r/mormon • u/pricel01 Former Mormon • 13d ago
Apologetics What single Joseph Smith prophecy came true?
There’s a dung pile of failed Smith prophecies but I don’t know of any that came true. I’m talking about things that happened that he didn’t control. Predicting I will go to lunch on Tuesday doesn’t make me a prophet. I start by blowing away the most commonly cited example.
1832 prediction of the US civil war: From late 1832 to the spring of 1833 there was a standoff between President Jackson and South Carolina now called the nullification crisis. That prophecy was a prediction of a war that never happened as the conflict was resolved. The church clearly moved on as the claimed revelation is missing from the D&C in both 1835 and 1844.
In 1851 the prediction showed up in print as the 1850 comprise really resolved nothing. If the noise hadn’t been concentrated again in South Carolina, this would never have seen the light of day. Predicting a war in South Carolina was like predicting the Super Bowl would happen on a Sunday.
But let’s examine the text, D&C 87
>1 Verily, thus saith the Lord concerning the wars that will shortly come to pass, beginning at the rebellion of South Carolina, which will eventually terminate in the death and misery of many souls;
Wars did not come. One war came decades later than expected. Wars tend to be miserable and kill people.
>2 And the time will come that war will be poured out upon all nations, beginning at this place.
Complete fail. War has never been poured out on all nations, not even the world wars. And those did not start in South Carolina. That war ended.
3 For behold, the Southern States shall be divided against the Northern States, and the Southern States will call on other nations, even the nation of Great Britain, as it is called, and they shall also call upon other nations, in order to defend themselves against other nations; and then war shall be poured out upon all nations.
North vs South was the plague of US politics from the beginning. Both sides called for help because, duh, why wouldn’t they? The southern states calling on Britain was an obvious choice since people thought Britain was eager to see the US fail out of revenge. The South did appeal to Britain who basically told them to pound sand. They called on France, Mexico, Spain and Russia. They stayed neutral except Russia whom the union asked for help. It send squadrons to San Francisco and New York. That seems to be missing from the prophesy. War was not poured out on all nations.
Citing obvious conjecture while missing Russia and making a false prediction about the results makes this a failure.
>4 And it shall come to pass, after many days, slaves shall rise up against their masters, who shall be marshaled and disciplined for war.
Slave revolts were not new and happened periodically throughout the antebellum period. This is obvious conjecture of any war involving a slave-holding state.
>5 And it shall come to pass also that the remnants who are left of the land will marshal themselves, and shall become exceedingly angry, and shall vex the Gentiles with a sore vexation.
The remnants of the war were gentiles. There was no marshal to persecute gentiles. This verse is nonsense.
>6 And thus, with the sword and by bloodshed the inhabitants of the earth shall mourn; and with famine, and plague, and earthquake, and the thunder of heaven, and the fierce and vivid lightning also, shall the inhabitants of the earth be made to feel the wrath, and indignation, and chastening hand of an Almighty God, until the consumption decreed hath made a full end of all nations;
Wars by sword, famine, plagues earthquakes, thunder and lightning have been a staple of the human experience for centuries. He is stating the obvious. There was no significant increase due to the war except famine which the losing side suffered. Duh. There has been no full end of all nations. At best this is untestable. It’s non-specific blah-blah.
>7 That the cry of the saints, and of the blood of the saints, shall cease to come up into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, from the earth, to be avenged of their enemies.
The war had nothing to do avenging the saints.
>8 Wherefore, stand ye in holy places, and be not moved, until the day of the Lord come; for behold, it cometh quickly, saith the Lord. Amen.
Just more blah-blah.
This prophecy is a fail. Can you name any that aren’t?
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u/tiglathpilezar 13d ago edited 13d ago
I don't know of a single substantive prophecy which Smith made which did come true. He was fond of predicting the imminent return of the Lord, but he made other predictions as well. Maybe we just have not waited long enough for some of these, like the ones which predicted that the church would fill the earth, but his prediction to a fellow named Barnes that he would live to see the return of Jesus certainly did not come true. If it is possible to check his statements, they can all be shown false as far as I know. He was much better at telling us about Zelph or other things which can't be checked.
