Simon on Mormon Stories

[_Tobin]

The only thing you are reeling under is your own false assertions and conclusions. For whatever reason, you don't believe in the scriptures or in the God of the Bible. You openly mock them and the fact that the prophets saw and spoke with God. You also mock anyone that really believes in the scriptures, states there is a God, and that others can really experience God. You are anti-God in every sense of the word and in open conflict with God and will have to account for who and what you are one day.

And I thought that I just giving Tobin a chance to explain his point of view more clearly. At least the only threat I have to worry about is that God will get me in the end. He evidently hasn't laid any commands on Tobin to take me out personally ... yet.

And now you've traded your pom-poms in and instead insinuate that I might try to harm you when I've never even hinted at any such thing nor would ever consider it. You really are despicable.

[Guest]

[dialogue between] Daniel Peterson and Natuska posted in the comments section of a Huffington Post article back in September 2011.

This shows why I do not trust DCP and do not think he is being genuine. He is simply a spin doctor for the crumbling LDS claims. Most of the MST entries I have read demonstrate individuals that have made their way successfully in the non-religious world, many in the scientific and scholarly world. And they talk about their HG 'experience'--each of them with a version of the bosom burning.

A handful of them have talked about a small plank that he or she claims in a bridge between the widening chasm or gulf between their scientific/scholarly world knowledge and the LDS claims. But DCP claims that there is no chasm or gulf at all. In doing so, he is being knowingly and intentionally disingenuous, or else he is nothing but a name-dropping dolt.

[_Drifting]

Tobin,

You can clear all of this up by explaining the why's and the wherefore's of God's manifestations to you.

What does He look like?
What is His voice like?
Does He speak English?

etc.

[_Tobin]

Tobin,

You can clear all of this up by explaining the why's and the wherefore's of God's manifestations to you.

What does He look like?
What is His voice like?
Does He speak English?

etc.

Yes, go speak with God yourself. That should clear up your many questions.

[_Chap]

The only thing you are reeling under is your own false assertions and conclusions. For whatever reason, you don't believe in the scriptures or in the God of the Bible. You openly mock them and the fact that the prophets saw and spoke with God. You also mock anyone that really believes in the scriptures, states there is a God, and that others can really experience God. You are anti-God in every sense of the word and in open conflict with God and will have to account for who and what you are one day.

And I thought that I just giving Tobin a chance to explain his point of view more clearly. At least the only threat I have to worry about is that God will get me in the end. He evidently hasn't laid any commands on Tobin to take me out personally ... yet.

And now you've traded your pom-poms in and instead insinuate that I might try to harm you when I've never even hinted at any such thing nor would ever consider it. You really are despicable.

Nah. Since you wouldn't answer reasonable questions and instead posted silly mockery, finished off with vague menaces about what God will do to me, I thought I was entitled to laugh at you a bit. I am sure you wouldn't hurt a fly.

[_Drifting]

Tobin,

You can clear all of this up by explaining the why's and the wherefore's of God's manifestations to you.

What does He look like?
What is His voice like?
Does He speak English?

etc.

Yes, go speak with God yourself. That should clear up your many questions.

Your non answer clears up one question on this thread...

Are you embarrassed by your experiences with God or has He told you not to tell anyone about them?

[Guest]

-

[_Buffalo]

I'm going to reproduce a string of comments between Daniel Peterson and Natuska posted in the comments section of a Huffington Post article back in September 2011. Natuska does a great job explaining why Dan and the mopologists are wrong about native american DNA.

Dan gets things rolling by posting links to Mormon Scholars testify.

For anybody who might be interested: Roughly three hundred affirmations of their faith from reflective and believing Mormons can be read at

http://mormonscholarstestify.org/

http://mormonscholarstestify.org/category/testimonies

And the collection continues to grow steadily.

And for anyone interested in what an actual archeologist of note has to say about most everything claimed by the Book of Mormon:

http://www.pbs.org/Mormons/interviews/coe.html

Michael Coe is an emeritus professor at Yale. He spent his life in archeology in one of the places Mormons like to claim is a strong candidate for the Book of Mormon lands. In short, the archeological record provides no support for those who like to claim the Book of Mormon is a historical record of early inhabitants of the americas. The most damning evidence is that no pollen has ever been found *anywhere* for cereals the Book of Mormon claims were grown.

