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Imagine you’ve grown up with The Lord of the Rings , and then someone tells you it was all made up. Sure, there was Sauron, they say; and yeah, he was defeated and all the orcs disappeared. There were no hobbits, though, and no rangers or riders or Nazgûl. There was no Gandalf and there was no Ring...

Dr. Shades wrote: ↑

Fri May 03, 2024 7:18 am

No, the Spalding-Rigdon connection hasn’t been debunked. Just because the Mopologists have declared it so doesn’t mean they’re correct.

It remains the most valid explanation for the origin of the Book of Mormon.

The only problem with it is a lack of evidence supporting it.

He has repeated variations of that in interviews. When I heard it I thought it at best impolitic, at worst delusional. However, I did leave room for the possibility that he could deliver the proof. It seems that my initial impression was, sadly, correct. I don't want to go ad hominem on the guy, bu...

Agreed. Except that one person's sand is imaginary. Just by definition, non-imaginary things are going to get more of a look from me than imaginary things, so it's difficult to place them on the same level. In the end, the non-imaginary things may not carry weight either, but the imaginary things N...

I have just one comment to add to this discussion - The only place that Kircher uses the name Nephi is in private letters to Peiresc to della Valle between 1628 and 1632, which ended up in the Vatican archives. As a collection, these letters have never been published - they have only recently been ...

I don’t think Christianity is insane or stupid. Human beings live by experiences and stories. Not all experiences and stories are helpful, but the story of a loving God seeking to save the world by entering it and giving everything to make it happen is a very lovely human(e) story. Those who come to...

Yes, it is odd. Perhaps any books he had at home were considered to belong to the Hanover Bookstore, which he maintained at his house and "was continued three or four years after his death by his wife" (according to Richard Husband ). A catalog of books for sale at the Hanover Bookstore was publish...

I'd like to see evidence of a copy of Oedipus Aegyptiacus existing anywhere in the United States before 1809. I haven't found any yet. Anyway, here's the full inventory of John Smith's estate at his death. Odd that there don’t appear to be any books. Am I just missing them? I see he left copyrights...

In order to be as fair as possible to Nielsen, because I really have no beef with him, I will share the following quote from How the Book of Mormon Came to Pass about the 1850 library census and its copy of Kircher as it relates to the possibility that John Smith had access to Oedipus Aegyptiacus : ...

Wonderful feedback! Thank you. I shall mull this over. I would have responded earlier but I have been working on my musical scores for my next documentary..... No worries, Philo! It is a fun documentary. I enjoy it when people raise our awareness of other charismatic religious leaders in the first ...