript disappeared. A Dr. Winter later claimed to have been shown the manuscript by Rigdon in 1822.
Rigdon was eventually baptized into the Mormon Church in November 1830 and always claimed that he had known nothing of Smith or Mormonism until late that year. Cowdrey et al found at least ten people who testified that they had seen Smith and Rigdon together a number of times from 1827 onwards—the very period when Smith was preparing the Book of Mormon.
The climax came in 1976 when Cowdrey and his friends were examining some old manuscripts in an LDS church library. They came across a few pages from the Book of Mormon in handwriting no one had been able to identify. But before this the researchers had managed to track down some undisputed samples of Spalding’s handwriting at Oberlin College in Ohio, including a deed from January 1811 bearing his signature.
There, amid the quiet and rather dull surroundings of paper and bookshelves, the awesome truth dawned on them: These harmless-looking scraps of aging paper had the potential to shatter once and for all the myth of Joseph Smith the saint and prophet—a great, historic, American myth for which men and women had lived and died and suffered and killed; a myth that had pioneered part of the Wild West, built the state of Utah, and now ruled the hearts and lives and fortunes of millions round the world.
This extract from the Book of Mormon ("translated" from "golden plates" in 1828) was in the handwriting of Solomon Spalding (died 1816)! What the young men had stumbled on was part of the long-lost manuscript of Spalding’s second novel—crushing evidence of Smith’s plagiarism and deceit that had been preserved by the unsuspecting Mormons themselves.
The three men proceeded to write a book detailing the results of their research (Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon? Vision House Publishers, 1977). The LDS Church issued denials of the identification and prohibited any further examination of the relevant manuscript. But the detailed testimonies of two independent handwriting experts, William Kaye and Henry Silver, are photographically reproduced for all to see: the unquestioned Spalding documents and the supposed Book of Mormon extract are judged professionally to be definitely in the same hand (Walter Martin, The Maze of Mormonism, pp.62–64).
The "Book of Abraham"
As if this were not sufficient indication of the true character of Joseph Smith, in subsequent years further evidence has come to light in connection with the so-called Book of Abraham. This is another "translation" produced by Smith and included in the volume Pearl of Great Price as inspired Mormon scripture.
In 1835, Smith acquired some ancient Egyptian papyri, and, with the help of Oliver Cowdery and (supposedly) the miraculous "Urim and Thummim," he "translated" the documents, making the astounding announcement that they were none other than the story of the patriarch Abraham, written the best part of 4,000 years ago.
The papyri were lost for well over a century but came to light again in 1967 at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Identified beyond dispute as those actually used by Smith, they were accepted enthusiastically by the LDS church in Utah as a golden opportunity to vindicate the divine inspiration of their prophet. The Church’s only well-qualified Egyptologist, Dee Jay Nelson, was asked to translate the papyri into English. He did so, and, within the next few years, several of the world’s leading Egyptologists verified that his translation was an accurate one.
He and the other experts verified conclusively that the so-called Book of Abraham is an ordinary pagan Egyptian funeral text, dating from between B.C. 200 and A.D. 100, at least 1,500 years after the time of Abraham. Its contents have nothing to do with the biblical patriarch and bear no relation to Smith’s English "translation," published as the "Word of God" in the Pearl of Great Price.
Nelson and his family resigned from the Mormon Church in 1975, a decision that must have been painful indeed for former devout followers of Joseph Smith. Since then, LDS Church leaders have kept as quiet as possible about the whole issue, no doubt hoping that some miracle will occur eventually to vindicate in some unimaginable way the veracity of their founder. (Detailed documentation on this affair, including reproductions of relevant correspondence, can be found in Barrett, pp.150–170).
The Witnesses to the Golden Plates
The evidence against Joseph Smith’s own credibility is so overwhelming that corroboration of his testimony even by persons of otherwise unquestioned reliability could scarcely restore any real confidence in his "revelations." Smith’s associates scarcely seem to fall into that category, even by Mormon standards. The principal witnesses, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris, always stuck to their story of having seen the plates in the presence of an angel, but all three subsequently left the LDS church.
