TA DA!!! My Book of Mormon in Mesoamerica website

Post by **_beastie** » Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:29 am

I think I may have figured it out anyway - if I make it show the code, I can just insert the directions scottie gave me, and it seems to work. I'll experiment some more and see.

Post by **_Jersey Girl** » Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:29 am

link this

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum46/1378.htm

maybe it will help

Post by **_Jersey Girl** » Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:46 am

Good heck, that's Moroni. I'm way too blind.

_Ray A · Post by **_Ray A** » Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:47 am

truth dancer wrote:Maybe there could be a link, "Responses to FAIR/FARMS?" Or something along those lines?

If beastie intends to reply to FARMS she will have a lot of reading to do:

http://farms.BYU.edu/publications/jbmsmain.php

http://farms.BYU.edu/publications/reviewmain.php

http://farms.BYU.edu/publications/insightsmain.php

I don't suggest this path unless she fully understands the arguments made in these publications. One helpful source would be New Approaches To The Book of Mormon, edited by Brent Metcalfe, and the FARMS reply:

http://farms.BYU.edu/publications/revie ... 6&number=1

This review was longer than the book under review. They are not all "deer/horse" arguments. I formed most of my views on this in 1994/1995, but have left open for other considerations.

Beastie also needs to be aware of the reliability of her sources. Guns, Gems, and Steel for example, has some negative critical reviews, and I point to one, originally published in American Renaissance:

Guns, Germs, and Steel should be taken seriously, first, because it has just won a Pulitzer Prize. This will bring it extra attention, and the cachet of the Pulitzer will convince many people that hereditarian accounts of history have been safely disposed of at last. Second, despite his political correctness ("The oldest Java ‘man’ fossils may actually have belonged to a Java woman") and predictable digs at whites, Prof. Diamond is intellectually serious. He is a vastly more interesting, less tendentious writer than Stephen Jay Gould, whom he resembles in being an academic popularizer of evolutionary biology (Prof. Diamond teaches medicine at UCLA). In fact, when a few years ago I first came across Prof. Diamond’s work in magazines like Discover and Natural History, my reaction was "These are the pieces Gould is trying to write." Third, as I will explain, everything valid in this book fits nicely into, indeed enriches, the hereditarian view of history...

Prof. Diamond does not notice that, even if the first settled Eurasian societies differed from those of genetically similar Africans and Mesoamericans only because of environmental reasons, the individual traits favored within these societies might over time have pushed their populations onto divergent genetic tracks. This is a very important point to which I will return...

Prof. Diamond has therefore done something no responsible scientist should ever do: set out to explain a fact before making sure it is a fact. Asking why the continents came to differ in technology although "human neurobiology" is everywhere the same is like asking how canaries digest meat, or why Napoleon ended up in exile on St. Helena despite winning the battle of Waterloo.

http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/ml_ggs.html

The Diamond quotes on the page "Who were the inhabitants of Mesoamerica" are benign, and taken from Pizzaro. I haven't looked through the site to see how else she uses Diamond, but I think she will be getting a visit from some FARMS scholars. I'm not saying this provocatively, but factually.

"The Devilish Details" also has some problems:

In my years of studying this issue, certain details have drawn my attention more than others. The most obvious example is the fact that I focus solely on the Mesoamerican question. There are many Book of Mormon scholars who address the Hebraic connections in the Book of Mormon, and I ignore that completely in this article. The reason for this is that I do not view possible Hebraic connections as compelling evidence either for, or against, the ancient origin of the Book of Mormon. In his book Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer, on page 45, quotes David Hume in a manner that illustrates why I am disinterested in the possible Hebraic connections in the Book of Mormon.

“Hume distinguished between “antecedent skepticism,”, such as Rene Descartes’

method of doubting everything that has no “antecedent” infallible criterion for belief:

and “consequent skepticism,” the method Hume employed, which recognizes the

“consequences” of our fallible senses but corrects them through reason: “A wise

man proportions his belief to the evidence.” Better words could not be found for a

skeptical motto.

Beastie isn't going to be taken seriously with dismissals like this. Any critic is going to ask why she didn't study "Hebraic connections". Dismissing this with quoting Why People Believe Weird Things is rather unscholarly. Something like dismissing continental drift by quoting "why people believe weird things". You need to get the facts about the debate on paper, and let the reader decide, not dismiss them by quoting Shermer, who apparently is doing the thinking for them.

More from that entry (my emphasis):

The Hebraic side of the Book of Mormon argument makes certain claims regarding connections in the linguistic structure or background elements of the Book of Mormon story that correlate with what scholars today accept about ancient Israel and its culture and language. The problem for accepting the miracle the Book of Mormon scholars claim is this: these elements can also be demonstrated to be within the bank of nineteenth century knowledge, as well.] The response that Book of Mormon scholars may make in turn is that critics cannot place this actual knowledge or material within Joseph Smith’s hands. While there were maps that contained the toponym NHM, for example, critics cannot prove Joseph Smith ever had access to them. While the structure of chiasmus was known in the nineteenth century, and is a literary form that is found in many texts from different time periods, critics cannot prove that Joseph Smith was aware of chiasmus and made deliberate use of it.

How are you so sure of this, beastie? Have you read any edition of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies? Have you even read Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner, who argues quite the contrary? I'm pointing out what I feel are some weaknesses. How much have you read what non-Mormon scholars have said about the content and structure of the Book of Mormon? And why should this be totally unrelated to the question of historicity?

Another point, again with my emphasis:

Moreover, some theories regarding the origin of the Book of Mormon propose that Joseph Smith was not the sole author, and may have had input from more informed sources, such as Sidney Rigdon. Although I have not made this my primary study, due to my conviction that it will never be possible to prove the most pertinent points, I am inclined to believe that Sidney Rigdon did have more involvement in the production of the Book of Mormon then he was willing to admit. He definitely would have had access to these ideas and background information regarding ancient Israel that some Book of Mormon scholars point to as supporting evidence of the ancient origin of the Book of Mormon.

Evidence? This is a "Diamond-esque" approach.

Anyway, I'm only giving a sample of the criticisms that will come. As I said at the beginning of this post, I think beastie still has a lot of reading to do, and from a much wider variety of sources, both pro and con. At the moment it's visibly one-sided.

Post by **_beastie** » Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:49 am

I think I have the div tag figured out, it's just going to take a while since I have to manually code it. Wish there was an easier way to do it, but it will make it much more readable.

Ray, I'm not going to take time to respond to your individual points right now. My focus now is just getting the site up and running.

Post by **_Jersey Girl** » Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:49 am

Ray,

What is it about her Rigdon statement that you find faulty?

_Ray A · Post by **_Ray A** » Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:50 am

beastie wrote:Ray, I'm not going to take time to respond to your individual points right now. My focus now is just getting the site up and running.

No problem.

_Ray A · Post by **_Ray A** » Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:51 am

Jersey Girl wrote:Ray,

What is it about her Rigdon statement that you find faulty?

See the Dan Vogel thread, Jersey Girl.

Post by **_Jersey Girl** » Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:52 am

Ray A wrote:
Jersey Girl wrote:Ray,

What is it about her Rigdon statement that you find faulty?

See the Dan Vogel thread, Jersey Girl.

I already have, Ray.

Post by **_Jersey Girl** » Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:54 am

Ray,

Are you a Rigdon/Spalding non-believer?