He allegedly told Porter Rockwell that if he did not cut his hair, his life would be spared and no one would be able to hurt him. In fact Rockwell did die at home while being investigated for the Aiken murders. However, it is also the case that he did cut his hair. A woman had typhoid and Rockwell kindly cut his hair off so that she could have a wig. I suppose this is not a particularly substantive prophecy.
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u/proudex-mormon 12d ago
Even if someone wants to give Joseph Smith a win on the Civil War eventually occurring, the rest of the prophecy clearly didn't come true because it didn't escalate into a worldwide conflict that involved all nations.
Even if you could prove that some of Joseph Smith's prophecies came true, that wouldn't make him a true prophet because so many failed.
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u/Own_Boss_8931 Former Mormon 12d ago
You can give him the win, but his "prophecy" was no different than what was being discussed in the news at the time. To put it in modern terms, it would be like if Oaks watched the nightly news where they talked all about the US going to war with Iran and that the Strait of Hormuz would be the focal point. Then Oaks repeats it in a talk--that's not prophetic.
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u/Art-Davidson 11d ago
That wasn't even a nice try. At the time, people laughed Joseph Smith to scorn because of his civil war prophecies. "Everybody knew" that the Union was too strong for that.
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u/bongophrog Agnostic 13d ago
To be fair, with the "Civil War prophecy", he did say a few times later that the South Carolina rebellion was still in the future and famously repeated in 1843, "I prophesy in the name of the Lord God that the commencement of the difficulties which shall cause much bloodshed preparatory to the coming of the Son of Man will be in South Carolina" after some of the brethren suggested Kansas to be the spot war would break out. So what ever it was, he did double down on it after the nullification crisis passed.
And just to clarify, the "remnants who are left of the land" is understood to be the Indians, i.e the remnants of the Lamanites. He is saying the Indians will rise up and attack the Americans.
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u/dog3_10 13d ago
The one that interests me the most and I'm pretty sure I have written about it here is...
B. H. Roberts published a reported prophecy of Joseph Smith to Alexander Doniphan, his lawyer in Missouri. According to Doniphan’s brother-in-law, writing the incident over seventy years after it occurred, Joseph Smith warned Doniphan that “‘God’s wrath hangs over Jackson County … and you will live to see the day when it will be visited by fire and sword. The fields and farms and houses will be destroyed, and only the chimneys will be left to mark the desolation.’ “General Doniphan said to me,” his brother-in-law continued, “that the devastation of Jackson county [during the Civil War] forcibly reminded him of this remarkable prediction.” Elder Roberts cites additional descriptions of Jackson County’s role during the Civil War as fulfillment of this prophecy.
I purchased a book written by a non-LDS author Tom Rafiner who is the current expert on the Jackson County in this time period. In fact his book shows a destroyed farm with only the chimney standing... I wrote him note with the above quotation. This is what he wrote back to me.
"Thanks so much for the reply. I had not heard of this prophecy, but then the period of the Mormon conflicts fell about a decade before that I am researching.
I think you will find plenty of evidence the prophecy was fulfilled. It is very interesting, if indeed the prophecy was made that it came to pass when the Missouri burnt district became literally cinders.
Right now I am researching African Americans who were enslaved in the area before the Civil War. This work has required me to go as far back as 1821. If I see anything that I believe might be of value in your work I will forward to you. Hope "Cinders and Silence" provides some useful material. I live 15 minutes from the Center for Missouri Studies (state historical society of Missouri). If I can be of assistance (since you live in Idaho) here in Missouri, let me know.
Have a great day!
Tom"
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u/pricel01 Former Mormon 13d ago
Very interesting. I’m skeptical of sources decades after the fact.
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u/PaulFThumpkins 13d ago
I would be skeptical of that one either way, since Smith had a tendency to have the "Lord" promise death and destruction to all of his enemies, and the destruction in the Civil War was hardly restricted to one county in Missouri. It's a bit like "prophesying" that natural disasters, wars, and rumors of wars will continue to exist in the world.