That is completely separate from the lack of DNA evidence. The Book of Mormon claims arrivals from the Middle east were amongst the "principal" founders of the native americans, though the DNA record indicates this is strikingly not the case. The time periods concerned are practically overnight in genetic terms so any trace should be easy to pick up - no one has come close to finding any supporting evidence. Several LDS geneticists have fallen from the faith when they realized the evidence in the DNA challenged the central occurrences in the Book of Mormon. By contrast, the genetic history of world Jewry is so clearcut that Jewish or non-Jewish heritage of any group of people has been trivial to determine.

You will find no scientific support if you choose to believe in the Book of Mormon and Occam's Razor would suggest that the whole story is fantasy.

Anyone interested in a profession of faith from a believing Mormon "archaeologist of note" is invited to read

http://mormonscholarstestify.org/2166/john-e-clark

And perhaps also

http://mormonscholarstestify.org/114/john-l-sorenson

(By the way, Michael Coe has had very laudatory things to say over the years about the scholarship of both of these men.)

And more is on its way.

On the DNA issue:

http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/display ... cat_id=488

Several quite prominent geneticists happen to be believing Latter-day Saints. DNA neither proves nor disproves the Book of Mormon.

Let's hope these "quite prominent geneticists" read this weeks issue of Science magazine - one of the most reputable peer-reviewed journals.

There's an article entitled "Tracing the Paths of the First Americans" which summarizes the findings of six recent papers looking at the genetic ancestry of native Americans. The key sentence is:

"The findings support earlier indications that the Paleoindians, the ancestors of today's Native Americans, stem from a single Asian source population."

And, a reputable geneticist, who happens to be LDS, has shown that a fragment of DNA (which some LDS thought was a a remnant of Lehi's group) has been in the US for about 15,000 years - way before any of the migrations.

With this new data, and previous work, your assertion that DNA neither proves nor disproves the Book of Mormon, is without foundation. All the extant evidence suggests the Book of Mormon account is not even close to being accurate.

http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publica ... m=2&id=504

http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publica ... cat_id=488

In light of the considerations laid out by Dr. McClellan and Dr. Whiting, it's difficult to see how anything in the "Science" article could disprove the claims of the Book of Mormon.

But then, Dr. McClellan is a population geneticist and Dr. Whiting is a prominent molecular biologist, so what would THEY know? Better to take the word of a hostile pseudonymous layman, right?

Very nice and hostile response. I am not a layman, unless you'd consider an active mid-career academic scientist working in a closely related area a "layman". Hostile isn't accurate - I really could care less what people believe as long as the science they base it on is accurate and not distorted.

It's odd that you would name-drop like this. Both scientists you mentioned are well published though don't work directly on ancestry of native americans. The first is a bioinformatician who works on mitochondrial SNPs and Whiting works on insect mitochondria.

Your FARMS and BYU links (which are not - repeat not) peer-reviewed are from 2003 which is a lifetime in this field and predates many of the most significant discoveries in this area and recent techniques of detecting sequence homology in autosomal DNA (in those days a certain mitochondrial haplotype was considered the great hope of LDS researchers - later shown to be inaccurate by a LDS researcher). They are opinion pieces and should be advertised as such.

I'd take a look at
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/333/6050/1692.summary

if I were you for the newer techniques in action. I will say it again - the peer-reviewed scientific literature (which excludes personal opinion pieces in BYU publications for obvious reasons) categorically rules out the requirement of Book of Mormon.

As I maintain - the evolutionary record is so clear that an undergrad would come to the same conclusion.

Dr. McClellan's article is a few years old, but that's not enough, in and of itself, to invalidate his points -- and his points suggest that the "Science" article is probably irrelevant to the Book of Mormon. Incidentally, if I've read the particular "Science" article in question, it specifically notes that more testing is needed, and its accompanying map very conspicuously indicates that testing hasn't been done in the area specifically favored for the Book of Mormon by most believing Latter-day Saint scholars.

Thus, even if Dr. McClellan's points DIDN'T hold, the "Science" article would seem to be indecisive regarding the Book of Mormon.

The authors essentially used DNA extracted from burial sites to piece together migration patterns. The data fits prevailing models rather elegantly. Scientists always request more testing to flesh out their datasets and increase the clarity of their results. The request for additional testing noted in the summary piece I cited relates to the not entirely ruled out possibility of additional arrivals from Asia via the Beringian route but additional sequence data will clarify that. That caveat clearly doesn't mean "We're actually expeting some Middle Eastern DNA to pop up if we keep sequencing". The implication of the caveat is entirely different.

