Possible Modern Source for the Book of Mormon

[_Runtu]

I don't care about proof, but I am interested in understanding what reasons Water Dog has for making some of his more extraordinary statements about the Book of Mormon.

For me, the question is quite simple: if the Book of Mormon were a 19th-century creation drawing on the Bible and local mythology, would it look any different than it does?

[Guest]

The onus IS on believers to prove that their claims about the Book of Mormon are true. No one is expecting you to go around collecting evidence against Dianetics or the Koran. While it is all good to claim you just need faith, the thing is that the Book of Mormon makes historical claims. Not only is there no evidence FOR many of them, there is evidence AGAINST many of them. So it is not a matter of faith. A believing Mormon who has honestly looked at the evidence must choose to believe in something that is false.

I would suggest you re-read what I wrote as you obviously didn't understand it. It may be a complicated concept, and I'm not being facetious when I say that. This is a philosophical construct. Everything is a matter of faith. I've never read it myself but there is a book titled "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist". It's a matter of what are you placing your faith in. Theists rely much more heavily on their own minds and intellect than atheists do. When you try to prove the Book of Mormon false, that's not what you're really doing. You're trying to convert me to your religion, telling me to abandon my faith for yours. You are no different than a missionary knocking on a door.

You are conflating the veracity of the Book of Mormon with the existence of God.

I don't need to "prove" the Book of Mormon false, I just need to read Guns, Germs, and Steel (or any number of historical or scientific works which take no position on the Book of Mormon at all) to know that the Book of Mormon makes claims that are incompatible with history and science. It is not just that the Book of Mormon is unproveable (and thus a faith matter), it is that it contradicts reality. Believers must either remain in willful ignorance by living in a bubble, or choose to believe against the evidence.

On the issue of God. I made no claims at all. depending on your approach the existence of God is either a faith matter, or it is a probability matter. Since probability can be subjective, any such calculation will be weighted towards what the calculator wants to be true. Personally, I think the probability of any sort of God existing is very low, and the probability of the existence of a benign personal God is zero.

But my views on God are completely irrelevant to my views on the Book of Mormon. I can imagine a God-free scenario where aliens are guiding human development and are the "angels" and personages that appear to prophets, the Urim and Thummim are advanced technology and so on. Joseph's whole story could be true! (along with Tobin's) He could have translated an ancient book from the gold plates (which were actually an alien information storage device). However, in that case I would expect the Book of Mormon to NOT contradict reality. Note that I am not asking for the Book of Mormon to contain verifiable facts. The aliens could want us to show faith so they avoid imparting information we can prove (maybe they are conducting an experiment on us). But, a true Book of Mormon would not contradict history and science.

So you see, belief in God has nothing to do with belief in the Book of Mormon. I don't get into arguments over God and have no interest in what other people believe.

The Book of Mormon is the keystone of a scam that has directly hurt me and my family, and continues to inflict pain on me and my family. This is why I bother to investigate its false claims and engage in these discussions. A skeptic who has not been damaged by it would simply dismiss it as unproven.

Edit: punctuation

[_Themis]

Prove it! Prove it!

Yay, another brainiac critic that doesn't see the irony in appealing to a higher authority.

You prove it. This is exactly what I was talking about earlier. You clearly do not understand the underlying philosophical concepts driving these discussions. The onus is not on me to prove anything. You want me to convert to your religion, you prove it. Just to be nice though, the answer to your question can be found in the very material Runtu references. Follow it back to the original sources.

LOL You think you get to make the assertions and everyone is supposed to prove them.

[_Spanner]

To look at one issue that is relevant to the Late War, what evidence do you have that Joseph thought the whole Book of Mormon story happened in Mesoamerica? All the evidence I have seen indicates that he thought the climactic wars occurred in Heartland USA.

You raise an interesting point. You're right, I believe he did think the events occurred in the "heartland." And that fact supports my point. It's not about Joseph Smith but what is written in the Book of Mormon. If Joseph Smith made the Book of Mormon up we should expect the story to describe a very different culture than it does. Him thinking events occurred in the heartland, saying things to this effect, supports this further. If Joseph Smith did make it up, then that means he had to intentionally model it after Mesocamerican culture. I dispute that this is even possible, but even if he did, why is he then on record as thinking events happened in the heartland? In his day and until just recently this was one of the major points brought up by critics, the fact that his depiction of the indians didn't fit with the indian culture people knew. Why didn't he respond to that by saying it was the ancestors of the Aztecs? Was this part of his clever deception? Nobody knew it, but he was a secret expert on anthropology well before his time. So he kept silent knowing that around 175 years later experts would find matching cultures and geography in south america. The ideas could not have originated from him, so where did he get them? Certainly not The Late War.