For a man who allegedly believed in Smith as a prophet of God, Cowdery showed a strange lack of faith in his leader. Mormon historian Barrett relates how Cowdery was excommunicated in 1838 for (among other things) attempting to "destroy the character of President Joseph Smith," for selling his own land in defiance of one of Smith’s down-to-earth "revelations," and for disgracing the church by his dishonest business practices (Barrett, p.370).
The church council also accused David Whitmer of defaming Smith, of neglecting his duties as a Church official, and of disobeying the "Word of Wisdom" (another of Smith’s "revelations" forbidding the use of tobacco, alcohol, and "hot drinks").
Harris appears to have been a credulous man. On other occasions he reported that he had seen and talked to Jesus in the form of a deer, and had seen the devil, who resembled a "jackass with short, smooth hair, like a mouse" (Fawn M. Brodie, No One Knows My History, p.81). Although he swore to having seen the golden plates, Harris later admitted under cross-examination that he only saw them "with the eye of faith"—whatever that might mean.
"I did not see them as I do that pencil case", he said, "[but] I saw them just as distinctly as I see anything around me—although at the time they were covered with a cloth" (William J. Whalen, The Latter-Day Saints in the Modern World, p. 32). Finally, of the eight further witnesses who claimed to have seen and handled the plates (but without any angels) in June 1829, three subsequently abandoned the LDS church.
What can we deduce about the trustworthiness of the men on whose testimony of plates and angels and marvelous stones and silver bows the entire Mormon religion depends absolutely? The exact details will probably never be known, but it is clear that Joseph Smith was certainly dishonest and probably superstitious. The Spalding manuscript; the connivance of Sidney Rigdon and possibly others; the possible fabrication of some bogus "plates" to lend credence to the story; Smith’s superstitious interest in crystal-gazing, which may have resulted in a partly genuine belief that he possessed a secret key to knowledge; and a number of ill-educated and not very saintly associates—these now appear as the main ingredients in the original Mormon recipe.
Some Catholics are aware of the demonic dimension of reality and of the extensive, well-documented evidence of strange preternatural phenomena that sometimes occur in connection with dabbling in the occult. They will not need to insist that the whole phenomenon must necessarily be explained in entirely "natural" terms.
The Scriptures predict the arrival of false prophets with deceptive "signs and wonders," and testify to Satan’s ability to disguise himself as an "angel of light" (2 Cor. 11). If there were indeed some extraordinary phenomena—visions, voices, automatic writing or whatever—this could help to explain the early growth of the Mormon Church. Such phenomena, coupled with the success of the movement and the adulation of ever-growing crowds of converts, may well have led Smith to believe increasingly in his own divine mission, regardless of his duplicity. Such self-deception seems to be a fairly common psychological phenomenon amongst cult leaders.
Mormon Theology
I argued last month that the credentials of a self-styled messenger from God may often be the crucial factor in deciding whether or not we should believe him, quite independently of the actual doctrines he asks us to believe. I put it to the fair-minded reader of any religion or none that the evidence we have adduced regarding the credentials and character of the founding fathers of Mormonism should convince us that it would be foolish to accept anything on their say-so—and especially on Joseph Smith’s say-so. To put it bluntly, I would not buy a used religion from this man (much less a brand new one) even should it turn out to offer an internally consistent and plausible-sounding theology, or perhaps certain Bible verses that seem to lend support to its distinctive doctrines.
Whether or not the LDS gospel does in fact sound consistent and appealing readers can now judge for themselves. We shall conclude our little survey of the Mormons and their church by setting out the main distinguishing features of their creed and how this differs from Catholic teaching.
The Book of Mormons’ Message
Smith’s new "Bible" tells how ancient peoples from the Near East migrated to America and were visited by Jesus Christ after his Resurrection. They are believed to be God’s true people. But the civilization, great cities, advanced metallurgical technology, and agricultural resources that it attributes to the "Nephites," "Jaredites," and other alleged ancient Americans are incompatible with what archaeologists have discovered. By sharp contrast, excavations in the Near East are found frequently to corroborate the genuine antiquity and authenticity of the historical narratives in the Bible.
Also we cannot help wondering why a book that was supposed to have been miraculously translated word for word should have undergone more than 2,000 textual changes between the original edition and the ones in use today (William Whalen, The Latter Saints in the Modern World, p. 49). In 1 Nephi 11:21, for instance, the original edition says that the "Lamb of God" is "the eternal Father," while the same verse in today’s version equates the "Lamb of God" with "the Son of the Eternal Father."
