Having Fun & Laughing with Friends as the Core of Mormonism

 

Despite some (no not all, not all, not all) mainstream Mormons unfortunately sometimes lacking a sense of humor by seeking to be overly pious, in original Mormonism under the guidance of Joseph Smith there was definitely a spirit of playfulness, fun and laughter a lot of the time. 

The following is excerpts from Humor and Mormonism (Posted on April 27, 2013 by Jettboy):

When many, both in and outside of the Church, think of Mormons, the last thing that comes to mind is a sense of humor. Jokes are more likely to be aimed at them. There might be stereotypes of happy couples with smiling children or cheerful young men and women, but this image won’t include laughter.  To some extent piousness has infiltrated the subconscious of the Latter-day Saints a little too much. A good joke might be hard to find among serious calls to repentance.

 

As questionable as speculation, I wonder if the Prophet Joseph Smith would approve of the member’s seeming lack of joviality. He certainly didn’t like the lack of that quality when he was alive. Brigham Young learned from him that music, theater, and dancing were not of themselves sinful like he was taught growing up.  Life is to be enjoyed within reasonable limits and not pined away in perpetual sorrow.

 

Despite all the information we have about the Prophet Joseph Smith, perhaps what has been ignored today by both believers and critics was his sense of humor and good nature. Even his contemporary enemies acknowledged those aspects of him. In fact, more than once they were scandalized by his amusements. Said one commentator hearing him speak, “His language and manner were the coarsest possible. His object seemed to be to amuse and excite laughter in his audience.” (Charlette Haven to Sister Isa, Jan. 22, 1843, in Mulder and Mortensen, Among the Mormons, pg. 118-119). He loved to make boastful claims in order to bring attention to his subject or stress importance.

 

An unquestionable example of hyperbole that all other instances of the same can be compared with is a statement about Emma’s cooking:

 

Emma’s lot must have been a difficult one, for he was always bringing home a group to dinner. But she was a good cook. “When I want a little bread and milk,” Joseph told William W. Phelps, “my wife loads the table with so many good things it destroys my appetite.”

– Leonard J. Arrington, “Joseph Smith and the Lighter View,” New Era, Aug 1976, pg. 8.

 

It is the same with many of the so-called boastful statements of Joseph Smith about his station in life, such as having more education than a college professor has. Many have looked at how he described his religious role and consider it blasphemy. High profile visitor John Quincy Adams heard such a boast and understood the humor behind his declarations. Adams commented that Joseph had too much power, and was answered back, “Remember, I am a prophet!” Quincy noted, “The last five words were spoken in a rich, comical aside, as if in hearty recognition of the ridiculous sound they might have in the Ears of a Gentile.” (Quincy, Josiah. Figures of the Past: From the Leaves of Old Journals. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883. Pg. 378-379).

 

Joseph Smith didn’t like the high mindedness of those who considered themselves too holy and self-righteous. He was even known to try and make them uncomfortable. As one story goes:

 

“I am aware that a great many have so much piety in them, that they are like the Baptist priest who came to see Joseph Smith. Joseph had the discernment of spirits to read a man, and a peculiar faculty of using up the old sectarian tone to “my dee-e-er brethren.” When he heard that good old tone he used to imitate it; and whenever one of the class, who are so filled with piety, and the good old tone, came to Nauvoo, Joseph used forthwith to take a course to evaporate their sanctimoniousness . . .

 

. . . After he got through chatting, the Baptist stood before him, and folding his arms said, “Is it possible that I now flash my optics upon a Prophet, upon a man who has conversed with my Savior?” “Yes,” says the Prophet, “I don’t know but you do; would not you like to wrestle with me?” That, you see, brought the priest right on to the thrashing floor, and he turned a summerset right straight. After he had whirled round a few times, like a duck shot in the head, he concluded that his piety had been awfully shocked, even to the centre, and went to the Prophet to learn why he had so shocked his piety. The Prophet commenced and showed him the follies of the world, and the absurdity of the long tone, and that he had a super-abundant stock of sanctimoniousness.”

