TBM's: Killer blow to the Book of Mormon?

[_Scottie]

IT DIDN'T WORK, Mr. Smarty Pants.

(ps, love the movie!)

Did you take the spaces out? Oh, and lowercase the i. Not sure why it posts as upper case.

[_charity]

Or how a few hundred complete buffalo carcasses. There are estimates that upwards of 10 million buffalo were butchered on the plains (US and Canada) in the late 1800's. That ought to be easy. There ought to be piles.

Who says they haven't found buffalo carcasses?? They don't make the news because they are found so often that it isn't newsworthy. That doesn't mean they don't find them.

Actually, Scottie. There are no large piles of buffalo bones. You can't find any, even if you try hard. YOu can ask me why if you want to. But the point is, that even though bone appears very hard to us, it does disintegrate over time. Unless fossilization occurs, unless the body falls into a tar pit or ends up in an ice berg there isn't going to be anything left of it in a few hundred years. That is why we do not deny the presence of Huns in Central Asia, even if there are no remnants of their hundreds of thousands of horses. And why there could possibly have been horses (equines) here.

Oh, yes. You know there were camels in Arizona, but they went "extinct." In the 1800's.

[_karl61]

Ergo, the evidence that a person has had "the witness of the Spirit" is that they believe in and live the "restored gospel."

No. The evidence that the person has had a witness of the Spirit is that they don't deny it, even if they become disaffected from the Church, inactive, whatever. The model for this are the witnesses to the Book of Mormon. Many of them did become disaffected. But none of them denied their witnesses, even when it would have been of financial and social benefit to themselves.

Martin Harris denied he saw the gold plates with his natural eyes.

[_LCD2YOU]

And here's your miundestanding of how how scientific inquiry proceeds. We DON'T HAVE disprove the Book of Mormon, any more than we have to disprove the existence of leprechauns.

Also, we can test a number of separate hypotheses related to the Book of Mormon and from them form a pretty good comprehensive picture. It may not "prove" the Book of Mormon is false, but it comes pretty damn close.

You subscribe to the "fallacy of the magic bullet." This is the same fallacy political commentators make when arguing against various policy recommendations. They claim a policy won't work because it doesn't "solve" the problem. But that's not the question. The question is whether, at the magin, the policy solves certain aspects of the problem in a way that exceed its costs. No single policy will ever solve a major social or economic problem.

Similarly, whereas no single thing can necessarily "disprove" the Book of Mormon, several individual pieces of evidence can, at the margin, chip away at its veracity (and some of the chips are damned big chunks), leaving at the end, essentially, nothing or very little left.

I would like to hear what you call chunks. I have read a lot of attempts to chip away, but nothing has stood up. Do you have something new?

Actually, like it has been said before, we don't need to "prove anything". Even then science "proves" nothing. "Proofs" are for math.

What about the "Final Battle" circa 420CE? See when i was in school in Utah, all these kids came from seminary saying "They found the final battle site! And boy was it bigger than they ever thought!" That was 30 years ago. My step-mom remembers the same thing being said 20 years previous to that. So with 50 years of "Almost finding the final battle" has led to what now?

You believe the "final battle" was real right? Where was it?

[_charity]

Martin Harris denied he saw the gold plates with his natural eyes.

You don't know what you are talking about. On his death bed, Martin pointed to his eyes, his real eyes and said that he had seen the plates with "these eyes."

[_charity]

What about the "Final Battle" circa 420CE? See when I was in school in Utah, all these kids came from seminary saying "They found the final battle site! And boy was it bigger than they ever thought!" That was 30 years ago. My step-mom remembers the same thing being said 20 years previous to that. So with 50 years of "Almost finding the final battle" has led to what now?

You believe the "final battle" was real right? Where was it?

I believe the final battle was real. I don't know where it was. It doesn't matter. The doctrine isn't affected by the geography.

[_karl61]

Martin Harris denied he saw the gold plates with his natural eyes.

You don't know what you are talking about. On his death bed, Martin pointed to his eyes, his real eyes and said that he had seen the plates with "these eyes."

Many people who met Martin Harris said he was crazy. He said he saw the plates with his spiritual eyes which caused some early church leaders to leave the church - it was the last straw for them.

[_charity]

Martin Harris denied he saw the gold plates with his natural eyes.

You don't know what you are talking about. On his death bed, Martin pointed to his eyes, his real eyes and said that he had seen the plates with "these eyes."

Many people who met Martin Harris said he was crazy. He said he saw the plates with his spiritual eyes which caused some early church leaders to leave the church - it was the last straw for them.

