KEP: A Quasi-Forensic, non-theory-ladened, Analysis

[_harmony]

Lots of people claim religious revelation. Are they all frauds or are they just sincere people who truly believe what their mind is telling them?

Does it matter what they believe, if it isn't true?

[_sethpayne]

Lots of people claim religious revelation. Are they all frauds or are they just sincere people who truly believe what their mind is telling them?

Does it matter what they believe, if it isn't true?

Well no, of course not. But we weren't talking about truth. We were talking about what it means to be a fraud.

[_harmony]

Well no, of course not. But we weren't talking about truth. We were talking about what it means to be a fraud.

So what does that make Joseph?

[_sethpayne]

Well no, of course not. But we weren't talking about truth. We were talking about what it means to be a fraud.

So what does that make Joseph?

I suppose he*could* have been a fraud but I think it is more plausible that he truly believed what he taught.

[_harmony]

I suppose he*could* have been a fraud but I think it is more plausible that he truly believed what he taught.

So... he believed he saw angels, flaming swords, treasure that moved around under ground, gold plates?

[_sethpayne]

I suppose he*could* have been a fraud but I think it is more plausible that he truly believed what he taught.

So... he believed he saw angels, flaming swords, treasure that moved around under ground, gold plates?

I think so, yes.

[_harmony]

I think so, yes.

There's a word for that.

[_sethpayne]

I think so, yes.

There's a word for that.

Just because Joseph Smith was sincere doesn't have anything to do with the truthfulness of his claims.

Lot's of people sincerely believe they have been abducted and probed. This doesn't make it true and I'm certainly not making that claim.

But, of course, I'm unsure two things here. One, do we disagree and two, what is the nature of the disagreement?

[_CaliforniaKid]

Joseph clearly had something under a sheet he was passing off as gold plates. The conclusion that he engaged in some measure of fraud is difficult to avoid. However, he could have believed some of his claims, certainly. Or come to believe them, over time.

[_Kevin Graham]

Ignoring for the moment the banal and dogmatic well-poisoning and false conclusion jumped to in relation Will's FAIR presentation, let's take a look at the English explanations in the EA, starting with Part 1, the First Degree.

Yes, you would have no choice but to ignore it, because you have no way to defend Will's lies. Calling mine a false conclusion is easy for someone who doesn't have the balls to make the argument. What "false conclusion"? Mine is based strictly on the evidence that proves Will Schryver is a deceptive and intellectual fraud. Not that I really needed new evidence, since his history is fraught with such examples. But in this instance Will devised a theory that relied heavily on the notion that William Phelps was responsible for the pure language, and that explains his choice of phrasing above. He lied as a way to fabricate evidence, which is his modus operandi. He said it was Phelps who termed this the "pure language" and that Joseph Smith and others got interested afterward because Phelp's fanaticism about teh subject made it contaigious. I easily disproved this by pointing to its origin in Mormon thought. And guess what, it wasn't Phelps.

The first thing that strikes me as odd is the very existence of the explanations--and this in a document that is titled as an "Alphabet". Perhaps the word "Alphabet" meant something different in 1835 than it does today, but what I would expect from an alphabet would be, well, an alphabetical list of the english letters corresponding with Egyptian characters, rather than explanations.

You're on another desperate fishing expedition. We already know that Joseph Smith believed one character in Egyptian translated to many words in English, so expecting a "letter for letter" translation, is warrantless. Especially when you consider that these kinds of "tit for tat" letter for letter translations don't exist for many languages. For example, how would you translate the three Russian letters Щ, Ъ, Ы to English equivalents, using letters alone? Or how would you translate the Arabic letter ب‎ to an English letter? Or the Hebrew letters, א or ע? Or the Finnish letters Š and Ä? The best we can do is explain their phonetic equivalents. And according to Richard Bushman,

Joseph was instructed 'to take off a facsimile of the characters composing the alphabet which were called reformed egyptian Alphabetically and send them to all the learned men that he could find and ask them for the translation of the same.' Lucy implied that once Joseph had a translation of all the basic characters he could carry on by himself -- thus the need to copy a great number of characters

So he referred to these "characters" as part of the Egyptian "alphabet," probably for lack of a better term. And according to David Whitmer Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from plates containing reformed Egyptian, and "Frequently one character would make two lines of manuscript, while others made but a word or two words." And this is generally how Egyptian was understood in the early 19th century, thanks to the bad scholarship of Athanasius Kirscher.

