Can someone explain why I was banned from MADB?

[_Chap]

mms:

I am sorry that you were banned for posting my material on MAD, something which I had certainly suggested might be done.

Of course the wording of my post was not designed for direct reposting on MAD, and I don't know whether you modified it at all before you posted it there - perhaps by removing such provocative phrasings as my reference to derision being the appropriate response to DCP's "cognate accusative = the Book of Mormon was not of this world" nonsense.

If you want to fight with DCP on that board, you have to be prepared to let the facts speak for themselves, and trust that the appropriate comments will form in the reader's mind. I think you can be pretty sure that they will form in DCP's mind, to judge from his reactions.

[_mms]

mms:

I am sorry that you were banned for posting my material on MAD, something which I had certainly suggested might be done.

Of course the wording of my post was not designed for direct reposting on MAD, and I don't know whether you modified it at all before you posted it there - perhaps by removing such provocative phrasings as my reference to derision being the appropriate response to DCP's "cognate accusative = the Book of Mormon was not of this world" nonsense.

If you want to fight with DCP on that board, you have to be prepared to let the facts speak for themselves, and trust that the appropriate comments will form in the reader's mind. I think you can be pretty sure that they will form in DCP's mind, to judge from his reactions.

No worries, CHAP. I thought about editing, but this is the thing: people commonly post what many members of that board believe to be "idiotic" "absurd" etc. statements on that board. These statements often come from "anti" Mormon sources. As long as they are quoting and putting it up for ridicule, it does not seem to be a problem. I thought it best to simply quote the entirety of yoru statement, without judging it one way or another. It was not MY statement, I was simply giving DCP the chance to respond. What if LOAP or BC had posted the post exactly as I did? The mods would have done nothing.

I was bound to be banned. I was just surprised that this was the post that caused it. As I suspected, my wife was thrilled. My "excommunication" from MAD was a reason to raise our caffeine-free diet cokes. It is just icing on the cake that I was banned in a way that makes it look like MAD is unwilling to allow legitimate challenges to DCP to remain on their board (deleting the post entirely). Credit to DCP, though, for responding despite the overprotectiveness of his security force over there.

[_Mister Scratch]

Well done, mms and Chap! It seems that the two of you delivered a real double-whammy to The Good Professor. First, he posted this "correction":

The thread in which I was asked to respond to a critique of a transcription of a small portion of some remarks I made several years ago about the Book of Mormon was closed before I'd even seen it.

But here, quickly, is my response:

-1-

I don't regard the cognate accusative in 1 Nephi 8:2 as a "killer point." I don't regard it as proof that the Book of Mormon is ancient, and have never said that I did. To overstate the importance I place on it is merely to create a straw man.

Moreover, I'm aware that the idiom to dream a dream exists elsewhere in English. Not only in the Bible-drenched John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress alluded to by the critic, but in the English of the musical Les Miserables, which the critic doesn't mention:

I dreamed a dream in times gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living

http://www.actionext.com/names_m/michae ... ables.html

John Bunyan, an English Puritan whose principal education came from reading the Bible, quite predictably uses biblical cadences and figures in his writing. That's one of the reasons he's so fine a stylist. In Fantine's song, I doubt that there's any biblical connection. The dreamed a dream idiom simply suits the rhythm and the poetic flavor of the piece. It's not typical English -- we normally have dreams in English -- but it's certainly grammatically acceptable and not at all jarring.

Thus, while I think that the existence of a potentially double cognate accusative in 1 Nephi probably points to the underlying Hebraism of the Book of Mormon, and is, therefore, worth pointing out, I don't see it as anything remotely like a "slam dunk." It's possible that Joseph Smith picked it up from his study of the Bible, imitating it either consciously or unwittingly. That said, there is very little evidence that the young Joseph Smith was a close student of the Bible, let alone a stylistic sponge like the autodidact John Bunyan, and there is explicit evidence to the contrary.

For that matter, I think that the evidence is strongly against Joseph Smith as author of the Book of Mormon. I reflected on that issue a few years ago in my "Editor's Introduction—Not So Easily Dismissed: Some Facts for Which Counterexplanations of the Book of Mormon Will Need to Account":

http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publica ... 7&number=2

In contrast to the idiom to dream a dream, the seemingly Hebraic if/and conditional sentences of the Original Manuscript (in Helaman and Moroni) are ungrammatical, jarring, and, accordingly, a much, much more important potential indicator of the Semitic character of the underlying text of the English Book of Mormon. If the critic can find parallel English constructions to those, I'll be impressed.

-2-

Of course I know that the Latin equivalent of English hand is manus, not manis.

The critic is responding to a transcription of remarks I presented orally. I didn't transcribe my oral remarks, I don't know who did, and I've never before seen the transcription. I'm not accountable for the way in which some person unknown to me transcribed the word manus.

If I'm going to be proved an idiot, it will have to be on the basis of better evidence than this.

(bold emphasis added)

Would you like to find out who did the transcription? There's no "Oops!" moment that I can see on the MADthread in question, but, sadly, DCP had to eat crow:

Just sent this note to the Powers that Be at the Maxwell Institute:

I've caught flack from a critic recently regarding the alleged fact that, in the talk on “Evidences for the Book of Mormon” that is transcribed on the Maxwell Institute site, I demonstrate that I don’t know that the Latin equivalent for hand is manus, not manis. Apparently this is a topic of discussion and hilarity somewhere on the web.

I had never looked at the transcript before, and even a cursory glance shows that there are several problems with it. Probably none of them is fatal, though. Still, would it be possible sometime, at your leisure, to change manis to manus where it occurs?

Whew. Maybe the worst of the crisis is over?

Apparently, this "embarrassment" over "manus/manis" was the result of a Maxwell Institute foul-up. D'oh!

[_Chap]

The 'manis' issue is entirely peripheral to my OP, and its only interest is the strange disclaimer that it provoked DCP to make - equivalent to 'I have never read the stuff they posted under my name at FARMS'.

The point worth watching will be whether DCP decides to ask FARMS to remove or modify the patently foolish argument - clearly made by him in his original talk - that such phrasings as 'dreaming a dream' go anywhere towards suggesting a non-human origin for the Book of Mormon, rather than merely being the consequence of the unsurprising fact that a young man in a religiously obsessed part of 19th C New England was familiar with the diction of the Bible.

I wonder whether we shall eventually see quotation from material posted at FARMS being claimed to be just as illegitimate as a representation of the alleged authors' real thinking as (supposedly) is the Journal of Discourses of the views of 19th century prophets such as Brigham Young?