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Janadele said:
Let us read again the quote responded to:
"mistaken" would have been a better choice of word for pakeha to have used when framing the question.
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But pakeha didn't. The question posted specifically asked about lying. You responded that they had lied.

Now, you are just backpedaling. Worse, you are trying to obscure the backpedaling by blaming pakeha for asking the wrong question. A question was asked, and you responded. If your response was in error, fess up and move on.
 
Janadele said:
Let us read again the quote responded to:
"mistaken" would have been a better choice of word for pakeha to have used when framing the question. However, the plain and simple fact is, that this statement/question posed by pakeha:
"when they say what Smith passed off as a 'translation' bears no resemblance to the truth" ... whoever "they" may be, are most certainly incorrect, mistaken, and making a statement which is not the truth.
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Talk about passing the buck! "Mistaken" would have been a better choice of words for YOU to have used when replying to the question of whether you thought they (meaning Egyptologists obviously, no need for scare quotes) were lying.

Backtracking much?!! :boggled:

D
 
Janadele said:
Let us read again the quote responded to:
"mistaken" would have been a better choice of word for pakeha to have used when framing the question.
Click to expand...

Blaming Paheka for your own mistake is dishonest at best. You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by acknowledging your error and correcting it, but you didn't, you just dug yourself deeper. Is intractability a Mormon virtue?
 
I repeat: The Pearl of Great Price is official Scripture and therefore official Doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp?lang=eng
The Book of Abraham is a part of the Pearl of Great Price.
"A Translation of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt. The writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus."
See History of the Church, 2:235–36, 348–51.
 
Janadele said:
"when they say what Smith passed off as a 'translation' bears no resemblance to the truth" ... whoever "they" may be, are most certainly incorrect, mistaken, and making a statement which is not the truth.
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And you justify this assertion how?

You are talking about people who have devoted their lives to the study of the type of Egyptian documents Smith pretended to translate. The evidence that they are entirely correct is ample and is freely available to anyone who bothers to look at it. Your unsupported assertion that the expert opinion of people far more qualified to hold one than you is "incorrect, mistaken, and making a statement which is not the truth" is slander.
 
Janadele said:
Once again,try to keep to what has actually been posted, rather than incorrectly commenting and embellishing. A question was asked by pakeha:
"Of course" was the answer given to the question as framed. The question of "were they mistaken" was not asked.
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Janadele said:
Let us read again the quote responded to:
"mistaken" would have been a better choice of word for pakeha to have used when framing the question. However, the plain and simple fact is, that this statement/question posed by pakeha:
"when they say what Smith passed off as a 'translation' bears no resemblance to the truth" ... whoever "they" may be, are most certainly incorrect, mistaken, and making a statement which is not the truth.
Click to expand...

Are you actually saying that, by your implication that I was the one "incorrectly commenting and embellishing", what you actually meant was, "If Paheka had only asked the question to which I responded, instead of the one she actually asked, you would see that you misstated what I said"? And you feel this justifies you?

Astonishing...

If the BoA were, actually, a defensible "translation" of the Book of Breathing (leading to the side question of why Egyptian funerary practices would refer to, much less be written by, Abraham 1000 years earlier...), then that should be apparent to any researcher, not just those searching through the seeing-stones of faith.

Not to belabour an issue, but your accusation that I was being dishonest or careless, instead of claiming that you, personally, misread or misspoke, rankles. Mistakes happen. Respectable people own up to them, apologize, fix them where possible, and move on.
 
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Janadele said:
I repeat: The Pearl of Great Price is official Scripture and therefore official Doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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Which makes it a bit suspect right out of the barrier.


Janadele said:
The Book of Abraham is a part of the Pearl of Great Price.
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That's the clincher. Anything that contains that sad mess is obviously bogus.


Janadele said:
"A Translation of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt. The writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus."
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That's just a straight-out lie.

I'd normally suggest that Smith pulled it out of his hat, but that was full of rocks, so he must have pulled it from somewhere else.
 
Janadele said:
Let us read again the quote responded to:
"mistaken" would have been a better choice of word for pakeha to have used when framing the question.
Click to expand...
We all read it the first time. The fault is not Pakeha's. You could have easily said, "No, I think they are mistaken, not lying".

However, the plain and simple fact is, that this statement/question posed by pakeha:
"when they say what Smith passed off as a 'translation' bears no resemblance to the truth" ... whoever "they" may be, are most certainly incorrect, mistaken, and making a statement which is not the truth.
Click to expand...
The plain and simple truth is that the ancient Egyptian language is well understood. The hypocephali that Smith claimed to translate can clearly be read by Egyptologists. How can they be mistaken? They can show exactly what these texts actually say in a language that they know how to read.

