The Mopologists' War with the Heartlanders is Heating Up

[_Lemmie]

Dr. Scratch,

I've noticed that Priestcraft Peter$on is blogging about his Peru tour right now. Is Peter$on telling this group that the Book of Mormon events took place in Peru? Peter$on is by no means an expert in Peruvian culture. What is he qualified to do in Peru other than lie to the tour group by telling them Peru was a location for the Book of Mormon? I'm hoping you can provide some insight.

The Mopologists have gone on record that the LGT is for the proposition that the Book of Mormon took place in what is now southern Mexico (Veracruz and Chiapas) and possibly Guatemala. Not Peru.

I have to believe the reason that Peter$on is in Peru is because he is never one to pass up an all expense paid vacation, even if it means throwing the LGT under the bus.

If Rodney Meldrum offered Peter$on an all expense paid vacation to take a Heartland tour group to New York, Peter$on wouldn't hesitate.

Peter$on is the personification of intellectual dishonesty and priestcraft.

According to the trip description at Cruiselady tours:

Cruise Lady is excited to be able to offer an incredible journey to Machu Picchu as well as an optional add-on Amazon River Tour to make this a trip of a lifetime! Daniel C. Peterson will be our headliner explaining our connection to this land and people.
http://www.cruiselady.com/tours/incredi ... -picchu-2/

[_Everybody Wang Chung]

Thanks Professor Lemmie!

For Priestcraft Peter$on, the Book of Mormon events took place wherever the Cruise Lady is willing to send him and his wife on an all expense paid vacation.

[_Dr Exiled]

DCP is the "real," professional imposter, not like those amateur heartlanders. Heartlanders would do well to attend DCP's fanciful lectures on "real" Book of Mormon "history" and learn from the master.

[_Everybody Wang Chung]

Kirk Magelby of Book of Mormon Central is officially off the reservation. Can anyone make sense of his blog about geography audits and BYU professors on the religion faculty not believeing the Book of Mormon is historical? Very bizzare.

Several years ago, Jack Welch challenged me to devise a methodology to reasonably evaluate multiple Book of Mormon geography models no matter their setting. It has taken years of work and involved dozens of people, but we now have an audit tool, an Excel spreadsheet, that can be easily configured to accommodate a variety of different assumptions about the text.

The only a priori assumption the audit procedure makes is that the Nephite text is consistent. Since virtually every scholar who has ever analyzed the text has come to this conclusion, we are on solid ground with a presumption of consistency.

And this gem:

The first model was audited last night, June 6, 2019. With a robust audit procedure in place, I now predict rapid progress. There is no time to waste. Many BYU professors, even on the religion faculty, do not believe the Book of Mormon is historical.

https://bookofmormonresources.blogspot. ... odels.html

I have no idea what Kirk is talking about. Stephen "Bukkake" Smoot, the Dales and now this? I feel like I'm living on the funny farm.

[_Philo Sofee]

It's science coming to the aid of scripture, just as mathematics did for the Dales! Isn't it glorious? Isn't it wonderful?

[_Lemmie]

So he states this about his tool:

The audit...measures completeness, internal consistency, and degree of fit to the text.

Then he states the tests were successful, which apparently we can interpret as the results showed there is internal consistency, right?

Here's the problem. The starting assumption in setting up the tests was this:

The only a priori assumption the audit procedure makes is that the Nephite text is consistent.

So, they started with the assumption that the Book of Mormon is internally consistent, and then, after their testing of physically consistent areas (I assume this means "real"), they came to the conclusion that.... the Book of Mormon is internally consistent!

And just in case different people are applying the test, they allow for this:

The audit allows each modeler a great deal of flexibility in the way they interpret the text based on their assumptions.

In other words, even though this audit is supposed to be a way to compare actual locations, each location's modeler can be very flexible in their assumptions, thus rendering the results from two different modelers impossible to compare, due to differing assumptions.

[_SteelHead]

Tautology is taut.

[_BlueFunk96]

Wouldn't the church leaders be able to resolve the question by asking the Three Nephites?

[_Stem]

So he states this about his tool:

The audit...measures completeness, internal consistency, and degree of fit to the text.

Then he states the tests were successful, which apparently we can interpret as the results showed there is internal consistency, right?

Here's the problem. The starting assumption in setting up the tests was this:

The only a priori assumption the audit procedure makes is that the Nephite text is consistent.

So, they started with the assumption that the Book of Mormon is internally consistent, and then, after their testing of physically consistent areas (I assume this means "real"), they came to the conclusion that.... the Book of Mormon is internally consistent!

And just in case different people are applying the test, they allow for this:

The audit allows each modeler a great deal of flexibility in the way they interpret the text based on their assumptions.

In other words, even though this audit is supposed to be a way to compare actual locations, each location's modeler can be very flexible in their assumptions, thus rendering the results from two different modelers impossible to compare, due to differing assumptions.

yes. when I see the test, see the spreadsheet and score number, I'm like, what are they testing? Their assumption? how so? "well we assume the geography described is internally consistent so whenever a geography mention is made we score it at 100% because it is internally consistent...conclusion: the text is tested at 100%".

[_Physics Guy]

I don't expect this audit algorithm to convince me that the Book of Mormon really happened but it doesn't sound to me like such a dumb thing for people who already believe the Book of Mormon happened somewhere and just want to know where. My reading of the quotes above is that this "automated audit" is just a big checklist of all the issues that have been discussed concerning Book of Mormon geography: distances between cities, directions to bodies of water, narrowness of the "narrow neck of land", and so on. So now if you want to see how good a match any place on Earth is with the Book of Mormon geography, you can go to this webpage or something, and type in a bunch of answers, for your chosen place, to a bunch of questions. Then at the end it will spit out a score for how well your place fits the Book of Mormon. To me that sounds reasonable enough.

The bit about assuming that the Book of Mormon is consistent in its description of geography doesn't sound so bad to me. I think the only reason they call this an "assumption" is that their checklist is probably based on a certain amount of interpretation, where the geographical meaning of some Book of Mormon passages isn't quite clear. So I think what they're saying is that they've interpreted those ambiguous passages in a way that ensures that none of their checklist items ends up being mutually contradictory with any of the other checklist items.

I don't think that's unreasonable, though it does leave open the possibility that there might be more than one self-consistent interpretation of Book of Mormon geography, so that somebody else might come up with a different checklist that was just as good as theirs.

The statements at the end of the linked post, about two "audits" having been done, are hard to understand. My best guess is that they scored Pueblo, Mexico for its Book of Mormon fit, and then repeated the scoring after tweaking the algorithm, but ended up with a similar score. The spreadsheet screenshot posted on the linked site shows a 100% score, so maybe Pueblo is Zarahemla or something? And apparently the "auditing" of one place takes a whole day or night, so it doesn't seem to be a fully automated procedure.