 

-- Jedediah M. Grant, “Instructions to Newcomers,” Journal of Discourses, 3:66–67

Joseph Smith & the US Constitution

 Excerpts from Insights into the Mind and Personality of the Prophet Joseph Smith by Donald Q. Cannon:

 

... As I studied these research materials on Joseph Smith, it became evident that he was a patriot in the best sense of the word. He frequently expressed his loyalty to the United States of America and often praised the government and especially the Constitution. Once, while pointing out some problems in that time, he nevertheless concluded, “With all our evils we are better situated than any other nation.”[29] His patriotic feelings are further expressed in these examples:

The Constitution . . . is a glorious standard; it is founded in the wisdom of God. It is a heavenly banner.[30]

I am the greatest advocate of the Constitution of the United States.[31]

Joseph Smith’s Sense of Humor by Donald Q. Cannon

 

Excerpts from Insights into the Mind and Personality of the Prophet Joseph Smith by Donald Q. Cannon

... Through my study of the teachings of Joseph Smith, I learned something about Joseph as a man—the human dimension. For one thing, I learned that Joseph had a sense of humor. He employed humor in his teaching because he understood that humor is helpful in reaching one’s audience. Some examples of his humor are the following:

 

You might as well baptize a bag of sand as a man, if not done in view of the remission of sins.[17]

... If we go to hell, we will turn the devils out of doors and make a heaven of it.[19]

All ye lawyers who have no business, only as you hatch it up, would to God you would go to work or run away.[20]

It is best to let Sharp publish what he pleases and go to the devil, and the more lies he prints the sooner he will get through.[22]

Mr. Sollars stated that James Mullone, of Springfield, told him as follows:—”I have been to Nauvoo, and seen Joe Smith, the Prophet: he had a gray horse, and I asked him where he got it; and Joe said, ‘You see that white cloud.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, as it came along, I got the horse from that cloud.’”[23]

When a man undertakes to ride me I am apt to kick him off and ride him.[24]

I have said more than I ever did before, except once at Ramus, and then up starts the little fellow (Charles Thompson) and stuffed me like a cock-turkey with the prophecies of Daniel, and crammed it down my throat with his finger.[25]

In addition to using humor, Joseph Smith tried to incorporate colorful expressions that people could relate to and understand. He wanted to talk their language to help them comprehend his message. Here are some examples:

I tried to prevail upon him, making use of the figure, supposing that he should get into a mud-hole, would he not try to help himself out? And I further said that we were willing now to help him out of the mud-hole. He replied, that provided he had got into a mud-hole through carelessness, he would rather wait and get out himself, than to have others help him.[26]

A little tale will set the world on fire.[27]

Hit pigeons always flutter.[28]

 Feelings of charity came easily and naturally to Joseph Smith. As he taught:

Love is one of the chief characteristics of Deity, and ought to be manifested by those who aspire to be the sons of God. A man filled with the love of God, is not content with blessing his family alone, but ranges through the whole world, anxious to bless the whole human race.[34]

There is a love from God that should be exercised toward those of our faith, who walk uprightly, which is peculiar to itself, but it is without prejudice; it also gives scope to the mind, which enables us to conduct ourselves with greater liberality towards all that are not of our faith, than what they exercise towards one another. These principles approximate nearer to the mind of God, because it is like God, or Godlike.[36]

... My heart is large enough for all men.[38]

The Restoration of Joy: The Gospel of Happy Sociality, Fun, & Laughter

 

In this post I will distinguish between the "gospel of Mormonism" and other sectarian versions of Creedal-Christianity, where humor, joy and laughter are often absent or rejected. The fact is the New Testament gospels actually never mention Jesus smiling or laughing. To be fair though, D. Elton Trueblood tried to argue in his book The Humor of Christ that Jesus told jokes and had a sense of humor. But most priests and pastors never discuss D. Elton's theory and focus more on reminding you that "you're a sinner" and on fearing God's wrath. Watch this short video titled Orthodox Christianity is Depressing, discussing how most traditional imagery of Jesus in Christiandom is not very cheerful to get the idea. Only in Joseph Smith's restored gospel in LDS Scripture does Jesus appear smiling to his disciples in 3 Nephi 19:25, 30.

