Beyond the fact that this isn't anything like the Bible Code, you mean?
So I want to talk about the Mormons
- Thread starter franklin
- Start date
Beyond the fact that this isn't anything like the Bible Code, you mean?
I wouldn't guide you anymore than you would let me.
jimmy eat jazz
Well-Known Member
It is useful to note that apologetic efforts to defend the Book of Mormon have not produced one peer-reviewed publication in a non-LDS related scholarly/scientific journal. If there were any true objectively verifiable scientific evidence (that is, compelling evidence for people without an emotional investment in Mormonism) for the civilizations described in the BofM, it would have been published . If there were any true objectively verifiable evidence that the BofM was an actual record of an ancient lost civilization, it would have been published. (And no, FARMS publications don't count.)
The type of textual analysis described here is not, we must infer, compelling evidence for people outside the LDS community who know about these things. This sort of textual analysis will produce similar findings, including chiasmus, in any number of pieces of literature if one cherry picks carefully enough.
For everything that JS got 'right' in producing the BofM, he got one or more things wrong, including the many anachronisms found therein. Given all that JS got wrong, the fact that the textual 'evidences' produced by apologists can be replicated in other pieces of literature, and the complete absence of any objectively verifiable evidence to support the existence of the two rather large, technologically advanced civilizations described by the BofM, emerging DNA evidence debunking the Hebrew genealogy of Native Americans (apologists 'new speak' to the contrary, the LDS Church has long taught that Native Americans are literal descendants of BofM peoples), one has to look at where the overall weight of evidence lies. If you conclude that it weighs in favor of LDS truth claims, then good for you I don't have any quarrel with you, but from where I sit, the evidence is pretty overwhelming in the other direction, which is one of many, many reasons why I chose to leave the Mormon Church.
The type of textual analysis described here is not, we must infer, compelling evidence for people outside the LDS community who know about these things. This sort of textual analysis will produce similar findings, including chiasmus, in any number of pieces of literature if one cherry picks carefully enough.
For everything that JS got 'right' in producing the BofM, he got one or more things wrong, including the many anachronisms found therein. Given all that JS got wrong, the fact that the textual 'evidences' produced by apologists can be replicated in other pieces of literature, and the complete absence of any objectively verifiable evidence to support the existence of the two rather large, technologically advanced civilizations described by the BofM, emerging DNA evidence debunking the Hebrew genealogy of Native Americans (apologists 'new speak' to the contrary, the LDS Church has long taught that Native Americans are literal descendants of BofM peoples), one has to look at where the overall weight of evidence lies. If you conclude that it weighs in favor of LDS truth claims, then good for you I don't have any quarrel with you, but from where I sit, the evidence is pretty overwhelming in the other direction, which is one of many, many reasons why I chose to leave the Mormon Church.
I've read this before. Where did you copy paste it from?
And why are you telling me you must infer that I must not be compelled in the least when I told everyone it compels me?
And where exactly would one go about publishing anyway? The Journal of Proving Religion?
I noticed no one addressed my DSRT post. By this we must infer they were too compelled by it and thus ignored it hoping it would go away.
CONAN
Well-Known Member
K thanks
Chad Feldheimer
Well-Known Member
https://www.currentargus.com/ci_234...-mormon-missionary-turns-himself-sexual-abuse
Wow. How did he think it was all good and he could just continue with his mission.
I have an acquaintance in SoCal who is all worked up about the offenses of adult Priests and the official efforts to keep the publicity( and apparently the correctional measures as well) to a minimum. Though a Catholic, it just makes the blood run cold.
When I was an LDS missionary, there were some problems like this as well. Adults. . .. well, 19 yr-old males. . . . . who went to various dens of sin and who cultivated gay relations with filipinos who were sometimes raised to be "gay" even then. . .. and others who were viewed as recruit projects. . . .
reprehensible actions. One of the persons I was aware of back then was some years later convicted of abusing young boys and killing them when he feared they'd tell on him . . . . . he spent some years in prison and insisted on being executed for his sins.
If you'd like to talk about this kind of sickness we could perhaps include discussions of the sins of UN officials patronizing slave sex dens in Thailand and elsewhere, or our own elected officials conduct at places like the Bohemian Grove in California. . . but let's take it to a different thread. . . . OK???
So can we move on to some discussions relevant to why decent people can be Mormons in good conscience????????
