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Occasionally, the planets align and miracles do happen. Here is an actual post from MAD that is worth contemplating:

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/674 ... of-mormon/

This is explained easily as a book that was made up, and the authors didn't take this sort of detail into consideration. Sheesh, when you're inventing an entire history, there are so many details to consider. You can't expect them to get it all nailed down, do you? I mean, you've got steel swords, chariots, horses, and all sorts of other things they didn't nail down correctly either. No big surprise here.

I did notice that the mopologists over there almost immediately jumped to wordplay, trying to figure out if the word "father" really meaning grandfather or great-grandfather, brother meaning cousin, etc.

Of course they try to shut him up almost immediately:

"You really think I am going to be concerned about a history where men were fathers over a long span of their years....on average? Please tell me that you have something better to occupy your time in order to create doubt in those that have not felt the Holy Spirit as strongly as others."

Wow. That's the spirit of inquiry for you.

So to be LDS, you have to believe that the average generation span was 60 years for a 1000+ years (592BC-424AD), but also that in the 1830s and 1840s it was common for married men in their 30s to be screwing 14 year old girls too?

sock puppet wrote:So to be LDS, you have to believe that the average generation span was 60 years for a 1000+ years (592BC-424AD), but also that in the 1830s and 1840s it was common for married men in their 30s to be screwing 14 year old girls too?

Isn't it marvelous?

Everybody Wang Chung wrote:Occasionally, the planets align and miracles do happen. Here is an actual post from MAD that is worth contemplating:

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/674 ... of-mormon/

Thanks for the "shout out." I'm "canard78" but post (very occasionally) in some of the other Mormon forums as mackay11. Feel free to add notes to the Google spreadsheet linked in the OP.

There are several different age and date cuts that are possible with fairly specific dates. Jacob, for example, has a very narrow birth window (599-593 AD) and Mormon and Alma (1)'s birth years can be calculated.

For example, Alma's dynasty has an average age gap of 60 years between father and son.
To bring it in line with a more reasonable gap (30 years) you'd need to add in an extra 7-8 missing generations. Where are they going to come from when you've got people mentioning specifically how long they lived/reigned/preached for.

mackay11 wrote:

Everybody Wang Chung wrote:Occasionally, the planets align and miracles do happen. Here is an actual post from MAD that is worth contemplating:

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/674 ... of-mormon/

Thanks for the "shout out." I'm "canard78" but post (very occasionally) in some of the other Mormon forums as mackay11. Feel free to add notes to the Google spreadsheet linked in the OP.

There are several different age and date cuts that are possible with fairly specific dates. Jacob, for example, has a very narrow birth window (599-593 AD) and Mormon and Alma (1)'s birth years can be calculated.

For example, Alma's dynasty has an average age gap of 60 years between father and son.
To bring it in line with a more reasonable gap (30 years) you'd need to add in an extra 7-8 missing generations. Where are they going to come from when you've got people mentioning specifically how long they lived/reigned/preached for.

Math is anti-Mormon, I guess.

Evangelicals believe that giants roamed the earth prior to the Flood, which were the offspring of angels and mortal women (based on certain Old Testament verses). Mormons don't believe that, of course, but they do accept that Mathuselah died when he was almost a thousand years old, and many other Old Testament patriarchs lived to outlandishly old ages.

Not that this bears directly on the Book of Mormon time frames, however it does invite a sort of "magical thinking" response, where the assumption may simply be that these guys were blessed by God with unusually durable fertility.

Also, the generation gap is measured off the men, whose sperm can remain capable of fertilizing an egg typically much longer than a woman is capable of ovulating viable eggs. How do we know these superheroes of ancient American Mormonism weren't stealing a march on Brigham Young and marrying young girls right on up into their 60s and 70s? Jacob's railing against polygamy doesn't preclude this, as seen by the Mormon D&C's containing a verse specifically decrying polygamy at the same time Mormon leaders were secretly practicing it.

Also, Jacob's anti-polygamy thing contains the specific caveat that God might command polygamy in order to raise up seed. Who better to raise up all this seed than the ancient American Mormon elite?

In fact, this unusually durable fertility could be invoked to defend against another criticism of the Book of Mormon, that being the unrealistic population growth rate.