If any of you have perused FAIRMORMON for more than a few minutes, you've probably noticed many obvious falsehoods, blatant misrepresentations and flat-out lies. Every Wednesday I intend to address a FAIRMORMON claim that is easily falsifiable by anyone (even the old widow in Parowan).
With this in mind I humbly give you this week's number 10 Easily Falsifiable FAIRMORMON Claim:
FALSIFIABLE CLAIM NUMBER 10
--Joseph Smith would not have known that the name Alma was a male name.
This claim by FAIRMORMON is easily falsifiable as there were many males in Palmyra who were named Alma.
https://www.fairmormon.org/evidences/So ... _male_nameFAIRMORMON wrote:[T]wo male characters named Alma appear in the Book of Mormon. And, of course, this seems to run counter to what we might have expected: If Joseph Smith knew the name Alma at all from his environment, it is highly likely that he would have known it as a Latinate woman's name rather than as a masculine one. (Many will recognize the Latin phrase alma mater, which means "beneficent mother.") Recent documentary finds demonstrate, however, that Alma also occurs as a Semitic masculine personal name in the ancient Near East—just as it does in the Book of Mormon. How did Joseph know this? How could he have learned it? Quite simply, so far as modern scholarship has been able to determine, he could not have known it from any source existing in his frontier American environment.
The Book of Mormon's use of Alma as a man's name has occasioned considerable amusement among uninformed critics of the book.
All one has to do to easily disprove this FAIRMORMON claim is go to familysearch.org, create a free account and enter the search terms for a male born in Wayne County, New York or any other nearby town/county. Here are a few men the Smith family could have easily known:
Alma Waters, born 1827, Palmyra, NY
Alma Synder, born 1822, Palmyra, NY
Alma C. Messinger born 1826, Palmyra NY
Alma Wilson, born 1807, Palmyra, NY
Alma Warren, born 1806, Palmyra NY
Here's a real interesting one: Alma L. Fuller, born 1816 in Palmyra NY, but died in 1880 in Providence, UT. It looks like this guy joined the Church in Palmyra and followed the pioneers to Utah? Interesting.
There are more. Go and give familysearch.org a try.
As FAIRMORMON asks, "How could he have learned it?" The honest answer is simply that Joseph would have known males named Alma that lived in and around Palmyra.
Stay tuned for next Wednesday when I will bring you Number 9 Easily Falsifiable FAIRMORMON Claim