Doctor Scratch wrote:Huh. That's real interesting, Prof. J. I wonder if William Tyndale was actually an alien? Maybe the "spirit committee" that translated the Book of Mormon for Joseph Smith was actually a committee of UFOs. The mind reels at the possibilities....
Darth J wrote:This is how the Jenga blocks are stacked: Warren Aston is the principal proponent of the site that Mopologists assert to be the Nahom mentioned in the Book of Mormon. For a substantial fee, Aston takes credulous Mormons on a tour of places he asserts to be the actual location of Lehi's journey. Aston is also very prominent in the UFO community. He has written extensively about the idea that space aliens are visiting our planet, disguised as humans.
Due to the influence of Mopologetics, Warren Aston's credibility has become connected to LDS truth claims. Official LDS curricula and magazines, BYU Studies, and essentially every Mopologist outlet tout Warren Aston's unsupported speculation about the NHM altars as clear evidence that the Book of Mormon narrative really happened.
If Aston's credibility is challenged, by implication you are challenging the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon and therefore Mormonism altogether. QED: the response of believing Mormons every time anyone on the internet notices that Aston is a crank. Granted that Ldsfaqs has a couple of, umm, issues, notice how quickly he reacted to my simply demonstrating that faith-promoting sources invariably omit any reference to Aston's ufology, even though the amount of work he has done in that arena far surpasses what he has done with "Book of Mormon archaeology" (scare quotes intentional).
Obviously, defenders of the faith have a modicum of self-awareness in realizing that it looks bad to say Mormon apologetics and ufology in the same breath, since the association is less than flattering. The thing is, there's no appreciable difference in either methodology or substance between ufology and Book of Mormon apologetics (cf. ancient aliens), other than "the Book of Mormon is special to me."
To receive the verdict of "anti-Mormon" (best heard in your head as a screech in Honey Lovejoy's voice), you need only do any of the following:
* Point out Brother Aston's extensive career in the UFO community
* Point out that the above is decidedly left out of Brother Aston's credentials in faith-promoting sources
* Point out that Brother Aston has a vested financial interest in touting certain Middle Eastern places as actual Book of Mormon historical sites.
And that's it. The faithful will fill in the blanks, and the implications write themselves.
Darth J wrote:If ufology is a perfectly legitimate undertaking, then I have to ask myself why faith-promoting sources invariably leave that off Brother Aston's biography.
Doctor Scratch wrote:Huh. That's real interesting, Prof. J. I wonder if William Tyndale was actually an alien? Maybe the "spirit committee" that translated the Book of Mormon for Joseph Smith was actually a committee of UFOs. The mind reels at the possibilities....
Gadianton wrote:Doctor Scratch wrote:Huh. That's real interesting, Prof. J. I wonder if William Tyndale was actually an alien? Maybe the "spirit committee" that translated the Book of Mormon for Joseph Smith was actually a committee of UFOs. The mind reels at the possibilities....
Or even that the Book of Mormon happened on another planet.
Gadianton wrote:Doctor Scratch wrote:Huh. That's real interesting, Prof. J. I wonder if William Tyndale was actually an alien? Maybe the "spirit committee" that translated the Book of Mormon for Joseph Smith was actually a committee of UFOs. The mind reels at the possibilities....
Or even that the Book of Mormon happened on another planet.
Gadianton wrote:Doctor Scratch wrote:Huh. That's real interesting, Prof. J. I wonder if William Tyndale was actually an alien? Maybe the "spirit committee" that translated the Book of Mormon for Joseph Smith was actually a committee of UFOs. The mind reels at the possibilities....
Or even that the Book of Mormon happened on another planet.
doctor Scratch wrote:Absolutely. Remember BY's Lunar Quakers? Or Zelph, the White Lamanite? I don't think we're pushing too hard agains the realm of possibility, even, to suggest that the Tyndale Committee could have been interstellar ghosts. I wonder, Dean Robbers--have you seen the film Event Horizon, where Hell (or "Outer Darkness"?) is shown to exist in outer space? I'm also reminded of the fact that Battlestar Galactica shares a number of parallels with LDS narratives....
In any case, yes: the notion of the Book of Mormon taking place on another planet might be one of the apologists' best options. It would also dovetail quite neatly with a certain prominent Mopologist's fascination with cosmology.
Although I see from Doctor Scratch's comment that the Moon Quaker idea came from Brigham Young, not Joseph Smith? I was not aware of that.Who's to say Lehi's journey didn't take place in a spaceship!? It would take care of that pesky archeological evidence problem.
Mormon alien stories have apparently come a long way since Joseph Smith's Quakers on the moon.
Lemmie wrote:Although I see from Doctor Scratch's comment that the Moon Quaker idea came from Brigham Young, not Joseph Smith? I was not aware of that.
Re: the movie, Event Horizon, interesting idea that it represented Outer Darkness, that does fit in with the Kolob concept, I suppose, given that it was a wormhole hop away. That was an interesting SciFi movie that I always felt got unnecessarily dark pretty quickly; as a religious allegory, however, it makes much more sense.