MG 2.0 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 12, 2022 6:35 pm
I understand that you and others believe this to be the case. For what it’s worth, I agree that the Nephites, Jaredites, and Lamanites wouldn’t have considered themselves Americans.
Regards,
MG
It's fine for you to believe what you like, but you don't get to fabricate history and expect others to agree with you. The evidence for an ancient Book of Mormon is so lacking, and the evidence for 19th century composition is so great, that the case is effectively closed. I don't see how anyone turns that around. There simply is too much evidence for 19th century composition. Moreover, I am done with "alternative facts." There are facts, and we should do our best to become familiar with them, accept them, and live in accordance with them.
The date of the Book of Mormon is not something that is simply a matter of personal ideological point of view. Real civilizations populated the Americas before the Europeans arrived. They had a real past, and we are unjust toward them when we maintain that their history is something other than the facts indicate. We are especially unjust toward them when we insist that their history is something that a 19th century European wrote for them. The only way around this problem, in my opinion, is to own up to the fact that the Book of Mormon is NOT a record of ancient Americans.
I see this as being somewhat akin to Genesis NOT being the history of ancient proto-Hebrews. It is one thing for Jews to mistakenly see it as such--no historian worth their salt would agree with them--but it would be another for non-Jewish people to insist, against the agency of Jews, that the collection of facts and meanings of the Jewish historical past derive transparently from the
history reported in that text. That would be false, absurd, offensive, and unjust. The Book of Mormon has the further burden of being a story that a white man of European background wrote based on his own culture's myths about First Nations peoples.
If a First Nations person chooses voluntarily to embrace the Book of Mormon as their truth, that is one thing. What is false, absurd, offensive, and unjust is modern non-First Nations peoples insisting that the Book of Mormon is the history of those people, when it is absolutely not the case. The best way to work with that bad situation is to acknowledge that the Book of Mormon is not ancient. And that works, because the book was not written anciently. It was written in the 19th century, as the preponderance of the evidence clearly shows.
This is not just a matter of what "I believe." There is no compelling case to make that the Book of Mormon is ancient, there is a compelling case to be made that the Book of Mormon is a 19th century text, and therefore it is not ancient but a 19th century text.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
