DCP Admits to "LDS Academic Embarrassment"

[_Gadianton]

Tell me, Charity: In which legit, mainstream journal can I read the work of these Book of Mormon SCHOLARS? I'd love to find out!

LOL. No kidding.

[_Calculus Crusader]

So you have to be the equivalent of the Mesoamerican Stephen Hawking to make an informed judgment on whether or not the Book of Mormon is coherent with Mesoamerica?

I'm sure that some apologists would like to encourage such a notion, but it's nonsense.

I think you should put your "expertise" in some perspective. Coe:

"Nonetheless, our knowledge of ancient Maya thought must represent only a tiny fraction of the whole picture, for of the thousands of books in which the full extent of their learning and ritual was recorded, only four have survived to modern times (as though all that posterity knew of ourselves were to be based upon three prayer books and Pilgrim's Progress)."

This is not an argument from the "absence of evidence", on my part. I quote this for some perspective. No matter how "expert" you become on the writings of the experts, you still only know a fraction.

I also notice in your bibliography that you don't cite LDS apologetic writings. How extensively have you studied them? Can you produce a bibliography of which LDS apologetic books you have read on this subject?

Give it up, bub. Mormonism is a fetid pile of **** that cannot be defended on any level.

[_Ray A]

My "position" is that the LDS apologists have failed to try and present their "Book of Mormon History" arguments in legit academic venues. The fact that they've failed to do so indicates embarrassment and shame on their part. I'm not sure why you think me citing Coe would have anything to do with that basic thesis.

It is not so much they have failed, but that it will take a lot more to convince professionals to go into the depth they need to, to even have a competent debate with Mormon scholars, without making any judgements about whether or not it's "fantasy" (beastie has only engaged a couple of these scholars, and no final conclusions should be drawn from that, and that's my beef, that "final conclusions" appear to be drawn). More important, in my opinion, than archaeology, are the internal evidences for the Book of Mormon. That has not even been touched on the surface by scholars like Coe (beastie has not even ventured there, yet). I have always argued this. I think most know that I have serious doubts about historicity, but there are very impressive internal evidences which strongly keep my interest. Whatever may be said about Mormonism itself, the Book of Mormon is not going to be easily dismissed, and broader non-Mormon scholarship is yet to go into this debate about internal evidences (some already have) at length.

I don't think the Book of Mormon will ever be shown to be "literal" history, and I'm quite sure not even Brant has argued that. And this is what he told me on FAIR. The nuances of this debate go much deeper than finding curelom bones. The "final word" is still a million miles away.

Many of the posters who mock Mormonism and the Book of Mormon on this forum have "issues", and those are emotional issues which have little to do with scholarship. It's like reading Dawkins and Davies. Some will side with Dawkins, others will side with Davies, and never the twain shall meet.

[_harmony]

More important, in my opinion, than archaeology, are the internal evidences for the Book of Mormon. That has not even been touched on the surface by scholars like Coe (beastie has not even ventured there, yet). I have always argued this.

And you have a PhD in what discipline?

It is what it is. And what it isn't is historical. Neither is the Old Testament, whose writers had an agenda that doesn't coincide with recording an accurate history. That doesn't mean it doesn't have value, just as the Old Testament has value. But it does no good to claim it is something that it isn't.

[_Ray A]

And you have a PhD in what discipline?

I don't claim to have a Ph.D. I don't have a Ph.D. I'm offering my opinion, from what I've read, just like beastie is. I don't claim to be an "expert". You offered "expert" status to beastie. I don't. Even experts have biases, pro or con. A bias or opinion does not make truth, regardless which side it comes from. Finding truth is a lifetime pursuit. Even Newton and Einstein had doubts about their theories. But if you listen to some posters here, you'd think truth comes from a Walmart meat-package with a "use by" date.

[_Calculus Crusader]

And you have a PhD in what discipline?

I don't claim to have a Ph.D. I don't have a Ph.D. I'm offering my opinion, from what I've read, just like beastie is. I don't claim to be an "expert". You offered "expert" status to beastie. I don't.

Beastie is an educated layperson. She may not be an expert in Mesoamerica, but she has the good sense to read what the experts have to say on the subject.

[_Ray A]

Beastie is an educated layperson. She may not be an expert in Mesoamerica, but she has the good sense to read what the experts have to say on the subject.

And you obviously know that I'm not an "educated layperson". Your bias is as obvious as a polar bear in Outback Australia, or a kangaroo skiing on Antarctic ice.

