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I thought the same!

Although I am not familiar with this work. Maybe I could, potentially be one of those, who could use this material, to engage more into the subject and then gain a better, and a more informed understanding of the matter. There is always a starting point on anything.

When I first read the OP I thought the Red Man song was one of the new ones being released and about had a heart attack wondering when the church had lost their minds! That's definitely one that should stay historical and forgotten.

I was listening to the Follow Him podcast yesterday where they are discussing the book of Ezekiel. I don’t remember the scholar’s name that they had on, but he talked about this very thing. He talked about how growing up in the church, after we read a passage of scripture, the first thing that we are often taught to do is to ask how it applies to us. But he said the most important thing when studying scripture is to first ask what did the author mean and what was his intended audience supposed to learn. After we know that then it is very, very good to also learn how to apply it to ourselves, in our lives, and different present day situations. But it should not be the primary goal all the time. Context is crucial.

A world where truth is being; not having. Ha! Perhaps my shortest post ever!

Oct 29 2026 - Eight more hymns added to ‘Hymns for Home and Church,’ including Christmas songs Some forgotten hymns are here: https://mormonr.org/sv/blog/005wCG/forgotten_hymns_of_the_restoration I mention one specifically because of a previous thread. Hymn 63 - "O Stop and Tell Me, Red Man" 1 O stop and tell me, Red Man, Who are ye? why you roam? And how you get your living? Have you no God;—no home? 2 With stature straight and portly, And deck’d in native pride, With feathers, paints and broaches, He willingly replied:— 3 “I once was pleasant Ephraim, “When Jacob for me pray’d; “But oh! how blessings vanish, “When man from God has stray’d! 4 “Before your nation knew us, “Some thousand moons ago, “Our fathers fell in darkness, “And wander’d to and fro, 5 “And long they’ve liv’d by hunting, “Instead of work and arts, “And so our race has dwindled “To idle Indian hearts. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/collection-of-sacred-hymns-1835/85 The title alone makes clear why this hymn no longer appears in our hymnbook. It refers to Native Americans as “Red Man” and uses phrases like “idle Indian hearts” and “customs,” language that would be inappropriate in a modern sacrament meeting. Other sacred hymns are included in the full transcript. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/collection-of-sacred-hymns-1835/85#full-transcript

Have you practiced mindfulness? One book I read said that if you are being mindful then you won't be bored. I've wondered if that is true. I've been trying to be mindful, and the idea holds up for the short time, like I can wash dishes and not be bored for 10 min, but if I had to do it for hours I don't know how true that would be.

You don’t see the difference between the simile of telling a widow to lament “like a virgin” and saying someone is a virgin?

Special Pleading: The Novella Even if you do allow the miraculous as plausible the bar for establishing a miraculous event should be much higher and the evidence for the Resurrection doesn’t even come close to meeting a high bar. The scientific method is flawed because some of those who practice it aren’t good prophets? And one of those is just in a popular scientific journal? What do you think this proves? It has nothing to do with the actual practice of science where you establish laws and theories that are falsifiable and rigorously and ruthlessly test them. Science doesn’t include some special insight that its practitioners can or should be able to see the future. I mean, you can gloat about how some scientists made some bad predictions. They never claimed the gift of prophecy. I mean, have apostles so at least we have people who won’t make the exact same mistakes these people made. It is not the scientist’s job to predict future advances. We can leave that to the apostles. In fact let’s see what they said about the first anecdote you shared. So looks like the power of revelation doesn’t have a special insight into these things either. Maybe we should just take all such talk of what humanity will accomplish or discover with a lot of salt and maybe not pretend that the predictions of scientists are somehow tied to the validity of the scientific method. Just so you know this kind of irrelevant and spurious reasoning is probably part of why Dan doesn’t think much of you.

If you are going to use neologism it should at least make sense. Because it wouldn’t make sense in that respect. Celestial and Terrestrial are almost opposites and aren’t related to the glory of the sun or the moon or the stars so that wasn’t what Paul was talking about. Celestial means stuff in space. So the glory of the sun, the moon, and the stars are all celestial. You can pull out the idea of three degrees of glory in the resurrection that are analogous to celestial bodies from the text if you squint really hard but attributing them to be celestial and terrestrial is just misusing words. If you wanted to use Greek words to describe these glories the glory of the sun would probably be some variation of the word Helios, the moon a variation of Selene (maybe), and the stars some variation of aster iirc. Joseph Smith messed up thinking Celestial and Terrestrial referred to what they don’t and added a third word that he made up to finish it off.

It is equipped to say what happens in its realm. To me it’s saying, if the rules are the world as we know it and have defined it, the data says it’s impossible. I think strong statements like this are the necessary result of the overwrought and illogical attempts to find scientific data for creationism within scripture, treating the Bible like either a science or history book. It needs to be clear if you insist on using it that way, it is impossible to prove faith positions on miracles. If you find it, you are messing the data. It does a disservice to those trying to understand science. It does a disservice to those with faith but who are willing to learn actual science and history methods to lead them to think science and history methodologies can prove or even support faith in miracles (as in there being physical evidence), who once they find the truth, then believe they have to give up faith if they have intellectual integrity because they haven’t been taught to look at scripture as something outside of science and only tangential to history, religious texts from different times and world views. Allowing that at sometime in the future new data might appear that provides evidence for miracles says nothing about the data we have now.

