FIRM Exults in "Firing" of Heartland Model Critics

[_Racer]

This second Watson letter story really really stinks.

Such an important letter lost? In this day and age people don't copy it? And why not ask the office of the FP for a copy?

It just never existed. Trust me. Absence of evidence is evidence that it ain't there.

So in that regard Yahoo Bot, why doesn't FAIR get off the kick of lost or missing papyri that contain the actual contents of the Book of Abraham? Trust me. Absence of evidence is evidence that it ain't there. Right?

[_TAK]

Well Mister Chung, I don't know where you've been; but some form of Mesoamerican LGT has been the dominant view in LDS scholarly circles since 1950 at the latest.

I guess those "scholarly circles" excluded your beloved Dr. Nibley..

The Way to Cumorah

It is often claimed that it is quite unthinkable that the Nephites could have met a military threat in Central America by fleeing to western New York. Such hasty pronouncements are typical of much Book of Mormon criticism, building impetuous conclusions on first impressions and never bothering to find out what the Book of Mormon says actually happened. Any schoolboy of another generation, raised on Xenophon and Caesar, would brush such objections aside with a laugh—apparently these self-appointed archaeologists have no idea of what ancient armies and nations could do and did in the way of marching and retreating. But what does Mormon tell us? That Operation Cumorah was only the culminating phase of many years of desperate shifts and devices to escape a steadily growing Lamanite pressure. The movement that ended at Cumorah was not a single project but the last of innumerable and agonizing hopes and setbacks, a bungling, piecemeal process of retreat that lasted for two generations. In the histories of the tribes many a nation, after being uprooted from its homeland, wandered thousands of miles in desperate search of escape and survival, fighting all the way, only to be eventually exterminated in some last great epic battle. We need only think of the tragic fate of the Visigoths, Burgundians, or any number of Celtic or Asiatic nations (including the Torguts in our own day) to realize that there is nothing incredible or even improbable about the last days of the Nephites. fn The Kirghiz, almost the same size as the Nephite nations, migrated just as fast and as far as the Nephites in attempting to escape their Chinese oppressors through the years—and they never knew just where they were going next.
(Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, 3rd ed. [Salt Lake City and Provo: Deseret Book Co., Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1988], 428.)