You reallyu don't know what you are talking about. You need to get the facts. Read Richard Lloyd Anderson's book on the Witnesses. You don't do any favors for the Critic Crowd when you make a post like that. It makes them all look stupid by association.

[_Trevor]

This is why the Book of Mormon is an archeological anomaly. It purports to be an ancient book. We have no physical evidence that it is what it claims to be. We have the testimony of people of it's truthfulness but all of these accounts are decidedly supernatural. Is this evidence for the historicity of the Book of Mormon? Depends on who you ask.

It may be evidence for building a faith, but it is not evidence to bring into a scientific discussion.

[Guest]

Ergo, the evidence that a person has had "the witness of the Spirit" is that they believe in and live the "restored gospel."

No. The evidence that the person has had a witness of the Spirit is that they don't deny it, even if they become disaffected from the Church, inactive, whatever. The model for this are the witnesses to the Book of Mormon. Many of them did become disaffected. But none of them denied their witnesses, even when it would have been of financial and social benefit to themselves.

I got the quote below from http://jewishatheist.blogspot.com/2007/11/ufo-sightings-and-religious-testimony.html

Dennis Kucinich may deny his testimony at some point, but the jury is still out:

[Emphasis added]

UFO Sightings and Religious Testimony

Dennis Kucinich's UFO sighting:

In Shirley MacLaine's new book, the actress and longtime friend of Dennis Kucinich makes an interesting claim: During a visit to her home in Washington state, Kucinich said he saw a UFO and heard messages from it.

"Dennis found his encounter extremely moving," MacLaine writes. "The smell of roses drew him out to my balcony where, when he looked up, he saw a gigantic triangular craft, silent, and observing him.

"It hovered, soundless, for 10 minutes or so, and sped away with a speed he couldn't comprehend. He said he felt a connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind."



Tim Russert asked Kucinich during the last Democratic debate if he had seen a UFO and Kucinich answered:

Uh, I did. And the rest of the account. It was an unidentified flying object, OK? It's like, it's unidentified. I saw something. Now, to answer your question. I'm moving my, and I'm also going to move my campaign office to Roswell, New Mexico, and another one in Exeter, New Hampshire, OK? And also, you have to keep in mind that Jimmy Carter saw a UFO, and also that more people in this country have seen UFOs than I think approve of George Bush's presidency.



Here we have a very successful politician, who is quirky to be sure but not obviously insane or prone to hallucinations, testifying that he saw a UFO. To be fair, he didn't clearly admit to Russert anything else that MacLaine said, but neither did he really deny it.

I think this provides an interesting window into various religious apologetic arguments.

C.S. Lewis, for example, popularized the argument that because of the things Jesus said, he must have been either a liar, a lunatic, or indeed the Lord. If MacLaine is to be believed, then by Lewis's logic, Kucinich must be either a liar, a lunatic, or someone who actually had the experience MacLaine described.

The Bible-Science apologists would focus on the fact that, technically, a UFO is nothing extraordinary -- it's just a flying object that we can't identify. This seems to be the route Kucinich attempted at the debate. Just like the Biblical Flood might have been a more local flood, Kucinich's UFO might have just been a weather balloon or a stealth bomber.

The mythologists would claim that Kucinich didn't mean his story literally -- it was an allegory for the Iraq war, or something.

So what are we skeptics to believe? If MacLaine is telling the truth about what Kucinich told her, I'm actually kind of stumped. I see no motive for him to have fabricated the story. I suppose a hallucination is possible, although I would assume hallucinations of that magnitude don't happen to otherwise sane people, unless some sort of drugs are involved, and we have no evidence that Kucinich was on any drugs, either. Another obvious explanation is that MacLaine either made up the story or seriously embellished it, or that Kucinich lied to her or embellished it to her. But I don't find that explanation especially compelling, either, because if she had lied or embellished it, Kucinich should have denied it more strongly, and if he had lied or embellished it to her, I don't see why he wouldn't deny it to Russert or at least explain what he had done in some way. Finally, there's no reason UFO's -- in the alien craft sense -- couldn't exist, although it seems unlikely that they would do things like Kucinich described without doing enough to confirm to more than fourteen percent of Americans that they exist.

In the end, I guess I'd bet on Kucinich having had some sort of hallucination. That's also my guess about various religious people's personal testimonies of seeing God or having other "supernatural" experiences, whether it be Moses's burning bush or some random Christian seeing Jesus in his bedroom at 4 am. Religious people who take such testimony seriously while dismissing someone like Kucinich out of hand are clearly biased and should reconsider their thought processes. So should the apologists.