• Security incident: ISF was recently accessed by intruders. Please change your password, and change it anywhere else you used it. Read more

LDS II: The Mormons


https://www.lds.org/new-era/2008/01/was-lehi-here?lang=eng

Above: The river Laman emptied into the Red Sea (see 1 Nephi 2:8). Right: Here we see where the Wadi Tayyib al-Ism meets the Red Sea.


Above and below: This wadi, or small valley, called Tayyib al-Ism, is typical for the area and contains perhaps the only stream that flows year-round in the region today. This canyon’s solid granite walls are an impressive sight, and they offer plenty of shade in an area where the temperature in the summer is usually over 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43°C).
Click to expand...

Well, the image may be a picture of the Red Sea, but it's not really very likely that there is a wadi source as stated. A "wadi" is more of a dry creek bed, or a wash than a river.

.wa·di [وادي]
/ˈwädē/
noun
(in certain Arabic-speaking countries) a valley, ravine, or channel that is dry except in the rainy season.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, Wādī Ţayyib al Ism, in Gharyān is near Tripoli in western Libya, over 2,000 kilometers northwest of Cairo. The Red Sea is still further southeast of Cairo. It's unlikely that this gulley is The River Laman that is being sought by apologists as a tributary to the Red Sea. I suspect Jeff Lindsay was just trying to sell books, or he has a different wadi in mind.That's the only wadi with that name I could find.

It's possible I missed the wadi that "meets/empties into the Red Sea" as claimed. Almost all references to Wādī Tayyib al Ism are from Mormon sources. This reminds me of the many searches for Noah's Ark that result in dubious claims which few ever seem to bother to check out.

ETA; Upon further digging, I find another wadi Tayyib al Ism. Nearer to the Red Sea, on the Gulf of Aqaba, in Saudi Arabia. I will need to see if it runs all year round.

2.5 mm (0.1 in) average rainfall in January and December, just trace amounts in other months.
http://www.worldweatheronline.com/Tayyib-Al-Ism-weather-averages/Tabuk/SA.aspx
 
Last edited:
Also, Joseph Smith is not some ignorant country kid who could not have known enough information to make the BoM up.
So many errors litter his volume and he was a treasure hunter and "seer", noted for deep interest and conversation regarding Native American history, and grew up in a booming era, in New York, of artifact hunting in the new world (the Smithsonian is full of erroneous finds from this era in its archives).

Considering his early charges by law of fraud and deception in regards to his treasure hunting and "seeing", the subsequent production of the BoM, in full consideration of the above, is hardly surprising.
 
skyrider44 said:
You have said repeatedly and unequivocally that there is no evidence for the content of the Book of Mormon.
Click to expand...

I wonder when you decided that dishonesty was the only approach left to you?

Again, I am tempted to quote your own style, and capshout that you produce the exact post in which I said any such a thing.

What I have said, and what I continue to say, is that there is no evidence, none, for the existence of multiple anachronisms in the exciting "american chapters" of the BoM. There is no evidence, none, for a mighty civilization that "covered the land" for "thousands of years" and incorporated the things Smith included in the story he invented (the parallels between Smith's BoM inventions and his BoA fabrications are instructive). Your honest counter would be to provide such evidence; a counter you have not done.

it would behoove you to address what I have, in fact, actually said, instead of constructing a "strawvehicle" and addressing what you wish I had said.

As I said in the part of the post you pretend to quote, but somehow managed to omit, to edit out, to redact (without any honest indication that you were so doing) your incorrect characterization of what I have, in fact, said, is, at best disingenuous equivocation. The more you persist in the falsehood that has been pointed out to you, the more it looks like arrant, errant dishonesty. "Lying for Jesus" is still, after all, lying. I suppose your club's standards are lax enough to excuse you, in your mind.

skyrider44 said:
Perhaps you were among those who made light of Lehi's statement in 1 Nephi 2:6, 8-9 in which Lehi describes pitching his tent in "a valley by the side of a river of water" (6) . . . and "he called the name of the river, Laman, and it emptied into the Red Sea" (8) . . . and he praised the river because it was "continually running . . . ." (9)
Click to expand...