In Mormonism you have a more joyful representation of the gospel (the "message") in that life in the flesh is not to be despised, because all flesh is composed of spirit-matter (see D&C 131: 7-8): and so you do not have this sour faced framework of "spirit against flesh," since in Mormonism the fleshly body itself is a spiritual materiality, bodily instincts and all; which turns "dionysian" joy and laughter, fun and dancing and celebrations of life in the body, into a spiritual activity rather than a "sinful" one. So rather than the pursuit of sour faced somber piety like the body-despising sectarians (who often sought to repress all joy in the sensory body), the pro-American Joseph Smith basically pursued "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." 

Joseph Smith "said ... to Mr. stout that Adam did not commit sin in eating the fruit" in 1841. For Adam only transgressed, so we are not as humans cursed with a permanent "sinful flesh" as claimed by Augustine's Original Sin dogma, which is nonsense and was rejected by Joseph (see Article of Faith #2). Joseph Smith instead dictated new scripture that declared that Adam was a mighty Archangel and he taught that Adam recieved the priesthood prior to earth. This radically shifted the framework away from the sectarian view in the Creeds, that saw Adam as sinning which cursed all human flesh: so that to be "holy" and/or "right with God" one needed to repress their instincts, appear pious, with celibacy as the highest spiritual ideal (if you were able). This body despising mentality was based on an underlying wish to escape one's alleged sin-cursed body, leading to sour faced self-flagellating life avoiding "pillar saints" and permanently celibate Catholic priests (that we still see to this day in the Catholic Church). By shifting the framework to a non-sinning Adam and Joseph saying Adam did not curse humanity with a "sin virus" -- but instead Adam did good by giving mankind the opportunity to experience joy and happiness in a body -- Joseph Smith had completely flipped the script and turned a life lived joyfully in the body itself as the way to connect with the divine or be "right with God." 

Joseph Smith completely rejected the core doctrines of the sectarian Creeds. In his restoration of all things, he rejected their core doctrines like the Fall, the Trinity, and Hell. For example, in D&C 19, Joseph explained that hell language in scripture is only metaphorical and in D&C 76 he taught Three Degress of Glory in the afterlife. This liberated the minds of his followers and removed the chronic mental stress many of them felt as former Protestants when they were terrified that a loved one or friend could be tortured in hell for not going to the right church or for not believing in the correct dogmas. Joseph Smith removed all of that mental anguish, all that pain and fear, with his doctrines; and thus he restored a sense of joy to being human again. For example, a relative of mine, Benjamin Franklin Johnson, grew up attending a Protestant church and while "attending these services, he was taught the principles of heaven and hell, and began to be 'afflicted with the idea of a future punishment, with literal fire and brimstone.'[3] Johnson said that this idea created great fear and anxiety in him until he found the Gospel of Jesus Christ [i.e. the LDS Church]" (Source). It's kind of hard to have fun and enjoy life when you're constantly tormented with the thought of you or your friends and loved ones, who don't belong to the right church or subscribe to the correct Creed, are going to be tormented forever in hell. I am personally saddened when I continue to meet many Creedal-Christians up to this day who are heavily burdened and drained of life daily by such hell fire fear mongering by their priests and pastors. Joseph Smith liberated my Pioneer ancestors from this yoke by instead casting a metaphorical canopy of joy over the horizon with a smiling Christ and gradations of heaven.  

Joseph taught that Adam fell upward so that mankind could pursue happiness through navigating oppositional forces and experience joy in a body of flesh (see 2 Nephi 2: 25). This meant that Adam's "one act" was part of a greater plan all along: which was for pre-existence spirits to gain bodies of flesh in order that they would have joy in their bodies of flesh! In fact, rather a Father God without a body and no passions (as taught in the sectarian Creeds), Joseph declared that God the Father  has a body of flesh and bones (see D&C 130:22); and rather than demanding extreme repression like we see with the pillar saints, Joseph Smith explained that actually "God is more liberal in his views"; and the same fun and joyful "sociality" among us here as humans would exist among us in the heavens among the embodied Gods (see D&C 130: 2; Abraham 4 and D&C 132). 

