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Post by Redhunter on Mar 23, 2009 7:31:49 GMT -5
The BoM is touted by the LDS church as proof positive of JS's mission and message. Unfortunately, the actual evidence negates that proof. And once again, I really don't see how this is any different than main stream Christianity saying the Bible (New Testament) is proof positive of Jesus and his message when a total lack of actual evidence negates that proof and even casts doubt that there even was an historical Jesus. And, yeah, we know that Joseph Smith was a real person since he wrote the the BoM, just as we know Paul was a real person that wrote a great deal of the NT. It's not that I'm disagreeing with you or trying to argue at all. On the contrary. It's just that I have the same regard for all religion whether it be Christianity and its various forms (including Mormonism,) Islam, Hinduism, or any other form of belief; none. And don't worry about the error. We all get things ass-backward sometimes. Since you corrected it so quickly, only an utter asshole would make an issue of it now. Well, hopefully if we can get more folks to see mormonism on par with the nuttiness of christianity then the mere mention of mormonism won't continue to bring cries of skyfire persecution as in the other thread that julian started. I agree more than most folks will imagine. Smith, jesus, or mohammed, they are all just tall tales about superheroes.
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Post by m52nickerson on Mar 23, 2009 9:27:26 GMT -5
Well, hopefully if we can get more folks to see mormonism on par with the nuttiness of christianity.... Who ever thought the Mormons were less nutty then Christians? Perhaps only less nutty then Scientologists! ;D
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Post by Caitshidhe on Mar 23, 2009 11:30:56 GMT -5
True. The mountains of evidence against the claims in the BoM point out that the entire BoM is a crock of male bovine fecal matter. Obviously, Smith didn't know enough about the history of the native American peoples to be able to come up with a story that didn't contradict the archaeological timeline. Still, sheep will believe whatever they want (or were told) to believe and damned be the evidence that shows that they're wrong. And if they haven't already done this already, you KNOW that eventually they're going to find some teensy shred of archaeological evidence that, while it doesn't 'prove' their claims, won't outright contradict them, either, and they'll hold it up as PROOF POSITIVE! that they were right all along. And we put people like this in positions of power.
The biggest problem with Smith is that, not only was he a real person that we know existed, but he was a real person that we know existed AND he was a less-than-decent character. I bounced around the intertube for a bit looking some things up, and apparently he was in and out of jail a lot for fraud--he was a conman. How the hell do you justify a religion based on the words (words only, no actual evidence!) of a conman? Muhammed and Jesus might or might not have been real people--I'm open to the idea that they existed, though I won't agree that they were anything other than religious men teaching new and different things--but they lived such a long time ago that there's no way to know who they were, what they were like, or how genuine they were. Maybe they were conmen, too, if they were even real. Joseph Smith, though, we know plenty about, and he probably wasn't the best guy in the world to follow out of the Union because some golden plates told him to. I mean, even if people 250 years ago fell for it, you'd think it would have lost credence by now. But apparently not.
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Post by ironbite on Mar 23, 2009 11:47:20 GMT -5
And remember, those golden plates he used?
Ironbite-dissapeared mid-translation.
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Post by JonathanE on Mar 23, 2009 16:15:24 GMT -5
And remember, those golden plates he used? Ironbite-dissapeared mid-translation. This is really not relevant, IB, to the discussion at hand. The statement is true enough, but has nothing to do with Meso-American archeology and the BoM. I didn't start this thread with the intent of flaming Skyfire, rather to try to educate him. What you're doing with that comment is contra-indicated, so please, refrain from "random" jabs at Mormon doctrine. There's already a thread for that.
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Post by Julian on Mar 23, 2009 22:28:24 GMT -5
Had been a bit busy when this thread was running hot, then forgot it was here.
The thing I was going to comment at the time, which always flabbergasts me about the BoM chronology is they have the same kind of sense of impossible timing as people that argue the world could be repopulated to 250 million people after a 'global' flood and a gene pool of eight people within a mere two thousand years or so, ignoring all the same genetic and environmental evidence.
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Post by Redhunter on Mar 24, 2009 2:20:57 GMT -5
Well, hopefully if we can get more folks to see mormonism on par with the nuttiness of christianity.... Who ever thought the Mormons were less nutty then Christians? Perhaps only less nutty then Scientologists! ;D Just like the rest of them, I didn't know how bad they were till I learned about them. All I knew is they had those LDS commercials on television that my mom mumbled about when they came on. Sky is the one who showed me how fucked up they really are. First the reading of the texts and then his behaviour.
