LDS Discussions — A Faithful Response

FAIR Mormon “LOL Seer Stones Are Awesome”: A Scholarly Assessment

Evaluating both the apologetic video and the LDS Discussions critique with an honest eye toward what the evidence actually shows.

Overview

The website ldsdiscussions.com published a review of a FAIR Mormon video titled “The CES Letter LOLOLOL, Seer Stones Are Awesome,” part of a series called “This Is The Show” (TITS) featuring the apologist Kwaku El. The ldsdiscussions.com review is lengthy, pointed, and raises some legitimate historical issues. It also, however, contains several significant misrepresentations of its own — ironically of the same kind it accuses the FAIR video of committing. This response examines each major claim, concedes what is honestly concedable, and corrects what is demonstrably wrong.

A note on tone: the FAIR video in question was brash and mocking, and ldsdiscussions.com is correct that such a tone is unhelpful in winning back doubting members. We do not defend the video’s rhetorical style. What we do defend is the underlying historical and theological legitimacy of several key points the video made — points that ldsdiscussions.com distorts in its critique.

Claim 1: “Joseph Smith Used the Same Stone to Defraud People”

LDS Discussions repeatedly asserts that Joseph Smith “defrauded people out of their money” with his seer stone, that he “never actually found anything,” and that this definitively marks a pattern of fraud. This framing, while rhetorically forceful, distorts the historical record in several ways.

The 1826 Trial: Fraud or Acquittal?

LDS Discussions implies that Joseph was tried and convicted of fraud in 1826. The historical record does not support this. Josiah Stowell — the man who hired Joseph to find a Spanish mine — testified in Joseph’s defense at the 1826 hearing before Justice Albert Neely. Stowell subsequently joined the Church and remained a faithful member. As FAIR Mormon and BYU Studies have both documented, the scholarly consensus from surviving court records is that Joseph was acquitted. The phrase “condemned” appears in only one secondhand, hostile account written years later. The most reliable documentation, including Justice Neely’s own bill of costs, indicates no serious legal consequence.

Scholarly Note

  • Gordon A. Madsen, BYU Studies (1980) — Concluded based on surviving legal documents that Joseph was acquitted at the 1826 hearing.
  • Church of Jesus Christ Official History Topic — Confirms Stowell was the employer and primary witness in Joseph’s defense; no conviction is documented.

Folk Magic Was Culturally Normal, Not Fraudulent

LDS Discussions frames treasure-seeking as uniquely suspicious. In fact, as historian D. Michael Quinn documented in Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (1987), and as Richard Bushman emphasized in Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005), treasure digging with seer stones was a common, accepted folk practice in early nineteenth-century rural New York. Keith Thomas’s landmark work Religion and the Decline of Magic traces these practices to English traditions that had been transplanted to America. Josiah Stowell hired Joseph Smith precisely because such skills were sought-after in that cultural context. Characterizing Joseph as a simple con man requires ignoring the fact that his employer believed in the enterprise as fully as Joseph did, and that multiple community members employed seers for similar purposes without any suggestion of fraud.

None of this resolves every theological question about the stone’s later use in translation. But it does undermine the narrative that Joseph was running a calculated deception. The historical record instead shows a young man operating within the accepted practices of his community — practices that he, along with many of his contemporaries, believed were genuine.

Claim 2: The Bushman Quote Was Misrepresented

LDS Discussions accuses the FAIR video of dishonestly truncating a Bushman quote. Here ldsdiscussions.com is broadly correct that the FAIR video improperly suggested the CES Letter had taken the quote out of context. The Bushman quote used in the CES Letter comes from a FAIR Mormon podcast (October 2010) and is legitimate in its original context. Bushman was acknowledging genuine historical tensions with the traditional translation narrative — he was not making a simple rhetorical flourish.

However, LDS Discussions itself then fails to acknowledge the other half of what Bushman has consistently argued: that the gold plates were necessary as physical testimony and evidence, that their existence was supported by multiple witnesses, and that the unusual translation method does not, for Bushman, undermine the Book of Mormon’s authenticity or divine origin. Bushman’s question “What are the plates for?” was an honest intellectual question, not an admission that the church’s truth claims are false. Presenting it as the latter — as LDS Discussions does throughout its review — is itself a selective reading of the evidence.

Richard Bushman

“What we would lose would be a powerful form of the evidence that the Lord gave to Joseph Smith and to us of the actuality of these experiences and therefore the actuality of the transcendent sphere… that would be gutting some of the most gritty and appealing parts of the Mormon story.”

Both the question and this answer are from Bushman. Both are authentic. Presenting only the question without the answer is the very rhetorical move LDS Discussions accuses FAIR of making.

Claim 3: The Urim and Thummim Comparison Is Dishonest

LDS Discussions argues at length that the biblical Urim and Thummim was merely a “yes or no device” — a “Magic 8 Ball” — and that equating it with Joseph Smith’s seer stone is therefore historically dishonest. This argument contains a significant scholarly problem.