In my view, Joseph Smith's life-affirming joyful theology was a mirror reflection of his own nature being a cheerful person with a sense of humor. These articles below go into more detail about Joseph Smith's personality and temperament: 

• Joseph Smith’s Sense of Humor by Donald Q. Cannon

• Joseph Smith as Cheerful (by those who knew him) Compiled by The Joseph Smith Foundation

• How Joseph Smith’s “Native, Cheery Temperament” Sustained Him Through Trials by Jeffrey Marsh

• The Looseness of Zion: Joseph Smith and the Lighter View by Leonard J. Arrington

• Humor and Mormonism by Jettboy 

• Joseph Smith and the Spirit of Optimism by Mark D. Ogletree

Excerpts from "The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity" by Kathy L. Gaca

 

Excerpts from The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity by Kathy L. Gaca

From the Introduction, Loc 157 ... :

By the beginning of the second century c.e., patristic writers actively began to adapt ideas about regulating human sexual conduct from Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans as they developed their own teachings about permissible and impermissible sexual activity.[2] Tatian, Clement of Alexandria, and Epiphanes exemplify divergent early trajectories of this adaptation. Tatian was an ardent Christian advocate of complete sexual renunciation, also known as the “encratite”position, and Epiphanes was a Christian Platonist and a Gnostic supporter of more libertine sexual principles.

 

Tatian and Epiphanes drew on the Stoics for some of their teachings, and Epiphanes borrowed from Plato as well. Clement, also a Christian Platonist, censured both Tatian and Epiphanes for going to opposite extremes. He used Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans to develop putatively more moderate sexual guidelines. He is recognized today as a church father partly because he shaped a more workable set of Christian sexual regulations somewhere between the encratite and libertine positions. ...

 

Long before the emergence of Christianity, starting in the fourth century b.c.e., Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans produced sexually grounded political theories designed to create a more just and harmonious society. By their reasoning, human reproductive and other sexual mores are central to any endeavor to attain social order, justice, and well-being. ... For different reasons, Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans all found Greek society poorly constructed in its sexual foundations.[3] In response, they went to work like city-planning contractors and put in their utopian bids to construct sexual systems that would create new and improved societies.

 

... [Philosophers] had good reason to doubt, as Plato did near the end of his life, whether their ideal city plans would ever have any influence over human sexual behavior and society.[6] Aspects of the Platonic, Stoic, and Pythagorean plans eventually did become more influential through the nascent Christian church as it developed its own sexually grounded bid for a new social order. This development started in earnest by the second century, when the patristic writers began adapting various regulatory elements from the Greek philosophers, as well as from the Greek Bible (or Septuagint), the apostle Paul, and Philo of Alexandria. The proto-ecclesiastical bid eventually won imperial approval. Near the end of the fourth century, the Roman emperor Theodosius I in effect awarded the contract to the church when he made orthodox Christianity the sole permissible religion in the Roman Empire.[7] At this time the sexual and broader political reforms promoted by the church proceeded on a much more ambitious scale than they had hitherto. This especially holds true for the religious sphere of Christian sexual reform. ...

 

... A millennium later, [Gentile] Christian sexual morality set forth on an even more ambitious venture into the world, hand in hand with European colonialism.

 

Through this wide-ranging movement of Catholic and Protestant empire, the ecclesiastical sexual reforms that began to take shape by the second century c.e. [after 100 AD]  have informed the sexual basis of Western culture.

