LDS II: The Mormons

[Billy Baxter]

my dear slowvehicle,

please stop looking down your nose at me and correcting my posts as if i were one of your students. i'm not.

bb

 

[halleyscomet]

i did?



bb

Well the Bible does advise against lying in most situations. Implying you're being deliberately deceptive with your responses might not be the best tactic for defending your faith.

 

[halleyscomet]

my dear slowvehicle,

please stop looking down your nose at me and correcting my posts as if i were one of your students. i'm not.

bb

It's a skeptics' forum. Correcting each other is kind of one of the points. If you don't want to be corrected when you're wrong, you can go elsewhere.

Considering you're still clinging to the notion that the book of Mormon is historically accurate, you can look forward to being corrected a lot.

 

[Marcus]

my dear slowvehicle,

please stop looking down your nose at me and correcting my posts as if i were one of your students. i'm not.

bb

Perhaps you could argue with the existence of steel and horses in mesoamerica? It's not nitpicking, it's just history.

 

[Slowvehicle]

my dear slowvehicle,

please stop looking down your nose at me and correcting my posts as if i were one of your students. i'm not.

bb

My Dear Mr. Baxter:

You appear to have misapprehended my nym. Perhaps you would be so kind as to conform to the MA in that regard.

Further, you continue to make assertions not supported by the record. (Some would call that a person-of-straw argument.) Perhaps you would be so kind as to conform to standards of honest disputation in that regard.

You might also consider substantively addressing the questions put to you, instead of raising derails, non-sequiturs, and herrings of that rosy-red hue.

I remain, significatorily yours, &ct.

 

[Slowvehicle]

Perhaps you could argue with the existence of steel and horses in mesoamerica? It's not nitpicking, it's just history.

...or steelworking.

...or domesticated wheat and barley.

...or the very geography of the exciting stories, itself...

There is a missing, multi-thousand-year, continent-spanning civilization that none of the peoples who actually inhabited mesoamerica during the years around "34 C.E"* seem to have noticed, and that left not a single trace.

*ETA: this may not be the exact time in which Mr. Baxter stated a confidence, but IIRC it is close...

 

[Billy Baxter]

Perhaps you could argue with the existence of steel and horses in mesoamerica? It's not nitpicking, it's just history.

your wish is my command:

http://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1055&index=1

bb

 

[Beady]

Isn't this about the same point we were at for his flounce?

This signature is intended to irritate people.

 

[Slowvehicle]

your wish is my command:

http://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1055&index=1

bb

My Dear Mr. Baxter:

You appear to be mistaking the logical fallacy of "special pleading" for "evidence".

Did you read your link? Did you notice the weasel words? Are you aware of the changes wrought by horse-husbandry upon those people who know, and raise, and employ, the horse?

Did you notice the assumption of geography in your link? Where, in your opinion, is the "narrow neck of land"? Did you notice that no explanation is offered as to why the actual, demonstrable, archaeologically-supportable, mesoamerican civilizations for which there is actual evidence did not notice the continent-spanning, multi-thousand-year civilization of the "nephites"?

You continue, as is your wont, to provide unsupported (and unsupportable) assertions when asked for evidence...

I remain, irredoubtably yours &ct.

 

[Billy Baxter]

My Dear Mr. Baxter:

You appear to be mistaking the logical fallacy of "special pleading" for "evidence".

Did you read your link? Did you notice the weasel words? Are you aware of the changes wrought by horse-husbandry upon those people who know, and raise, and employ, the horse?

Did you notice the assumption of geography in your link? Where, in your opinion, is the "narrow neck of land"? Did you notice that no explanation is offered as to why the actual, demonstrable, archaeologically-supportable, mesoamerican civilizations for which there is actual evidence did not notice the continent-spanning, multi-thousand-year civilization of the "nephites"?

You continue, as is your wont, to provide unsupported (and unsupportable) assertions when asked for evidence...

I remain, irredoubtably yours &ct.

yes i read the link. did you?

No one knows where the narrow neck of land was. Some people believe that the BOM peoples lived in a limited geographical area, while others believe in a continent-spanning area.

IMHO it doesn't matter where they lived; it's similar to Christians demanding to know where Noah's Ark is before they will believe the Biblical account.

bb

 

[Slowvehicle]

yes i read the link. did you?

No one knows where the narrow neck of land was. Some people believe that the BOM peoples lived in a limited geographical area, while others believe in a continent-spanning area.

IMHO it doesn't matter where they lived; it's similar to Christians demanding to know where Noah's Ark is before they will believe the Biblical account.

bb

My Dear Mr. Baxter:

I find it difficult to believe that you would read an apologetic account, written by a mormon apologist, published in a mormon house-organ, and not notice the special pleading, misdirection, and weasel-wording, to say nothing of the factual errors.

As merely one instance, while it is only recently that "usable" bones of the Hun horse have been discovered, there has long been evidence for horse-husbandry of the kind sadly lacking: to wit, tack and trappings, to say nothing of independent, contemporary corroboration of Hunnish horsemanship.

