Calm

Meaning what?

If Joseph thought they were genuine (I am not sure we can say one way or the other as he quickly lost interest in them), that is evidence imo that his own experience was not a hoax as he would be more inclined to accept them imo if his own experience supported the existence of authentic plates. This has the info you mentioned as well as other content. https://mormonr.org/qnas/a9l1T/the_kinderhook_plates

It’s possible neither of you are following the other’s logic correctly because of incorrect initial assumptions being used (perhaps having to do with why certain choices are made?). I see this happening a lot in communication, especially on this board where I have the chance to try and trace reasoning back. I am not following the arguments here well enough over the days’ (are we up to weeks yet?) worth of discussions because of interruptions in my attention and it’s too overwhelming to try and reread everything….so I am just throwing this out as a possibility because it certainly seems to me both of you are discussing in good faith, trying to present your own materials clearly and putting sincere effort into trying to understand the other. But if you start off looking at something with a faulty assumption, it is very easy to misinterpret and to continue even when corrected multiple times (this has happened to me way too many times and I assume I have done it to others quite a bit). Unfortunately I am not sure how to solve the problem. I think listing out each other’s assumptions to begin with might help, but it’s hard to identify all the assumptions one has that can affect a conversation.

But there were plenty of opportunities for the witnesses to be asked later on by a variety of people. It wasn’t limited to a one and done.

Given how anti-Mormon has been used historically, it is a better match imo for someone whose purpose is to destroy the Church or who desires the Church to be destroyed—as in cease to exist as either an organization or a community—rather than just criticize it or even demonstrate some of the beliefs it is built on is false. Many critics it seems to me either don’t care that much what the fate of the Church is, but simply want to express their opinion of the Church (I find many atheists just want theists to be able to make truly informed decisions or are happy to let churches function how they want as long as the churches don’t try to run the secular communities as well as their own religious ones) or would be satisfied if the Church lost what they see as the problems and adopted other ideas and practices while continuing as a community.

Is it the quality that gets it categorized like this or the fundamental premise that such work is built on..the intimate involvement of the spiritual world in the mundane world…angels, revelation, miracles?

Of course as they have the most reason to invest the effort to learn. Why would nonbelievers want to devote that much effort and time needed to disproving someone else’s faith at an academic level when they could be out having fun, visiting friends, devoting time to a career they enjoy, etc? Sure, as a hobby, but true scholarship will require at least some training in the area in order to save time (self taught is possible, but much longer imo to up your game to expert level).

What languages fall in this category?

Do we have authors from that time period intentionally trying to alter their writing so as to imitate someone/thing else to see how different the mimicked or altered texts are to their usual styles in word choice and syntax? Though with the Book of Mormon, isn’t there the problem we lack much of his writing prior to that experience and his vocabulary and style might have been influenced and moved closer to the text’s style where you wouldn’t see it in stuff he wrote previously to that experience.

Which is pretty subjective, is it not since we lack similar examples? Even if we assume purely naturalistic, what books would be a good fit to create probabilities with? Would need to be similar genre and purpose at least. What else?

https://ilovehistory.utah.gov Hopefully one of these fits your learning style. Chat recommends starting with the PBS documentaries and then going more in depth. With history to go.

https://video.pbsutah.org/show/utah-history/ chttps://historytogo.utah.gov

Resorting to chat because I don’t do podcasts:

Leonard Arrington’s a highly respected historian. Decent writer too as his books were enjoyable reads for me. His Great Basin Kingdom might be out of date because it’s as old as I am, someone more knowledgeable than I am in history scholarship is needed, but it was the go to history for quite sometime and you can read it online here, hopefully for free. https://archive.org/details/greatbasinkingdo0000arri_q8o0/page/n5/mode/2up

The ones who put time into it, who are serious and trying to understand, yes. I still see a lot of dismissive comments of the witnesses all being related, etc online when I venture there….which I admit isn’t as often as I used to. Have other things to occupy me.