We can thus see that the original Hebrew Bible's view that was pro-body, with the "good nephesh" (the fleshy body) and was pro-sex: God even endorsed wives and concubines. This was changed by pagan converts to early Messianic Judaism (pre-70 AD Christianity), wherein, after 70 AD non-Hebrew converts outnumbered Hebrew Christians. These non-Hebew converts were influenced by Platonism and other Greek ideas. So, using the Greek translatiin of the Bible rather than the Hebrew Bible, after 70 AD we see Christianity losing it more Hebew pro-body aspects. Most of the original Jewish Christians died in 70 AD, so the Gentile Christians smuggled in pagan ideas into the Churches.

Excerpts staring from Loc 202: 

The inhabitants of Europe, the Americas, and various other regions live and make love in the domains of these religious sexual rules. This holds true even for the many persons, Christians and non-Christians alike, who resist [Empire-run] Christian sexual morality and its predominantly marital orientation. The Christian pattern of family values remains powerful in the United States and elsewhere, [6]. Plato in the Laws remains convinced that “no one will ever posit a more correct or better definition [of the ideal city] in its preeminence toward human virtue than one in which the private ownership of women, children, and all other goods is everywhere and by every means eliminated from human life,”739b8 –e[3]. Nonetheless, by this time Plato has come to believe that such reform is not workable given entrenched human possessiveness —my house, my family, my slaves. Only “gods or children of gods dwell happily in the fully communal city,” Laws 739d6 –e1.

 

... the sexual ethics of Plato and the Hellenistic philosophers, the Stoics in particular, provided early Christians with a prototype to adopt, with the result that Christian sexual morality followed rather fluidly from its philosophical predecessors. This view, if correct, would mean that the church fathers launched the philosophers’ sexual reforms on a scale that Plato, the Stoics, and the Pythagoreans never imagined —not a small town utopia here and there, but first the Roman Empire and later the New World as well. The differences separating the Hellenistic philosophers and church fathers would be relatively minor compared to their largely shared code of sexual morality. The former sing the Hymn to Zeus while the latter say the Lord’s Prayer, but the philosophers are honorary pre-Christian church fathers in their sexual restrictions and ascetic discipline.

 

... “Christianity has sometimes been considered . . . as playing the role of the oppressive mother superior...sexually liberated pagan culture of Greece and Rome. Most recent works on sexuality in the ancient world, however, have shown this to be an oversimplification, if not totally inaccurate.” [Foucault’s Care of the Self is first in Martin’s supporting citation, 289 n. 3.]. ...

COMPETING VIEWS: CLEMENT & AUGUSTINE'S VIEWS DOMINATED

... the relationship between Plato, early Stoicism, and so-called libertine Christianity, as exemplified by Epiphanes, is one of substantive and thoughtful continuity regarding sexual mores. Epiphanes regards the Platonic and early Stoic sexual principles as the right models for a Christian way of life. Clement, however, condemns Epiphanes for heresy because the ecclesiastical sexual mores that Clement champions cannot be reconciled with the Platonic and early Stoic sexual reforms. ....

PAUL IMPLEMENTED STOICISM & SO DID Epiphanes:

Stoic eros, in both its early communal form and its later marital guise, challenges the ingrained Greek conviction that eros is a divine force that capriciously subjugates mortals to its power. The Gnostic Christian Platonist Epiphanes adapts and promotes early Stoic eros in a communal Christian form.

SEX ONLY IN MARRIAGE CAME FROM CERTAIN GRECO FORMS OF PAGANISM:

... the dictate that people should make love strictly for reproduction and only within marriage...has a specifically Pythagorean provenance, and its central imperative is incompatible with Stoic sexual ethics, early and later alike. Given the prevalent but mistaken view that this sexual regulation was common currency in Hellenistic moral thought, its appearance in Philo and the church fathers seems a simple carryover of a widespread Greek philosophical view into the Christian sexual morality of the patristic period.

 

This impression is false. Like the infinitesimal triangles that shape the elements of Pythagorean reality,[21] the sexual dictate to marry and make love strictly for reproduction is a distinctive, even peculiar, artifact of Pythagorean thought, which transmutes and naturalizes into a biblically grounded church doctrine through the scriptural exegesis of Philo and Clement.