It's as though some huckster in the distant future claimed to translate a religious text about the life of a long dead prophet from an ancient scrap of paper written in a dead language called "English". Then, decades later, scholars were able to decipher the meaning of this dead language so as to be able to clearly read it, and announced that the "sacred text" actually said, "WARNING: Choking hazard - Small parts not for children under 3 years or any individuals who have a tendency to place inedible objects in their mouths".
 
Janadele said:
I repeat: The Pearl of Great Price is official Scripture and therefore official Doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp?lang=eng
The Book of Abraham is a part of the Pearl of Great Price.
"A Translation of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt. The writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus."
See History of the Church, 2:235–36, 348–51.
Click to expand...

Why should your offer of a completely pro-mormon source bear any wight, when you dismiss as "anti-mormon" any site that disagrees with you in any way?

You are (of course) welcome to your opinion, but if all you are going to do is preach, then play the "Religious Persecution" MartyrCard© ("Get out of Hell, Free) when offered substantive, practical, empirical evidence, you might want to do so in the appropriate venue.
 
Olowkow: From the New Era, January 1968.. "Joseph Smith had in his possession three or four long scrolls, plus a hypocephalus (Facsimile 2). Of these original materials, only a handful of fragments were recovered at the Metropolitan Museum. The majority of the papyri remains lost, and has likely been destroyed. Critics who claim that we have all, or a majority, of the papyri possessed by Joseph Smith are simply mistaken. The Egyptian characters on the recovered documents are a portion of the "Book of Breathings," an Egyptian religious text buried with mummies that instructed the dead on how to successfully reach the afterlife. This particular Book of Breathings was written for a deceased man named Hor, so it it usually called the Hor Book of Breathings. Other than the vignette represented in Facsimile 1, the material on the papyri received by the Church, at least from a standard Egyptological point of view, does not include the actual text of the Book of Abraham."
 
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Janadele said:
Nonsense. It was not I who framed the question.
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So if you loan your car to a friend, and someone sees the empty parking place and asks, "Was your car stolen?", you will answer "yes" because the person didn't ask you, "Did you loan out your car?"?
 
I would like to address Janadele's attempt to restrict this discussion to LDS-approved dogma.

Janadele, what you believe to be "holy" is not necessarily holy to us, and is neither safe from nor immune to criticism. We are not going to spare your religious sensibilities in this debate, nor should we be expected to do so. We regularly serve up sacred cows, and the only thing to debate is whether they should baked, boiled or barbecued; medium-rare or well-done; and whether or not one should "embellish" them with horseradish or barbecue sauce.

Given the fact that Joseph Smith's work has been repeatedly contradicted by the findings of researchers in multiple disciplines, not just in one small area of study, I think it is quite reasonable to assume that his writings are simply not of high enough quality to be reliable sources of information. Certainly a genuine god could do better than this (although a genuine but woefully incompetent god does remain in the differential diagnosis as a very, very remote possibility).
 
Janadele said:
I repeat: The Pearl of Great Price is official Scripture and therefore official Doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp?lang=eng
The Book of Abraham is a part of the Pearl of Great Price.
"A Translation of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt. The writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus."
See History of the Church, 2:235–36, 348–51.
Click to expand...

And given that the Book of Abraham is clearly a fraud, what do you suppose that says about your religion to those who are not unwilling to consider that it could be false?
 
Janadele said:
I repeat: The Pearl of Great Price is official Scripture and therefore official Doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
http://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp?lang=eng
The Book of Abraham is a part of the Pearl of Great Price.
"A Translation of some ancient Records that have fallen into our hands from the catacombs of Egypt. The writings of Abraham while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus."
See History of the Church, 2:235–36, 348–51.
Click to expand...

While we are repeating things:
Egyptologist Dr. James H. Breasted of the University of Chicago noted:

"... these three facsimiles of Egyptian documents in the ‘Pearl of Great Price’ depict the most common objects in the Mortuary religion of Egypt. Joseph Smith’s interpretations of them as part of a unique revelation through Abraham, therefore, very clearly demonstrates that he was totally unacquainted with the significance of these documents and absolutely ignorant of the simplest facts of Egyptian writing and civilization."[26]

Dr. W.M. Flinders Petrie of London University wrote:

"It may be safely said that there is not one single word that is true in these explanations"[27]

Dr. A.H. Sayce, Oxford professor of Egyptology,

“It is difficult to deal seriously with Joseph Smith’s impudent fraud.... Smith has turned the goddess [Isis in Facsimile No. 3] into a king and Osiris into Abraham.”[28]
Click to expand...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Abraham#Controversy_and_Criticism
 
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