I'll be interested also to see who here are independent thinkers, and who here are Kevin's toadys.
“Kevin’s toadys?”
Here you go again invoking the titles you have come to deserve. You really are a glutton for punishment aren’t you?
I don't expect anyone to just believe what I say because I say it, and I don't know anyone who does. I present a side and I expect people to use their brains to detemine which side has the best case. This is contrary to what you and the apologists want. You want all readers to avoid the critical side at all costs because you know they would be convinced of it. Without a preexisting "testimony" nobody could believe this nonsense, and some of your ow apologists have unwittingly admitted this.
You want people to read FARMS because that is all you read. You don't know any better. Yoú live in a shell and you're ruled by a theology that tells you anything critical is of the devil. So no, you're not an independent thinker. You're an independent spinner.
Charity, you just proved that you are not an independent thinker. You have not researched any of this beyond clicking on a FARMS link and naïvely accepting whatever you read while passing it along in cut and paste format. Any moron with a mouse could do this (and many do). The fact is you have not tested any of these claims. You have never gone to a library and researched the footnotes in a Nibley or Gee apologetic. You operate on the gullible assumption that these guys are honest and really place truth before testimony spinach. All you have done is accept without question, John Gee’s apologetics, and declared his statement to be some kind of amazing evidence. Look at the footnotes. His sources are strictly LDS writers and as CK just noted, David Bokovoy admitted the possibility that it could have been referring to another place entirely. By LDS apologetic standards, the “possibility” that it could mean something else, completely undermines the original dogmatic assertion. Or is that only when other possibilities can explain a critic’s assertion?
Why didn’t you continue pasting the “evidences” found in Gee’s “review”? Like this bit of insanity:
Most of Joseph Smith's interpretations of the fac-similes have been shown to be in the right general ballpark although "there has been little or no work done on [these types of texts by Egyptologists] since the end of the last century."
The citation following the assertion adds nothing to the amazing claim. Joseph Smith’s translations of facsimile 3 in particular are so off the wall that my three year old could have been more successful describing the characters properly. She knows men don’t usually wear dresses and that being black doesn’t mean you’re a slave. Why is Gee lying to his audience? Can he name any Egyptologists outside the LDS Church (meaning, outside John Gee) who agree with this assessment that Joseph Smith was “in the ball park”?
And then we have this bit of “evidence” from the same review:
The astronomy detailed in the book of Abraham does not match the heliocentric astronomy of Joseph Smith's or our own time, but can only be a geocentric astronomy like that characteristic of the ancient Mediterranean world
His source? Another apologetic piece written by Dan Peterson and Bill Hamblin. I love how FARMS reviewers continuously cite each other as authorities to back up their own speculations. The proposition set forth by Hamblin and Peterson is highly suspect at best, but most likely erroneous given the evidence they had to circumvent in order to reach this conclusion. These guys ignore all the evidence that point in the other direction. They don’t deal with the amazing similarities between the Book of Abraham and Thos Dick’s book, which Joseph Smith owned. According to LDS scholar Klaus Hansen,
According to the Book of Abraham, the patriarch had a knowledge of the times of various planets, "until thou come nigh unto Kolob which Kolob is after the reckoning of the Lord's time; which Kolob is set nigh unto the throne of God, to govern all those planets which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest." One revolution of Kolob "was a day unto the Lord, after his manner of reckoning, it being one thousand years according to the time appointed unto that whereon thou standest. This is the reckoning of the Lord's time according to the reckoning of Kolob." God's time thus conformed perfectly to the laws of Galilean relativity and Newtonian mechanics." (
http://zarahemlacitylimits.com/essays/M ... BOA_8.html)
And then this truly embarrassing argument by Gee:
David Cameron discovered an Egyptian lion couch scene much like Facsimile 1 explicitly mentioning the name Abraham
As already noted, Ed Ashment makes mincemeat of Gee on this point, proving that the mention of Abraham on a facsimile had nothing to do with the historic figure and everything to do with the fact that it was an appropriate term to use because it began with “Abr.” (
http://www.irr.org/mit/ashment1.html)
So what’s left charity? Every “parallel” mentioned in Peterson’s 1994 ensign article has fallen through the cracks upon further critical assessment (offered, not by other LDS, but the independent thinkers on the other side of the fence). Of the five or six mentioned in Gee’s article you only provided one, because you knew the others have since bitten the dust. And now, thanks to Bokovoy’s unsuspecting admission that this term could be in reference to something entirely different, it appears the Olishem connection is just another stretch.
You see what happens here is the same thing that happens with William. They all sit down and think hard about ways the Book of Abraham could be considered ancient. They pick things out of the Book of Abraham and say to themselves, “Now if we could just find something in the ancient texts that resembles this, it would be good apologetic fodder.” And that is what we are witnessing here.
So they begin with the premise that the Book of Abraham would have the same world view as the ancients and begin drawing any kind of parallel they can. They begin with the premise that Olishem is where Abraham lived, so they read whatever evidence they can dig up, no matter how vague and subjectively interpreted it might be, to meet that conclusion.
They do not approach this objectively in the sense that they let the evidence take them where it may. This is how scholarship generally operates, but not the LDS apologetics at FARMS. These guys begin with a conclusion and then force the evidence to meet that conclusion. The same goes with Lundquist, who probably stayed up many nights pounding the lexicons trying to find some twisted means to extract an Olishem rendering from the “ancient texts.”
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein