Three Powerful Books

[_mentalgymnast]

Seriously? Your “take” on the Book is to restate chapter headings?

Yep. That’s where it starts.

Which one, and only one, theory do you subscribe to? We could look to see what Callister has to say on that particular theory. If you subscribe to more than one, it seems that you don’t take any one of them seriously more than the other.

Regards,
MG

[_Jersey Girl]

Strong the bias among those here is, yes.

Regards,
MG

Might I suggest that you read your own posts? They are dripping with bias driven assumptions.

[_honorentheos]

Seriously? Your “take” on the Book is to restate chapter headings?

Yep. That’s where it starts.

Which one, and only one, theory do you subscribe to? We could look to see what Callister has to say on that particular theory. If you subscribe to more than one, it seems that you don’t take any one of them seriously more than the other.

Regards,
MG

The one that says the Book of Mormon is a product of the 19th century.

[_mentalgymnast]

If one is open to the possibility of there being a God, it’s the divine origin story with plates and an angel that actually make the most sense.

I lost belief in the Book of Mormon while hanging onto underlying Christian belief for a number of years. Physics Guy seems to believe in God, or the possibilty of God, and doesn't share your view.

The Book of Mormon fails under the weight of the claims it's a record of a migrating people from the old world to the new. It fails under the weight of the actual evidence regarding the peoples who were here during the period it claims to cover. It fails under the weight of evidence it is thoroughly a book of the early 19th c. frontier.

Believing there may be a god doesn't suddenly make the Book of Mormon more likely to be a true story about a branch of Israel migrating across the oceans to arrive in the Americas and giving rise to an advanced civilization 2,000 years before Columbus. The facts are what they are regardless of your beliefs.

That much is true. Out of curiosity, have you spent much time reading Brant Gardner?

https://www.fairmormon.org/authors/gardner-brant

https://www.amazon.com/Brant-Gardner/dp ... 116&sr=8-2

If so, could you point me towards a source that would ‘take down’ the prolific work he’s done on the Book of Mormon?

The facts, as you say, are what they are.

Regards,
MG

[_Lemmie]

Seriously? Your “take” on the Book is to restate chapter headings? Unreal. Did you even read it? Or is it just your assignment to push it?

Yep. That’s where it starts.

No, that’s not an answer to my question. Also, repeating the subtitles of a book is not at all where one’s assessment of a book starts. One starts with reading it. But, you have given yet another example of how you have no idea what you are pushing, but will push because your church tells you you should.

[_mentalgymnast]

Yep. That’s where it starts.

Which one, and only one, theory do you subscribe to? We could look to see what Callister has to say on that particular theory. If you subscribe to more than one, it seems that you don’t take any one of them seriously more than the other.

Regards,
MG

The one that says the Book of Mormon is a product of the 19th century.

If you want to get nitpicky, that wasn’t one of the specific arguments that Callister presented in chapter 2 of his book.

I think most people that have really put some time and effort into looking at the background mileu surrounding the Book of Mormon won’t argue that the book is a product of the 19th century. How could it not be? It was transmitted/processed through a brain inside of a person that lived during that time period.

Regards,
MG

[_mentalgymnast]

Strong the bias among those here is, yes.

Regards,
MG

Might I suggest that you read your own posts? They are dripping with bias driven assumptions.

I’m not arguing that they don’t.

Regards,
MG

[_mentalgymnast]

Seriously? Your “take” on the Book is to restate chapter headings?

Yep. That’s where it starts.

Which one, and only one, theory do you subscribe to? We could look to see what Callister has to say on that particular theory. If you subscribe to more than one, it seems that you don’t take any one of them seriously more than the other.

Regards,
MG

*bump

[_honorentheos]

The one that says the Book of Mormon is a product of the 19th century.

If you want to get nitpicky, that wasn’t one of the specific arguments that Callister presented in chapter 2 of his book.

I think most people that have really put some time and effort into looking at the background mileu surrounding the Book of Mormon won’t argue that the book is a product of the 19th century. How could it not be? It was transmitted/processed through a brain inside of a person that lived during that time period.

Regards,
MG

viewtopic.php?p=782265#p782265

Is everyone here familiar with the Cottingley Fairies photos? It was a series of 5 photos taken in 1917 in England.

This is the most famous one:



It has influenced depictions of fairies even to this day.

Quaint as it might seem now, there was a great deal of controversy over them with many people, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, taking them as evidence of spiritual beings. There were experts in photography who declared them as legitimate.

Interestingly, I once saw a show on the Cottingley Fairies filmed in the 1970's that covered this as a controversy over the existence of spirit beings. Skeptics were brought on to offer a variety of theories for how the photographs were produced. All of them involved some relatively sophisticated photographic techniques for girls in 1917 to be using or remarkable coincidences. The show, being fundamentally interested in portraying this as a supernatural controversy, rightly cast doubt on accepting any of those theories as correct. No one explanation seemed in particular likely.

Then something marvelous happened. In the 1980's, the girls who produced the photos admitted it was a hoax. They also described how they did it. It turns out they cut out pictures of fairies from a book, stuck them to hatpins, and took pictures of them. That's it. That's what they did. So much for acid etched engravings and complicated exposures.

This story has long stuck with me for two reasons. First, whenever I see complicated and remote explanations for unusual phenomena and potential hoaxes, I'm always reminded that the reality can be devastatingly more simple. Second, while everyone was right to reject those complicated theories for how the photographs were produced, it's always fascinated me that people lost sight of the fact that even though those theories were unlikely, the explanation that entailed the photos were of actual fairies was vastly, vastly more unlikely than that. You can't prove extraordinary supernatural claims simply by attacking somewhat unlikely natural explanations.

This story does inform what I see in Book of Mormon debates. I personally am skeptical of theories of authorship that do not involve Smith. Elaborate plagiarism hypotheses have always struck me as strained. And while I find myself on the same side as believers when seeing this, I also see them as having a huge blind-spot for not appreciating just how much more implausible the supernatural tall-tale version of events is than the authorship theories they are finding without sufficient basis.

[_honorentheos]

The evidence is overwhelmingly against the Book of Mormon being a record of any of the peoples of the Americas between 600 BCE and 500 CE. It is also heavily in support of the Book of Mormon being a fabrication from the early 1800's. Discussions that do not address those bedrock issues are party games played by children who wish to believe in fairies.