The low church tradition was the background of many early members. It still permeates our Sunday observances imo, pretty much everything outside the temple. There used to be an element of pride among some members that we did so much with so little in the past in my experience. Pride in the minimalism in our buildings and services as well as leadership (not hiring people for jobs where many other faiths did, depending on the willingness to donate time as well as money, etc). I believe as the culture around us becomes less obviously religious, we will develop more rituals we can bring into our homes to create sacred space there. Family Home Evening is a long time practice (few would call it a ritual, but I tend to have a broad definition of the term, I will use practice for the less structured rituals of religious life for this post, I think). The push to begin and end the day with prayer and daily scripture study are other practices that have been going since at least my childhood (60s). I include seminary as a more communal structured version of this for youth. I don’t know if it was just my mom talking about how homes should be refuges from the loudness and chaos and busyness of the world or they talked about homes as refuges from the world as well in my childhood, but it was a theme at least by the 70s in my ward if not beyond. Part of this was not only avoiding contention, being a home of love, but also having visual reminders of faith, especially for children. I think there’s been a big push for religious artwork in homes in the past 50 years or so. It may be just that my own family didn’t have religious artwork, including my grandparents and extended family, but the grandparents and most of my aunts and uncles were born and raised in Utah and most devout, all had scriptures and many books by church authorities in their homes, so I am assuming artwork just wasn’t pushed that much. I didn’t have LDS friends growing up, except for one family when quite young. I also don’t remember any trips to Deseretbook when visiting relatives in Utah though there were likely some, so I can’t remember what offerings of artwork they had prior to my college years (late 70s). I haven’t much to base my conclusions on therefore except for my extended family. While I don’t remember religious art, I always remember the books because I would read anything within my reach (hands and mind). Even when there were no Deseretbooks around, there was the Seventies? libraries/bookstores in the churches iirc. Then suddenly Greg Olsen’s work seemed like it was everywhere. We even have a few of his now, but it’s the fantasy stuff, not the religious. The kids wanted his Jesus pictures growing up, they even gave them as birthday gifts in primary, so they joined kids’ artwork as the only non coordinating art in the house (either the art had to work with the room or I made the room work with the art, everything has to look like it belongs, it’s part of the family, not just visiting in my home or I get antsy). When I worked in the churchish bookstore my favorites were Chad Hawkins’ line drawings of temples, at the time he was working on getting all of them, but I wonder if he fell too far behind and gave up. I have one religious piece in my home now, but it’s not the usual, Cherubim and a Flaming Sword by J Kirk Richards. The symbolism that draws me is the tree of life, the cross (sword), and the otherworldly and threeness of the angels. The Tree of Life motif is probably my favorite visual theme….though probably mostly because I love trees. Our walls are too bumpy for wallpaper or I would have one basement room full of a forest mural, very green, very old earth, quiet and enclosed. Pity we don’t have sacred groves attached to all our chapels. I think we are quite late to the table with sacred holidays for increasing experience of sacred time and space. Christmas wasn’t a huge deal in my view at Church with much additional celebration beyond what could fit into Sundays and personal family time (the choir would sing and there would be a Christmas program during Sacrament Meeting instead of talks), though the Church had the Tabernacle choir performances and lighted temple square for decades and both were semi rituals for BYU students while I was there. And of course the was the yearly Nativity story to be told by us kids using the Primary diorama? setup we got in church to help us remember what Christmas was really for….our contribution to the home’s decorations (Mom decorated the tree, they were always beautiful). I am expecting more holiday observances, not in the sense of sacraments, but in creating more opportunities for bringing our minds to faith to create more spiritual anchors throughout the year. Makes sense to adapt traditions of others rather than attempting to create our own as there will likely be additional reinforcements beyond what we can just get at church. If This Little Light of Mine can find a place in our hymnbook, who knows what we will adapt for our needs!

But this would depend a great deal on whether these witnesses were independent, just bystanders or they had a reason to benefit from the defendant being named as the murderer….say they had as much reason or more to want the victim dead as the defendant (an inheritance was involved, for example).

Unfortunately the easiest to understand evidence here, the witnesses, is also the easiest to dismiss, imo (added: I see Analytics brought up the key issues). While it seems unlikely for 14 men and more to keep quiet if they were involved in fraud, it is not inconceivable that they cared enough about how their loved ones thought about them that they kept the fraud to themselves even when on their death bed because they knew the anguish and bitterness they would cause since at least some of their families sacrificed tremendously to follow Joseph, join the Church, move with the members, etc. Not saying it’s likely, but I see it as plausible, especially if the original motivation was hope for a utopian society or something similarly valued. Avoiding humiliation and disdain, being seen as a person of integrity is highly meaningful to many people. Sure, they may be applauded and be able to dine out for the rest of their lives on stories that trashed Joseph and Mormons, but how would they be treated in their homes by spouses and children, parents and siblings who believed them? There is also a possibility all were concerned about retaliations from angry members, either because it was believed they were lying or because they didn’t. If one had family killed because of commitment to the faith and then later heard someone confess to lying about the plates or angels, it would be very possible imo to want to exact vengeance from those directly responsible for the suffering and deaths of one’s family. If the level of fraud they were committed to was not full out because they had been duped themselves, but rather they were just helping Joseph a true prophet in their eyes at that time by exaggerating some, it would be even easier most likely not to admit to that exaggeration, imo. So while I personally believe the witnesses are very important for bringing the sacred into the mundane world, creating the narrative that laid foundation for the faith, I don’t see them as the strongest evidence. Unknown until after the creation of the scriptures ancient elements in the Enoch or Abraham traditions are stronger potential evidence, imo. The issue with these are how unique and detailed are the story elements as well as what number of them takes it past plausibility for a coincidence based on Joseph’s creativity and ability to pick up hints (if they exist) to flesh them out. Otoh, demonstrating the text couldn’t have been produced by Joseph or anyone else in the vicinity or of his or any previous time period because of word usage in the text is evidence that is the most independent of the motivations of those directly involved in the founding of the Church it seems to me. Personality doesn’t really come into it, though language skills do. It’s not a slam dunk (in the sense of being able to show one way or the other), of course, as can be seen here because this kind of evidence using statistics and requiring hours, if not days and months to truly familiarize oneself with it isn’t that accessible to most people. We have to depend on experts to evaluate this type of evidence for us and explain why it matters. Those who want to discredit it to be taken seriously by believers would need to show they put the same level of effort into the analysis, using the best sources, etc similar to those making the claim their analysis supports Joseph. How do you determine the probability that someone is consciously trying to imitate sacred language or create new language that feels sacred? I don’t think it’s particularly reasonable to expect that of non believers, so it’s likely the evidence will end up satisfying believers while they are able to dismiss critics’ work as not thorough enough at least until there are ways to not only remove bias from AI so one can dump all known texts into their maw so they can complete what would take a lifetime for a human to do, but also have a mistake proof way of calculating probabilities…is that last even possible? Is there a way to remove subjectivity so that all agree the weight given to the occurrences are reasonable?

