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The more you talk the talk and walk the walk of Mr. Scratch, the more of an intellectual hack you appear to be.
I'm not the one who runs to others to save me from myself. You use various monikers to do precisely that. You're a joke.
I don't use different monikers. I've been Droopy at MAD for a number of years, far longer than this place has existed. Coggins, in one form or another, is my standard handle across the web.
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The fact of the matter is Dartagnon, when the truth regarding the Book of Abraham finally becomes too much for the critics to sustain, and the walls come tumbling down around your ears and the ears of others, like Brent Goldencalf, who have substantially overstated their case regarding the relative merits of their own evidence, there won't be any egg on your face because, like all good anti-Mormon intellectual charlatans, you will have moved on to your next target
This has been my "target" ever since I began to have problems with apologetics. Nobody has since been able to address it adequately. All I get is the promise that one day, if I have faith enough, LDS apologetics will come up with a super duper apologetic to make all the critics flee in embarrassment.
Foam, froth, and bluster. Unimpressive.
T
his is an explanation that might work for idiots.
In the meantime, Book of Abraham apologetics is a boil on the butt of Mormon apologetics. It is an embarrassment. And what makes it worse is that few seem to realize it. Idiots like you pretend things have been taken care of "over and over and over" for so many years now, but that last act proved you had no clue about the basics. You're an idiot. You don't know anything about the Book of Abraham or the controversy surrounding it. This is why you had to run to MAD before commenting further. You knew you had flapped off at the lip without first knowing what you were talking about, and you had hoped someone over there could save you from your own stupidity. Nobody could.
Now you're howling at the moon, calling all critics charlatans, anti-Mormons, goldencalves, etc. Anything you can to give you some sense of gratification in light of your reputation's recent train wreck.
I've only called you a charlatan. I use "goldencalf" as a reworking of Metcalf's name because he worships the arm of flesh-he is a secular humanist, represented and symbolized well by the golden calf (that's from the Old Testament Dartagnan...)
I don't know anything about the Book of Abraham? I've was reading it at a time you were very likely still in diapers smearing poop over your face wondering where that horrible smell was coming from. I've actually immersed myself
in the text, Dartagnon, as opposed to immersing myself in various hypothetical scenarios regarding its possible naturalistic origins while wrapped in a mental masturbatory fantasy of my own preeminent intellectual superiority. I've immersed myself in
the text. I've compared that text to other ancient texts in a life long study of ancient religious documents that, somehow or another, time ad time again, parallel Joseph's teachings and ideas. You are UTTERLY MAD (or, what is far more likely, just intellectually dishonest)if you think the evidence for the Book of Abraham rises or falls on the KEP or the Sensen text. There are a plethora of other evidences supporting the Book of Abraham from a textual, historical, and doctrinal standpoint, and your self important tantrums change these realities not one little bit.
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I actually got some good feedback from MAD.
You didn't go there for feedback. You went there to find out if there really was evidence that you had been yapping about so confidently. In other words, you went there to find out if anyone could save you from yourself. You have no business debating me or anyone else for that matter. You're a lightweight, even by MAD standards.
No, my mendacious and self justifying friend, I went there for education so as to be apprised of the present state of the debate. You make a sad and pathetic mistake if you think I went there for "evidence" or out of fear. I know the Book of Abraham is the word of God through the principle of revelation, the same principle by which I know some other things about the Church and its teachings that you apparently do not. And, like so many who
do not know, your mouth and your keyboard work overtime crowing about scholarly arcana that, without doubt, has nothing whatsoever to do with the ultimate legitimacy of the Book of Abraham as the word of God. You hide behind scholarly arcana because you cannot meet the Saints in the open arena of ideas with the broader issues of Book of Abraham origins that anyone of normal intelligence can understand and which do not bode well for the critic's overall case.
Like an attorney who retreats behind his wall of legalese to hide his true intentions or deflect critical analysis of his claims, you throw Brent Metcalf in front of you to take your bullet, hoping that somehow, somewhere, in the dense, jargon peppered text and endless concourses of footnotes, the final blow to the Book of Abraham will be given.
It will then be, of course, the smart people, the Brights like yourself; only those who really understand all the arcane, rarefied points of analysis who will bring the news to the great unwashed that the Church is not true. Then you get to dance upon the grave of the Church in a secularist/post-modern/Nietzschean
striptease; enticing all who have not yet embraced the new religion of nothing to join the funeral.
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critics have substantially overstated and exaggerated the merits of their case
Then prove it.
It can't be proven. In the first place, there isn't enough evidence on either side to prove anything. In the second, the nature of sacred things is that proof is hard to come by until some future time at which point the tests will already be behind us and knowing with certainty will not interfere with the exercise of faith.
Yea, I thought so. All you have are a team of desperate apologists avoiding all evidence at all costs, and trying to drum up some kind of miracle theory. They then point to the fact that they are scholars who dispute it and pretend this means squat. They are apologists trying to save their way of life from shambles.
If you keep this up much longer Dartagnan, you'll go blind.
Time has always been the enemy of the Church. The more time goes by, the more learned and sophisticated the population becomes. It has been decades since the Book of Abraham was proven false, and you guys have fumbled over yourselves like the three stooges, coming up with one ridiculous theory after another, often contradicting yourselves and eventually backing down from your original premises. At least the critical argument is consistent; which makes sense since it is the one based on the facts.
Actually, if you really knew anything at all about the history of the Church, this statement wouldn't have come out of your keyboard at all. Your entire persona and approach to these topics certainly isn't that of an idiot. Far from it, they are the persona and approach of what is essentially an anti-Mormon Moonbat; a tendentious and bitter enemy of that which he does not understand and cannot accept because it makes just too many demands on a megalithic ego that cannot be educated, cannot be corrected, and simply will not shut up and listen...