LDS II: The Mormons

Billy Baxter said:
hi Craig. Since you want me to join this thread, I'll try to address your concerns one at a time after sufficiently researching each topic.

What specifically is the most egregious "tell" in the BOM that invalidates its Christ-centered message? Was your copy of the BOM folded and wrinkled, or did it smell of mildew? ;)

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How about that it gets the human civilization in the Americas wrong? There were no chariots, horses, iron or steel swords. The civilization the book describes simply did not exist.
 
Billy Baxter said:
hi Craig. Since you want me to join this thread, I'll try to address your concerns one at a time after sufficiently researching each topic.



What specifically is the most egregious "tell" in the BOM that invalidates its Christ-centered message? Was your copy of the BOM folded and wrinkled, or did it smell of mildew? ;)



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Take your pick, pre-Columbian wheels, pre-Columbian steel, horses and humans in the New World pre-Columbus, civilizations of the type described in BoM, all of them leaving no physical evidence.
 
If you look at early London after the Roman conquest you see what roads and architecture look like with wheeled, animal drawn transport. We don't see a lot of ramps in storage areas in the pre-Colombian architecture which would indicate wheeled carts. We also don't see wheel ruts or scaring.

When it comes to iron, there are many sites all over the Roman Empire where bog iron was collected and smelted. Iron and steel production produce a great deal of scaring on the ground. due to the heat and use of clay in making forges (ceramic of any type stays around pretty much forever).

Please don't say that we just haven't found the civilizations yet. The mapping of North and South America, Satelite imagery, LIDAR mapping would all show signs of this civilization. Again, we know what this civilization should look like because we know what Mediterranean industry and commerce using the tools and technology described in the BoM looks like.
 
Billy Baxter said:
OK, I'll research the question of horses in the BOM and get back to you tomorrow.

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It's not just horses, it's finding a community of people with the lifeways of people who have and use horses. Also add a civilization with the lifeways of people who have iron and steel. The stuff you have changes the way you live.
 
Billy Baxter said:
OK, I'll research the question of horses in the BOM and get back to you tomorrow.

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You never noticed the disparity between actual meso-american history and what was purported in the Book of Mormon? I suppose then, too, you are unaware of the DNA evidence flatly contradicting the origins of native Americans according to the Book of Mormon.

How about Smith's own life story as a conman, swindler, and pedophile?

Is it that whole milk before meat thing, and you are still on the liquid phase of the diet?
 
jsfisher said:
I suppose then, too, you are unaware of the DNA evidence flatly contradicting the origins of native Americans according to the Book of Mormon.
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I know folks who take that DNA evidence as "proof" modern Jews have no genetic connection to the Jews of ancient Israel. One theory I've heard seriously floated was that modern Jews are actually descended from European Romani who claimed to be Jews in order to bypass Medieval laws against Christians practicing usury.

The result is an impressive melange of racism, which is to be expected from a religion that claimed dark skin was a curse from God.
 
I drove by Hill Cumorah several times last week. It is not so big as to rule out using ground penetrating radar or core samples to find the vault ol' Joe found the plates in.
 
Wolrab said:
I drove by Hill Cumorah several times last week. It is not so big as to rule out using ground penetrating radar or core samples to find the vault ol' Joe found the plates in.
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I smell a kickstarter.

I'm serous here. Both the faithful and skeptic alike should be behind a project like this.

First we need to figure out how deep we'd need to probe to get satisfactory results.

We'd need to find ground penetrating radar that can both prove deep enough AND differentiate between solid ground and the results of a cave-in. That should be doable. If I'm remembering the National Geographic specials I've watched over the years, ground resulting from natural processes is distinctly different profile from ground that has been disturbed.

Next we'd need an estimate on the scanning itself.

Finally, we need to secure access to the site and take care of any permit issues that need to be resolved.

I'm sure there are experienced archaeologists, potentially even in this thread, who would be able to guide us through the overall process.

Update: I asked my wife, who works at an Ivy League university and has had a number of interactions with archaeologists giving presentations. The short version is doing something like that privately is very expensive and very difficult. The best bet for doing this successfully would be to get a university archaeology department and preferably a few recognized archaeologists behind the project.

The fact that this is universally considered pure fiction by people outside the Mormon church is going to complicate the process of trying to get objective archaeologists behind it. Biblical archaeology gets done because the Bible references a lot of real places and events that actually happened. I don't think there's anybody who isn't Mormon who thinks Smith was telling the truth about a cavern existing in that location.
 
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I re-read a book called "Fantastic Archaeology":
https://www.amazon.com/Fantastic-Archaeology-North-American-Prehistory/dp/0812213122

Which goes into the many wild theories regarding pre-Columbian America. The author spends a chapter on Smith and his "story" and points out that Smith borrowed the notion, common at the time, that megalithic structures like the "mounds" could not have been built by the "primitive savages"... The Indians.

Rather, someone more advance... Whiter....Like perhaps one of the "Lost Tribes". These notions were quite common at the time and fed into ideas of white superiority.
 
Wolrab said:
I drove by Hill Cumorah several times last week. It is not so big as to rule out using ground penetrating radar or core samples to find the vault ol' Joe found the plates in.
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If you believe the illustrations in Mormon materials, the "vault" was not that big -- barely larger than the plates themselves. And the plates are depicted as about the size of a regular car battery. Dunno how rocky the hill is, but I think you'd get a lot of false positives.
 
JayUtah said:
If you believe the illustrations in Mormon materials, the "vault" was not that big -- barely larger than the plates themselves. And the plates are depicted as about the size of a regular car battery. Dunno how rocky the hill is, but I think you'd get a lot of false positives.
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It doesn't matter anyway as Ol' Joe never really said where it was : http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Mormon/Geography/New_World/Hill_Cumorah

I don't believe drumlins are a good candidate for GP radar.
 
Wolrab said:
I drove by Hill Cumorah several times last week. It is not so big as to rule out using ground penetrating radar or core samples to find the vault ol' Joe found the plates in.
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The church owns the hill. They are never going to give permission for something aimed at disproving their idiocy. That won't be the reason they give, of course.
 
The Hill is likely LDS property, and getting their okay to search would only be a little harder than levitating the Pyramids.

And about as useful.
 
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