Welcome! You will find and perhaps you already have, that since there isn't any good evidence for Mormon truth claims, they will always end up resting on faith and possibilities. Further, the apologists don't care who gets run over by their possibility bus. Joseph Smith's and Brigham Young's graves have huge bus tire marks all over them. Any support for the racist priesthood ban by the first presidency was merely men speaking/speculating. Hell, I wouldn't put it past the apologists if they treated Jesus much like he was treated in the famous book The Brothers Karamozov. Jesus would interfere in the current apologetic and destroy the whole enterprise with his goody two shoes adherence to truth and logic. He would need to be stopped by Midgley and his army of spies.
After leaving, I read the CES letter and listened to a lot of RFM. I definitely was really shocked to see so many evidence based issues. When I left I decided that being myself and not supporting an anti-LGBT organization was more important than staying in the church or what truth claims there were, and it turns out there were really good non-philisophical reasons to get out due to evidence like his.
The church has gone far way from Christ for sure. The whole "they were speaking as men" excuse is the same thing as Creationists saying that there are no such things as species only "kinds". No one is willing to define when they are or not speaking as men or prophets and are willing to say they are or aren't whenever they would like to get out of arguments.
I haven't heard of Midgley until joining the forum, and I'm not sure I want to look him up, he sounds pretty nasty.... I know of DCP, Gee, and Givens, but not Midgley
Welcome! You will find and perhaps you already have, that since there isn't any good evidence for Mormon truth claims, they will always end up resting on faith and possibilities. Further, the apologists don't care who gets run over by their possibility bus. Joseph Smith's and Brigham Young's graves have huge bus tire marks all over them. Any support for the racist priesthood ban by the first presidency was merely men speaking/speculating. Hell, I wouldn't put it past the apologists if they treated Jesus much like he was treated in the famous book The Brothers Karamozov. Jesus would interfere in the current apologetic and destroy the whole enterprise with his goody two shoes adherence to truth and logic. He would need to be stopped by Midgley and his army of spies.
After leaving, I read the CES letter and listened to a lot of RFM. I definitely was really shocked to see so many evidence based issues. When I left I decided that being myself and not supporting an anti-LGBT organization was more important than staying in the church or what truth claims there were, and it turns out there were really good non-philisophical reasons to get out due to evidence like his.
The church has gone far way from Christ for sure. The whole "they were speaking as men" excuse is the same thing as Creationists saying that there are no such things as species only "kinds". No one is willing to define when they are or not speaking as men or prophets and are willing to say they are or aren't whenever they would like to get out of arguments.
I haven't heard of Midgley until joining the forum, and I'm not sure I want to look him up, he sounds pretty nasty.... I know of DCP, Gee, and Givens, but not Midgley
Look him up here and read him over at DCP's Sic et Non. Louis Midgley. He is a piece of work, forever acting as a self-appointed church loyalty sleuth, making files on everyone who doesn't adhere to his brand of orthodoxy (he might be part of the SCMC, the church committee focusing on apostates). He used to teach at BYU in the political science dept. But his lectures were too much on apologetics for my friends' liking. He was one of the originals on Dialogue magazine.
He isn't long for this earth, being in his 90's. I wonder if he gets enough bran but he was always cranky.
Last edited by Dr Exiled on Mon Dec 07, 2020 1:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
Myth is misused by the powerful to subjugate the masses all too often.
I still remember this post from Dr. Simon Southerton on the old message board.
Its pretty hard to completely erase signs of a populations DNA. An individual yes, but not a population. Lets say a small population of 500 drongos (Oz slang for dope) mixed with a large adjacent population of say 100,000 hippies (apologies to any hippies) the odds of picking up the drongos mtDNA would be related to the different sizes of the two groups (500/100,000 = one in 200). So if you tested 1000 hippos (hybrids) you would stand a good chance of detecting the mtDNA of a drongo. Test 10,000 and your odds would be extremely high of picking up a drongo.
Using the latest methods for testing the nuclear DNA you would always be able to detect drongo DNA. This is because you can examine tens of thousands of DNA markers in nuclear DNA. It is almost impossible for the nuclear DNA to go extinct. Mitochondrial DNA is only passed continuously down maternal lines. Y chromosome DNA is only passed down paternal lines. Nuclear DNA is passed down both lines and can be passed much more rapidly between adjacent populations.
Of course all this is not really relevant to the Book of Mormon narrative as the book tells us precisely nothing about any non-Hebrew groups living nearby. All of the adjacent populations in the Book of Mormon came from the Middle East.
The Nephites are described as a "lonesome and a solemn people" within the text of the Book of Mormon. (See Jacob 7:26) They weren't among non-Hebrew people in the Promise Land.
I didn't see the new book from Dr. Southerton on Amazon. But I did recently purchased this book of an interview with Dr. Southerton on Amazon.
I haven't heard of Midgley until joining the forum, and I'm not sure I want to look him up, he sounds pretty nasty.... I know of DCP, Gee, and Givens, but not Midgley
I've had the acquaintance of Lou for many years and once interviewed him briefly for a paper I was contemplating.
He is a wonderful man of impeccable integrity. Just because you [the generic you] disagree with his religious beliefs and the manner in which he explains himself is not an excuse to defame him. Address what he writes. There's a lot to address. Lots.