There are many anachronisms in the Book of Mormon, large slabs of which (about 27,000 words in all) are direct quotations from the King James Bible of 1611. It perpetuates some of the errors of that translation, such as the word torn instead of refuse or offal as a translation of the Hebrew suchah in Isaiah 5:25. In some places we find really astonishing reports: In Ether 15:31 we read of a gentleman named Shiz who "struggles for breath" after his head has been cut off and then finally dies. (For more extensive criticism of the Book of Mormon, see Isaiah Bennett, Inside Mormonism (Catholic Answers), pp. 432–449.)
God and Creation
The first article of the Christian creed is held in common with all great monotheistic religions: God is One; he is infinite, self-subsistent Spirit, the almighty "Creator of heaven and earth." All limited and finite beings depend utterly on him for their existence.
LDS doctrine denies this fundamental theistic premise. The "inspired" Doctrine and Covenants states that the "elements are eternal" and indestructible (DC 93:3). The things we see were not created out of nothing but only "framed" or "organized" out of preexisting matter (DC 20:17). The Mormon worldview is materialistic because it makes the mistake of assuming that if something is real we ought to be able to make a mental "picture" or image of it. This leaves no room for truly spiritual being. Mormon "revelation" asserts that "all spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes" (DC 131:7).
For Mormons, therefore, God is a material being in time and space who is only partly responsible for our existence. From a Catholic viewpoint, this reduces him to an idol, unworthy of human worship and adoration. Although at times he is said to be "unchangeable" in some sense (DC 20:17), he is in fact believed to be capable of "growth" and "maturation." In fact, he was once a quite lowly figure, as we are, and has now taken on a celestial body: "The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s" (DC 130:22). Because the Bible tells us that God made man "in his own image" (Gen. 1:26–7), Latter-Day Saints conclude that he must fully share our nature. (If such reasoning were valid, then the image I see in the bathroom mirror must also be a three-dimensional being, composed of flesh and bones.)
The prophet Joseph proclaimed, "God himself was once as we are now and is an exalted man and sits enthroned in yonder heavens! I am going to tell you how God came to be God. We have imagined and supposed that God was God from all eternity. I will refute that idea, and take away the veil . . . yea, God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ himself did " (History of the Church 6:305–306).
Brigham Young—who, like all Smith’s successors as president, prophet, seer, and revelator of the LDS Church, is supposed to enjoy infallibility—declared on many occasions as "revelation" that the earth where God once lived was in fact this earth and that he and Adam are one and the same person. Modern Mormons do not accept this generally and try to argue that Young was not speaking ex cathedra, so to speak—not with his full authority.
"Gods" and Men—Essentially the Same
Although Mormons commonly talk about "God" in a way that might create an impression of the unique Being of orthodox Christianity, they believe in the existence of many "Gods" ruling the many worlds scattered throughout the universe. Whether one or more of these is supreme over the rest seems rather obscure. In any case, we are to worship our "Heavenly Father," the God of this world, who "organized" it into its present condition. Smith asserted, "The heads of the Gods appointed one God for us" (History of the Church 6:475). Thus, by their own admission, Mormons worship a being who is not necessarily the Supreme Being; he is merely our local deity.
On the basis of certain biblical texts that speak of various "gods" (understood by Catholics to mean either false gods or lesser spiritual beings), the Latter-Day Saints’ polytheistic gospel proclaims a whole race or "species" of divine beings of which "Heavenly Father" is only one member. Unable to form a clear picture in their minds of the Christian mystery of three Persons in one God, Mormons reject this doctrine and reinterpret the Trinity in a way that posits three separate members of the God-species who happen to be of particular importance to us on planet Earth.
Joseph Smith declared, "I will preach on the plurality of Gods. . . . I have always declared God to be a distinct personage, Jesus Christ a separate and distinct personage from God the Father, and that the Holy Ghost was a distinct personage and a Spirit: and that these three constitute three distinct personages and three Gods" (History of the Church 6:474).
Our Father in heaven is married to at least one female deity, and together they procreated all the billions of human beings as "spirit children." All of us are claimed to have lived in heaven as spirits before entering a body here on earth. Devout "saints" sing a hymn written by one of Smith’s widows, Eliza Snow:
"In the heavens are parents single? No; the thought makes reason stare! Truth is reason, truth eternal tells me I’ve a mother there."
