Possible Modern Source for the Book of Mormon

[_cognitiveharmony]

They use many examples of events that can be expected to be random such as birthdays, deaths, historical events etc. They then proceed to analyze the Book of Mormon with the same expectation of randomness. This is a reasonable and rational expectation. There is no demonstrable reason for us not to expect the dates in the Book of Mormon to be random if it is in fact a historical text. The analysis simply proves that the chance of the dates in the Book of Mormon being actually random rather than made up is 1 in 2000. I would now ask you to either acknowledge this fact or present an argument that at least challenges the actual premise of the analysis.

Just a hint for you. What makes a birthday and a historical event in this context both apples, is the expectation of randomness. That's why it was such a good example in the analysis.

What's the example of the date that occurred on the first month, first day?

Alma 52:1

Assassination of Lamanite leader, Amalickiah.

[Guest]

What is Hunt's background? Was it, at the time he wrote the Late War, as an uneducated farm boy in rural areas near Palmyra and Manchester?

If not, why would we suppose that Hunt and JSJr might just have shared similar patterns and manners of speech and thought?

according to a biographical sketch of a man (born 1843) i believe to be a direct descendent of Hunt (from Men of Mark in Virginia, 1907):
[His] great-grandfather was also Gilbert J. Hunt, of New York city, who was an ardent patriot in the Revolutionary struggle between the American colonies and Great Britain, and was a writer of some local reputation.

Hunt also wrote at least one other published book:
The Tour of General Lafayette through the United States (New York, 1825)

[_Spanner]

First public casualty:

http://www.ldsfreedomforum.com/viewtopi ... 14&t=30777

Last War/Napoleon was the last straw.

Further along in the thread linked above is this wrenching comment:

Last comment: Some of the desperate apologetics I have seen including on this thread- trying to explain it all- can I simply offer- I know what you are going through.

It hurts right now. Anger, embarrassment, resentment, the wedding you didn't have, the money you gave those people, the doors you knocked the 2 years you lost, friends telling you don't fall for it, and so on.

Just to say, it is possible to move past that and simply lay your life at the feet of Jesus, and say, I'm here.

It is true- he employs no servant at the gate.

He is on the other side. You'll find him, he'll take that sick feeling away and replace it with hope, love, joy.

We've done that. We still want to take the sacrament each week, and identify with LDS theology more than any other. (God head, pre-existance, sacrament, the need for a form of authority, need for baptism, his priesthood) It means we can't buy into the religious culture- (LDS) missionary work, temple baptisms and ceremonies, garments, kids on 2 year missions, LDS tithing, teaching lessons (haven't resolved how to do this, probably means we will surely be released)

The implication for us is, children, slowly unwinding things but keeping them participating- we like the youth program, want them to serve in the gap year, believe aside from messed up individuals and their interview techniques and lesson add ons/ personal opinions, want them to have a sunday school/ youth program participation. The Church teaches so many good values

We have no interest in open marriage, or drinking alcohol. We want to honor the sabbath, read the scriptures, and we have zero interest in active participation in other churches.

But if we are away from home one weekend we might go to another church to take the sacrament one week.

We haven't worked all that out.

But we're doing it slowly

How did I get here?

I am so lucky, so lucky, so blessed. I haven't prodded my wife in any way, nor she me. She was 6 months behind me. Mine was Iraq war, how could they fall for something so obvious, and back Bush. Then the handshakes, Cheney, Bush and so on
Then CHH / Wiikiwajado here at LDSFF
Then the waste of money on the conference centre
Then the abomination of the Mall, utter utter mammon
Then "lets go shopping"
Then seeing who built those places, and who is getting all the contracts in SLC to build things
Then seeing how the 12 are paid $600k a year, and all the others on boards where they get lots of money as directors.
The Mall was what did my wife. She is heavily involved in charity and compassionate service. It did her head in. How could Christs church be so uncharitable. And so she was prepared to suspend the holy anointed image,an consider

Then Tom Phillips explaining how some members get taken tot he temple and get their Second Anointing, on the quiet. Hmm, that not right surely. But he and his wife did

Then. Sweden and L Tom Perry and his breifcase. The arrogance. To simply put a line through Sweden like that

FINALLY
It was those 3 words. Those 3 missing words from the lesson manual. Who. Has. Means

Rock Waterman came in, and I read the tithing blog, which I turned into the 29 page tithing was originally and meant to be on surplus income

This came out at the same time as the December Ensign article- which said even if you and your family go hungry and homeless and have no utilities and are cold, pay your tithing.