[_beastie]

This is not an argument from the "absence of evidence", on my part. I quote this for some perspective. No matter how "expert" you become on the writings of the experts, you still only know a fraction.

Of course I only know a fraction, I’ve never claimed otherwise. I have consistently stated that I possess adequate background knowledge on the subject to make an informed evaluation of the claim that the Book of Mormon occurred in ancient Mesoamerica. It is quite possible for a layperson to obtain that level of information, no matter how much you would like to pretend otherwise.

This is one of the sillier trends established by certain apologists at FAIR, and continued at MAD. If you have the letters PhD beside your name – even in an unrelated subject (see: Peterson), then others without the magic letters are supposed to accept their assertions without question. Nonsense.

I also notice in your bibliography that you don't cite LDS apologetic writings. How extensively have you studied them? Can you produce a bibliography of which LDS apologetic books you have read on this subject?

The only actual book I’ve read is Sorenson’s. Even you must admit his is pretty much the only one worth reading on the topic of Mesoamerica in particular. But I have read Brant’s website, as well as many of the FARM articles on the subject. I am confident that I possess an adequate background knowledge on Book of Mormon apologia. Can you point out where I have misunderstood apologia? I doubt it.

"Mormon archaeology" may be a joke here, but it's not, even to specialists like Coe. In his PBS interview, Coe said:

It almost seems you are deliberately misunderstanding Coe.

Coe does not think “Mormon Archaeology” is a joke in that archaeologists who are Mormon, and who may have gotten their start due to their desire to find evidence of the Book of Mormon, have done great archaeological work in general. This does not mean that he thinks looking for Nephites is a valuable use of time, in fact, he explicitly states otherwise.

This is how "Mormon archaeology" has been presented to non-Mormon specialists. They are aware of what Mormons are saying, and writing, and don't engage in the kind of mockery you see here. You can pick quotes from Coe which appear to legitimise your position, and I can do the same. In spite of the opinions Coe has offered, I think he has not completely shut the door. If he did, that would not be very objective. I think any reasonable person should never entirely shut the door. More from his PBS interview, which also reveals his assumptions about how Joseph Smith "wrote the Book of Mormon":

Yes, Coe is quite respectful of Mormonism and his Mormon colleagues. That does not mean that he considers it possible that the Book of Mormon is truly an ancient Mesoamerican document. If he did, he would not have explicitly told his Mormon colleagues to quit wasting their time looking for Book of Mormon evidences.

You are misusing his willingness and desire to show respect to Mormons by trying to insinuate that he is open to the Book of Mormon being an actual Mesoamerican document.

When you read the mockery of posters here towards the Book of Mormon, you get the feeling that fools are going where angels fear to tread.

Well, God can take satisfaction by damning us for all eternity. We know he does have a very sensitive ego and an unbounded need to inflict cruelty on those who wound that ego.

More from Coe:

Perhaps the most outspoken critic of Mormon archaeology has been Yale University's Michael D. Coe, one of the world's preeminent scholars of the Olmec and the Maya. The author of the best-selling book Breaking the Maya Code, Coe says there's not "a whit of evidence that the Nephites ever existed. The whole enterprise is complete rot, root and branch. It's so racist it hurts. It fits right into the nineteenth-century American idea that only a white man could have built cities and temples, that American Indians didn't have the brains or the wherewithal to create their own civilization."'

http://www.rickross.com/reference/Mormon/mormon33.html

Of course, LGT requires believing that American Indians did built their own civilization, and Nephites blended seamlessly within, but Coe is pointed out the nineteenth century origins of this idea, which absolutely arose from the idea that the great civilization being uncovered could not have been built by the ancestors of the American Indians.

More from the same article:

