I think your comment about now re-remembering your earlier experiences of the food you were getting all along is an important thing for us all to reflect on. How do our current positions affect our memories of the past? How much can we trust in the accuracy of our autobiographies as we’d write them today? Is everything we do an act of meaning making rather than meaning discovering?

In the Mormon context, does this experience give ANY slack to Smith as he told and refined his First Vision experiences and wove a story of the background of his coming to occupy the position he did? If we’re ready to admit that we shift our memories according to our current views, does Smith deserve all the crap he gets from doing the same?

One can only take a metaphor so far. Did I always think it tasted like shit? No. But it was, in my opinion, one spoonful of bullshit after another. I just didn’t understand that until later.

One other thing I’ve noted about the True Believing historians versus the non or ex-Mormon historians. One of the reasons that the True Believers have such a hard time with the scholarship of the Nons is that the Nons focus primarily on the more provocative and sensitive subjects within the topic. Understandably. They’re the most interesting. So when the Non Believing historian says “I”m going to expand the scholarship on Mountain Meadows or Joseph Smith’s polygamy or post-Manifesto polygamy, etc., the True Believers are frustrated because they know they are going to have to put on their apologists eyeglasses and fight to explain, contextualize, or dismiss unwelcome information that they wish they didn’t have to deal with in the first place.

It seems that way to me. Few of the non believing historians want to explore the evolution of irrigation practices among the Mormons. Nowhere near as interesting as blood atonement.

In your story, however, the baby always thinks it tastes like shit. Did you?

Something causes such shifts. One of my theories for many people is that they reject things because they previously believed TOO MUCH. Reality is SUPPOSED to look like this and it no longer does, hence my old theory must be crap. I try to always judge whether my experiences and new evidences I come across drive my theory making (inductive arguments; supposedly the scientific approach and what I strive for)and how much is my investment in my old theory driving what I am seeing?

Hey, in mentioning a believer’s/non-believer’s investment, I finally got back to the main topic of your original post! Yay!

Certain sections of the Doctrine and Covenants: mind-blowing and spirit-enriching

King Follett Discourse and other places you find Smith’s metaphysical musings: some of the most startling and ennobling ideas ever spoken, including quite radical and exciting ways for approaching many important theological conundrums. Mormonism escapes many of the traps other groups are in and can’t punch their way out of given their starting principles, and it falls into few, if any, new pickles because of its theological commitments. I find Smith’s stuff very, very consistent and defensible.

Depiction of a fully just universe with every entity in it having 100 percent agency and an opportunity for joy within its sphere: incredibly elevating ideas that if taken seriously should revolutionize positively all of our approaches to life and how we view everything and everyone else

I don’t always know what to make of many of the other things Smith said and did, but these things above (and I’m sure with more than ten-minutes thinking I’d come up with many others) are reason enough for me to always keep an open mind and heart toward this pivotal figure in my life and thinking. I know we also differ on expectations for what a “prophet” should be and act like, and also on how a church with important truths in its care should act and be like. I think those things also help explain other ways in which I’m prone to cut him/it more slack than you.

SPOILER BELOW

It was more shit.