As you pursue your education, you would do well to notice when an "argument" is being presented that evades the question being argued, as the FARM paper does.

I remain, peripatetically yours &ct.

 

[Billy Baxter]

My Dear Mr. Baxter:

I find it difficult to believe that you would read an apologetic account, written by a mormon apologist, published in a mormon house-organ, and not notice the special pleading, misdirection, and weasel-wording, to say nothing of the factual errors.

As merely one instance, while it is only recently that "usable" bones of the Hun horse have been discovered, there has long been evidence for horse-husbandry of the kind sadly lacking: to wit, tack and trappings, to say nothing of independent, contemporary corroboration of Hunnish horsemanship.

As you pursue your education, you would do well to notice when an "argument" is being presented that evades the question being argued, as the FARM paper does.

I remain, peripatetically yours &ct.

The article offers several reasons horses' remains haven't been found abundantly in mesoamerica during Nephite times.

But by all means dismiss these points with the loaded phrase "weasel words" rather than believe the all-too-possible arguments could be valid.

bb

 

[dropzone]

The article offers several reasons horses' remains haven't been found abundantly in mesoamerica during Nephite times.

But by all means dismiss these points with the loaded phrase "weasel words" rather than believe the all-too-possible arguments could be valid.

bb

Kid, by training I'm an archaeologist. Horses were gone a long ****** time before your Prophet arrived, and they lacked the shoulder bones needed to support a saddle. That developed in Asia, and we have bones to prove the progression. You are beyond incredibly wrong. Why do you even try?

 

[Slowvehicle]

The article offers several reasons horses' remains haven't been found abundantly in mesoamerica during Nephite times.

But by all means dismiss these points with the loaded phrase "weasel words" rather than believe the all-too-possible arguments could be valid.

bb

My Dear Mr. Baxter:

The apologies for why the bones of domesticated horses have not been found are not the "weasel words". The excuses presented are the "weasel words".

Not to mention, horses change the societies that use them. Could it be that you are simply unaware of the unsuitability of most of meso- and austral-america for the use of horses?

Had horses been any kind of feature at all of any mesoamerican civilization (particularly one spanning continents, for millennia), there would be tack. There would be silage. There would be contemporary artistic representations. There would be contemporary corroboration. All of these exist to attest to (for example) the Hun horse. None exist to attest to the "nephite" "horse".

I remain, agrarianly yours & ct.

 

[dropzone]

\Not to mention, horses change the societies that use them. Could it be that you are simply unaware of the unsuitability of most of meso- and austral-america for the use of horses.

Not even close to being true, as shown by the rapidity stolen Spanish horses transformed First Nations societies. Try again.

 

[Slowvehicle]

Not even close to being true, as shown by the rapidity stolen Spanish horses transformed First Nations societies. Try again.

Did you miss the "meso-" and "austro-"? Where, in your oh-so-informed opinion, did the First Nations reside?

For that matter, where did the "nephites" reside?

 

[halleyscomet]

The article offers several reasons horses' remains haven't been found abundantly in mesoamerica during Nephite times.



But by all means dismiss these points with the loaded phrase "weasel words" rather than believe the all-too-possible arguments could be valid.



bb

The argument is based upon profound, possibly willful, ignorance. A culture with horses is going to have vastly different architecture and roads than the ones found in the Americas. That pathetic little string of excuses you linked to is like trying to prove the Holocaust never happened because you can't find an order with Hitler's signature. Such arguments ignore the vast swaths of evidence outside of that one tiny excuse.

If that slab of disingenuous ******** is the best defense of the book of Mormon you can come up with you might as well give up the whole thing as allegory with no actual relation to real history.

 

[Billy Baxter]

My opinion is that many if not all of the Nephite and Lamanite cities were destroyed at the time of the Crucifixion. The BOM describes tempests, whirlwinds, fires, earthquakes, etc. and the "whole face of the land was changed." The voice of God declared that he had "hidden" many cities from his sight due to their iniquities. Mountains were leveled and valleys became mountains.

The Lamanites finished the job of destroying the Nephites completely several centuries later.

If God wanted to hide the destroyed cities from sight and change the geography, I for one accept that they will stay buried. My pet opinion is that Baja California may have once been the "narrow neck of land" now submerged.

bb

 

[bruto]

Does it not strike one as a little odd that God would go to such lengths to hide evidence of things and then go to such other lengths to provide scriptures about them? Of course there's always the escape clause that God is unfathomable and unknowable (except of course when it comes to the precise rules about what to do with our genitals), but it certainly does not seem opportune to demand faith in something about which you have just finished diligently destroying the credibility.

 

[JayUtah]

The BOM describes tempests, whirlwinds, fires, earthquakes, etc. and the "whole face of the land was changed."

All that also applies to Pompeii and Herculaneum, and we managed to find those.

The Lamanites finished the job of destroying the Nephites completely several centuries later.

Then where are the Lamanite cities?

If God wanted to hide the destroyed cities from sight and change the geography, I for one accept that they will stay buried.

Unfortunately, "God made all the empirical evidence disappear" does not carry any weight among skeptics.