Beastie and argument for horses in the Book of Mormon.

[hauslern]

Does anyone remember the site a user called Beastie had on horses in Mesoamerica?

[Xenophon]

Not sure if there was another site but http://www.mormonmesoamerica.com was the beastie site I was most familiar with and the one in her sig line. It is no longer in service now but you can use the wayback machine to see some archived versions of it that may have what you are looking for: https://web.archive.org/web/20161015000 ... merica.com

[Marcus]

Thanks for posting that, Xeno. I wasn't here when Beastie posted most of this, but her success at countering various mopologetic arguments is legendary. I looked at a bit of her blog at your archive link, and was very impressed at how timeless her argument remans:

Although it may be surprising to Joseph Smith and other church leaders, as well as to the majority of current LDS believers, modern Book of Mormon scholars insist that the Book of Mormon is actually the story of a relatively small group of Israelites who were immediately subsumed within a larger, pre-existing, native Mesoamerican population. In addition, the entire story of the Book of Mormon occurred within a small 500-mile radius within Mesoamerica. Even the Hill Cumorah, where Joseph Smith obtained the gold plates, is not really the same Hill Cumorah mentioned in the text. Although the Israelites/Christians were immediately genetically and culturally subsumed within the larger native population, they were elite rulers of the cities in which they lived, despite the fact that they practiced a religion quite alien to the natives. In the modern world, where religion is often separated, to varying degrees, from governmental functions, this does not seem to strain credulity. However, in ancient Mesoamerica, religion and government were one seamless whole, so each group of natives that agreed to Nephite leadership would also have been agreeing to the Nephite religion, or at the very least an abdication of their former religion along with the governmental associations.

The problems with this theory are numerous. I cannot possibly address all of them, but rather intend to focus on a few that interest me in particular. But the first question to be answered is why modern Book of Mormon scholarship insists on this interpretation to begin with, when it seems so contrary to the face value of the text itself. The answer is simply that they have been forced into this corner, not only by modern science but also by the inconsistencies within the text itself, which have been noted almost since its inception. Of course these inconsistencies could readily be explained by understanding the Book of Mormon as a work of fiction written by a nineteenth century American, but Book of Mormon scholars often approach the topic with the a priori acceptance of the theory that the Book of Mormon is an ancient text as Joseph Smith claimed. Therefore, a theory must be constructed that allows for this final determination, regardless of how it strains or even insults the actual text or Mesoamerican history itself. When such a priori determinations are fixed before the analysis of available data, this is a sign of pseudoscience.

[bolding added.]

That final sentence, in my opinion, still encapsulates the biggest problem of mopologetic argument.

Assuming one's conclusions within one's starting assumptions is a fatal error, rendering any further discussion invalid. Or, as Beastie so eloquently puts it, "a sign of pseudoscience."

[Xenophon]

Happy to oblige, beastie was always one of my favorite posters here. A sharp mind, quick wit, and as you point out, very good at cutting to the most basic elements of the problem at hand.

[Fence Sitter]

There is no evidence linking the Americas (or any other land) to the Book of Mormon. None. Any attempts to do so have been the same as trying to prove the Hobbit actually occurred in New Zealand.

[huckelberry]

Happy to oblige, beastie was always one of my favorite posters here. A sharp mind, quick wit, and as you point out, very good at cutting to the most basic elements of the problem at hand.

Xenophon, I checked our members list and Beastie does not show. My memory says it was ZLMB where she was posting and she did not come here or if she did she stopped posting quite a while back. I agree with you about the quality of her posting and research. It was clear she spent real effort in building information. I remember thinking it was material perhaps worth publishing . I have wondered but have zero information about what has become of her. I suspect she decided she had invested enough effort in Book of Mormon study and went on to live life with other concerns.

Certainly wish well for her.

[huckelberry]

i put horse fossils mexico into our search and it found two references, one from Marcus the other Beastie. Old thread, sample:
beastie wrote:

I can see that I am dealing with non-professionals on this forum and so, allow me to educate you guys and gals of the internet. It is not about documenting every fact or detail. It is about getting the message across to the general public.

Ah yes, here's the message:

"We're just going to make a bunch of assertions that reputable archaeologists would find ludicrous, and you can take our word for the fact that these archaeologists are just a bunch of incompetents".

No, no need to document assertions that flatly contradict the findings of the experts in the field. None at all.

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=104536&hilit=horse+fossils+mexico
thread from january 2008
she joined this board nov 2006

[drumdude]

There is no evidence linking the Americas (or any other land) to the Book of Mormon. None. Any attempts to do so have been the same as trying to prove the Hobbit actually occurred in New Zealand.

If I had the spare time, I would create a mirror journal to interpreter to explore exactly that.

You can use all their same arguments to exactly the same effect. There’s no hypothesis too ridiculous to be supported by the standard Mormon apologetic arguments.

[Bret Ripley]

Source: https://www.discussmormonism.com/viewto ... 3#p1940343

(Iconography by Blixa.)

[huckelberry]

The subject of horses has come up recently. example is this excellent recent post.
Re: Looks like MopologistGPT has been reborn

Post by Physics Guy » Fri Jun 02, 2023 4:52 am
It turns up quickly if you google "Texas Journal of Science horses". The lead author is Wade Miller, who retired from BYU in 2002 and has been a long-term champion of pre-Columbian American horses. I don't know whether he's taken seriously or regarded as a crank.

They found a bunch of fossil teeth a couple of meters down, lying next to bits of charcoal that were carbon-dated to various times between 1500 and 3000 years ago or so. They have no direct dates for the teeth themselves. That's normal; fossils don't usually contain carbon, and radiometric dating with other elements has uncertainty ranges of hundreds of thousands of years.

They identify the teeth as those of native North American horses that most people think went extinct 10000 years ago or so. The identification discussion runs a lot longer than the dating part, but I can't tell whether the horse identification is solid or doubtful.

Their main reason for not thinking that older teeth got mixed up with younger charcoal seems to be that they didn't find any other fossils of extinct species at the site in the layers that had charcoal of those ages. I don't know how widely or thoroughly they looked for such rejumbled fossils. It's obviously possible in principle for much older fossils to get mixed up with younger stuff, if for instance there were a flood that washed up some old bones and teeth one time, or if some medieval Mexicans dug up some Ice Age horse teeth at some point. That kind of complication to fossil records doesn't just happen all the time, but it happens. It's usually not an issue for dating fossils that are millions of years old and found buried in rock, since then you probably have uncertainties of a few million years anyway, and floods and scavengers are unlikely to mix things that were buried a million years apart. I don't know how big an issue mixing is for much more recent stuff like these horse teeth.
I was a teenager before it was cool.
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