KEP Dictation Argument: The Evidence

[_Darth J]

Brother Englund:

I'm sorry that I keep interrupting your cheerleading with questions.

I guess it's a lost cause for you to consider whether the EAG and so on may not have been used to compose the Book of Abraham, but rather whether they were used to give the appearance of knowing how to translate. I say that since you only argue that these KEP documents could not have been intelligibly used to create the Book of Abraham, and do not anywhere address the possibility that these documents may have been props and/or like the patter a magician does about the mystic arts of the Orient before sawing a woman in half.

Since the above seems to be a lost cause for you, maybe you could briefly pause from discussing all this interesting trivia about ciphers that Google has found for you and tell us about that historical evidence that Joseph Smith or any of his contemporaries believed or claimed that they were creating a cipher, or used anything from the KEP to encipher anything. I keep asking this and you never respond, but I'm sure that's merely oversight rather than a tacit admission that no such evidence exists.

[Guest]

Brother Englund has already conceded that despite his claiming that Schryver's unicorn hunt will help those who fell from the faith see the error of their ways, he cannot name a single person who disbelieves the truth claims of the LDS Chuch because of any particular theory about the Kirtland Egyptian Papers.

Precious Darth J,

Are you suggesting that all the time and energy that has been devoted to this topic over the last 40 years by the critics, has had absolutely no delitarious affect whatsoever on the faith of any members or investigators?

Are you saying that the countless hours that were spent by the Tanners, Micheal Marquardt, Clark, Howard, Metcalfe, Graham, Osborne, Smith, and others, has all been for not in terms of criticisms against the Church and its scriptures?

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

Here's what you said earlier in this thread:

All that may change is the way some people have mistakenly viewed the KEP, and to the extent that their mistaken view has negatively impacted their faith in the restored gospel, maybe their viewing the KEP correctly will remove a perceived stumbling block to their possibly returning to and growing in faith.

When I asked you to name one person to whom this would apply, you admitted that you could not. You are now admitting this a second time.

None of the above things have had any impact whatsoever on my beliefs about the Church, and I am not aware of anyone else whose lack of faith in the Church's truth claims is based on some theory about the KEP, either.

The disaster that is the Book of Abraham causes people to doubt the Church because the historical record is quite unambiguous that Joseph Smith claimed to be translating what was written on the papyrus he got from Michael Chandler, and because the content of the book is a mishmash of Masonic legends, Genesis, 19th century ideas about astronomy, Josephus, etc.

Your hero is also on record as saying that the facsimiles should not be there and he would not be surprised to see them removed. This means that the current Church leadership cannot discern true scripture from Joseph Smith's speculation----the "robbing Peter to pay Paul" school of apologetics.

A person does not need any familiarity with the Kirtland Egyptian Papers to disbelieve what the Book of Abraham claims to be. I was perfectly happy as a believer with the theory that the KEP represented an attempt to reverse engineer the papyrus, and I still felt that theory may be acceptable when I lost my faith in the Church. The KEP, and any theory about them, had absolutely no relationship to either my faith or loss of faith in the LDS Church.

The answer to your question is no. I cannot demonstrate any impact of all the above people's theories about the KEP on people disbelieving the LDS Church, and you have admitted that you cannot, either. Having conceded this, you are now falling back to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

This is also why the "even if you're right, so what" question I have repeatedly asked remains unanswered. The Church's reluctance to share the KEP with the public says more about the Church than any particular theory about the KEP. In addition, whatever theory one prefers, the KEP are weird, and there is nothing prophetic or Godly in their very existence. As I have said before on this board, if Schryver is right about his theories, then Joseph Smith has never looked less than a prophet.

[_wenglund]

Dear Nomad and Wade:

I am certainly glad that Fratello Schryver has leaked some new tidbit about his theories to you that have not had a chance to be scrutinized by someone other than a fawning cheerleader...

Kind and thoughtful Darth J,

This comes as news to me. Since you presume to know bettter than me what supposedly was leaked to me, could you please let me know what that leak was? Would you be so kind as to share what you supposedly garnered through you legendary mind-reading skills so that I can be as up to date on things as you are?.

As for your text-critical questions, let me give you essentially the same answer I gave the last time you asked me this: Since I am not trained nor an expert in textual criticism, I am not in a position to say, but will leave that to those who are in a position.