LDS Discussions is correct that the biblical Urim and Thummim most likely functioned as a lot oracle — the dominant scholarly position in Old Testament studies. However, the Jewish Encyclopedia and other sources note that the exact function of the Urim and Thummim remains genuinely uncertain; it is one of the more debated questions in biblical scholarship. More importantly, LDS Discussions’ argument proves too much: if the biblical Urim and Thummim were merely a binary yes/no device, then using the same term to describe Joseph’s translation instruments is certainly imprecise — but LDS Discussions then turns around and complains that the church was hiding something by not talking openly about the stone. You cannot simultaneously argue that the stone’s use was obvious from D&C 17 (as critics claim the church should have communicated) and that the Urim and Thummim label was deliberately deceptive. The two complaints are in tension with each other.

The D&C Terminology History Is More Complex Than LDS Discussions Allows

LDS Discussions argues that the phrase “Urim and Thummim” was retroactively inserted into D&C 10 to reframe Joseph’s treasure-seeking instruments as a biblical device. This is historically accurate as far as the textual edit itself is concerned. However, FAIR Mormon has documented that the first use of the biblical phrase “Urim and Thummim” to describe translation instruments came from Orson Hyde and Samuel Smith in August 1832, and W.W. Phelps used it in January 1833 — this was an organic community development of biblical language to describe what they understood to be a divinely guided process. It was terminology adoption, not cover-up. The fact that terminology evolved does not demonstrate that the underlying events were fabricated.

Historical Documentation

  • FAIR / mobom.org — Documents the Urim and Thummim terminology first entering LDS usage in 1832–1833, well after the Book of Mormon’s publication, as early church members drew biblical parallels to their experience.
  • Wheat & Tares (2023) — Pre-1833 newspaper accounts of the translation use neither “Urim and Thummim” nor seer stone — demonstrating the terminology was still in flux, not deliberately suppressed.

Claim 4: The Ouija Board Comparison

The FAIR video accused Jeremy Runnells of claiming Joseph Smith used a Ouija board, which LDS Discussions correctly refutes: the CES Letter was using “Ouija board” as a functional analogy, not a literal historical claim. The FAIR video misrepresented the CES Letter on this point — that is fair criticism.

However, LDS Discussions then uses this accurate point to dismiss the broader apologetic response, which is a non sequitur. One error in the FAIR video does not invalidate the video’s other arguments, just as errors in the CES Letter do not invalidate its other arguments. Both sources contain accurate points and inaccurate points. Intellectual honesty requires assessing each claim on its own merits.

Claim 5: The Stone Never Found Treasure, Therefore It Was Not Divine

LDS Discussions argues: if God was preparing Joseph by giving him a seer stone, why did Joseph never find any treasure with it? This is presented as a decisive logical disproof. But it assumes a premise the text never establishes — namely, that God’s purpose in the stone was to help Joseph find literal buried treasure. That is not a claim made in LDS scripture or in any canonized text. The alternative reading — which is FAIR’s position — is that Joseph used a culturally familiar instrument as a focus for his developing prophetic gift, and that the stone was never divinely intended to function as a treasure locator. The failure to find treasure is therefore entirely consistent with the LDS position.

This is not a retreat or a rationalization. Doctrine and Covenants 1:24 explicitly teaches that God speaks “after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding.” The broader principle — divine accommodation to human context — is a standard feature of prophetic communication across religious traditions, LDS and otherwise. Orson Pratt recorded Joseph Smith explaining that as he matured spiritually, his reliance on physical instruments decreased entirely. This trajectory is the opposite of what would be expected if the stone were a prop in an ongoing fraud.

The Translation Evidence Itself Points Away from Fraud

LDS Discussions does not engage with one of the strongest evidential arguments for the translation’s authenticity: the manuscript evidence studied by Royal Skousen of Brigham Young University. Skousen’s decades of work on the original and printer’s manuscripts of the Book of Mormon demonstrates an unusual pattern consistent with an external dictation source. Joseph dictated in relatively long stretches of approximately 25–35 words at a time, had scribes read text back for confirmation before proceeding, and introduced phonetically spelled proper nouns that were subsequently corrected on the same line — behavior inconsistent with composing the text himself. Skousen’s analysis does not prove divine origin, but it does establish that whatever process Joseph used, it did not operate the way a simple literary forgery would. LDS Discussions’ framework requires ignoring this body of scholarship entirely.

Manuscript Evidence

  • Royal Skousen, BYU Studies / Critical Text Project — Original manuscript shows tight dictation patterns, phonetic name corrections, and scribe read-back confirmation — features incompatible with simple forgery.
  • Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, Vol. 7 (1998) — Skousen identifies evidence of a tight-control revelation model where specific words, not just impressions, were communicated to Joseph.

Claim 6: The Church Intentionally Taught a False History

LDS Discussions argues that the church deliberately concealed the seer stone translation method, citing the South Park (2003) comparison to the 2005 church visitor center film as evidence. This is its strongest argument, and it deserves honest engagement.

