ludwigm wrote:To manis <-> manus : The "I" is the right next of "u" on the keyboard. Manis is a simple mistyping, committed frequently. I could cite tens or hundreds even from this site. It is not worth to mention.
Of course. See my reference to this in my original post.
But this trivial point had interesting results, in that it evidently led DCP in effect to disclaim the whole article posted on the FARMS website under his name, with the strange excuse that it was a transcription of oral remarks made by him some time ago, and that he had never read it.
To those of us who view the phenomenon of LDS 'apologetics' as a fascinating example of intellectual pathology, this is another nice little specimen to add to our butterfly collections.
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.
and
It's possible that Joseph Smith picked it up from his study of the Bible, imitating it either consciously or unwittingly.
correlate with this:
Now, I ask you how a nineteenth-century farm boy could have come up with something like that, which is a perfect illustration of an Arabic grammatical point. Probably he did a lot of his work in the graduate school there at Palmyra University—well, of course there wasn't such a place. And there was no such Joseph Smith. This came to him via another route, not through academic study.
I think we should all understand that apologists asking "how could a farm boy like Joseph Smith do such a thing?" is really just a verbal tic, and completely meaningless.
If you were over at MADB right now, you would be taken out back and summarily shot.
Actually, the dude made a very similar comment on the MAD thread
"How could Joseph have known?" is a just a rhetorical device for distraction, like a magician's magic wand that points the audience's eyes away from the rabbit in his other hand. One can even, unwittingly, distract oneself from straightforward alternatives by thinking this way.
QUOTE(Daniel Peterson) Now, I ask you how a nineteenth-century farm boy could have come up with something like that...?
QUOTE(Daniel Peterson @ Mar 27 2008, 04:09 PM) *
It's possible that Joseph Smith picked it up from his study of the Bible, imitating it either consciously or unwittingly.
I am satisfied with your answer to your own question.
So far they haven't shot him. Sargon then asserted:
A critic on a message board recently suggested that a good question to ask is, "is it likely?", when considering the historicity of the Book of Mormon. This question supposedly is meant to render Book of Mormon historical claims weaker.
I ask now, "is is likely?" As Dr. Peterson has sad, it certainly is possible that Joseph Smith himself came up with "dreamed a dream". But is it likely?
My perfectly deceitful and completely corrupt Satanic Mormon mind says, No.
Scooby-doo moment: HUNH?
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.
I love the old switcheroo whereby the discussion of if/and statements is brought in to cover up the failure of the cognate accusative argument:
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.
I have one possibility in mind: bad grammar resulting from oral composition on the fly.
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”
Book of Mormon apologetics reminds me of people who find Jesus in grilled cheese sandwiches and oil spots. If you want to find something badly enough, you can talk yourself into the most idiotic notions.
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:Book of Mormon apologetics reminds me of people who find Jesus in grilled cheese sandwiches and oil spots. If you want to find something badly enough, you can talk yourself into the most idiotic notions.
Really, the whole thing is so damn tedious. If a Harvard trained physician can become convinced of alien abductions, surely it is no marvel that a PhD in Medieval Islam can believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon. Being smart and learned has nothing to do with being right. Being emotionally convicted and socially and/or financially rewarded for believing and defending just about any nonsense will make it all the harder to break the spell.
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”
Trevor wrote:I love the old switcheroo whereby the discussion of if/and statements is brought in to cover up the failure of the cognate accusative argument:
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.
I have one possibility in mind: bad grammar resulting from oral composition on the fly.
Yup. And the joke here is that the original if/and expressions were almost all edited out by Joseph Smith himself in the second edition of the Book of Mormon, published in 1837 in Kirtland, Ohio. See the following attempt to make a pro-LDS case, in which this striking fact is acknowledged:
Evidently the Prophet himself, who had of course experienced the actual process by which the Book of Mormon was given to the world, felt no scruple about eliminating what is, according to the apologists, the precious evidence of the original form of the directly delivered word of God, which he had seen, ready translated, through the seer stone. I wonder why Smith apparently felt so confident that it did not matter if he did that? Is it not an economical hypothesis that he had simply written it himself in the first place, and took the opportunity of a second edition to clean up the clumsy expressions in poorly constructed English plentifully exhibited in the original edition?
Oh yes - and the diversion from triumphantly brandished but now deflated "cognate accusative" to "if/and" constructions is a pretty silly attempt to distract attention. That's what we usually get from DCP when he knows he can't win the argument on the original point.
If/and conditionals are actually one of the single best evidences for the Book of Mormon. I really can't explain why several of them show up in a row in the Book of Mormon O-MS, unless it was serial incompetence on the part of Joseph or his scribe.
CaliforniaKid wrote:If/and conditionals are actually one of the single best evidences for the Book of Mormon. I really can't explain why several of them show up in a row in the Book of Mormon O-MS, unless it was serial incompetence on the part of Joseph or his scribe.
Well, Joseph Smith clearly felt is was a screw-up, or why else did he edit them out?
CaliforniaKid wrote:If/and conditionals are actually one of the single best evidences for the Book of Mormon. I really can't explain why several of them show up in a row in the Book of Mormon O-MS, unless it was serial incompetence on the part of Joseph or his scribe.
Well, Joseph Smith clearly felt it was a screw-up, or why else did he edit them out?