DiscussMormonism.com

mentalgymnast wrote:

Gadianton wrote:One thing I can tell you that accounts for everything, is somebody making up fake "Bible writing" scripture.

The Bible is surely a component/influence on the language and also structure of the Book of Mormon.

Regards,
MG

Whoosh!!

Gadianton wrote:One thing I can tell you that accounts for everything, is somebody making up fake "Bible writing" scripture.

mentalgymnast wrote:The Bible is surely a component/influence on the language and also structure of the Book of Mormon.

Maksutov wrote:Whoosh!!

Apparently you see that as a concern? Some might say that it would be a natural thing to see/expect.

Regards,
MG

mentalgymnast wrote:

Gadianton wrote:One thing I can tell you that accounts for everything, is somebody making up fake "Bible writing" scripture.

mentalgymnast wrote:The Bible is surely a component/influence on the language and also structure of the Book of Mormon.

Maksutov wrote:Whoosh!!

Apparently you see that as a concern? Some might say that it would be a natural thing to see/expect.

Regards,
MG

The natural thing to see/expect is you spinning around your gymnastic bar and thinking it's a rod of iron, going around and around (instead of letting go and exploring the rest of the universe) and asking why others aren't doing the same.

mentalgymnast wrote:

Maksutov wrote:Whoosh!!

Apparently you see that as a concern? Some might say that it would be a natural thing to see/expect.

Regards,
MG

Yes, many people who can point to where Joseph was making it up say it's natural that Joseph would be using the Bible in order to write what is effectively Biblical fan fiction.

Why is Deutero-Isaiah in the Book of Mormon when it was written after Lehi left?

Why is it riddled with New Testament phrases and themes that were of course written after Lehi left?

If you believe that Joseph Smith read the words off a stone that were translated from the gold plates, this is not possible.

If you believe that Joseph Smith was just processing this into a book of his own mind, the entire need for gold plates, rocks in a hat, etc falls away.

You can't make it all fit together so you constantly jump around from possibility to possibility.

And then when you back yourself into a corner too far, you say that it's more "complex" than people think.

But the truth is that it's really simple - you only need complexity if you're trying to create a process that is not supported by evidence, logic, and the words of the people involved.

jfro18 wrote:
Why is Deutero-Isaiah in the Book of Mormon when it was written after Lehi left?

I like Grant Hardy's book, "Understanding the Book of Mormon". In that book, in reference to the Deutero-Isaiah problem, he says:

[we should]...acknowledge that we probably know less about what constitutes an ‘inspired translation’ than we do about Ancient Israel. Once one accepts the possibility of divine intervention, the theology can accommodate the (always tentative) results of scholarship.”

The Deutero-Isaiah chapters in 1st and 2nd Nephi are an uncomfortable presence, but not an inexplicable one, for, as Hardy affirms, accepting a divine provenance for the Book of Mormon provides the theological basis to resolve difficult historical issues. And we do not have a very good sense of what it means for a prophet to translate sacred texts solely through inspiration–with no training in, or knowledge of, the original language.
https://bycommonconsent.com/2016/02/12/ ... n-bom2016/

Regards,
MG

Maksutov wrote:The natural thing to see/expect is you spinning around your gymnastic bar and thinking it's a rod of iron, going around and around (instead of letting go and exploring the rest of the universe) and asking why others aren't doing the same.

I think you'd be surprised how many of us hang out at the gym using a variety of different 'work out' modalities and equipment.

It is a known fact that we can multitask as humans. That being the case, I think it is possible to look at Mormonism in depth while at the same time "exploring the rest of the universe". It may be you who might be limiting yourself.

Regards,
MG

jfro18 wrote:
Yes, many people who can point to where Joseph was making it up say it's natural that Joseph would be using the Bible in order to write what is effectively Biblical fan fiction.

Why is Deutero-Isaiah in the Book of Mormon when it was written after Lehi left?

Why is it riddled with New Testament phrases and themes that were of course written after Lehi left?

If you believe that Joseph Smith read the words off a stone that were translated from the gold plates, this is not possible.

If you believe that Joseph Smith was just processing this into a book of his own mind, the entire need for gold plates, rocks in a hat, etc falls away.

You can't make it all fit together so you constantly jump around from possibility to possibility.

And then when you back yourself into a corner too far, you say that it's more "complex" than people think.

But the truth is that it's really simple - you only need complexity if you're trying to create a process that is not supported by evidence, logic, and the words of the people involved.

Bumping this for MG who spun right on past these, of course.

mg wrote:The output is the language, Joseph's language being part and parcel, seen on the stone. Now, would Joseph's grammatical errors be part of that? Why not? If it's his brain producing the language from the input of other sources, why would we not expect his syntax to be the basis of said output?

Stop right there. Do you know how to draw a simple flow chart? have you considered sketching out what you are saying is going on here? What you are proposing makes no sense. The only thing that would fit what you're saying, and please be clear if this is what you mean, is that Joseph's brain came before the output on the stone in the causal chain. So like this:

plates --> spirit world committee --> seer stone processing --> Joseph's brain (subconscious?) --> English words on seer stone --> Joseph reads words

Is this possible? Sure. But it's not what the LDS.org summary means. You can pretend it does or tell us we can't prove that it doesn't. If this is what you want to believe, knock yourself out. But it buys you no more than:

plates --> i-stone processor --> English words on stone ---> Joseph reads English words.

the i-stone processor can have a 19th century hick vernacular module that mimicks how a 19th century hick would create his own Bible writing and take that into account as part of the "translation". We already have one black box, MG, the seer stone, and so proposing a mysterious nueral net of a dozen black boxes, including feedback from what would seem to be on the output side of the equation and creating a feedback loop, buys you nothing. It seems as if your real argument is that the process is so complex, that it can't be questioned. We get it, we've had the religious propose unfalsifiability before.

mg wrote:What part of that version do you think I am rejecting?

The part that says all that Joseph did was read words that appeared in English off of a stone.

Weren't there times he 'translated' without the plates, the stone or the hat?

What about all the text he generated from completely irrelevant items like the Breathing Permit of Hor or the Kinderhook Plates, or even from thin air as with his revelations? What you have is a classic channeler pretending to be anything but.

Gadianton wrote:plates --> spirit world committee --> seer stone processing --> Joseph's brain (subconscious?) --> English words on seer stone --> Joseph reads words

I'm not trying to defend MG because I think he's playing pretty fast and loose with his comments here and I find your responses and patience inherent therein quite admirable but...

If I stuffed my faced in a hat, excluding all the light, and words appeared on a stone inches from my nose, in the darkness, I don't' think I could read them. I stick my head in a hat now, put my phone in there and try and read the website I browse to inches from my nose and see nothing but blurry lines of text. I zoom in a bit and start to make words appear but they get all criss-crossed as I try to read them, because they are too close and one eye is seeing it while the other is showing me another angle. I guess that's why Joseph had to take breaks and it hurt his eyes or something. Maybe what we're having to throw in as an assumption here, because Joseph and his scribes made the same assumption, is that words appeared on the stone. naybe MG is trying to say the stone was not used at all. It was just a stone and Joseph was a fool to think it had any use.