beastie wrote:I was just wondering since you only focused only on him being the SOLE witness.
Speaking of courts, eye witness testimony, despite its cache in the public eye, is known to be quite unreliable.
What is better, one witness, or ten witnesses? The point here isn't about the reliability of witnesses, but the method used to determine facts. You examine evidence, including eyewitness evidence, and weigh it all up. However, crucial eyewitness evidence left out of a court case can bring a wrong verdict, as happened in the Lindy Chamberlain case in the 1980s.
What is better, one witness, or ten witnesses? The point here isn't about the reliability of witnesses, but the method used to determine facts. You examine evidence, including eyewitness evidence, and weigh it all up. However, crucial eyewitness evidence left out of a court case can bring a wrong verdict, as happened in the Lindy Chamberlain case in the 1980s.
Eye witness testimony has also been known to convict innocent individuals.
As long as you agree that eye witness testimony alone isn't indicative of compelling evidence, absent other forms of corroborating evidence, then we're in agreement.
We hate to seem like we don’t trust every nut with a story, but there’s evidence we can point to, and dance while shouting taunting phrases.
beastie wrote:As long as you agree that eye witness testimony alone isn't indicative of compelling evidence, absent other forms of corroborating evidence, then we're in agreement.
That's what I said (in clarification), all evidence has to be weighed. What seems to me to have occurred is that Runtu's grandpa and his brother probably saw pices of wood shrapnel from a lightning strike (and this can happen after it strikes a tree). They may have thought they "saw" a bolt of lightning "on the ground", when in fact what they saw was shrapnel resulting from a lightning strike.
beastie wrote:As long as you agree that eye witness testimony alone isn't indicative of compelling evidence, absent other forms of corroborating evidence, then we're in agreement.
That's what I said (in clarification), all evidence has to be weighed. What seems to me to have occurred is that Runtu's grandpa and his brother probably saw pices of wood shrapnel from a lightning strike (and this can happen after it strikes a tree). They may have thought they "saw" a bolt of lightning "on the ground", when in fact what they saw was shrapnel resulting from a lightning strike.
Well, of course. I completely agree. What I was trying to point out was that, even though witnesses insist they saw something and stubbornly stick to their story until they die, it doesn't necessarily mean they actually did see what they thought they saw.
Also, take into consideration that, in the case of the Book of Mormon witnesses, someone is telling you what you are about to see/feel. Your mind would be expecting these things. Suggestion is a powerful thing.
It's sort of like EVP's. If you listen to a lot of them, it sounds like noise. But if someone puts the suggestion in your head first on what you should expect to hear, you will suddenly hear it.
Same with cloud watching. A random cloud is just that, but if someone points out that one looks like a bunny, you can't even see the random cloud anymore. All you can see is the bunny.
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Runtu wrote:Well, of course. I completely agree. What I was trying to point out was that, even though witnesses insist they saw something and stubbornly stick to their story until they die, it doesn't necessarily mean they actually did see what they thought they saw.
This is true. I was also skeptical of witness testimony until I read David Whitmer Interviews: A Restoration Witness, which records almost all of his major statements and interviews with the press. Reporters said even if you disbelieved him, you could not disbelieve he believed he was telling the truth. Your grandpa would probably say the same. Henry Moyle, later to become an apostle and member of the First Presidency, expressed "some hesitation" about the "too spiritual" nature of some parts of Whitmer's account, but he nevertheless accepted it. There's always room for legitimate doubt, and if you want, to call it a fraud. I prefer to be more cautions.