Isn’t this the same thing Analytics is stating when being pushed for an explanation of how Joseph produced the text, just from the opposite view with a slight variation….the mechanism doesn’t have to be known in order for the prediction of an ordinary (naturalistic) outcome to still be significant? Just making the observation…not saying it impacts any arguments. I just found it interesting. (This may have been pointed out before, I may have missed a couple of posts with interruptions the past few days).

My husband is off exploring Down Under. His mom was Australian, so it’s been a life long dream. He may have gotten there before for a few days for a conference, but they blur in my mind even if I do know he’s been on every other continent in the world multiple times. He is down there for over 3 weeks. Would have loved to join him, but first it was limited wealth and now limited health. Anyway… He hit New Zealand for the first part. Yesterday was Hobbiton. Today it’s Hoggiton where MiddleEarth hogs hang out (actually it’s an agricultural research facility if I understood him correctly, managed by someone with either a sense of humor or an eye out for tourists…or both):

I just did a search in the corpus of LDS conference talks and while early on there were quite a few uses of “whore” and “abominable” (assuming most of these are quoting “great and abominable” but I used my quota up trying to figure out how to search two separate words in the same talk so I can’t be sure how many), there’s significantly less as time goes on. There’s been over the years waxing and waning of the word “Catholic” as well, but I could find no talk that had either of the first two words linked with “Catholic”. So while the Catholic Church wasn’t always talked about in positive terms from the conference e pulpit, it would appear those specific labels/insults were not used there. https://www.lds-general-conference.org Last time “whore” was used was 1988 and it was coupled with the GandA referring to plain and precious things removed, this time in reference to the word “Atonement” only be once in the NT. There was no implication it was the Catholic Church that was the culprit. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1988/04/atonement-agency-accountability?lang=eng

They are primarily used these days in my experience in connection with the Restored Church by critics, often trying to make the Church look bad as in exaggerating the impact of certain more extreme beliefs among members and leaders or trying to ignore the fact that change is built into our system through the doctrine of continuing revelation and eternal progression (line upon line learning) and acting as if old beliefs are still current even if no one has taught such for a long time. When active members use the phrase for the Catholic Church in my experience, they are either pointing out we have never had that as a doctrinal belief or making a joke using it, which is unfortunate imo, but it’s seen as humorous because members don’t typically hold that view these days. There are no doubt some members who still believe this, but there are members into conspiracy theories, who take gospel hobbies to the extreme, and do all sorts of things counseled against by leadership. I would say the sincere, devout member not into fundamentalism or other ideas verging into problematic territory who believes such things is rare and less educated in church doctrine and practices (possibly they have not had access to such materials while forming their ideas while encountering for some reason the more extreme claims…like an uneducated young missionary making unfounded claims they weren’t instructed to make).

There is also the disparity in purpose, how to measure success when the goals are different. Utah was not about maximizing wealth to begin with, but more about attempting to meet the needs of all of its residents, not prioritizing wealth building overall, either for the territory as a whole or a small percentage of its population. It would be interesting to compare poverty levels…but exactly how is beyond me. Variations needing to be controlled for seems insurmountable to me as I start to think of them. You can’t just pick two areas with similar environments because they also would need similar interactions with surrounding areas if goods and people move in and out of the area.

You are too entertaining… IMO, what got people banned when lying about things was lack of civility, vulgarity, etc. IOW, it was more how they did it than what they did.

What environment would have this variety in your analysis?