Perhaps you are one of those club apologists who excuses the personal dishonesty of raising up red herrings in the service of "higher truth".

To be perfectly clear: I have never, not once, referred to (or for that matter even pondered) the river Laman. Perhaps you ought to get up to speed with the latest understanding that the "River Laman" is not, nor is claimed to be (even by laymen) located in the western hemisphere; as such, it forms no part of Smith's new world inventions.

A dispassionate observer would notice that your river teems with red herrings; a lame and desperate attempt at a diversion from the questions you keep ignoring.

When, in your opinion, is the mighty civilization that "covered the land" for "thousands of years" in the pre-colombian americas to be supposed to have taken place? Where, in your opinion, it is to be supposed to have been located? (I am also still interested in your own opinion about þͤ Fludde...)

skyrider44 said:
<snip of a veritable shoal of pale-pink straw-stuffed Clupeidae>
Click to expand...
 
http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs022/1102686658457/archive/1103458743076.html

Hang on, things just got more whacky. There's something called a "Heartland Movement" where the globe trotting "lost tribes" are thought to have landed in North America and settled in the Great Lakes region. I suspect this is actually closer to what JS had in mind what with the whole belief in America having a divine destiny.

There was also a lot of speculation at the time about the mounds like those around Cahokia, Illinois being a lost civilization. You've got mysterious mounds, you've got a belief in America as a new promised land and you've got Smith tying it all together with his new American foundation myth. Unfortunately, North American Natives didn't have horses, steel or wheels either.
 
Craig,

Don't forget the in vogue Egyptian artifacts, as mystical powers (keeping in mind that JS was a diviner), Manifest Destiny, and the Great Awakening.

Does it seem odd for a treasure hunting diviner from the North East during the Manifest Destiny and Great Awakening period to have produced a religio-history of North American?
Not really.

A read of the following chronology forwards an expectedness of his production.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Mormonism
 
Last edited:
skyrider44 said:
The author of the foregoing will be denounced within nanoseconds of this posting, as will the content of his account proper. That is of little consequence inasmuch as the naysayers have made it clear that they cannot accept even a smidgen of information—even the most minute particle of data—that runs counter to their set-in-concrete beliefs about the Book of Mormon. That, as I have noted previously, is something less than scientific and demonstrates a bias that is palpable. Responsible scientific minds, including those owned by high school science teachers, place no constraints on the search for truth. Who would have thought, for example, that a certain bacterium causes some stomach ulcers—and not stress as was commonly believed for decades (until a South African doctor discovered otherwise)?
Click to expand...

The only minds I see set in concrete seem to be those of Book of Mormon literalists who seize upon every little, tiny bit of "evidence" for the alleged veracity of the Book of Mormon.

The bottom line is that the naysayers have shown that the evidence of barley, the horse, steel and in the pre-Columbian Americas is too put it bluntly tenuous in the extreme. So is the evidence for the actuality of the events of the Book of Mormon. (Further that the chiasmus in the Book of Mormon prove zero one way or the other.)

It is simply a fact that the overwhelming majority of specialists in pre-Columbian Archaeology place zero credence in the Book of Mormon has describing pre-Columbian societies and history.

There has been a vast number of archeological digs in the Americas and yet the society described in the Book of Mormon has so far not been found. Instead what has been found are societies that are definitely not the societies described in the Book of Mormon. The chances are tiny that we will find anything that will substantiate the account in the Book of Mormon.

A truly scientific view of the issue would accept that it appears that the Book of Mormon is not currently supported by evidence from New World Archeology and ethno-history and is not likely to be ever so supported.

To me it is rather obvious that the Book of Mormon owes a lot to beliefs about a race of Moundbuilders who were allegedly whipped out by "red" Indians. Of course the Moundbuilder race was almost always conceived of has "white". Joseph Smith it seems to me simply took this pop culture idea and constructed a rather elaborate myth with it. It's real world basis would seem to be in the light of available evidence pretty close to zero.