Given the abundance of native american DNA already collected, it's not even remotely likely that new samples will change the current outlook, only it will lend further evidence for a precise number of Alaskan arrivals. Were Lehi's party really the "principal founders" they've done a very good job of hiding all evidence - not just in the US genetic record but also in the soil. Their presence was as real in the US as the Kinderhoek plates.

Plus, the data cover both broad regions where one can buy tours to visit the Book of Mormon lands.

Actually, if you had read the articles by Drs. Whiting and McClellan, and if you understood my position (I suspect that you have no idea what it is), you would realize that I'm not "punting" on any scientific discipline, and that I don't expect "Middle Eastern DNA" to turn up.

I read bits of both references you cited, although I skipped the biology lesson at the start of the first link. I skipped over the sentence which would make a peer-reviewer shudder:
"First, however, I feel compelled by my faith to state that the only reliable way to test the veracity of the Book of Mormon or statements by modern prophets such as Joseph Smith is to put Moroni's promise to the test on a personal level".

His argument seems to be a restatement of absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and that exact answers to research are not an experimental reality. Here we agree though repeated and sustained absence of evidence does undermine the counter hypothesis that Lehi's DNA does exist.

He suggests it's not probable that the genetic trace of a small migrating party would necessarily or logically be detected. Here I strongly disagree - their DNA was different and if they had *any* survivors (even those whose DNA has been collected from native burial sites) it would have shown up, even if those survivors subsequently died out: people reproduce and so does their DNA. Scandinavian and Asian DNA has been detected in the American genetic record.

The author seems to concede that no DNA from Lehi has been found and he's comfortable with this. Given the plethora of accumulated evidence, I'd venture it will never be found. Science attaches a confidence to predictions and on the basis of the available evidence Lehi's DNA never existed.

The second link's author states no scientific experiment can be used to test the account of the Book of Mormon. Then he deals with a number of problems of DNA research and problems associated with detecting evolutionary relationships and points to the difficulties in making conclusions on data which do not directly test a hypothesis: many of the researchers did not specifically look for Lehi's DNA. But scientists are curious beasts and if they detected an interesting bit of DNA they would have devoted attention to it - especially if they detected Middle Eastern DNA. After all - interesting bits of DNA led to our knowledge of mobile DNA and viral integration.

He identifies the problem of the difficulty of detecting small amounts of DNA in a larger population though recent genetic advances, based largely on the explosion of sequence data from around the world, mitigates that concern: traces from tiny founding colonies have been detected in the genetic record.

The enumeration of difficulties still reads like an apology for the lack of evidence. One LDS adherent once told me "Trust me, BYU whizzes are all over this problem". And that itself causes a problem. Evidence of Lehi's DNA would constantly be on our TV screens and used by the missionaries if it were found. But it never will be.

If your position for the lack of DNA evidence (and the more serious lack of a pollen record) is more sophisticated and subtle than this, I'd be very interested to hear it.

I suspect that there are only a handful of diehards monitoring this portion of the comments section, so I'm probably going to opt out soon on the basis of the principle of marginal benefit.

In the meantime, though, I just want to say that I think it would be wonderful to live in a world, as you and all non-Mormons apparently do, where no argument ever turns out to be mistaken, no evidence ever turns out to be wrong, no seemingly solid claim ever proves unreliable, no scholar ever makes a mistake, all propositions are accepted without resistance, and there is no controversy about assertions of fact.

You're punting on a lot of linguistics, archeology, anthropology, molecular biology and evolutionary science, generated by legions of scientists - some LDS - from around the world being not just mistaken but so profoundly wrong that they somehow miss all the events recorded in the Book of Mormon. Good luck with that.

[_Buffalo]

Unfortunately for apologists, they cannot prove the LDS church true. But this goes for any apologist for any religion trying to prove that their religion is true or that god exists. With the Book of Mormon we have a different caveat. If the book was definitely proven true, the existence of god would be verified and the world can breathe safely in the knowledge that there is a god. Not going to happen anytime soon.

So, I would never expect the Book of Mormon is verified. Faith does not work that way.

Here is a fact: when we die, we will know the truth whatever truth that may be.

This is consistent with a hoax.

[_Buffalo]

...

Ahh, the old "seeing God must be a mental disease" line. And clearly the Bible was written by people suffering from mental disorders. You really should get some pom-poms Chap or a mascot suit. Your incessant cheerleading for the anti-God line is very entertaining.

Snap a picture next time you see God, and prove him wrong!