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

[_CaliforniaKid]

Beastie,

My compliments on your site. I'm glad you finally got around to doing this. I'm only as far as "The Devilish Details", but look forward to delving some more over the next few days. Best,

-Chris

[_Addictio]

Hey, beastie.

Good to see you got this up as a separate site. It surely deserves one, and much traffic. Congrats!

And my condolences re the return to W-2 work.

[_CaliforniaKid]

Hi, Beastie,

Great site! A few things especially stood out to me.

1) On the "What Would Give Me Pause" page, here's an 1823 book that you might be interested in mentioning. Read pages 52 and 53.
2) Nice work on the Translation Issues page. I have bookmarked this for future reference.
3) You write, "If Joseph Smith didn’t read individual words that appeared on a stone or through spectacles, and instead, had some sort of gestalt image or understanding conveyed to him of events that he then put into his own words, which allowed for translation errors, then that same understanding is what colored his later comments regarding the Book of Mormon and its setting." This is an excellent point. If apologists are going to argue that Joseph Smith was wrong to believe in a hemispheric geography, a pan-American Lamanite heritage, etc., then they'd have to assume that the gestalt conveyed to Joseph Smith was sufficiently vague or diluted by his consciousness that he could get it pretty royally wrong. That means that his rendering of this gestalt as English text is highly suspect, not only as a geographical sourcebook but also as a guide for faith and morals. (Shameless blog plug on translation issues, by the way).
4) MAD's copyright claim, I suspect, would not hold in any court of law. If you get Brant's permission to reproduce any of his posts, that should be enough. Also, rather than listing the thread title, date, time, page number, and author of a post, you could just link to it. If you click on the little number in the upper-right-hand corner of any MAD post, a box will pop up giving you the link directly to that post. You can then use Frontpage's "add hyperlink" feature to link straight to the source. It's a good trick to learn, because I noticed there are a few places where you recommended people read an online article or essay but didn't link to it. Make our lives easy, please. We're fat, lazy Americans.

I'm halfway through horses right now. More, perhaps, as I proceed.

-Chris

[_CaliforniaKid]

Your rebuttal to the acidic soil argument was excellent.

You did a brilliant job answering the various purported pre-Columbian horse bone finds.

Does Brant Gardner really equate "horse and chariot" with "way on a litter"? That's absurd.

What is Sorenson thinking when he dates the tower of Babel/Jaredite flight to 3000 BC? As far as I know, the earliest ziggurats were late third millennium (i.e. like 2100 BC), and the Babylonian ziggurat wasn't built until Hammurabi, something like 1750. Is he following David Rohl? I don't think even Rohl (who by the way is a bit of a nutjob) dates it back quite that far.

"FARMS" doesn't have a lowercase "s" at the end.

Your information on tapirs was very good.

This is the best critical treatment of Book of Mormon horses I've encountered.

[_Ray A]

See, I've read the tripe from Mormon Apologists. Like that "In the Footsteps of Lehi". If there ever was a bunch of wishful thinking, attempts to confuse the issue with "what ifs". In other words typical apologetic BS. Tell oh master of the dodge and whine, do you know all the apologetics of say, Islam? But yet they would not be correct, right? What a worm.

Did you write a thorough critique of it? I not only read it, but proofread and critiqued it (in MS form) years before it was published by Warren and his wife (and I did this as an exmo, because Warren wanted my opinions). Let's see your advanced critique and rebuttals. Start a thread on that, preferably in the Celestial forum.

As for credibility, you have none.

I'll let less biased people than you judge that.

by the way,

What a small and pointless little world you live in.

If I did live in a pointless world I'd be posting here 24/7, and trying to prove Mormonism false 24/7. Life is too stimulating and interesting to do that. Smell the flowers, and let bygones be bygones. I'm now off to more interesting adventures. Have a good night, or day, or whatever it is in your part of the world.

[_LCD2YOU]

Here's the thing Ray A.


I don't have to prove anything. The burden of proof is on the one that supports the notion. If I were to say, "I teleported across the US", it's not for you to disprove my statement at all. It's up to me to provide the evidence.

Now what is evidence? Evidence is not say, "Oh you have to look at it with a more open mind". Evidence, irrefutable evidence, stands out and on it's own. Sadly the Book of Mormon has no evidence and only belief to sustain it.