Yale's Michael Coe likes to talk about what he calls "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness," the tendency among Mormon theorists like Sorenson to keep the discussion trained on all sorts of extraneous subtopics (like tapirs and nuptial beds) while avoiding what is most obvious: that Joseph Smith probably meant "horse" when he wrote down the word "horse," and that all the archaeology in the world is not likely to change the fact that horses as we know them weren't around until the Spaniards arrived on American shores.
"They're always going after the nitty-gritty things," Coe told me. "Let's look at this specific hill. Let's look at that specific tree. It's exhausting to follow all these mind-numbing leads. It keeps the focus off the fact that it's all in the service of a completely phony history. Where are the languages? Where are the cities? Where are the artifacts? Look here, they'll say. Here's an elephant. Well, that's fine, but elephants were wiped out in the New World around 8,000 B.C. by hunters. There were no elephants!"
Another eminent Mormon archaeologist of Mesoamerica, Gareth Lowe, has come down hard on Sorenson's attempts to, as he puts it, "explain the unexplainable." "A lot of Mormon 'science' is just talking the loudest and the longest," says Lowe. "That's what Sorenson is about, out-talking everyone else. He's an intelligent man, but he's applied his intelligence toward questionable ends."
Sorenson is quite well aware of his pariah status among non-Mormon archaeologists as well as in certain Mormon circles, and in a way he seems to relish the intellectual combat. He and his prolific, steadfast colleagues at FARMS are the last of the true believers, still confident that hard proof of Mormonism's essential truth will eventually emerge from the ground.
"This is a very, very lonely line of work," Sorenson conceded, running a hand through his thinning hair. "Non-Mormon archaeologists and anthropologists don't want to have anything to do with us. Still, Mesoamerica is such a wide-open field, with so many complexities and conundrums. Only one one-hundredth of one percent of the material has been excavated. And so I have complete faith that over time, the answers are going to rise up out of the forest carpet .... like wild mushrooms."

For one thing, this Coe statement clearly puts to rest the canard that Coe isn’t familiar enough with current Book of Mormon apologetics to make a fair judgment. Second, it also puts to rest the canard that Mesoamerican experts, if only they were not so prejudiced against religion, could be convinced by Book of Mormon apologia. Obviously both Clark and Sorenson have done their best to persuade their colleagues that the Book of Mormon is worth considering as an ancient Mesoamerican text And equally obvious is the fact that it hasn’t worked.

More important, in my opinion, than archaeology, are the internal evidences for the Book of Mormon. That has not even been touched on the surface by scholars like Coe (beastie has not even ventured there, yet).

Usually “internal evidences” refers to the Hebraic connections within the Book of Mormon. I have repeatedly explained why that doesn’t interest me in the least. There was already so much information about the Bible and its history during Joseph Smith’ time period, and it is impossible to pinpoint what Joseph Smith would have been exposed to. Therefore, the naturalistic explanation is impossible to eliminate.
By contrast, it would be quite possible to eliminate the naturalistic explanation for a real “hit” regarding the Book of Mormon and Mesoamerica, because so little was known about it during Joseph Smith’ time. But I mean a real “hit”, not the vague list of Sorenson, which could fit just about any culture.

[_Gadianton]

Ray's move to turn the tables is a surefire win for Mormons. How is he turning the tables? For Ray, It's up to the academic world to step down and take the time to read and study the output of LDS vanity authors over the course of decades in order to have an opinion on the historical underpinnings of the Book of Mormon. Since this will never happen, no one will ever have the authority to question the historical authenticity of a book that is claimed to have been given to a farmboy by an angel. "Real scholars" haven't done their homework, and laypersons simply aren't qualified. It's a huge oversight to think that in all these years, the fact that academics have found little if any interest in the Book of Mormon (considering how widely available it is and how conspicuous the church is) means nothing for its case as real history. Scientologists have hundreds of books, entire encyclopedias written by Hubbard himself, which have also been overlooked by the mental health community. I suppose they aren't qualified to say anything about the massive amounts of research scientologists have done in auditing sessions and so on, and laypersons with the time and without the risk to their careers to explore the details of nutball religions aren't qualified.

[_Runtu]

Ray's move to turn the tables is a surefire win for Mormons. How is he turning the tables? For Ray, It's up to the academic world to step down and take the time to read and study the output of LDS vanity authors over the course of decades in order to have an opinion on the historical underpinnings of the Book of Mormon. Since this will never happen, no one will ever have the authority to question the historical authenticity of a book that is claimed to have been given to a farmboy by an angel. "Real scholars" haven't done their homework, and laypersons simply aren't qualified. It's a huge oversight to think that in all these years, the fact that academics have found little if any interest in the Book of Mormon (considering how widely available it is and how conspicuous the church is) means nothing for its case as real history. Scientologists have hundreds of books, entire encyclopedias written by Hubbard himself, which have also been overlooked by the mental health community. I suppose they aren't qualified to say anything about the massive amounts of research scientologists have done in auditing sessions and so on, and laypersons with the time and without the risk to their careers to explore the details of nutball religions aren't qualified.

That's exactly the reason DCP and Sorenson summarily dismissed Coe's statements: he hadn't seriously engaged the apologetic scholarship. It's bizarre, isn't it?