Just read an interesting post by JASH over at the Great and Specious Board.
JASH wrote:Missouri was in the old world when all the land was together. Afterward, the land was divided. (Gen 10: 25)
In the Bible quote, it says the land was divided in the time of Peleg, which was about four generations after Noah. The Biblical chronology online at LDS.org has the death of Adam at about 4000 BCE, so the Peleg division would have been between 4000 to 3000 BCE.
The Lehi Expedition to the Yucatan started around 600 BCE.
Historical geologists tell us that Laurasia broke up into Laurentia (which was later formed into North America) and Eurasia (minus the Indian subcontinent) around 55 million years ago.
JASH's claim is an impossibility in terms of geological science.
moksha wrote:Just read an interesting post by JASH over at the Great and Specious Board.
JASH wrote:Missouri was in the old world when all the land was together. Afterward, the land was divided. (Gen 10: 25)
In the Bible quote, it says the land was divided in the time of Peleg, which was about four generations after Noah. The Biblical chronology online at LDS.org has the death of Adam at about 4000 BCE, so the Peleg division would have been between 4000 to 3000 BCE.
The Lehi Expedition to the Yucatan started around 600 BCE.
Historical geologists tell us that Laurasia broke up into Laurentia (which was later formed into North America) and Eurasia (minus the Indian subcontinent) around 55 million years ago.
JASH's claim is an impossibility in terms of geological science.
God is in charge of the sciences so as to make things appear to have happened as they did not. Joktan, his brother, living presumably at the same time, missed it the great upheaval because he was yet to be born.
or
the earth being divided is a reference to something else entirely, like some earthquake or something--localized that got carried in lore into something more than it ever was.
Or
it's really just mythical stuff. God told the ancients that the earth had changed in time, with lands being divided, and by the time Gen is was written they had already decided in the way of mythical story telling that it happened in the day of some guy named Peleg.
Maybe you could explain to him what would happen to the Earth if a rapid separation of tectonic plates were to occur resulting in massive supervolcanic activity? From what I understand Mormons are really open to science and scientific fact so just explaining to him the unreliability of his position from a purely logical point of view will most likely result in him changing his mind.
- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
I think you are talking about someone who believes a man can spend three days in a whale stomach and come out unscathed or asses that talk or wooden boats large enough to contain every living creature on earth for 40 days (or is it 120?) and so on.
deus ex machina and all that.
"Any over-ritualized religion since the dawn of time can make its priests say yes, we know, it is rotten, and hard luck, but just do as we say, keep at the ritual, stick it out, give us your money and you'll end up with the angels in heaven for evermore."
I suppose JASH's point could be technically correct if by Missouri he meant the many layers of sediments and sedimentary rock overlaid through millions of years on the Laurentia Craton and its deformations, and that by Old World he meant Laurasia which itself was a fragment of Pangea.
All in favor of this being what JASH meant please signify by the uplift of keyboards to the square.
I assume this is a way to explain Missouri as the location of Eve’s garden? Seems unnecessary when you can just say the Bible story relocated from Missouri to the Middle East as a result of the ark being dumped there. Surely there were plenty of fine gopher wood trees growing around the Jefferson City area.
"The DNA of fictional populations appears to be the most susceptible to extinction." - Simon Southerton
I find it so amazing that Joseph Smith could walk around and point to something and come up some BS story that people then as well as a 140 years later believe: A small Drumlin in NY becomes the hill that two (count them: Nephites, Jaradites) great iron age civilizations became extinct through a war of extermination. A mound builder hill in Illinois becomes the burial sight of a famous native American white chieftain-warrior named Zelph who was known from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains. A pile of rocks in northeastern Missouri becomes Adam's (as in Adam and Eve) altar where he blessed all his children (the mental gymnastics needed for that one boggles my mind). Then we have his translation of the kinderhook plates and a nine foot skeleton who was a descendant of Ham, through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.
Looking at all of this from the outside now, it amazes me that I use to believe this crap.
sunstoned wrote:I find it so amazing that Joseph Smith could walk around and point to something and come up some BS story that people then as well as a 140 years later believe: A small Drumlin in New York becomes the hill that two (count them: Nephites, Jaradites) great iron age civilizations became extinct through a war of extermination. A mound builder hill in Illinois becomes the burial sight of a famous native American white chieftain-warrior named Zelph who was known from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains. A pile of rocks in northeastern Missouri becomes Adam's (as in Adam and Eve) altar where he blessed all his children (the mental gymnastics needed for that one boggles my mind). Then we have his translation of the kinderhook plates and a nine foot skeleton who was a descendant of Ham, through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.
Looking at all of this from the outside now, it amazes me that I use to believe this crap.
Social/family pressure can get anyone to believe nonsense. I think we were all there at some point. Luckily we saw that using our brains isn't the big sin religion claims.
"Religion is about providing human community in the guise of solving problems that don’t exist or failing to solve problems that do and seeking to reconcile these contradictions and conceal the failures in bogus explanations otherwise known as theology." - Kishkumen
So even when the continents were all jammed together, how far apart were Missouri and Israel?
Looking at a map of Pangaea, to get from one place to the other would require a trek across half of North America, then across all of North Africa. Pretty conveniently located.
"The DNA of fictional populations appears to be the most susceptible to extinction." - Simon Southerton
sunstoned wrote:I find it so amazing that Joseph Smith could walk around and point to something and come up some BS story that people then as well as a 140 years later believe: A small Drumlin in New York becomes the hill that two (count them: Nephites, Jaradites) great iron age civilizations became extinct through a war of extermination. A mound builder hill in Illinois becomes the burial sight of a famous native American white chieftain-warrior named Zelph who was known from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains. A pile of rocks in northeastern Missouri becomes Adam's (as in Adam and Eve) altar where he blessed all his children (the mental gymnastics needed for that one boggles my mind). Then we have his translation of the kinderhook plates and a nine foot skeleton who was a descendant of Ham, through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.
Looking at all of this from the outside now, it amazes me that I use to believe this crap.
It’s probably more that you didn’t spend any time thinking it through.
“When we are confronted with evidence that challenges our deeply held beliefs we are more likely to reframe the evidence than we are to alter our beliefs. We simply invent new reasons, new justifications, new explanations. Sometimes we ignore the evidence altogether.” (Mathew Syed 'Black Box Thinking')