As for my first posting to you, yeah, it was rough. But your blithe dismisal of me was pathetic and patronizing. So what about the rest of what you posted and I have started on about Sorenson? Do you post somethign and then forget it? If so, then why even post it?

[_Ray A]

Here's the thing Ray A.


I don't have to prove anything. The burden of proof is on the one that supports the notion.

The evidence has been presented by Warren. It is in the book you read. He and his wife spent years going to Yemen to do actual field work. That's where he got all those photos you see in the book. He took many of them them with his own camera, not plucked from National Geographic. Now it's up to you to start a thread, preferably in the CF, and critique point by point what you disagree with.

Good night.

[_LCD2YOU]

Here's the thing Ray A.

I don't have to prove anything. The burden of proof is on the one that supports the notion.

The evidence has been presented by Warren. It is in the book you read. He and his wife spent years going to Yemen to do actual field work. That's where he got all those photos you see in the book. He took many of them them with his own camera, not plucked from National Geographic. Now it's up to you to start a thread, preferably in the CF, and critique point by point what you disagree with.

Good night.

Actually I don't have to do anything of the sort. Let me ask you this: Do you think the book "Chariots of the Gods" is worth the pulp it was printed on?

See I did read Warren's BOOK. It was not a paper on the subject. It was a collection of his wish list that he wants to see for the Book of Mormon. He has suppositions, not evidence in his book. Why do I dismiss it so easily?

In science, real scientists write books for the interested AFTER they write the highly technical papers on the subject. Stephen Hawkings, the late Stephen Gould and others did just that. Other books written for "science" are written explaining current theory for non-theorists who are still interested. Warren is going against the grain. He wrote a book instead of writing a paper. Why? See papers in science are subject to rigorous scrutiny. Scrutiny that I think Warren knows he won't survive.

But he's an apologist. He wants to make others feel good about the lack anything that points to the Book of Mormon being a real book. So he writes a book for the ones who want to believe. The troo believers[sup]tm[/sup] will suck that up. He rants about how "some just don't want to see the truth" which plays right into the audience he has targeted.

So Ray A., no. You want to present Warren's book as "evidence", you bring it up. Again, it is not for anyone to "dis-prove" but the believer to "prove" (although proofs are only in math - real science uses evidence) the book. Show or present Warren's "evidence" in the CF. Remember, a lot of his pictures are really bereft of anything like context.

Now back to "Chariots of the Gods". Do you think it is correct? If not are you going to "dis-prove" it or do you think it is up to someone to "show the evidence is real"?

See even in "CotG", I think it is the latter.

[_beastie]

Thanks, Chris and addictio.

by the way, Chris, as I've previously stated, I haven't studied the mid-east connections at all, so can't give informed responses to things like the dating of the ziggurat. You may notice that I accepted Brant's dating for that section of the essay, simply because accepting Sorenson's dating would end that portion of the essay immediately. ;)

At any rate, here's the footnote he used for that assertion:

31 for a generation the scholars agreed on a date in the vicinity of 3100 BC for the first appearance of the ziggurat, but radiocarbon dating has now pushed the first occurrence back a bit more. James Mellaart, "Egyptian and Near Eastern Chronology: A Dilemma?" Antiquity 53 (1979); 6-18: 54 (1980); 225-27

by the way, it looks like Ancient Setting is online here:
http://www.cumorah.org/www/docs/libros/ ... r_bom.html

I'll add that and other links. My server has been down off and on all week so I'm just now getting to some more tasks.

[_Gadianton]

Beastie had a conversation on Sorenson metallurgy issues with a number of apologists on FAIR a couple(?) years ago that included DCP, Brant, I can't remember who else, but also a few of DCP's colleagues via email correspondence (including Sorenson?) answering Beastie vicariously through DCP. I think this thread, probably the most "scholarly" thread ever on FAIR by FAIR standards, was directly responsible for Beastie's banishment. I remember spending the next week or so putting all my spare time into reading on smelting and kicking around the issues with a friend of mine who has a forge. Going back and reading the thread, I felt the apologists had a very shallow understanding of metallurgy, it went beyond cherry picking and misrepresentation. I was actually kind of surprised by that.

The moral of the story for this post is that even if FARMS & Co. have a large body of literature, given that it's published amongst apologists who are ultimately supporting each other to support the church, the lack of peer review or any real standards to measure quality lessens the need to be familiar with all of it. And an intelligent layperson can easily threaten their positions.