As for the cause of stomach ulcers it seems to me that Mormon literalists are the ones similar to those who thought and some still think that only stress caused stomach ulcers.

In the past 50 years we have learned an immense amount about the pre-Columbian world of the Americas. It is richer, more complex and frankly interesting than we once thought, (See the Book 1491), but that new knowledge makes the veracity of the Book of Mormon less rather than more likely to describe anything approaching pre-Columbian reality.
 
skyrider44 said:
The author of the foregoing will be denounced within nanoseconds of this posting, as will the content of his account proper.
Click to expand...

Nobody has been discussing the accounts of Laman and his family wandering through the holy land and Northern Africa. The accounts are entirely too vague to be of much use in determining anything. Given the changes that can happen to landscapes over time it's not really all that difficult to find a way to correlate the vague descriptions in those chapters with theoretical locations.

I am perplexed as to why you even bring these passages up, as the recent discussion in this thread has been about specific anachronisms in the Book of Mormon regarding the culture, technology, farming and animal husbandry of the Americas.

Are you conceding that the claims of making and using steel are false?

Are you conceding that there were no domesticated horses in the Americas before Columbus?

The breakneck speed with which you are changing topics and trying to move the discussion to another continent on the other side of the Atlantic certainly seems like a concession on your part.

If you're not conceding, then it seems you have more than a little difficulty in staying focused. Have you ever been tested for an attention deficit disorder of some kind? If you have legitimate neurological issues then our continuing to engage you in this thread may not be the friendly debate we're all trying to have, but a matter of Neurotypical though highly intelligent intelligent people "picking on" someone with a mental disorder.
 
Last edited:
skyrider44 said:
The author of the foregoing will be denounced within nanoseconds of this posting, as will the content of his account proper.
Click to expand...

Since you clearly wish to discuss the African chapters of the Book of Mormon, let's dive into some of the absurdities there.

They Spoke what?!?

1 Nephi 1:2 claims that Jews in 600BCE Palestine were speaking Egyptian. This despite the fact that the evolution of various Semitic languages can be quite accurately traced in the region, with no indication that Egyptian was in use. Demotic and Semitic languages are not related in the way they would be if Egyptian was a common tongue in 600 BCE Palestine.

Speed-walking, prophet style

1 Nephi 2:5-6 claims the party WALKED from Jerusalem to the Red Sea in three days. Let's be charitable and stretch the definition of "Red Sea" to include the Gulf of Aqaba. It's a bit of a cheat, but having read Nephi, he's a bit of an all around idiot anyway. We can't expect him to tell the difference between the Red Sea and one of its gulfs.

According to Google Maps, using Israel's route 90 to walk from Jerusalem, Israel to Eilat, Israel is a distance of 190 miles / 306 kilometers. The estimated walking time is 62 hours. While that is technically less than three days, that's 63 hours of CONTINUOUS walking across a paved road. It does not take into account camping overnight, hunting / scavenging for food or the fact that Nephi and his party describe walking through wilderness, that is, ragged terrain that would not let them move as quickly as one can on a modern paved road.

The Wikipedia article Preferred walking speed states "In the absence of significant external factors, humans tend to walk at about 1.4 m/s (5.0 km/h; 3.1 mph)" which appears to be close to the walking speed Google uses to estimate the walking time.

Let's make that estimate a bit more reflective of Nephis' party. The BoM describes them as a collection of relatively wealthy, settled shepherds / farmers, with a few elderly people in their party. We'll assume the following breakdown of every 24 hours:

15 hours of walking
8 hours of sleep.
1 hour of hunting / food prep / camp break set up and break down (An absurdly optimistic estimate if you've even been camping with elderly people, but I'm feeling generous)

We need to account for the elderly folks in the party. They die not long after all this wandering but they manage to get a fair hunk of distance covered. We'll be optimistic and assume only a slight degradation on overall party travel speed. Instead of 3.1 mph we'll assume 2.8. This is still a VERY generous speed to work with that does not take into account how ragged the terrain would have been.