THE GREEK BIBLE:

To investigate the formation of Christian sexual morality without considering the Greek biblical norms [in the Septuagint] that inform it is like trying to understand Moby Dick while setting the whale aside. ...

Priesthood as the Power to Generate (Procreate) Endless Lives

In the 1800s, the LDS Church defended plural marriage by arguing that it gave men an outlet for their sexual desire; so that men would not be tempted to commit adultery or visit prostituties. Implicit in this was a nonjudgemental attitude of male virility and sexual desire in and of itself. D&C 132, the Book of Abraham 2:11, and the temple endowment on power in the loims and joy in one's posterity, all interpreted male sexual desire and seed-fertilizing power as holy, as man's "power in the presethood." Givens quotes Joseph Smith in his book Feeding the Flock, page 51, saying "the priesthood [...is] the power to generate 'endless lives' (a post-resurrection posterity), [WJS, 247]." In other words, Godhood, becoming one of the Gods in Abraham chapter 4 entailed procreative power with a body of celestialized flesh that bears the souls of men through wives and concubines (see D&C 76 and 130, 131, 132). 

All this changed in the 1900s, when the US government forced the Mormon Church to abandon plural marriage and what followed was a slow procress of endimg the theology behind the doctrine of procteatimg Gods as well. As Puritanicl Protestantism entered Mormon Thought and culture and the origional pro-body doctrine was replaced with a more Protestantsoumdimg dogma. Overtime Mormon men were then expected to control their sexual desire with Augustinian lines of thought. This was a complete reversal in mindset. The former Nauvoo era theology accepted male biology and desire as natural and embraced a spiritual outlet for man's sex drive, but the latter post-1900 view despised the body and attempted to muzzle the man's "power in the preiesthood"; and move him away from the former Nauvoo Enlightenment and back to the mindset of the Dark Middle Ages: of monkish asseticism, and celibacy before marriage, and only monogamous marriage.

Joseph Smith on “Feeling Nothing” and the Book of Mormon’s Pragmatic Epistemology on Faith as Uncertainty Growing to Experiencial Knowledge & the Criteria of the Ethically "Good" as Truth

 

From Joseph Smith, “Feeling Nothing”, and the Book of Mormon’s Pragmatic View of Faith by instrument_801:

Early accounts of Joseph Smith’s religious life suggest that both his experience and the Book of Mormon he produced frame faith not as emotional certainty, but as a pragmatic process of acting in hope and judging truth by its enduring fruits even if not felt.

 

Here are some musings I am working through. The story of Joseph Smith begins with a young man trying to find God. He was seeking redemption of his sins and trying to discern which church, if any, was true. In one of the Church’s First Vision videos, the narrative draws on an account I was less familiar with. In it, Joseph Smith states that he “wanted to feel and shout like the rest but could feel nothing.”

 

> Br Joseph tolt us the first call he had a Revival Meeting his Mother & Br & Sister got Religion, he wanted to get Religion too wanted to feel & shout like the Rest but could feel nothing…[See: Alexander Neibaur, Journal excerpt, 24 May 1844; in Alexander Neibaur, Journal, 5 Feb. 1841–16 Apr. 1862, pp. 23–24; handwriting of Alexander Neibaur; CHL.]

 

This experience aligns closely with how the Book of Mormon defines faith and knowing truth. Faith is explicitly not equated with perfect knowledge or emotional certainty. It is described as hope in things that are true but not yet fully known, followed by action in uncertainty (Alma 32:21, 27). Truth is tested through lived experience, and confirmation comes as the “seed” grows and produces a real impact on the soul and one’s understanding (Alma 32:28, 33–34).

 

Within this framework, feelings are not rejected, but they are not decisive on their own. What matters is what faith produces over time. The Book of Mormon provides a clear moral epistemology for judging truth: “all things which are good cometh of God” (Moroni 7:12). Individuals are given the capacity to judge by observing whether something invites them to do good, to believe in Christ, and to grow in light (Moroni 7:16–17). Is this how Joseph viewed his faith?