Some of these spirit children rebelled and became the devil and his angels. Their punishment is that they are eternally denied the opportunity of progress. If we accept the Mormon gospel and live virtuously, we shall not only rise again physically along with all mankind but will keep on developing until we ourselves are Gods. If not, we will reach only a lower "kingdom" in the future life. (Heaven consists of a hierarchy of three "kingdoms"—celestial, terrestrial, and telestial; few if any of us will join the devils in hell, or the "Second Death.")
The essence of the Mormon gospel is summed up very clearly by the contemporary LDS theologian Glenn L. Pearson: "The truth we have found to be that gods, angels, devils, and men are of a common parentage. They are the same in physical appearance and original potentiality. Gods are those members of the divine race who have reached the status that might be called perfect maturation, or realization of the maximum potential" (Know Your Religion, p. 24).
Still more succinctly, another Mormon leader, Lorenzo Snow, summed up the "restored and everlasting gospel" in a widely quoted aphorism: "As man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become." Catholics, on the other hand, believe that by grace we will be transformed into more perfect images of God in the Mystical Body of Christ and live forever in his direct presence. The suggestion that any human creature might eventually rise to equality with his Creator would be seen as absurd and blasphemous.
The Mormon Idea of Christ
How does Jesus Christ fit into the LDS theological scheme? In common with orthodox Christians, Mormons believe that Christ by his suffering, death, and resurrection is our Savior and made possible our "exaltation." (By this "exaltation," of course, they mean the un-Christian notion of becoming equal with God). Since Mormons believe that we, no less than Jesus, were begotten in a very literal way in the spirit world by two heavenly parents, a problem arises for them. A recent Mormon catechetical text, glossy and profusely illustrated, deals with it under the heading, "Jenny’s Question":
"The Markham family had been to Sunday school and was driving home. Brother Markham asked each of his four children what they had learned that day. . . . When Jenny was asked what she had learned, she replied, "Daddy, I’m confused. The teacher talked about Jesus being God’s only son. I thought all of us were God’s children." The lesson goes on to suggest that "Jenny’s Question" is answered well in the words of a "modern prophet," Joseph Fielding Smith, president of the LDS Church in the early twentieth century:
"I want the little folks to hear what I am going to tell you. . . . Now, we are told in scriptures that Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son of God in the flesh. Well, now for the benefit of the older ones, how are children begotten? I answer just as Jesus Christ was begotten of his father. The difference between Jesus Christ and other men is this: Our fathers in the flesh are mortal men who are subject unto death: But the Father of Jesus Christ in the flesh is the God of Heaven. . . . Mary, the virgin girl, who had never known mortal man, was his mother. God by her begot his son Jesus Christ, and he was born into the world with power and intelligence like that of His Father" (Family Home Evening, pp.125-126).
Brigham Young denied emphatically that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Ghost (Journal of Discourses 1:511). Mormon doctrine is really a denial of Jesus’ virginal conception, as we can see from above: "Older ones" know how children are begotten, and that is just how Jesus was begotten—so we are told. God himself—a God of "flesh and bones"—is the father "in the flesh" of Jesus rather than a "mortal" man. In plain language, Mormons believe that God the Father appeared at Nazareth and had sexual intercourse with Mary. Such was the "miraculous" conception of Jesus, in Mormon theology.
Marriage Polygamous and Eternal
Orthodox Christians believe that the union of one man and one woman, for the duration of this earthly life, is God’s true and original plan for the family (although polygamy, having more than one wife, was tolerated for a time among the ancient Hebrews). The Book of Mormon itself is severely opposed to polygamy, stating that David’s and Solomon’s plural marriages were "abominable" before the Lord, who explicitly commands his people to practice monogamy (Jacob 2:24, 27).
This did not prevent Smith from taking a keen interest in women other than his wife, Emma, who was most unhappy about her husband’s behavior. Eventually, on July 12,1843, Smith received the divine seal of approval in the form of a new revelation to the effect that polygamy was now commanded by the Lord: "And let mine handmaid, Emma Smith, receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph, and who are virtuous and pure before me." This "new and everlasting covenant" had to be practiced by all Mormons, as far as possible, on pain of eternal damnation (DC 52:132).