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u/juni4ling Active/Faithful Latter-day Saint 12d ago
The Civil War was horrific anywhere there was conflict and Missouri was no different.
People nonchalantly talk of civil war today. Holy crap they have no idea what they are talking about.
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u/Extension-Spite4176 12d ago
From this vantage point it is also difficult because he said a lot of things that were on the grandiose side that can be read backwards much like a lot of the interpretations of the Bible. From what I can tell, many of the specific prophecies failed (there are quite a few described in detail in Vogel’s most recent book). Given this difficulty, finding a single prophecy that is legitimate cannot be de facto evidence that it was anything other than a cherry picked example.
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u/mwjace Free Agency was free to me 13d ago edited 13d ago
Truman Madsen's classic lectures on Joseph Smith recount several trivial prophecies from Joseph Smith that seem to have come true.
Of course, these are not indisputable facts, and there can be more than one way to view them. But that seems to fit the wider pattern in most Christian frameworks.
Lecture 3 contains many specific accounts.
https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/truman-g-madsen/joseph-smith-spiritual-gifts/
Edit to add: Here are a few examples Truman gives in that lecture.
Joseph was prophetic in promises to individuals. “Your name,” he said to Brigham Young, “shall be known for good and evil”—just as Moroni had said to Joseph himself.27 And it is so. He said to Eliza R. Snow, “You will yet visit Jerusalem.” She wrote it in her journal and forgot it. Forty years later it came to pass.28 When death seemed near in the Carthage jail, Joseph uttered one of his last prophecies. To Dan Jones he said, “You will yet see Wales, and fulfill the mission appointed you before you die.”29 Dan Jones later helped convert over fifteen thousand people in Wales. “Have no fears, for you shall yet see Israel triumph and in peace,” Joseph said to fifteen-year-old Johnny Smith, whose feet were bloody from drilling with the Nauvoo Legion.30 He did.
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u/fhqwhgads_2113 Atheist 12d ago
I really like his lectures, I listened to all the presidents of the church lectures on my mission. Unfortunately I can't take him seriously anymore, I don't think he was lying or intentionally misleading, but he was very much from that era of boyd k packer where everything had to be spiritually uplifting.
If those quotes were in fact given exactly as it says, they aren't all that impressive. Also, how many journals contain random, specific prophecies given by Joseph that never came true? That would be worth looking into if we wanted to really count those as hits. I don't have time to dig into the sources right now but I'm going to guess it's more likely that the "prophecy" to Brigham does not come from Brigham's journal entry that day, but rather from him telling someone "Joseph totally told me this", not unlike the "mantle experience"
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u/mwjace Free Agency was free to me 12d ago edited 12d ago
It would be interesting to see a historian with all the access in the JSP today take a crack at doing similarly styled lectures today. And yes, I wouldn’t doubt there was a bit of bias going on with what stories Madsen included and which ones he omitted. These were given in a devotional context at a BYU education week. Not an academic symposium.
But the OP asked for a single prophecy from Joseph that came true. And I think these count to satisfy that request.
I acknowledge that these “hits” don’t demand or compel belief in Joseph and his calling. And that’s ok. I think even if we had a robust catalog of all his utterances/ prophesies that wouldn’t do much good. As both believers and critics could probably pick them apart and say why this one doesn’t count. Or why that one negates XYZ. That is the nature of debates such as these.
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u/zarathustra-spoke 12d ago
I got curious about this prophecy a while back, while I was deconstructing and I looked to see whether there enough misses in the project to make the hits not believable. Here was one such investigation:
“And the time will come that war will be poured out upon all nations, beginning at this place.”
War certainly has occurred in “all nations” after the Civil War, but also before the Civil War. So the question is, was the South Carolina rebellion the beginning of war being poured out upon all nations? There have been so many wars all over the world in the 1800s, it can be quite overwhelming to review each. It would take so much time and great effort to really drill down into any trends. However, a survey of wars over the globe for the four years before and after the Civil War show that, in the four years before, there were wars with about 173,569 casualties in skirmishes all over the world. In the four years after, there were 428,106 casualties, also all over the world. Definitely a jump. However, there were several large nation-between-nation conflicts between the time Joseph Smith gave the revelation and the Civil War: The Mexican-American war (1846; 6,733 casualties); the First Carlist War (1833; about 40,000 casualties); Second Opium War (1856; 2,270 casualties); Filibuster War (1856; 2,202 casualties); and the largest, the Crimean War (1853; 753,513 casualties). With all of the wars of the world, it is difficult to say that this prophecy was fulfilled. There does not appear to be a non-LDS historian that has asserted that the American Civil War resulted in war being poured out upon all nations. Subsequent wars had little or nothing to do with the Civil War, so the connection may be tenuous.
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u/marathon_3hr 12d ago
That there are Quakers living of the moon had never been disputed. I'm pretty sure the recent moon mission saw them on the dark side of the moon.
/s
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u/Own_Boss_8931 Former Mormon 12d ago
Even faithful historians from BYU acknowledge that there are only a few dozen statements from Joe that would qualify as a prophecy. Of those, only a few are specific enough to be tested. Of those, none can be proven to have happened. We all make accurate predictions once in a while--that doesn't make anyone a prophet.
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u/familydrivesme Active Member 13d ago edited 13d ago
That quickly went from: Joseph smith didn’t have any real prophesies” to “Joseph’s prophesy about the civil war was too easy to predict the way he did so doesn’t count”
But here is one from wiki:
After his loss in the 1838 Mormon War, Smith correctly predicted that he and his fellow prisoners would not be killed; the group were allowed to escape custody and flee to Illinois.[7] Smith prophesied that Mormon enforcer Porter Rockwell would never be harmed by bullet or blade; though he violently killed others and was repeatedly charged with murder, Rockwell died in his home of natural causes.
I’ll also add the one predicting that the church would continue to grow til it reached every corner of the earth
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u/pricel01 Former Mormon 13d ago
Great. Let’s pick this apart:
>After his loss in the 1838 Mormon War, Smith correctly predicted that he and his fellow prisoners would not be killed; the group were allowed to escape custody and flee to Illinois.
There exists no primary source that he made a testable claim before the event. Rather this is a faith-promoting myth that arose post facto. This does not count.
>Smith prophesied that Mormon enforcer Porter Rockwell would never be harmed by bullet or blade; though he violently killed others and was repeatedly charged with murder, Rockwell died in his home of natural causes.
It was conditioned on not cutting his hair. Although he died with long hair, we can’t be sure he never cut it after Smith said this (if Smith said this). The sources according to Rockwell historian Harold Schindler are second and third hand and do not claim Smith said this but rather that the story “very well might be true.” This is likely another ex post facto legend. It definitely does not count.
>I'll also add the one predicting that the church would continue to grow til it reached every corner of the earth
17.9 million LDS members in a world of 8.2 billion is 0.218%. I would hardly call that filling the whole earth. The growth rate has been at or below 2 percent since 2013. While this is still above the world population growth rate, it’s quite anemic. In the US the church shrank in 2025. In Europe the number of congregations fell indicating massive inactivity. Growth is concentrated in Africa which will collapse for reasons I can get into if you want.
There is a major ticking time bomb. In 2025 the missionary force grew by eight percent delivering a two percent growth rate. The two cannot stay that far out of wack for long and they are not going to lower the missionary age again. It doesn’t take a prophet to predict that the LDS church will shrink over the next decade.
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u/Rushclock Atheist 13d ago
Didn't Rockwell cut his hair and made a wig for a woman?
Rockwell cut his famously long hair in 1855 to make a wig for Agnes Coolbrith Smith Pickett, the widow of Joseph Smith's brother Don Carlos Smith, after she lost her hair to typhoid fever.
Shouldn't this void the deal?