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Post by JonathanE on Mar 24, 2009 6:07:38 GMT -5
I will try to steer this back to the original discussion. The archeology of pre-Columbian Meso America clearly negates the premises of the BoM. Despite large amounts of money spent by BYU to dig all over Central America to find evidence of the BoM, none was found. The straw that broke the back of said research was the Mayan language, the glyphs covering their temples and pyramids. Not only is it unrelated to the language of Egypt, Israel or Europe, there is NO mention of any of the events outlined in the BoM in any of the glyphs. Events as monumental as those outlined in the BoM should have been mentioned, somewhere in the writing of the Mayans, shouldn't it?
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Post by Julian on Mar 24, 2009 6:15:02 GMT -5
I will try to steer this back to the original discussion. The archeology of pre-Columbian Meso America clearly negates the premises of the BoM. Despite large amounts of money spent by BYU to dig all over Central America to find evidence of the BoM, none was found. The straw that broke the back of said research was the Mayan language, the glyphs covering their temples and pyramids. Not only is it unrelated to the language of Egypt, Israel or Europe, there is NO mention of any of the events outlined in the BoM in any of the glyphs. Events as monumental as those outlined in the BoM should have been mentioned, somewhere in the writing of the Mayans, shouldn't it? And somewhere / everywhere / anywhere in the collective histories / folklore / culture of the Lamanites North American Indians...
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Post by JonathanE on Mar 24, 2009 6:30:54 GMT -5
The BoM was written long before the breaking of the Mayan language. JS seems to have based much of his writings (the BoM) on the idea that the original occupiers of North America were the refugees from the Middle East. The archeological evidence says that massive cultures predate the supposed events of the BoM by half a millenium. The Olmec culture and its predecessors, predate the BoM story by at least 500 years. As Julian points out, there is not a single thread of evidence for any of the events in the BoM, and the lack of reference to any of the characters contained in the BoM should dispel the notion that there will ever be any supportive evidence found. The Mayans were, for a time, up until the language was deciphered, touted by apologists as possibly being the culture that resulted from the Nephite-Lamanite split and the destruction of the Nephites. The written record of the Mayas blows this out of the water. Perhaps god will miracle some evidence...
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Post by trike on Mar 24, 2009 6:49:10 GMT -5
The BoM was written long before the breaking of the Mayan language. JS seems to have based much of his writings (the BoM) on the idea that the original occupiers of North America were the refugees from the Middle East. The archeological evidence says that massive cultures predate the supposed events of the BoM by half a millenium. The Olmec culture and its predecessors, predate the BoM story by at least 500 years. As Julian points out, there is not a single thread of evidence for any of the events in the BoM, and the lack of reference to any of the characters contained in the BoM should dispel the notion that there will ever be any supportive evidence found. The Mayans were, for a time, up until the language was deciphered, touted by apologists as possibly being the culture that resulted from the Nephite-Lamanite split and the destruction of the Nephites. The written record of the Mayas blows this out of the water. Perhaps god will miracle some evidence... To add onto what Jonathan said: At the time Smith lived very little was known about Native American culture or civilization on either continent, but especially South America. In fact, very little was known about these civilizations until the 20th century and even now we know little about them compared to many other European/middle Eastern ancient cultures, chalk it up to racism (which also is the reason why we know so little about early sub-Saharan civilizations) and instability in the region. So Smith was a product of his time when he wrote all sorts of fanciful things about the ancient inhabitants of the Americas, all sorts of writers, nutcases and ordinary people were doing the exact same thing at the time and it was hardly visionary when he wrote it. However, his nonsense about it was the only nonsense that got codified into a religion and blindly accepted as doctrine by millions. And now that we know enough about those ancient cultures and peoples (helped by modern technology such as DNA analysis) we can safely and correctly say that these native inhabitants were not from the Middle East nor did they have use of the wheel, horses, iron and the like, and that they are in no way what Smith said they were. This nonsense in the BOM should have been abandoned long ago.
