Well, it looks like this thread has reached the end. I would simply like to repeat something that The Nehor said back towards the beginning.
I don't know what paths others must take to win their salvation. There are better people than me whose views on Gospel subjects strike me as overly simplistic.
I don't think there is a set of the 'enlightened' and the 'unenlightened'. I believe a wise God distributes truths to those who seek it and give them what they need. Needing more truth is hardly a recommendation of high honor, it might just as well mean your faith is weak. To others those truths may be a reward of some sort.
I think he pretty much hit it on the head. Peace can be found in many different ways and down many avenues. The point I've been trying to make is that it is possible to find peace in the LDS church without having to have all the answers. And do so with a sense of integrity and hope. I think that some valid reasons as to why this is the case have been made clear in this thread.
I wanted to reply to your earlier post to me, in which you mentioned NHM and Jeff Lindsay. From my perspective, studying the Old World connections to the Book of Mormon would be interesting only in that it provides more background information on the culture that created the Book of Mormon - nineteenth century New England, religiously obsessed, populated with and visited by Biblically obsessed individuals. You can muse about NHM or chiasmus all you want, but reality is that, quite predictably, it can be demonstrated that this information/knowledge WAS available during the period of the creation of the Book of Mormon. That's why the bar shifts, and the new standard is a demand that the exact text be placed in Joseph Smith' hands, or it be incontrovertibly proven that the more educated sidney rigdon authored the book. Since, at this time, I'm not particularly interested in analyzing the Book of Mormon as literature, this topic doesn't interest me at all.
Jeff Lindsay's site is an excellent example of why you need adequate background information about ancient Mesoamerica to evaluate its claims. I'm not saying you have to read dozens of books on the subject, but if you're serious about all this, then you need to read some. And you also need to do a little background work to see if Lindsay's sources really say what he insinuates they say. For years he used Sorenson's footnotes about metallurgy, which I debunked myself. He may still use them, for all I know. And for years he referred to a new site as possible proof of metallurgy during the Book of Mormon time frame, when it had been previously dated to around 1350 AD. (I believe he has since updated that, but it took him YEARS to do so) It's like when Brant and Sorenson talk about the "linguistic evidence" supporting the use of metal in the Book of Mormon. Unless you've studied the topic on your own, you would never know that the "linguistic evidence" actually refers to METAL, not METALLURGY. All the mesoamerican scholars know that the ancient Mesoamericans used metalworking with outcrops or meteorites, and the "linguistic evidence" refers to that material. Unless you know enough to SPECIFICALLY pin them down on what the "linguistic evidence" actually is, you would never know this.
Here's another example from Lindsay, also used by Clark. They make much of the "fortifications" match - yet they never tell you that texts from Joseph Smith' time period, such as the View of the Hebrews, also had their ancient americans using fortifications. I specifically asked Dr. Clark about this, and he was aware of it, and said in future writings he would make note of that. I hope he does, because it seems deliberately deceptive to pretend that the fortifications in the Book of Mormon ran counter to the nineteenth century understanding of ancient America, when it was EXACTLY what they believed about ancient America.
People like Jeff Lindsay, Brant, Sorenson, can get away with being slightly misleading because the vast majority of their readers possess very little, if any, background knowledge on the topic of ancient Mesoamerica. It's like John Clark claiming that so many details of the Book of Mormon match mesoamerica, like "warfare" - without informing the reader that bows and arrows did not exist during that time period, and neither did metal weapons or armor, and neither did "conquest wars". So I'm left wondering just what matched? That people fought each other? Yeah, they did. They also walked on two legs.
I suspect that the evidence for the Book of Mormon isn't really what makes you think it's worth sticking with the church, and it's actually a peripheral issue. Things like Jeff Lindsays' site makes you feel good about believing what you already believe, for different reasons. That's fine, people do that all the time. But I just want you to be clear headed about what you would have to do to really be able to fairly judge this "evidence" others eagerly place before you.
We hate to seem like we don’t trust every nut with a story, but there’s evidence we can point to, and dance while shouting taunting phrases.
If you are genuinely interested in how well the Book of Mormon fits ancient Mesoamerica, please read these essays. I took the time to write these essays due to my feelings of social obligation to people like YOU, MG - people who are interested enough in the question of historicity of the Book of Mormon to actually research it on the internet and land on places like FAIR and Lindsay. You are being misled.
Look at Lindsays' section about the judicial system, and what a great match it was to the Book of Mormon:
Of the many other areas showing parallels to the Book of Mormon, consider the Mesoamerican justice system. John Sorenson explains (Images of Ancient America: Visualizing Book of Mormon Life, (Provo, Utah: Research Press, 1998), p. 116):
One of the primary duties of a ruler was to settle disputes among his people. Sometimes that could be done by him personally, but in a population of much size, he would not have time to deal with every conflict. Judges were delegated to carry out that duty.
Cortez, for example, described the situation at the great market in the Aztec capital: "There is in this square a very large building, like a Court of Justice, where there are always ten or twelve persons, sitting as judges, and delivering their decisions upon all cases which arise in the markets." [Fernando Cortées: His Five Letters of Relation to the Emperor Charles V, ed. and transl. Francis A. MacNutt (Glorieta, New Mexico: Rio Grande Press, 1977) 1:259] In public assemblies, the Spaniards observed native police officers with pine cudgels who enforced order if required to do so by the authorities.
Police and judges in a legal system are also mentioned in various contexts in the Book of Mormon, but would not have been part of Joseph Smith's experience with local Native American tribes. (Mesoamerican societies also had prisons, as the Book of Mormon teaches.) To ascribe such complex elements of civilization to people viewed as primitive savages would have been remarkably foolhardy, but these elements are now known to have been present in the Americas--and again in Mesoamerica, the very place where the physical geography can be aligned with the Book of Mormon.
Do you know why this is extraordinarily misleading?
We hate to seem like we don’t trust every nut with a story, but there’s evidence we can point to, and dance while shouting taunting phrases.