A detail of the story that the missionaries leave out is what happened
right before the pillar of light descended. In Joseph Smith’s own words,
After I had retired to the place where I had previously designed to go,
having looked around me, and finding myself alone, I kneeled down and began
to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so, when
immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and
had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I
could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for
a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.
But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the
power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I
was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction--not to an
imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world,
who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being--just
at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my
head…( Joseph Smith History 1:15-16)
Despite being relatively important to the story, the missionaries will
always leave out this detail about Satan.
Why is that? My theory is this: the Missionaries want you to feel the
Spirit in the discussions. They won’t hesitate to identify any vaguely good,
peaceful feeling you have as the Spirit telling you that their message is
true. When you hear a story about a sincere boy praying and having his
prayer answer by a loving father-God, that will naturally elicit good
feelings, without regard to whether or not the story is true. Likewise, when
you read about the awesome power of some evil being from the unseen world
seizing the boy to destruction, that will elicit bad feelings. The story is
edited to only elicit good feelings, thus increasing the odds that you will
"feel the spirit" and will want to embrace the message.
In his book Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer talks about
the techniques that "psychics" use to fool people into thinking they are
communicating with the dead. One of the principles is to "keep it positive
(‘He wants you to know he loves you very much,’ ‘She says to tell you that
she is no longer suffering,’ ‘His pain is gone now’)."[1] Isn’t that the
exact same approach that the missionaries are using when they accentuate the
positive aspects of the first vision story and edit out the negative
aspects?
[1] Shermer goes on to explain why they keep it positive: "Life is
contingent and filled with uncertainties, the most frightening of which is
the manner, time, and place of our own demise. For a parent, an even worse
fear is the death of one’s child, which makes those who have suffered such a
loss especially vulnerable to what ‘psychics’ offer. Under the pressure of
reality, we become credulous. We seek reassuring certainties from
fortune-tellers, and palm-readers, astrologers and psychics. Our critical
faculties break down under the onslaught of promises and hopes offered to
assuage life’s great anxieties." (Why People Believe Weird Things, pages 2 &
5, emphasis added).
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