From what I can tell, it appears that at least Phelps started out his EA that way (associating English alphabet with the characters), but stopped after the second or third letter, while Joseph didn't include the letters at all (which I find instructive--Phelps evidently took it upon himself to assign letters that Joseph had not, thereby evincing at least some level of independent action on Phelps' part).

Uh, you're merely mimicking Will's video presentation step by step, you didn't discover these things via your own independent research. Yes, the Phelps manuscript included a column for alphabet letters, but this is only on the first page. For the first three characters the alphabet letters were not given as an "x" was put in instead. Phelps probably assumed there would be, but then quickly realized this was wrong-headed thinking when Joseph Smith refused to dictate any for him to transcribe. The first character was pronounced "ah" but he is clearly the only person who might have thought that character would literally translated to "A." It is simply idiotic to think there would be a "letter for letter" translation in all languages. Some languages have more letters than others and Joseph Smith clearly believed the Egyptian characters translated into English phrases and even long sentences.

It made no sense to provide a column for an English alphabet letter. The only thing this anomaly proves is that Phelps was wrong to think that, but he was corrected by Joseph Smith, since he quickly refrained from it and failed to provide an alphabet column for all the other pages. This textual anomaly doesn't represent an "A ha!" moment for Will's apologetic, to leap to ludicrous conclusions of Phleps being a mastermind behind the project. If anything, it shows he was a follower, not a leader (no one else followed his initial mistake did they?). You're just getting caught up into Will's deceptive, rhetoric-based persuasion methods, which usually amounts to misrepresenting the documents. And I know he's coaching you via email as we speak, because he hasn't the gonads to go toe to toe with me or anyone else for that matter.

So, the existence of the explanations draw into question the use, or at least the meaning, of the word "Alphabet", in the title.

No they don't, for the reasons explained above. You're just doing Will's bidding in his absence, taking the fall for his stupidity. Dumb meets dumber.

The second thing that struck me was that the explations in Part 1 appear to be all (with one or two possible exceptions) descriptions of persons, places, or things. It is a list of nouns. Third, the list of nouns don't seem drawn indiscriminately from across the full gamut of language, but appear to be restricted to, as Will pointed out in his FAIR presentation, a very narrow subject matter.

The list of English explanations was limited in and of itself. So naturally the words therein will be relatively "narrow." So what? A character literally meant certain nouns and pronouns, but the actual "translation" process used these as a primer to fill in more context, based on all sorts of convoluted and nonsensical linguistic concepts, such as "degrees."

For the most part, the list of nouns in Part 1, the First Degree, are in reference to things that are, in various respects, first: first in power, rank, creation/time.

How does any of this change the fact that Will has lived up to his reputation as a liar and has again lied and misrepresented these documents? You're now going on another fishing expedition because you cannot address the refutations to Will's stupidity. I guess you'll have to wait to see how he responds in the next email.

Something to consider

Only if you're dead set on denying logic and probability. For the apologist, there will always be something new to consider no matter how inconsequential it is to the truth. It is only necessary to salvage bad apologetics and theological systems. For the apologist, the debate will never end, even after it has officially ended. You guys will keep pumping out dumb arguments in your little echo chamber where your peers are fellow back-slapping apologist/scholars, trying to argue how technically it is still possible the world is flat, the moon is made of cheese, people live in the sun, and that the KEP represent a failed attempt to encode the Book of Abraham. Anything that can be used to explain away all the evidence that strongly suggests Joseph Smith didn't have a fuqing clue and could not translate ancient documents, which is the basis of the entire Mormon Church.