However, given your renown mind-reading skills and unrivaled acuman for psyco-analysis, I am surprised that you feign to ask. Surely you already know what the textual experts think about the matter, if not even better than they do about what they supposedly think on the matter. So, don't be coe. Tell us all what you have already figured.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[_Nomad]

Dear Nomad and Wade:

I am certainly glad that Fratello Schryver has leaked some new tidbit about his theories to you that have not had a chance to be scrutinized by someone other than a fawning cheerleader, so that you can play your passive-aggressive games and tell everyone who isn't dazzled by Schryver's theories how he or she is just too stupid to understand it.

If you have a moment out of your trumpeting the false dichotomy that if Metcalfe or Kevin Graham are wrong then Schryver must be right, as well as your D-Day-like attack on this non-existent army of straw men who depend on the former two to justify their lack of faith in the LDS Chruch, I wonder if you could answer a question that I asked some time ago and has yet to be addressed:

I'm watching the video for the third time, and there are many assumptions whose basis is not explained.

In the "substantial words study," I enjoyed the tautology that "substantial words" are words that convey "substantial meaning."

Then, around 11:50, we get this:

"Unique" words are asserted to be:
blood
commandments
creation
eternity
follower
glory
government
minister
ordained

"Generic" words are asserted to be:
after
before
end
father
first
God
good
heaven
land

Who decided on this classification (besides Schryver, I mean)? Why is "God" generic? Why is "heaven" generic? Why is "glory" unique? Why are any of the asserted "unique" words unique? There is nothing in the video that suggests that the distinction between "unique" and "generic" is anything but arbitrary.

As Fratello Schryver's emissaries, and seeing as how you both understand his theories in ways that everyone else's Cro-Magnon level intellect could not hope to grasp, perhaps one or both of you can answer this question.

Why would Joseph Smith have directed the production of a “prop” to pretend to translate the Book of Abraham when that translation had alredy occurred before the “prop” was created?

You’re not making any sense, which is why I am so certain that no one here really understands what Schryver is arguing. Instead, you all just make up things that you want to talk about. Things that you imagine are relevant, but which aren’t. For example, the classification of “unique” or “generic” words. As I understand it, the “unique” words were weighted more heavily in Schryver’s study. And since he wanted to be as conservative as possible, he was very strict about which words were categorized as “unique” as opposed to “generic”. But I don’t think you’ve really thought this through very well, since if he had made more words “unique” than he did, then the results would have been more pronounced than they already were that the first three chapters of the Book of Abraham were translated before the EAG was produced. I’ve seen a good portion of the detailed analysis behind the substantial word study (about 100 pages or so). My impression was that it was not only very rigorous, but that he went out of his way to be conservative in his classifications. I thought he could have weighted some of the words even more than he did so that the results would have been more pronounced than they were. Even so, the results were very persuasive that the words come from Abr. 1 – 3, and not from the other chapters (in Abraham and Genesis) that he included in the study.

[_wenglund]

When I asked you to name one person to whom this would apply, you admitted that you could not. You are now admitting this a second time....

I am quite aware of what I said. And, given your prodigious mind-reading skills, it is certain that you are aware of this also.

However, if you would kindly put down, for a moment, your x-ray goggles and telepathy tinfoil hat and look very carefully and thoughtfully at the questions I asked, you just might discover that I wasn't asking you about what I thought on the matter, but rather what YOU thought. Do you understand the important distinction?

Once you finally gain cognition, I would very much appreciate a direct answer to my questions.

If it helps you with your comprehension in correctly grasping what I am getting at, feel free to replace in my questions the phrase "are you suggesting" with "do you believe".

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[_Darth J]

Dear Nomad and Wade:

I am certainly glad that Fratello Schryver has leaked some new tidbit about his theories to you that have not had a chance to be scrutinized by someone other than a fawning cheerleader...

Kind and thoughtful Darth J,

This comes as news to me. Since you presume to know bettter than me what supposedly was leaked to me, could you please let me know what that leak was? Would you be so kind as to share what you supposedly garnered through you legendary mind-reading skills so that I can be as up to date on things as you are?.

I am basing this on experience. The only time you want to engage anyone is when you think you have something. When you don't, then everything needs to be "put on the shelf." You were one of those who got a sneak preview of Schrver's FAIR presentation. You suddenly showed up right before Schryver's slideshow presentation that turned him into an apologist rock star (according to himself) to engage in your passive-aggressive mutant second-cousin of the Socratic method, then went away for a while when people were not as impressed as they were supposed to be. Now you are back doing the same thing, right around the time when Schryver has been dropping hints about being published, giving more non-answers and challenging people to explain a theory that you won't articulate, punctuated by "stay tuned" and "more to come."

