Kishkumen wrote:Water Dog wrote:Is there no such thing as an intellectually honest critic or is it just the ones on this forum?
Water Dog, no one is interested in your snipe hunt. We are well familiar with the many ridiculous arguments and pseudo-science that have been thrown at the wall in an effort to support LDS testimonies of the Book of Mormon as an ancient text. Reading just one more book or article will be an exercise in chasing those vanishingly small returns.
Either people have a spiritual testimony that the Book of Mormon is true or they do not. Then, those who have said testimony either consider it an ancient text or they do not. I have a lot more sympathy with the latter group. Those who are ready to swallow any sliver of possibility that the book is ancient against the obvious are not going to receive an enthusiastic reception here. It has nothing to do with apostates and anti-MOrmons dismissing evidence or being unwilling to read. To the contrary, it is about practical people cutting their losses when they realize that an argument is poorly supported and obviously blinkered.
Well said. I have nothing against Water Dog, but what I see is a lot of unsupported assertions about a growing body of evidence supporting the Book of Mormon. What has John Sorensen come up with in his book that materially changes anything? Obviously, Water Dog isn't interested in suggesting anything.
My interaction with him has been quite frustrating because, after I showed rather specifically how the Book of Mormon "bullseyes" were in the current discussion in Joseph Smith's time and place, he simply waved it off by saying that other books were different from the Book of Mormon. Why does that matter? He doesn't say.
The thing that most apologists seem to forget is that we all started where they are: we wanted the Book of Mormon to be true, and we were happy to accept even tenuous evidence of its historicity. But eventually we realized that the evidence overwhelmingly points away from its antiquity. Most of us did not want that at all and only reluctantly acknowledged where the evidence leads. It hurt like hell to go through what we went through, so we are unlikely to get excited about Water Dog's vague assertions or John Sorensen's huge accumulation of evidence that might be plausible if you look at it from the right angle and give it enough fudge room.
For the record, I have not read Sorensen's latest. That said, I've read everything FAIR, FARMS, and the Interpreter crowd have to say, and there's still this giant empty space where the Nephites ought to be. And frankly, dropping Jeff Lindsay's name as a role model is not an encouraging sign.