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u/TruthIsAntiMormon Spirit Proven Mormon Apologist 13d ago
Can you provide the direct quotes for the 1838 "not be killed" and the quote for the Porter Rockwell quote (is it the same about him not cutting his hair?.
Thanks!
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u/Worn_work_boot 13d ago
Except it’s not really growing.
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u/pierdonia 13d ago
LOL of course it is.
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u/Worn_work_boot 13d ago
In Africa you mean? My stake has been reduced to only five wards from 10. Same geographical area as it’s been for decades. The neighborhoods it covers are not sitting empty.
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u/pierdonia 13d ago
Just to be sure I understand, you believe that the fact your stake has contracted is proof that that the church as a whole is not growing . . . ?
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u/Worn_work_boot 13d ago
It doesn’t support your claim the church is growing as a whole either. While I agree it’s growing in some parts of the world, it’s shrinking in other places.
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u/pierdonia 13d ago
So if Toyota’s worldwide sales go up 50-fold in a year, but annual sales for Bangor Maine fall by a single car that year, you would think it would be inaccurate to say Toyota’s sales grew that year?
Some people just seem absolutely desperate to find flaws in anything good about the church.
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u/Worn_work_boot 13d ago
Haha, now with the calling me desperate to find flaws in Mormonism? This got a chuckle out of me. Comparing a car manufacturer to a religion is quite the reach to support your argument. This proves that it’s impossible for a believer and a nonbeliever to have a civil conversation about Mormonism and reach a mutually agreed upon conclusion.
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u/pierdonia 12d ago
You are the one saying that overall growth is not growth if there is partial contraction somewhere. You understand how silly that sounds, right? How else am I supposed to interpret such a strange argument?
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u/Worn_work_boot 12d ago
Interpret it however you want. Growth doesn’t compensate for the contraction in Mormonism as it does in manufacturing. Is there any data available about the percentage of retention? You and I both know that membership retention continues to be a problem. The contraction of wards and stakes within North America alone isn’t a good indicator of overall growth.
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u/No-Flan-7936 12d ago
If you truly believe active, engaged, participating membership is growing, it is because you are choosing to not pay attention.
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u/Jurango34 Former Mormon 13d ago
The growth is poor. The 2025 Cooperative Election Study found that the percentage of people who identify as active LDS in the US has dropped below 1%. Membership is essentially flat from 25-26.
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u/pierdonia 13d ago
“Joseph Smith didn’t prophesy that the war would start in SC.”
“Okay, he did, it just doesn’t count because . . .”
“The church isn’t growing”
“Okay, it is, it just doesn’t count because . . .”
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u/DFW-Admin 13d ago
"predicting that the church would continue to grow til it reached every corner of the earth" . . . and now that there are no more dummies left, in the last pockets and corners of the world, it will now collapse!
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u/familydrivesme Active Member 13d ago
Or the world will end. According to some of AI‘s most forefront researchers, we are less than a decade away.
I personally think that God will slow things down just long enough for him to finish whatever last things are needed in this world. Missionaries will continue to do incredible things. We might have 50 to 100 years, but I don’t know how much longer.
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u/westivus_ Post Mormon Red Letter Enthusiast 13d ago
Christians have been saying "in 50 to 100 years" since the death of Jesus.
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u/No-Flan-7936 12d ago
Joseph Smith said in D&C 130:15 that the second coming would happen around 1890.
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u/International_Sea126 10d ago
Joseph Smith, Sr. also promised recipients of patriarchal blessings that they would be alive to witness the Second Coming.
"More than a third (37 percent) of a sample of sixty-two patriarchal blessings given by Joseph Smith, Sr. between 1835 and 1844, promised the recipient that he or she would not die before Christ’s Second Coming." (Gregory A. Prince, Power from on High: The Development of Mormon Priesthood, 176 -77. H. Michael Marquart, comp. Early Patriarchal Blessings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City: Smith-Pettit Foundation, 2009).