And that opened the door of my mind to take all the stuff from the shelf and accept that (in my opinion) they lie to us for personal financial gain

Then I for the first time read Malachi 1&2 and learned hang on, god was talking to the CHURCH, not the members.

So with an open mind I stumbled on Joseph Smith, marrying other mens wives he'd just sent on missions, 14 year old girls.

All that was easy to say "oh, well, it wasn't until D&C132 when it all started to fall apart

But then I leared about Swedenborg.

And now this.

For us, there is no comeback

But there is a "go through". To Jesus.

Past the servant, past the arm of flesh. To him

Maybe that's the test. When a man, woman, lose the faith they were promised, do they abandon him, or embrace him even closer?

We shall see

Our "religious" journey might have just ended, but our spiritual one has just commenced.

And with that, my brothers and sisters, I bid you, Adieu!

I hope AussieOi has a safe landing.

[_DrW]

okay, one more category from Tvedtnes...

The Hebrew Background of the Book of Mormon, by John A. Tvedtnes

Adverbials

Hebrew has fewer adverbs than English. Instead, it often uses prepositional phrases with the preposition meaning in or with. The English translation of the Book of Mormon contains more of these prepositional phrases in place of adverbs than we would expect if the book had been written in English originally—another Hebraism. Here are some examples:
"with patience" instead of patiently (Mosiah 24:15)
"with much harshness" instead of very harshly (1 Nephi 18:11)
"with joy" instead of joyfully (Jacob 4:3)
"in spirit and in truth" instead of spiritually and truly (Alma 34:38)
"in righteousness" instead of righteously (1 Nephi 20:1)
"with gladness" instead of gladly (2 Nephi 28:28)

Ch. VII, p. 46

43. So William was ordered to depart to the land which lieth in the east, where he remaineth unto this day, and his name shall be no more spoken of with reverence amongst men.

Ch. VIII, p. 48

4. Now when Dacres beheld the ship of Columbia his eyes sparkled with joy, for he had defied the vessels of Columbia.

Ch. XIV, p. 75

21. Howsoever, the battle waxed hot, and they began to rush one upon another with great violence.

Ch. XIX, p. 101

20. And the men of Columbia rushed forward with fierceness, and drove the men of Britain from their strong hold.

Seems as though you are systematically decimating the apologist's linguistic arguments with a great decimation.

[Guest]

You ignored my questions. At a minimum, you have to throw out the 1,1 date. And possibly three other of those dates. So you only have four dates. If so, that's not going to be statisticaly significant no matter what. Also, numbers are not random. You see more 1's than 9's in actual data like this.

I see what you're getting at, believe me, in fact, the way that I wrote my initial post wasn't as accurate as it could have been. For us non-scientists this is a bit abstract, but I do think Dr. W's last post shows the bare-bones facts of the matter. If something important happened on day one, and then the same important matter continued into day two, and then into day three, how on earth can we blame the historian for just recording what happened on three consecutive days? Let the narrative disappear from before your mind's eye for a moment and consider the predictability of the brain that accounts for the unconscious number of "of"s and "and"s that a person uses in their writing or even catchy phrases on the person's mind that can be recast into new ideas. Now consider that same unconscious predictability at work when picking dates, and then the narrative wrapping around the dates instead of the other way around. Now you have the premise of a good psychological thriller where reality seemed normal with everything having perfectly good explanations, except maybe something's a little off, and then after an adventure and a plot twist, the inner meaning to the subject is revealed and thus also the alleged reality is shown to be a fabrication.