You guys can turn anything into a hit for Joseph!
The problem is, that the Book of Mormon is not very accurate in describing either Mesoamerica or the heartland. There are a growing number of believers, including Glen Beck no less, who think all the evidence points to the heartland. Heartland and LGT backers each disprove the other. From the sidelines it is hilarious. When I read the Book of Mormon, I certainly don't picture the battles happening in the jungle. They happened in open country, and when they set an ambush in the "wilderness" they describe going into the patches of wilderness. That does not sound like jungle to me! But even if the Book of Mormon did describe Mesoamerica, that is irrelevant.

One common believer reaction to Book of Mormon critics is to pileup a bunch of "how could Joseph know [insert "hit"]" points and items that are compatible with reality. Then expect critics to counter them. That is a waste of time. There only needs to be ONE piece of disproving evidence to show that the book is a hoax. Joseph was attempting to write a book about Hebrews in ancient America. Of course he is going incorporate as much factual material as he can. And where he guesses something, for many things there is a reasonable chance he will get it right. So accurate items prove nothing in the presence of material that demonstrably contradicts reality. "Hits" would only be of use if there were no counter-factual material.

In the absence of disproving evidence, your hits would increase faith in the veracity of the book, but that is definitely not the case at all. The Book of Mormon contains bronze-age myths, and deutero-Isaiah (another link). No number of "hits" will remove them.

My interest in the Late War is not that is disproves the Book of Mormon. I already know that it is a hoax. What I, and many others here I am sure, are interested in is what this does to theories of how Joseph created the book. For some people who have managed to swallow all the other disproving information, the Late War has been the last straw (early in the thread there is a link to another board where someone left the church after the Late War issue came out). But I don't think that applies to any one posting here.

[_Uncle Ed]

@Spanner:

So accurate items prove nothing in the presence of material that demonstrably contradicts reality. "Hits" would only be of use if there were no counter-factual material.

A lot of cogent explanation occurred yesterday, but this snippet focuses on what I want to point out:

A hoax will reveal itself. People can't get away with anything forever. Did Joseph Smith know he was hoaxing? I choose to believe that he existed in a metaphysical reality all his own, and that he really did believe there were gold plates hidden out in the woods near his house. He saw lines of text and had the faith to believe that they came via his gift as a "seer". It's odd how until the early 1840's Joseph Smith is reported to have said things that support the local geography model, like, If I recall correctly, the Jaredites coming into the land northward via the gulf of St Lawrence, and of course his Zelph story. Then those first articles about explorations and books thereof on Mesoamerica started to come out, and Joseph Smith is reported to have said that Book of Mormon events were located around the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, etc.

What modern Mormons don't realize is that from the evidence of those c. 14 years of the church's existence before Joseph Smith's death, he distanced himself from the Book of Mormon. He never taught from it. It was never a thing he brought up, but only responded to others bringing up the subject of the Book of Mormon. His efforts to use the book to make money to support his religion making failed and he moved on. Originally the book was presented as proof of his prophetic calling, it was a weighty endorsement from God that Joseph Smith's call to the ministry was genuine and especially different from the plethora of other self-anointed ministers flocking throughout the Burned Over District.

Now the Book of Mormon forms the "keystone of our religion" in very deed. Everything has been placed upon it to stand while it stands. All such language originated at the time of the book's issuance. This is "key": we have Joseph Smith promoting the Book of Mormon only until he could no longer afford the time and expense to promote it, then he moved on.

All conservative or fundamentalist Judeo-Christians have the same problem: belief in their scriptures within a wider world of scientific and philosophical expansion, the "real world" that points a battery of smoking guns at all the assertions made in scripture claiming to be the truth.

As the number of "hits" on the structure of the world presented in scripture increases, the belief comes under increasing pressure to bear up. There is only one possible outcome if one is to continue to belief: assert that for whatever reason(s) the so called real world of science and the philosophies of men is mistaken where it conflicts with scripture. Time will prove the error of man's wisdom without God, and, just as always in the past, the scientific "facts" will be altered to deny the errors of the past. We cannot depend on the philosophies of men mingled with scripture, because it is corrupted by the machinations of Satan. Only strict adherence to scripture will guide the seeker of truth unerringly to salvation. Any supplanting of scripture with the philosophies of men will result in confusion and potential disaster.

The scripture itself warns against upholding the wisdom of the world over the truth of God given by his prophets. So anyone getting into trouble over these kinds of arguments as this thread indulges in can withdraw behind the assertion, "If science and the scriptures are in conflict, we can be certain that it is always science that is in error". And that takes huge faith.

But the belief that there is no God or gods is just as huge. I'll finish up with that, again: "your faith" is bigger than mine....