The "covenant" was certainly "new" but not quite "everlasting." During the next few decades, leaders such as Smith, Young, and Heber C. Kimball took dozens of wives each, but there were not enough women available for most LDS men to take more than one wife, two or three at the most. At length, when the U.S. government threatened to confiscate Mormon property and deny statehood to Utah, the danger of eternal damnation for refusing to practice polygamy faded away. In a Manifesto issued September 1890, president Wilford Woodruff instructed Mormons to "refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land."
Monogamy is regarded still as an evil to be tolerated only because of unjust civil laws. Polygamy is still seen as the theoretical norm, and Mormons believe it will be practiced in the next life. (LDS "fundamentalists" still practice it quietly in pockets of Utah.)
Respected LDS theological opinion surmises that Jesus himself married Mary Magdalene, Martha, and possibly others and naturally appeared first to "his own dear wives" after the Resurrection (Whalen, p. 123).
Jesus taught that there is no marriage in heaven (Matt. 22:30), but Mormons "seal" their marriages for eternity, where they believe they will go on procreating more and more spirit children forever in order to populate more and more worlds. Indeed, they believe that this "celestial marriage" is essential in order to reach the "celestial kingdom"—the supreme level of heavenly glory. Women can enter there only by virtue of the priesthood of their husbands. There is a complex Mormon hierarchy, headed by a council of twelve "apostles." Virtually all LDS men are priests of one rank or another in either the "Aaronic" or "Melchisedek" priesthood.
Facing the Facts
I have argued that, although it is unreasonable to demand absolute proof in this life for the validity of religious faith, faith must be rationally defensible and grounded in some strong and objective evidence. From a Catholic viewpoint, the Mormon faith does not pass this test. It is unworthy of any honest and rational person, for instance, to keep trusting in the divine inspiration of Joseph Smith’s Book of Abraham—after Dee Jay Nelson and other Egyptologists have exposed its fraudulence—simply because he "feels his heart burning within him" when he reads that book. (This poignant plea was urged by a devout Mormon elder who wrote to Professor Nelson, begging him to return to the LDS Church. See Martin, p. 161).
Catholicism need not depend for its credibility only on subjective inward experiences, no matter how comforting or uplifting. It makes good sense to explain the existence of the vast number of composite, limited, and changeable beings in the universe by the appeal to traditional theism, belief in one creator God. It does not make sense to "explain" them (as Mormonism does) by postulating a multiplicity of finite "Gods" basically similar in nature to ourselves, whose existence cries out for explanation as much as ours does.
It makes sense to believe that if the Son of God himself organized the nucleus of a community that was to carry on his teaching in perpetuity, he would then assist this community always to remain faithful—as indeed he promised it would (Matt. 16:18). It does not make sense to maintain that while Christ’s original Church was not only fallible but in fact became totally corrupt and apostate for 15 centuries or more (in spite of Christ’s promise to the contrary), a brand new Church, "restored" by a patently dishonest "prophet," is to be trusted as an infallible interpreter of the original revelation—especially when its new "revelations" sometimes contradict each other.
It makes sense to believe that the constant and unrivaled stream of well-testified miracles over two millennia, often in association with men and women of great holiness of life (think of Lourdes, of Fatima, of the inexplicable picture at Guadalupe, of the dozens of marvelously incorrupt bodies of saints) is a pointer to the authenticity of the Catholic Church. It does not make sense to ignore all of this, and to brand all of these saints hypocrites who worshiped God only "with their lips," in favor of a few "visions" and other unusual phenomena reported over a limited time and in a limited locality by persons who for the most part were not noted either for consistency or for sanctity.
The Latter-Day Saints are generally good and devoted people, whom many Catholics could do well to emulate in their zeal and spirit of sacrifice, in their concern to build loving Christian communities, and in their positive approach towards family values and the sanctity of life. Nevertheless, their "gospel" is a sad travesty of Christ’s gospel. If this article can assist some Catholics to be more aware of this, and perhaps help some Mormons to find the painful yet joyful path to the true home of all Jesus’ followers, it will have served its purpose.
Fr. Brian Harrison is a professor at the Pontifical University of Puerto Rico. This article was adapted from a pamphlet published by the Australian Catholic Truth Society.
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