Leaving aside for a moment how we can read various texts and determine if some histories have legitimately correlated dates based on the subject matter while others don't based on the context of the work, consider that this exercise when performed on various history books should come up with the average date. some will be higher and others lower, and one in two thousand might be a legitimate oddity. The best way to argue against this method would be to take ten or twenty history books that all would consider legitimate samples, and do this test to see if dates are uncorrelated or not. Perhaps as cognitive harmony suggested, such an exercise would show that the Book of Mormon is normal in this regard. There could be some pretty unnerving implications here, but, it is what it is...

[_DrW]

First public casualty:

http://www.ldsfreedomforum.com/viewtopi ... 14&t=30777

Last War/Napoleon was the last straw.

<SNIP>

I hope AussieOi has a safe landing.

Comment on the AussOi thread on LDSFF:

Weren’t evil spirits aware of the gold plates’ content prior to Joseph Smith’s translation? And if so, couldn’t they “inspire” men to write books before the Book of Mormon was published, so that they could be used in the future in their attempts to discredit the word of God.

I kid you not.

Pretty sure that somebody, somewhere, in this epic thread foresaw and even prophesied this exact apologetic. How could they possibly have known?

[_Shulem]

Something more condemning than this related to dates is the old age that all the patriarchs/kings lived to in the Book of Mormon. Many instances of 80, 90,100, 120 years old. I don't think that was typical for Mesoamerica. But of course Brant Gardner says it depends on what the definition of years is. Fortunately for the Book of Mormon apologist, no word in the Book of Mormon has any meaning to it. Pretty f***ed up way for a God to reveal his most perfect set of doctrine if you ask me.

DEFINITION OF WHAT A YEAR IS? That's the most asinine thing I've heard in a long time and believe me, my nastyass has heard a lot of asinine thing! Brant comes to that conclusion for the sole purpose of saving his testimony from certain death. It's all about making stuff up to keep the faith.

A year is a year is a year, period.

But I suppose Brant would also defend the Explanations of Facsimile No. 3 and neuter them on the spot by posing: Depends on what your explanation of a king and a slave is.

Brant is not living the life of an honest man. He is lying to himself. He is a nice man and a gentleman and I have no dislike towards him. But he is a liar for the Lord and that ruins his character.

Paul O

[Guest]

They use many examples of events that can be expected to be random such as birthdays, deaths, historical events etc.

Thank you for pointing out what I already pointed out they did right (they compared deaths with deaths for example).

They then proceed to analyze the Book of Mormon with the same expectation of randomness. This is a reasonable and rational expectation.

And this is where I note they go wrong and change their criteria from comparing similar events as they did in their examples. Instead of taking similar events (let's say a death) from all over the Book of Mormon and comparing those, they instead select very different events from a very narrow portion of the Book of Mormon. So, I want you to try to explain to me why this selection bias isn't a BIG problem here and why it should merit your praise as being either reasonable or rational choices?

[_Shulem]

It's as if, in apologetics, they give each problem a value of 1, and then multiply all the problems together, rather than add them. Thus, to the apologist, ten small problems (each with a value of 1) when multiplied, is still 1, thus still a small problem. In other words, 1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1 = 1.

Conversely, critics see each problem adding together (1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1=10) and collectively all these "small" problems add up to carry great weight.

You're right. LDS apologists don't know how to add. They factor things on an entirely different level and base everything on FAITH rather than REALITY. Take the Explanations of Facismile No. 3, for example -- you can add up all the errors made by Joe Smith in translating and you will find that in reality every translation is an error. But the apololists only see 1 error and have a multitude of excuses to defend that small little itty-bity mistake.

Paul O

[_Equality]

What is Hunt's background? Was it, at the time he wrote the Late War, as an uneducated farm boy in rural areas near Palmyra and Manchester?

If not, why would we suppose that Hunt and JSJr might just have shared similar patterns and manners of speech and thought?

according to a biographical sketch of a man (born 1843) i believe to be a direct descendent of Hunt (from Men of Mark in Virginia, 1907):
[His] great-grandfather was also Gilbert J. Hunt, of New York city, who was an ardent patriot in the Revolutionary struggle between the American colonies and Great Britain, and was a writer of some local reputation.

Hunt also wrote at least one other published book:
The Tour of General Lafayette through the United States (New York, 1825)

Now if we can just show that Hunt wrote the book in 67 total working days we will really have something, eh?