What do you guys think of the following approach from Joe Sampson in his book Written by the Finger of God?
Do you endorse these sort of ideas? Are you embarassed by them?
I think Sampson's book was very entertaining and informative, but I would be hesitant to say that his approach here has any genuine credibility as far as resolving these issues.
As I noted over there, this is exactly how the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar works when applied to the Book of Abraham (though the breaking down of characters into component parts is only explicit in the grammar's analysis of the first few characters). I thank kamenraider for pointing this out, since I'd never heard of Sampson's book and I will definitely pick it up now. I was trying to do some of this work on my own, but I see now that a lot of it is already done. Sampson's book could very possibly be the most important analysis of the alphabet and grammar published to date. The light should now be dawning for anyone (like Will) who wonders why the translation of a mere few chapters took so long.
By the way, comparison of the two FARMS Reviews of Joe Sampson's book provides some interesting insight into two of the major apologetic paradigms (and into how willing they are to turn and devour one another). The viciousness of the latter article, especially given that its conclusions are based on a misrepresentation of the historical evidence of Joseph Smith's involvement in the alphabet and grammar project, turns my face a bit red. The former article reminds me of Paul Osborne.
I wonder what people like Pacman think about this. He, and others, often point out how ridiculous it is for Joseph Smith to have thought that so many words could come from one symbol. Now we can see that this could be exactly what he thought.
WK: "Joseph Smith asserted that the Book of Mormon peoples were the original inhabitants of the americas"
Will Schryver: "No, he didn’t." 3/19/08
Still waiting for Will to back this up...
Sounds too much like "zipa dee doo dah," to not mention it.
CK, do me a favor and post this over on the Book of Abraham forum.
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein
CaliforniaKid wrote:The viciousness of the latter article, especially given that its conclusions are based on a misrepresentation of the historical evidence of Joseph Smith's involvement in the alphabet and grammar project, turns my face a bit red. The former article reminds me of Paul Osborne.
I just finished reading the Gee review. His rather convoluted efforts at divorcing Joseph Smith from the KEP had me rolling my eyes. Color me unimpressed.
I wonder what people like Pacman think about this. He, and others, often point out how ridiculous it is for Joseph Smith to have thought that so many words could come from one symbol. Now we can see that this could be exactly what he thought.
I have presented Pacman in the past with a fairly substantial amount of evidence to this effect, but he seems determined that it cannot be so. I suppose we should blame Pacman's intellectual father, Hugh W. Nibley:
In 1967 a Mr. Heward passed around handbills at a General Conference pathetically asking, "Why should anyone want to fight the truth?"—the "truth" being his own great discovery that if somebody translates a single dot as the story of Little Red Riding Hood something must be out of joint: "Could a single dot carry that much meaning?" Mr. Heward asked with eminent logic. We are asked to believe that this point escaped all the smart men of Kirtland, who persisted for no reason at all in deriving a whole book from less than two dozen signs, when they had thousands of such signs to draw from, and thereby achieved such monumental absurdity as no child could fail to notice. In 1970 Messrs. Howard and Turner bring forth as the crowning evidence against Joseph Smith Mr. Dee J. Nelson's sensational find that the hieratic word ms.t is translated by Joseph Smith with a paragraph of 132 words. It never occurred to anyone to ask, in the glad excitement, whether this was really Joseph Smith's work and whether ms.t was ever believed by anyone to contain a story of 132 words.
Nibley didn't know what he was talking about, and though his essay is confused and even self-contradictory it has remained the dominant apologetic view of the KEP ever since.
I just finished reading the Gee review. His rather convoluted efforts at divorcing Joseph Smith from the KEP had me rolling my eyes. Color me unimpressed.
I get dizzy trying to keep everyone's Book of Abraham theories straight! :-)
The thing I keep coming back to is this:
What sort of God, creates a religion where only a few folks with 15 PhDs can figure out what anything means?
What sort of God, creates a truth so hidden that only a handful of people (or one person), can figure out what the message is?
I realize I am not God but still... what kind of God is so confusing, convoluted, tricky, and cruel to devise such a twisted system.
What sort of information has come forth in the Book of Abraham, that is in any way so significant that it must remain hidden in this bizarre message for a select handful of folks to get? Why all the nonsense? Couldn't God come up with a better plan?
I just don't get it. ;-)
~dancer~
I don't mean to derail the thread CK... :-)
Last edited by Bing [Bot] on Sat Aug 18, 2007 12:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"The search for reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings for it destroys the world in which you live." Nisargadatta Maharaj
truth dancer wrote:I get dizzy trying to keep everyone's Book of Abraham theories straight! :-)
The thing I keep coming back to is this:
What sort of God, creates a religion where only a few folks with 15 PhDs can figure out what anything means?
What sort of God, creates a truth so hidden that only a handful of people (or one person), can figure out what the message is?
I realize I am not God but still... what kind of God is so confusing, convoluted, tricky, and cruel to divise such a twisted system.
What sort of information has come forth in the Book of Abraham, that is in any way so significant that it must remain hidden in this bizarre message for a select handful of folks to get? Why all the nonsense? Couldn't God come up with a better plan?
I just don't get it. ;-)
~dancer~
I don't mean to derail the thread CK... :-)
It all goes back to the idea that Joseph was a man with a direct connection to the divine. The Book of Abraham is a reminder to us all that we couldn't know the mysteries of heaven without Joseph.
Runtu wrote:It all goes back to the idea that Joseph was a man with a direct connection to the divine. The Book of Abraham is a reminder to us all that we couldn't know the mysteries of heaven without Joseph.
Hell's Bells! We don't know the mysteries of heaven even with Joseph! Joseph did a great job of making the plain complex, the precious profane, and the simple unbelievably convoluted.