It is true that the church did not prominently present the seer stone method to investigators or in Sunday school curriculum for most of the twentieth century. It is also true that the traditional image of Joseph looking directly at the plates was the dominant visual representation. To the extent that this created a misleading impression for new converts, that is a legitimate criticism.

However, “not prominently teaching” is different from “actively lying.” The seer stone was referenced in multiple nineteenth-century church publications, in Joseph Fielding Smith’s Doctrines of Salvation, and in various FAIR Mormon publications well before the 2013 Gospel Topics Essays. The church published its own official photograph of the seer stone in 2015. Richard Bushman discussed the full translation method at a FAIR Mormon conference in 2010 — the very conference whose podcast LDS Discussions quotes. This does not look like an institution in the grip of a deliberate cover-up so much as an institution that downplayed a theologically complicated detail and has since moved toward greater transparency. That shift deserves criticism for its slowness — but the charge of deliberate, systematic lying is an overreach.

Joseph Fielding Smith Is Misused

LDS Discussions quotes Joseph Fielding Smith’s statement that the seer stone’s use in translation is “hearsay” and “hardly seems reasonable.” This is presented as a church leader admitting the stone was not used. But LDS Discussions misreads the quote. Joseph Fielding Smith was arguing that using the stone would have been theologically inferior to using the Nephite interpreters — he was making a doctrinal argument about which instruments God would have preferred, not admitting that Joseph was a fraud. The multiple eyewitness accounts from Emma Smith, David Whitmer, Martin Harris, Elizabeth Ann Whitmer Cowdery, and others are not merely “hearsay” in any meaningful evidentiary sense. Joseph Fielding Smith was entitled to his personal skepticism; his personal opinion does not constitute a church admission.

Claim 7: The First Vision Canard

LDS Discussions briefly introduces First Vision account variation to correct the FAIR video’s claim that Joseph’s first divine claim was the appearance of both God and Jesus. This is fair in pointing out that the 1832 account describes a different experience. But the issue of First Vision account variation is a separate topic — one that cannot be validly used to compound the seer stone question without independent argument. The implicit logical form is: “FAIR got something else wrong; therefore FAIR is wrong about seer stones.” This is an instance of the very rhetorical sleight-of-hand LDS Discussions accuses FAIR of performing throughout the article.

Where LDS Discussions Is Correct

Intellectual integrity demands acknowledging the following points where LDS Discussions presents valid criticisms:

Valid Points Raised by LDS Discussions

  • The FAIR video’s tone of mockery was counterproductive and uncharitable toward those with genuine doubts.
  • The Bushman FAIR podcast quote was used legitimately in the CES Letter; accusing Runnells of truncating it was inaccurate.
  • The Ouija board accusation against Runnells was a misreading of the CES Letter’s obvious analogical intent.
  • The church did underemphasize the seer stone method for much of the twentieth century, and this created a harmful gap between the taught narrative and the historical record.
  • Dismissing concerns about the seer stone merely by pointing to other miraculous claims without engaging specific historical issues is intellectually insufficient.

The Core Question FAIR Gets Right

Beneath the rhetorical noise on both sides, the FAIR video made a point that LDS Discussions never satisfactorily answers: once you grant that God uses supernatural means to communicate with human beings — angels, visions, inspired translation — the choice of physical instrument becomes a second-order question. LDS Discussions’ answer is that the instrument matters because it was previously used for a failed practice. But this argument proves too little unless you can establish that the stone’s failure to locate treasure is evidence that God never subsequently used it for a different purpose — a philosophical claim, not a historical one.

The multiple independent eyewitness accounts of the translation process, the manuscript evidence studied by Skousen, the complexity and internal consistency of the Book of Mormon text itself, and the theological coherence of God accommodating prophetic instruments to the cultural context of the prophet — none of these are addressed in the LDS Discussions critique. They are not trivial. They are the reason serious scholars such as Bushman, Skousen, Brant Gardner, and John W. Welch take the translation’s authenticity seriously even while acknowledging its historical complications.

Conclusion

LDS Discussions’ review of the FAIR video is a mixture of legitimate criticism and its own selective presentation of evidence. Where it correctly identifies errors in the FAIR video — the Bushman quote, the Ouija board accusation, the dismissive tone — we agree. Where it overstates its case — the fraud charge, the cover-up charge, the “Magic 8 Ball” argument against the Urim and Thummim, the silence regarding Skousen’s manuscript evidence — the critique fails on its own terms.

The honest conclusion is that the seer stone translation is historically unusual and theologically challenging. It was underemphasized for too long. But the historical evidence does not establish fraud, and the dismissal of the physical evidence from the original manuscripts is a serious gap in the LDS Discussions treatment. Scholars like Bushman and Skousen — who have spent careers with the primary sources — continue to find the truth claims of the Restoration worthy of serious engagement. That does not make them correct. But it does mean the question is more genuinely open than LDS Discussions suggests.

Good apologetics requires honesty about what the evidence shows and what it does not. So does good criticism. The seer stone is a hard historical question. It deserves a harder treatment than either side gave it in the exchange reviewed here.