And the Testing one, two three, testing one, two one two three this is radio free Mormon on the air

Broadcasting behind enemy lines tonight's episode

Magic and the book of Mormon. Now when I talk about magic as I'm going to be using it tonight and as I use it in the title to tonight's podcast, I'm not talking about folk magic or supernatural magic or even occult magic the kinds of magic

that D Michael Quinn writes about in his famous book Early Mormonism and the magic world view.

No I'm going to use the term magic as it is used by magicians,

those who perform tricks for entertainment purposes,

because I was a magician since the age of 10 and I don't do a lot of magic anymore but I guess once a magician always a magician it's kind of like being a bishop once a bishop always a bishop and I learned a great deal about magic when I was a kid and not only how to do

magic tricks but also a lot of the theory behind magic and the principles of magic and what it is you

need to do to effectively fool an audience to trick them to make

them think they're seeing one thing which is magical when actually what is happening is

very normal very ordinary very unmagical.

That's the whole point of doing magic.

As I say, I started my interest in magic when I was 10 years old

and I got a book through scholastic books in fourth grade called Spooky Magic.

There were a number of tricks in there.

I loved them, I learned them, I astonished my friends and family, and I continued my interest

in magic in getting more books after that, checking books out of the library, learning additional tricks, and as I say, learning more about the theory behind Magic as I went along.

I segued somewhat out of my interest in magic around 1976 when I started studying dance,

but magic was never really that far from me. I attempted to do a few tricks when I was in Japan on my mission, a few bits of street magic

with the idea that maybe that would get people more interested in hearing our message

than in approaching them and saying, would you like to hear a Tokubetsu

Nameseji about Joseph Smith?

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