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Post by Redhunter on Mar 24, 2009 7:11:03 GMT -5
The BoM was written long before the breaking of the Mayan language. JS seems to have based much of his writings (the BoM) on the idea that the original occupiers of North America were the refugees from the Middle East. The archeological evidence says that massive cultures predate the supposed events of the BoM by half a millenium. The Olmec culture and its predecessors, predate the BoM story by at least 500 years. As Julian points out, there is not a single thread of evidence for any of the events in the BoM, and the lack of reference to any of the characters contained in the BoM should dispel the notion that there will ever be any supportive evidence found. The Mayans were, for a time, up until the language was deciphered, touted by apologists as possibly being the culture that resulted from the Nephite-Lamanite split and the destruction of the Nephites. The written record of the Mayas blows this out of the water. Perhaps god will miracle some evidence... Well, obviously the devil, while planting fossils to fool men of science into thinking creationism was false, carefully removed all remnants of the Lamanites. Satan removed all traces so that the mormon people would be persecuted as crazy liars. Oh, and he erased all traces of the reformed egyptian language too. Oh, and he made sure god took the golden plates. And the compass. And emptied the massive battlefields in the United States where all of those Nephites and Lamanites duked it out to the death in 421 AD. Boy, if I didn't know for CERTAIN that satan was behind all of this, it would sure make a guy look like an idiot for believing it!
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Post by Star Cluster on Mar 24, 2009 7:28:03 GMT -5
The BoM was written long before the breaking of the Mayan language. JS seems to have based much of his writings (the BoM) on the idea that the original occupiers of North America were the refugees from the Middle East. The archeological evidence says that massive cultures predate the supposed events of the BoM by half a millenium. The Olmec culture and its predecessors, predate the BoM story by at least 500 years. As Julian points out, there is not a single thread of evidence for any of the events in the BoM, and the lack of reference to any of the characters contained in the BoM should dispel the notion that there will ever be any supportive evidence found. The Mayans were, for a time, up until the language was deciphered, touted by apologists as possibly being the culture that resulted from the Nephite-Lamanite split and the destruction of the Nephites. The written record of the Mayas blows this out of the water. Perhaps god will miracle some evidence... To add onto what Jonathan said: At the time Smith lived very little was known about Native American culture or civilization on either continent, but especially South America. In fact, very little was known about these civilizations until the 20th century and even now we know little about them compared to many other European/middle Eastern ancient cultures, chalk it up to racism (which also is the reason why we know so little about early sub-Saharan civilizations) and instability in the region. So Smith was a product of his time when he wrote all sorts of fanciful things about the ancient inhabitants of the Americas, all sorts of writers, nutcases and ordinary people were doing the exact same thing at the time and it was hardly visionary when he wrote it. However, his nonsense about it was the only nonsense that got codified into a religion and blindly accepted as doctrine by millions. And now that we know enough about those ancient cultures and peoples (helped by modern technology such as DNA analysis) we can safely and correctly say that these native inhabitants were not from the Middle East nor did they have use of the wheel, horses, iron and the like, and that they are in no way what Smith said they were. This nonsense in the BOM should have been abandoned long ago. I was going to post nearly the same thing, trike. But to add to even this, Smith felt safe in preaching his "revelations" since little was known about the peoples and cultures of the Americans during his time. He had no idea that within 150 years, there would be an explosion of advancements in scientific discovery as well as archaeological and investigative methods. Id didn't matter then what he told because there wasn't really any way at that time to prove him wrong and he had no way of knowing that his claims would later be show to be outside the realm of reality. This, again, is much the same as the origins of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic religions. Those that first formulated the "causes" behind what they saw had no way of knowing that someday, all their "revelations" would be shown to be based on mere fantasy. What is truly amazing is that there are so many millions of people that still hold onto these ancient fantasies that have been shown to be incorrect instead of accepting that a deity of any kind is not necessary to explain our universe, world, or existense.
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Post by JonathanE on Mar 24, 2009 16:11:31 GMT -5
Skyfire, can you show us ANY evidence in the archeological record that doesn't negate the story?
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Post by Old Viking on Mar 24, 2009 18:21:46 GMT -5
Fascinating stuff, JonathanE. I'm reluctant to expend mental energy by using science -- soft or hard -- to refute the beliefs of religious nutbags (of any persuasion). It is an utterly useless exercise. Nonetheless, I find great pleasure in encountering the sort of knowledge you just shared. (Archeology must be a wonderful career. If only it didn't involve so much, you know, actual work.)
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