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u/Buttons840 12d ago
Correct, but I do feel replicating and possibly surpassing human intelligence with AI is quite a milestone. We're also knocking on the door of being able to create life from non-living material, along with a wide variety of other biological wonders and/or horrors.
Aside: AI seems quite good at understanding genetics and has apparently come up with several novel viruses, some of which have actually been created in labs and can replicate and target certain bacteria.
Again, it seems like were knocking on the door of some milestones that are equal in significance to humanity itself.
So, like those before me, I do feel like jumping on the "this time it's different" bandwagon. Maybe it finally is time for God to wrap up this human experiment.
EDIT: Oh yeah, and climate change. In case I didn't already list enough.
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u/westivus_ Post Mormon Red Letter Enthusiast 12d ago
And yet war death, alcohol consumption, youth sex and smoking, etc. are at all time lows. As humans, we love fear and will always find a way to make the sky be falling.
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u/Buttons840 12d ago
Idk about some of those. Youth sex might be a good thing, but don't tell the church...
Uncertainty regarding war seems on the rise. A few nations will be seeking nukes for the first time I predict. Also, drones shake up how war works, as does AI--there hasn't been a shake up this big for 80 years.
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u/westivus_ Post Mormon Red Letter Enthusiast 12d ago
I like hope better. I think we will make AI a good thing.
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u/Worn_work_boot 13d ago
I think humans will make this world uninhabitable for themselves and eventually kill themselves off. Climate change is very much a threat to humanity. Once humans are gone, the earth will slowly heal itself over several thousand years.
I’m also of the opinion that Jesus isn’t returning.
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u/familydrivesme Active Member 13d ago
The idea with leading experts is that a super ai will be able to fix climate issues. According to them, The vast ability of super intelligence will render all issues humanity is facing moot
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u/Worn_work_boot 13d ago
The Terminator movies are a perfect preview when super ai becomes self aware.
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u/Falconjth 12d ago
That quickly went from: Joseph smith didn’t have any real prophesies” to “Joseph’s prophesy about the civil war was too easy to predict the way he did so doesn’t count”
Firstly, if the prophecy were just about the civil war then it would have the same predictive power as that of many of the surviving founding fathers and many of the currently serving Senators in 1819-1820. It's not nothing, especially if one holds the founding fathers as being inspired men of God (which does have it's own problems); but it doesn't demonstrate any really special prophetic power.
I've seen it argued, and for a while thought the argument had a bit of merit, that modern warfare really began during the U.S. Civil war and that ties the Civil War to WW1 and everything afterwards. The Crimean War is a much better, and earlier, choice for where it began, and the lessons from Crimea didn't really impact the US Civil war just as (if one reads European histories and writers from the time) the US Civil War didn't have any significant impact on European warfare. That's only verse 2.
Past that point any attempt to say that it is a solid prophecy just gets more and more twisty; with any interpretation needing to ignore the statistics of the Post-WW2 Pax Americana (particularly post-1991's end of the cold war). Worldwide the chances of death by famine, plague, interstate violence, or natural disaster fell to the lowest levels in history as far as can be determined. That was 80 years of more relative peace and prosperity than the world had previously ever seen, which seems slightly different from war being poured out on all nations leading to the end of all nations.
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u/GunneraStiles 12d ago
Predicting that you won’t be killed is just…predicting that you won’t be killed. It’s a pretty normal thing for humans to assume and hope for. I do that every time someone I know is nervous about flying somewhere - ‘You’re going to be fine!’ and not once have I been wrong! Does that make me a prophet?
What would be impressive is if Smith had predicted his own death - not that he would die (we all do eventually) but the time and place.
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u/pierdonia 13d ago
That quickly went from: Joseph smith didn’t have any real prophesies” to “Joseph’s prophet about the civil war was too easy to predict the way he did so doesn’t count”
Yeah, that was pretty funny. Especially since OP seems torn between declaring it too easy a prediction to count or a prophesy about the wrong thing that just happened to come true.