I'm pretty sure the LDS officials will excommunicate this "elder" and return him home and set up some professional counseling. . . . and it'll be a decent amount of time and a determined effort on his part if he ever gets a call to a mission again.
I'd like to respond to your comment to lend some credibility to my own ideas here. No offense intended to the others in the "conversation".
I looked at your DSRT Egyptian issue a bit.
I could load up this thread with a bunch of links to various "diffusional" ideas about pre-Columbian contacts between the Americas and other continents. . . . all the other Continents. . . .
It was a popular idea on the early American frontier from New England westward that the natives had obvious cultural and linguistic connections. . . .
There is little doubt about Viking contacts, and earlier European contacts going back to around 25000 BC as cultural artifacts have been found in the East coast areas which suggest some folks worked their way across the Atlantic following the ice age marginal ice-pack hunting seals and fishing along the way. Numerous settlements exist from Texas to the SoCal offshore islands establishing contacts with Asia prior to the last ice age receding. . . . a fishing or marine culture and inland settlement sites.
And then there was a vast culture that existed in the Midwest US hundreds of years prior to European influx called the "Mound Builders", from Oklahoma to Ohio. . . .
There are investigated and published sites within ten miles of my home dated to over ten thousand years ago, and artifacts establish a culture that carried on commerce via boats across the then mostly lake-filled Great Basin clear to the Reno area.
There is also the fact of Caucasoid "Kennewick Man" along the Columbia River.
More to the point about Book of Mormon evidences there is a body of work done by a Harvard marine biologist and epigrapher, Barry Fell. Fell was raised in New Zealand and spoke Maori, and later studied Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Egyptian in Scotland. In his studies he recognized "cognates" between Polynesian languages and the Ptolemaic Greek spoken in North Africa hundreds of years before Christ. The Egyptians had ocean-going commerce with Indonesia, where they operated mines anciently. Fell found evidences in steles and other ancient writings across the Pacific Polynesian area and even to the coasts of North and South America of writing that could be read as written in a "Reformed Egyptian" language, dating to the relevant time period.
One historical Egyptian mariner sailed east across the South Pacific to Easter Island, and back, making astronomical calculation about the circumference of the Earth, estimating 24,000 miles. . . . and indeed the Chinese had for a while great ocean-going vessels as well, sailing to Africa in a lucrative trade around 400 AD which was unfortunately considered dangerous to the established "Old Money" rulers and outlawed. . . . the ships were ordered burned and the trade stopped cold. . . .
A lot of the 'evidence" of such things has been routinely dismissed by the Oxford/Cambridge/Royal Society educational community as inconvenient to the British Sneerage interests worldwide, which demand that all other pre-Imperialist cultures be dismissed as mere aboriginal manifestations of inferiority bordering on the sociopolitical level of the chimps.
I'm reading this as your way of saying ocean faring travel bringing old world words to the new as very likely; something GVC pointed out earlier. I think it's besides the point though, since the account is of a god assisted journey.
An issue our anthropologists face is working with the data available to them. Naturally they're limited to relatively modern documents and the scant archeological evidence. I'm not so sure it's as much about ignoring as it is about lack of evidence proper, as they expect to be the case.
I personally find it hard to reject any notion of per-columbian travel based on the all the similarities of the creation myths that are found at every corner of the globe. If there wasn't contact then aliens or something handed out these identical religious roots.
As a side, babe, a while back I asked our ex-resident anthropologist about the recent controversy surrounding the Clovisites and newly discovered other peoples who would have eventually been geographically isolated from each other by ice climate iirc. They have distinct, unrelated characteristics yet geneticists can't (yet) find evidences of the separate cultures, even though skeletal evidence is apparent. Goes back beyond the ice bridge origins theory.
This stuff is up your alley so I thought I'd share.
This stuff is up your alley so I thought I'd share.
It's people taking a previously existing document and looking for patterns and observations not relevant to the meaning of the text.
Except for, in this case, they *are* relevant to the meaning of the text. Recognizing that Alma 36 is a chiastic structure, for example, completely changed the way I view that chapter. Here's a book about the poetry in the Book of Mormon, written by an English professor from UNC, https://www.amazon.com/Feasting-Word-Literary-Testimony-Mormon/dp/1573452041. Hebrew poetry structures are a significant topic of his book. I could go on with other examples from the list I posted, but I don't have the time right now. And I'm basically done with our conversation, anyway.