One justification I'm going to make for the comically short amount of time I've allocated for hunting and food gathering is the fact that the younger, fitter members of the party can forage ahead while the elderly bring up the rear.

All of this gives us an average travel time of 42 miles per day. That's a LOT of ground to ask an old man and his wife to cover in a single day, but hey, God's motivating them.

This exceedingly optimistic set of assumptions gives us a MINIMUM travel time of 4.5 days to get from Jerusalem to a gulf off the Red Sea. A more realistic set of assumptions, such as a REALISTIC walking speed for Nephi's folks, stopping to eat during the walk, or taking longer to set up and break camp, gives us a travel time of at least a week, and assumes exceedingly easy terrain.
 
(Approximately 1.913 nanoseconds later...)

Can anyone explain what the fact that there are no less than 7 Hebrew words translated (non-synonimically), in one KJV passage or another, as "river" (נהר,אשד,אובל, כפלג,אפק,יאר,ולא) has to do, in any way, with the word "river" being given (by Moroni, under instructions form 'god') to Smith, translated from the "reformed Egyptian"? Wan't the idea to get the "translation" right?

Can anyone explain how long Lehi is to be supposed to have "camped" or "pitched his tent", by the "Riven Laman", that he was able to declare it was, in fact, a perennial stream?

Not to mention, even a high school teacher should be "up to speed" on the ongoing research that indicates that H. pylori is, in fact, "associated with" peptic ulcer disease; however, in the last 15 years it has been shown that H. pylori is not present in a significant number of cases of peptic ulcer disease, and a significant portion of the population is asymptomatically H. pylori positive. The "association" is no longer considered the only, or even the primary, cause.
(http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/710231, for an overview...)
 
This reminds me of when I was a kid, getting into coin collecting, and I kept hoping that I'd find a really rare coin. I didn't realize that with thousands of people professionally picking over coins in circulation, the odds were almost nil. I'd see a bit of a mark on a coin and desperately interpret it to be a sign this this was a rare whatchamacalit die strike, because I so wanted it to be true.

Later, grown up, I realized that my desire to find something rare was making me almost blind to an honest interpretation of the grade and marks on a coin, and my naive hopefulness was also making me almost blind to accepting that there weren't rare coins out there for good but broke kids like me to discover free in circulation because I couldn't afford to compete monetarily with the rich.

Mormons who want to believe that pre-Columbian archaelogy is or wlll prove their beliefs to be true remind me of my naive coin-collecting self, desparately trying to fool themselves that any bit of evidence fits what they imagine it should be, and that the "prize" of being right is almost in their grasp.
 
Slowvehicle said:
(Approximately 1.913 nanoseconds later...)

Can anyone explain what the fact that there are no less than 7 Hebrew words translated (non-synonimically), in one KJV passage or another, as "river" (נהר,אשד,אובל, כפלג,אפק,יאר,ולא) has to do, in any way, with the word "river" being given (by Moroni, under instructions form 'god') to Smith, translated from the "reformed Egyptian"? Wan't the idea to get the "translation" right?
Click to expand...

Mormon apologists as presented here do seem to reply pretty heavily on Hebrew despite the fact that the book they claim to be defending was not written in it. Using Hebrew words when dealing with a mythical language, based on Egyptian, of which there are NO surviving examples, is pretty stupid.

Slowvehicle said:
Can anyone explain how long Lehi is to be supposed to have "camped" or "pitched his tent", by the "Riven Laman", that he was able to declare it was, in fact, a perennial stream?
Click to expand...

Keep in mind, Nephi is the narrator, so everything said in the story is trough his eyes. The text makes it very clear that Nephi is a supremely arrogant, yet profoundly stupid and socially inept individual. He has all the characteristics of a Narcissistic personality disorder.