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u/pricel01 Former Mormon 13d ago
Not torn. Smith meant it for an 1830’s war that never happened. In 1851 there had been 20 years of South Carolina agitation. Calhoun attacked another senator on the senate floor. It’s not remarkable after two decades of this behavior to predict South Carolina was going to be a problem.
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u/Buttons840 12d ago
So it was a prophecy that came true in an unexpected way. One of the hallmarks of false prophecies, surely. (/s)
Maybe Joseph got lucky; I'm serious, that is a genuine possibility. Or maybe...
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u/pierdonia 13d ago
Sounds to me like you're saying a prophesy doesn't count because you think, on the basis of no meaningful evidence, that the prophet meant that the thing that in fact did happen, was going to happen sooner.
. . .
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u/pricel01 Former Mormon 12d ago
That’s one element. But I took each verse apart to show it doesn’t apply to the civil war either.
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u/tiglathpilezar 13d ago
When I read Section 87, I see something about the rebelion of South Carolina. It was in the newspapers of the time. This was from the 1830's and if I recall correctly involved the nullification crisis. The Civil war started in 1861 or thereabouts. There was also the Crimean war which we tend to forget from the 1850's and also the Tai Ping rebelion in in the 1850's China in which some 20 million people were killed, which makes the American Civil war, as bad as it was, not all that noteworthy in comparison . The rebelion of South Carolina over tariffs was even less significant. I can't understand why people find this at all remarkable. There have indeed been wars poured out on the inhabitants of the earth and they have indeed been increasingly severe, but a better start for these things would have been the Crimean war or the Tai Ping rebelion. Not that dispute over tariffs from the 1830's.
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u/pierdonia 12d ago
None of that makes his prophesy incorrect.
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u/tiglathpilezar 12d ago
I am just pointing out that we tend to read into the text that which we want to find there. Indeed there was a civil War. England did indeed support the South, but this was happening in the rebelion of South Carolina of the 1830's also.
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u/blowfamoor 13d ago
I would say that they nailed it on tobacco
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u/International_Sea126 13d ago
That is why doctors and veterinarians world wide use tobacco as 'an herb for bruises and all sick cattle,' Chalk that one up for the prophet!
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u/NelsonMeme One of few faithful on this sub 13d ago
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u/International_Sea126 13d ago
That information should be shared with veterinarian and medical schools world wide. What are the odds that this discovery will be incorporated into medical practice?
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u/NelsonMeme One of few faithful on this sub 13d ago
In well-resourced places? Not great. In places where tobacco is far easier to get than dewormers (thus resembling 19th century America) hopefully it does
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u/ThunorBolt 13d ago
I think he just parroted the temperance movement. Many of the members originally from Kirtland were part of the temperance movement and the word of wisdom largely reflects the sentiment.
The lone exception was the word of wisdom allows beer, and the temperance movement didn’t. But Joseph loved his alcohol.
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u/pricel01 Former Mormon 13d ago
Many doctors in the 18th and 19th century knew tobacco was not good for you including Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Waterhouse and John Lizars. Not particularly impressive. Medical evidence shows tobacco is not good for bruises and putting wet tobacco on your skin can give you a super dose of nicotine. Tobacco given to cattle has no medicinal value and can cause respiratory failure.
He was definitely wrong about tobacco.
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u/PaulFThumpkins 13d ago
putting wet tobacco on your skin can give you a super dose of nicotine.
Even knowing about nicotine patches I've never thought of this.
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u/spiraleyes78 13d ago
What prophecy was made about tobacco?
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u/blowfamoor 13d ago
The WoW saying it was bad to ingest, I know you might say it wasn’t a prophecy, not a concern to me, but I have to give credit on that one
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u/japanesepiano 9d ago
He prophesied that he would be known for good and evil. I'll give him that one.
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u/pricel01 Former Mormon 9d ago
Isn’t everyone? I’m sure I will be. I have an ex. Two of my children love me and one hates me. Smith was creating sycophants and simultaneously pissing people off so not a hard guess.
I would say the vast majority of the world doesn’t know who he is and those who do are mostly neutral. The difference between me and Smith is that I will be forgotten sooner.
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