As for your text-critical questions, let me give you essentially the same answer I gave the last time you asked me this: Since I am not trained nor an expert in textual criticism, I am not in a position to say, but will leave that to those who are in a position.

In other words:

However, given your renown mind-reading skills and unrivaled acuman for psyco-analysis, I am surprised that you feign to ask. Surely you already know what the textual experts think about the matter, if not even better than they do about what they supposedly think on the matter. So, don't be coe. Tell us all what you have already figured.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

I guess you meant "coy." I am not yet persuaded by any particular theory about the KEP, and I am very open to the possibility that all of these theories are wrong. However, that stance does not fit within your cosmological battleground of the righteous and faithful (Fratello Schryver has told everyone that he has had his calling and election made sure, after all) proving that the KEP is some kind of bizarre cipher project for which no historical evidence exists, while Satan's minions rely on some kind of translation key idea of the KEP to rationalize away their belief in "the restored gospel." Since "I don't really know and it ultimately makes no difference" is inconsistent with this cosmological battleground in which you envision yourself, it naturally follows that you demand I come up with my own hypothesis about something in which I am not particularly interested.

That is not to say I have no interest whatsoever in this newest KEP circus. I am interested in the insights that all of this is providing about the Mormon apologetics community.

[_wenglund]

May I once again respectfully ask if anyone has looked carefully and found one of the ciphered messages in this image?:



I would prefer not to see a clever illustration go entirely to waste.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[_wenglund]

I am basing this on experience. The only time you want to engage anyone is when you think you have something. When you don't, then everything needs to be "put on the shelf." You were one of those who got a sneak preview of Schrver's FAIR presentation. You suddenly showed up right before Schryver's slideshow presentation that turned him into an apologist rock star (according to himself) to engage in your passive-aggressive mutant second-cousin of the Socratic method, then went away for a while when people were not as impressed as they were supposed to be. Now you are back doing the same thing, right around the time when Schryver has been dropping hints about being published, giving more non-answers and challenging people to explain a theory that you won't articulate, punctuated by "stay tuned" and "more to come."

Okay. Now that you have gone to great lengths beating around the bush. Would you mind giving a direct answer to my question? Please inform me of what supposedly has recently been "leaked" to me by Will. I am dying to find out.

I guess you meant "coy." I am not yet persuaded by any particular theory about the KEP, and I am very open to the possibility that all of these theories are wrong. However, that stance does not fit within your cosmological battleground of the righteous and faithful (Fratello Schryver has told everyone that he has had his calling and election made sure, after all) proving that the KEP is some kind of bizarre cipher project for which no historical evidence exists, while Satan's minions rely on some kind of translation key idea of the KEP to rationalize away their belief in "the restored gospel." Since "I don't really know and it ultimately makes no difference" is inconsistent with this cosmological battleground in which you envision yourself, it naturally follows that you demand I come up with my own hypothesis about something in which I am not particularly interested.

That is not to say I have no interest whatsoever in this newest KEP circus. I am interested in the insights that all of this is providing about the Mormon apologetics community.

While I appreciate you unloading your sentiments about the whole KEP issue, you somehow failed to directly respond to my the specific request (which was in response to your specific textual critical questions). Care to give it another try?

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[_Darth J]

Why would Joseph Smith have directed the production of a “prop” to pretend to translate the Book of Abraham when that translation had alredy occurred before the “prop” was created?

Now it's back to the circular reasoning. Let's just assume that the "dictation manuscripts" are really copies of a parent Q document. That does not explain where that parent "Book of Abraham translation" came from, so this theory does not solve the ultimate problem; it just adds an extra step.

The reason he may have created this prop is to prove that he could read all these ancient, mysterious writings---he translated the papyrus by the power of God, and now he's going to show that he knows all these mysteries about the language of the ancients. An after-the-fact prop is no less magician's patter than before-the-fact talk about the mystical arts of the Orient. I know that Schryver and his emissaries, like you, want to divorce history from your cipher mania, but unfortunately Michael Chandler signed a document indicating that Joseph Smith could read the Egyptian characters at the time Joseph Smith first obtained the papyri, and if you're an inspired hallucination fan (though you prefer to call it "catalyst"), the papyri are still what set this "translation" in motion.

And you also are not talking about who Joseph Smith's audience was: largely unschooled frontier people who believed that a magic rock in a hat was a perfectly acceptable explanation for the Book of Mormon, and who had a very different worldview than any of us.

I'm not saying this is my theory; I'm wondering why nobody seems to be considering this. It's at least as likely as creating the cipher idea out of whole cloth. By the way, why isn't Hauglid as impressed as you are? I guess he must be just another moron who doesn't know anything.