[_Arrakis]

The only meaningful parallel is the idea of native americans being the descendants of ancient israelites.

Concerning the View of the Hebrews, here's a partial list from B.H. Roberts

Extensive quotation from the prophecies of Isaiah in the Old Testament
Preaching of the gospel in ancient America
Israelite origin of the American Indian
Future gathering of Israel and restoration of the Ten Lost Tribes
Peopling of the New World from the Old via a long journey northward which encountered seas of many waters
Religious motive for the migration
Division of the migrants into civilized and uncivilized groups with long wars between them and the eventual destruction of the civilized by the uncivilized
Assumption that all native peoples were descended from Israelites and their languages from Hebrew
Burial of a lost book with yellow leaves
Description of extensive military fortifications with military observatories or "watch towers" overlooking them
Change from monarchy to republican forms of government

Those parallels aren't meaningful?

[_Runtu]

Yes. Your own sources demonstrate this. Take View of the Hebrews. There are more differences than similarities with the Book of Mormon, as has been explained by others repeatedly. Take any source related to mound builder mythology, or any other mythology related to native americans at the time, and you'll find problems such as this. If Joseph Smith was simply copying these theories the Book of Mormon would be very different.

http://publications.maxwellinstitute.by ... 0&index=22

Who said anything about copying, let alone copying from View of the Hebrews?

Another obvious difference I would add which this author doesn't is the means of travel. View of the Hebrews has the Israelites coming to America by land and limited use of canoe across the Bering Strait, which is still the accepted hypothesis today for how pre-Columbus people got to the Americas. So why did Joseph Smith change this instead of sticking to the accepted knowledge?

What accepted knowledge? There was no consensus, no accepted knowledge, in Joseph Smith's day. There's nothing to change.

And it's not just a matter of Joseph Smith exercising some creative license and changing the story a little.

There's no story to change. That's how mythology works. There are commonly accepted elements, such as that the Native Americans killed off a superior, white race, and that these advanced white people had technologies that the Native Americans didn't have. But there's no template, no "story" Joseph would have had to follow. If I write a novel about UFOs and it doesn't follow the script for Close Encounter of the Third Kind, it doesn't mean I'm no longer writing about UFOs.

View of the Hebrews, as a single example, is a very complicated story with interdependence. The details can't be changed without it collapsing the theory as a whole, a theory also by the way which was based on the accepted anthropological, archaeological and historical knowledge of the day.

So, we're agreed that he didn't copy View of the Hebrews.

So Joseph Smith was also going against the accepted body of knowledge by the experts, a body of knowledge which has since changed to be more in line with the Book of Mormon version than the mythology which existed at the time.

Two points: what accepted body of knowledge, and what has since changed to be more in line with the Book of Mormon? If you're going to make such extraordinary claims, perhaps you can provide some evidence.

How did Joseph Smith pick and choose various aspects from mythology to construct a more correct narrative?

He didn't.

http://publications.maxwellinstitute.by ... 1&index=12

The only meaningful parallel is the idea of native americans being the descendants of ancient israelites. Joseph Smith certainly wasn't the first to have this idea, and he never said that he was.

So, after all this verbosity, all you're really saying is that Joseph Smith didn't copy from View of the Hebrews. On that we agree. What that has to do with anything I posted is beyond me.

What I showed in my piece is that common beliefs (maybe that's what you mean by accepted knowledge) in Joseph Smith's time show up in the Book of Mormon. If you're going to argue that such elements of moundbuilder myth don't actually show up there, you'd need to give some evidence of that. So far, you have presented nothing.

[_Always Changing]

The limited theology in View of the Hebrews is completely different.

WaterDog, you might want to read this-- http://books.google.com/books?id=H-I2AA ... on&f=false
It will give you a better idea of how much different Ethan Smith's theology is from that of the Book of Mormon.

[_Themis]

The Book of Mormon contains complicated Christian and Jewish themes formulating in a very new understanding of the gospel.

Were still waiting on the other thread for you to back this one up. I doubt you will.

Where did this come from? The limited theology in View of the Hebrews is completely different.

So? I don't think anyone here is suggesting the whole Book of Mormon is taken from the VoH. They both contain some similar story elements that suggest they have similar sources. Things like Native Americans migrating here from the middle east.

[_Themis]

Were still waiting on the other thread for you to back this one up. I doubt you will.

Surely I don't need to explain that discussions like this take time. Your little "gotcha" statements because I don't adjust my schedule to fit yours and respond to every little demand within minutes is childish. Grow up or get lost.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/1 ... indication

:)

One of the purposes was to shame you into backing up what you claimed. You had plenty of time to respond, especially when we see you posting on other threads frequently. You are staring to try and back them up, so now maybe a real discussion can start.