It would be JUST like Nephi to decide something looks like it lasts all year and therefore assert that's exactly what happens. Personally, I'm willing to let this particular absurdity slide, given the hubris and stupidity of Nephi.

skyrider44 said:
Could Potter's stream qualify as a river? Potter notes that there are several Hebrew words which qualify as the river.
Click to expand...

SkyRider44, Why ARE you yammering about Hebrew when the Book of Mormon asserts it was written in "Reformed Egyptian?"
 
Last edited:
The Church of LDS "archeologists" remind me very much of the Old and New Testament and Islamic "archeologists" who go out and look for any hint of a historical "fact" written in their respective religious books. As was pointed out, their goal is not an unbiased "truth" about the ancient world, but anything, anything that might possibly be interpreted as related to their holy writings. The desperation is almost disturbing: any inscription, or rock, or name, or fragment, or a ridge on the moon, that can in any way be twisted to allude to a holy story is played up as proof. A few rock outcroppings that look from a distance a little like a boat becomes Noah's Ark, complete with tabloid stories about wooden timbers in the shape of planks, Noah's log book, and barrels of tiger poop. It is a lot like finding an image of Jesus on a piece of toast. Except you can create an in-house publication to add the veneer of scholarship to it.
 
Dissolution said:
Seems entirely consistent with the god of the Old Testament, as least.
Click to expand...

My wife and I have been watching "Criminal Minds" on Netflix lately. I've noticed how many of the religiously deluded killers they profile would sound a lot like Nephi if they wrote the story from the killer's point of view.

If you tell the story if Nephi from the viewpoint of the brothers, and you get a VERY different account. You see a family cult driven out of Jerusalem. The cult murders and robs a wealthy member of the community on their way out of town and kidnaps a few other families on the way to use for breeding stock!

Early on, two brothers are trying to escape the cult, but end up being pulled back in either through force, threats or the frightening will of their father and the most delusional of their brothers. Eventually the brothers are so cut off from the community they grew up in that they cannot turn to them for help. They HAVE to stay with the cult. Their only other options are dying in the wilderness or being executed for their participation in the brutal murder of an unconscious man.

1 Nephi is a psychological horror story.
 
Last edited:
From our Broken Clock archives:
Chris Smith's Carrel said:
In 2002 BYU professor Stephen Jones (a physicist whose research interests include cold fusion, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and Book of Mormon horses) contacted Barker and offered to fund AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry) dating of the horse skull itself. Samples were sent to two separate radiocarbon labs, both of which returned post-conquest dates (averaging about 150 years ago). This study has finally settled the controversy surrounding the Spencer Lake horse skull. The skull is a hoax, and provides no evidentiary support for the Book of Mormon.
Click to expand...
http://chriscarrollsmith.blogspot.com/2008/02/spencer-lake-horse-skull.html

However, perhaps Dr Jones has continued his streak and, by proving the Spencer Lake horse a hoax, he has instead proven the BoM to be correct.
 
halleyscomet said:
My wife and I have been watching "Criminal Minds" on Netflix lately. I've noticed how many of the religiously deluded killers they profile would sound a lot like Nephi if they wrote the story from the killer's point of view.

If you tell the story if Nephi from the viewpoint of the brothers, and you get a VERY different account. You see a family cult driven out of Jerusalem. The cult murders and robs a wealthy member of the community on their way out of town and kidnaps a few other families on the way to use for breeding stock!

Early on, two brothers are trying to escape the cult, but end up being pulled back in either through force, threats or the frightening will of their father and the most delusional of their brothers. Eventually the brothers are so cut off from the community they grew up in that they cannot turn to them for help. They HAVE to stay with the cult. Their only other options are dying in the wilderness or being executed for their participation in the brutal murder of an unconscious man.

1 Nephi is a psychological horror story.
Click to expand...

Alternatively, Nephi may simply have been a schizophrenic with religious delusions.
Plenty of them on Criminal Minds, too!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

ISF - Join now!

Every member here is approved by hand. No bots, no spam, just people who care about evidence and honest debate.

Membership is free!

Create your free account

Back
Top Bottom