You’re not making any sense, which is why I am so certain that no one here really understands what Schryver is arguing. Instead, you all just make up things that you want to talk about. Things that you imagine are relevant, but which aren’t.

Well, at least we can count on apologists not making up irrelevant things that they want to talk about.

Speaking of making things up, have you found that historical evidence about Joseph Smith or his companions thinking they were creating a cipher yet, or an example of them attempting to use this mess to encipher anything?

For example, the classification of “unique” or “generic” words. As I understand it, the “unique” words were weighted more heavily in Schryver’s study. And since he wanted to be as conservative as possible, he was very strict about which words were categorized as “unique” as opposed to “generic”. But I don’t think you’ve really thought this through very well, since if he had made more words “unique” than he did, then the results would have been more pronounced than they already were that the first three chapters of the Book of Abraham were translated before the EAG was produced. I’ve seen a good portion of the detailed analysis behind the substantial word study (about 100 pages or so). My impression was that it was not only very rigorous, but that he went out of his way to be conservative in his classifications. I thought he could have weighted some of the words even more than he did so that the results would have been more pronounced than they were. Even so, the results were very persuasive that the words come from Abr. 1 – 3, and not from the other chapters (in Abraham and Genesis) that he included in the study.

So, Nomad does not know how Schryver decided which words were "unique" and which words were "generic," nor which words Joseph Smith would have considered to be "unique" and which would have been "generic." Does anyone else want to try?

Nomad, if the "unique" vs. "generic" isn't relevant, then why did Schryver talk about it at all, and why did he use it to introduce his methodology?

[_Darth J]

I am basing this on experience. The only time you want to engage anyone is when you think you have something. When you don't, then everything needs to be "put on the shelf." You were one of those who got a sneak preview of Schrver's FAIR presentation. You suddenly showed up right before Schryver's slideshow presentation that turned him into an apologist rock star (according to himself) to engage in your passive-aggressive mutant second-cousin of the Socratic method, then went away for a while when people were not as impressed as they were supposed to be. Now you are back doing the same thing, right around the time when Schryver has been dropping hints about being published, giving more non-answers and challenging people to explain a theory that you won't articulate, punctuated by "stay tuned" and "more to come."

Okay. Now that you have gone to great lengths beating around the bush. Would you mind giving a direct answer to my question? Please inform me of what supposedly has recently been "leaked" to me by Will. I am dying to find out.

I don't know, because you never give a straight answer to anything. It is always "why do you assume," "you're trying to read my mind," "stay tuned," etc. Your past behavior speaks for itself. The best part of this whole thing is your hypocritical figurative lip service to "the restored gospel" and "does this bring us closer to Christ" while calling everyone else stupid, as you have repeatedly during this thread (such as where you invited me to gain cognition). Neither you nor your hero care at all what picture you paint about what defenders of the faith are like, which is far more important than the nuances of some obscure piece of early Mormon trivia.

I guess you meant "coy." I am not yet persuaded by any particular theory about the KEP, and I am very open to the possibility that all of these theories are wrong. However, that stance does not fit within your cosmological battleground of the righteous and faithful (Fratello Schryver has told everyone that he has had his calling and election made sure, after all) proving that the KEP is some kind of bizarre cipher project for which no historical evidence exists, while Satan's minions rely on some kind of translation key idea of the KEP to rationalize away their belief in "the restored gospel." Since "I don't really know and it ultimately makes no difference" is inconsistent with this cosmological battleground in which you envision yourself, it naturally follows that you demand I come up with my own hypothesis about something in which I am not particularly interested.

That is not to say I have no interest whatsoever in this newest KEP circus. I am interested in the insights that all of this is providing about the Mormon apologetics community.

While I appreciate you unloading your sentiments about the whole KEP issue, you somehow failed to directly respond to my the specific request (which was in response to your specific textual critical questions). Care to give it another try?

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

See, you don't want to address my sentiments about the whole KEP issue because you don't have an answer. But also, Wade, you're not qualified to respond to textual criticism questions. Remember?

As for your text-critical questions, let me give you essentially the same answer I gave the last time you asked me this: Since I am not trained nor an expert in textual criticism, I am not in a position to say, but will leave that to those who are in a position.

Now, you seem to be saying that no one even knows or understands what the arguments are. If you are not qualified to opine on textual criticism, then how are you in a position to say that Schryver is right?

And if no one knows what alternative theories have been, then what exactly was buried in Mount Doom under the continental plates and all that?