I think it does the opposite. It says a miracle is outside the discipline of historical method. Ideally, yes. But then why does Dan come along and, while speaking within that naturalism paradigm, issue pronouncements about what "the data" show or do not show? How is methodological naturalism equipped to articulate what "the data" are regarding miracles, how it should be evaluated, what quantum or measure is appropriate, and so on? I just don't think methodological naturalism can work as an arbiter of "the data" regarding miracles because it a priori denies the existence of miracles. Science is a wonderful aspect of the human experience, but it is not the sole mechanism for discerning truth and reality. Moreover, the scientific consensus is not sacrosanct. It is not perfect and pristine and 100% correct. Our command of it is incomplete, blinkered, and tainted with biases and decidedly nonscientific influences. In 1957 Lee De Forest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, scoffed at the notion of space travel: "To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth—all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances." In 1930 Robert Millikan, an American experimental physicist honored with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for the measurement of the elementary electric charge and for his work on the photoelectric effect, stated: "No 'scientific bad boy' ever will be able to blow up the world by releasing atomic energy." In 1912 Guglielmo Marconi, inventor and electrical engineer, known for his pioneering work on long-distance radio transmission and credited as the inventor of radio, stated: "The coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous." In 1909 Scientific American declared that "the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced." In 1903 Albert Abraham Michelson, an American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light who won the 1907 Nobel Prize in Physics, stated: "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote." And so on. I appreciate what scientists have to offer and contribute to humanity, but I can't get on board with the idea that any one of them (let alone all of them together) has/have a pristine and unassailable command of everthing there is to know. The quote from Shakespeare, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" can, to me, be applied to suggest that human knowledge, logic, and science cannot explain everything that exists in the universe. Or, as King Benjamin put it, "Believe in God; believe that he is, and that he created all things, both in heaven and in earth; believe that he has all wisdom, and all power, both in heaven and in earth; believe that man doth not comprehend all the things which the Lord can comprehend." Thanks,, -Smac

I think it does the opposite. It says a miracle is outside the discipline of historical method. It contradicts all the known laws of science, so it qualifies as an impossibility in terms of the study of science.

Okay. Only a handful of people have seen Dan's various calumnies against me and my character, and not all of them have credited Dan's calumnies, and I am unlikely to meet any of the people who do credit them, and several of those who do dislike me already. Also, I found much of Dan's calumnies to be out-of-hand stupid. So me being - what's the term? - "butthurt" is certainly up to you, but it's not really borne out by the evidence. My adverse critique of Dan has more to do with the potential and/or actual damage he is doing to the faith of other Latter-day Saints, including unsuspecting ones who may assume that Dan, being a Latter-day Saint, would be a useful resource for someone hoping to strengthen or rehabilitate their faith, and may not fully appreciate that he has now repeatedly bragged about "offering ... reasons for people {that is, Latter-day Saints} to feel justified in not remaining faithful," and that he has called this a "sweet spot" and indicative that he is "doing something right." I would hope that Dan would like to advance the work of the Church. I would also hope that he is a genuinely devout Latter-day Saint. At present I am giving him the benefit of the doubt on these points, despite what I have seen him say. For me, the fundamental reason I stay in the Church is because I believe it is what it claims to be. That it also does all sorts of wonderful things to improve society is a natural and intrinsic "by their fruits"-style outgrowth of that fundamental reason. I want to effect positive change within the Church, but in supportive and sustaining ways, and not in an adversarial or subversive or "loyal opposition" sort of way. I would hope Dan could say the same. I would much prefer to view him as a Terryl Givens or a Richard L. Bushman than a John Dehlin or a Sam Young. Thanks, -Smac

The main point of disagreement is not with the existence of a historical Jesus or with the mainstream scholarly reconstruction of him as an apocalyptic preacher who was executed under Roman authority. Those are widely accepted conclusions in critical historical work, and nothing in the quoted paragraph on that score contradicts Latter-day Saint belief. The disagreement is with the first half of the statement—the claim that, from a scholarly point of view, the resurrection is a physical impossibility that “the data” do not support and for which we lack evidence that clears an especially high bar. That framing treats a reported miracle as the kind of claim historical method is equipped to confirm or disconfirm in the same way it handles ordinary events. Historical scholarship operates under methodological naturalism: it explains the past using ordinary historical causes and evidence that can, in principle, be assessed without invoking the supernatural. Under that rule, a bodily resurrection is excluded from the set of possible explanations before the evidence is even examined. Calling the result “what the data show” or “what scholars can say” therefore reflects a prior methodological commitment more than an empirical finding about the evidence itself. How can the resurrection of Jesus Christ be empirically verified or falsified? What would count as evidence that could “get over the bar”? Eyewitness testimony, empty-tomb reports, and early creedal material are the main historical data we have; they are also the data critical scholars already use when they reconstruct the rise of belief in the resurrection. Those data are not typically treated as sufficient to establish the event under ordinary historical standards, because the standards themselves do not allow miraculous causation. Whether the proper standard should be preponderance, clear and convincing evidence, or something stronger is rarely made explicit, and it is not clear that any of those legal-style thresholds map cleanly onto a singular claim from the first century. In short, it is difficult to speak of “the data” ruling the resurrection in or out when the method in use has already decided that such an event lies outside what historical data are permitted to establish. This is a recognized feature of the discipline rather than a novel observation. Many scholars who work on the historical Jesus or the origins of Christianity explicitly distinguish between what can be said under historical method and what may be affirmed on other grounds (theological, experiential, or otherwise). The quoted statement collapses that distinction by presenting the methodological exclusion as a straightforward conclusion about the evidence. So I find it odd to see a scholar of Dan's caliber A) presuppose, and rely on a methodological naturalism paradigm that presupposes, the absence of miraculous events, and then B) characterize that paradigm as establishing authoritative parameters of "the data," and all C) while not informing his neophyte audience. There is nothing insightful or scholarly in announcing "the data do not support the miracle" when the speaker is acting within a paradigm that does not allow for the possibility that the miracle happened. Put another way, once Dan presents the interpretive method, and given that this method a priori and in advance rules out miraculous causation, announcing that "the data" - which Dan has already paradigmatically curated to exclude any consideration of miracles - do not establish the miracle is not an independent finding; it is the method restating its own starting assumption. As for the Latter-day Saint context, the Church teaches the bodily resurrection of Jesus as a foundational historical event, not merely as a later interpretive story. When someone who identifies as Latter-day Saint and presents himself as guided by “the data” publicly treats the resurrection as something the evidence does not support, that creates an obvious tension with the Church’s position. The objection is not to the study or public explanation of critical scholarship as such; it is to the implication that the resurrection fails an evidentiary test that historical method is not designed to apply in the first place. The tension is heightened precisely because Dan presents the conclusion as what "scholarship" and "the data" show rather than as what one methodological framework concludes. Thanks, -Smac

Benjamin Park puts out some interesting stuff; I'm not sure this is one of them.

I know what the focus of your posts has been. My opinion on the motive behind your posts remains unchanged.

https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference_home/2020-2024-fair-conferences/august-2023-fair-conference/knowing-brother-joseph-how-the-historical-record-demonstrates-the-prophets-religious-sincerity That topic isn’t the primary focus, so it may not be as detailed. For those who don’t want to read the whole presentation, here is the section on dating the Beamann (edited: I never spell her surname correctly) sealing:

You don't have to take my word for it. The content of my various posts in this thread is available for review. The content focuses overwhelmingly on Dan's social media stuff. Thanks, -Smac

Which part of this do you disagree with? Resurrection is another thing that, from an academic point of view, that's a physical impossibility. And so without extraordinary evidence for that, there's no way a scholar can say 'Yes, this makes sense,' because it doesn't. It violates everything we know about the operation of the universe. So the bar for that kind of evidence is even higher, and we don't have data that come anywhere near getting us over that bar. So from a scholarly point of view, the resurrection is not something that is supported by the data. Can you point me to the academic study of resurrection? The overwhelming majority of scholars agree that there was a historical Jesus of Nazareth, who was probably an apocalyptic itinerant preacher, who probably preached against the Roman Empire, and preached the coming of the Kingdom of God imminently, and was executed because of it. And then we have Jesus' followers afterwards spreading stories about him coming back to life and ministry before leaving again. Are you saying this isn't the mainstream academic view of critical biblical scholarship? Like what exactly is it about this paragraph in particular that you took the time to quote that you have an issue with. Which words go against what the church teaches? Why is it that Dan's chosen profession (making critical biblical scholarship accessible to the masses) bothers you so much?

Sure.

Yes, it is not explicit, but I think it's hard to suggest an alternative reading. I don't think there is any evidence for that. I think the only educated guess is Emma. I keep going back to the assassination of Caesar on the floor of the Senate. We seem to generally accept, on evidence far inferior to what we have about Joseph, the historicity and particulars of the incident, and the participants. Thanks, -Smac

https://wheatandtares.org/2024/11/25/re-writing-origins-of-polygamy-fanny-alger-affair

Yes, not all, not the early civilly married women whom Joseph didn't civilly marry. Yes, Louisa Beaman as per Don Bradley, which would also explain why the Partridge sisters were sealed twice, I suggest one was an adoption and the other a marriage at the request of Emma. And Helen Mar Kimball too, the idea that Joseph Smith may have used the concept of adoptive sealings to make his proposals. Helen Mar Kimball may have believed the marriage was more of a formal ceremony than a real marriage, initially. I have the Wheat and Tares interview but I bet the FAIR version might be better.