Rajah Manchou

Thanks for sharing this link, I really enjoyed that presentation

I was really curious about this when it came out because their spelling of Mormon as M'raman. Would that be an accurate hebrew-ified transliteration of Mormon?

I dunno, I think everyone that explores Mormon history has had moments when we choose not to share something with someone we love. In one case, sharing my thoughts on history did lead to a deconversion. I'm more careful now, and I don't feel I'm more careful because of arrogance. Its mostly because exploring church history was extremely painful for me in the beginning. I served my mission in Africa. When the question of blacks and the Priesthood was inevitably asked, the investigator wasn't asking it because "i'm just curious, this is totally fine". The question was usually framed in a way that sounded more like "why on Earth should I?" Having had that conversation with hundreds of people that really struggled to answer that question with a "YES, i should!", I don't feel it's fair to spin this as white people being unintentionally demeaning because they are woke and out of touch. I wonder how Kwaku would answer the question "why on earth?" if it was asked him by a sincere investigator of the church in Africa, someone that didn't know where Cottonwood Heights was and had no clue who the Fresh Prince of Bel Air is. By framing it that way he sounds just as demeaning and out of touch as Dehlin. outside the bubble they both are in, Dehlin and Kwaku come across as extremely tone-deaf

good grief

I can't find the reference right now, but didn't Chris and Duane Johnson find that the Book of Mormon had more textual similarities to a Koran published in the early 1820s than any other text?

I live outside the US, and things are unusually boring. Not like the roaring 70s when America was able to drop hundreds of thousands of bombs on this place, killing many more than COVID, without anybody even batting an eye. I'd say in terms of wars and rumors of wars, on this side of the world, things have improved significantly.

I don't know which side of the debate this falls on, but I think its an interesting peek at how some members felt about Native Americans in the 1850s. Joseph Ellis Johnson organized a wild west show featuring 17 Omaha "ingines" as a way to get them all the way to Washington DC to make an appeal directly to the President of the United States for their native lands. I think it shows that some early members were both truly concerned about the indigenous Americans, but they were also stuck in a culture that didn't know how to give indigenous people the full respect they deserved. Johnson’s tour originated from his desire to bring the harsh condition of local Omaha Indians to the attention of the public and provoke federal government action to help the Omaha people. See Jack A. Nelson, “The Pioneer Press of the Great Basin,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1971), 186. It is at least one example of early members of the church going out of their way (from Nebraska to Washington DC by stage coach with 17 Omaha Indians) to help native Americans retain their lands.

Not sure he's on the board anymore, but we now know that there was likely contact between South Americans and Polynesians previous to the European arrival in the Americas: DNA reveals Native American presence in Polynesia centuries before Europeans arrived "The researchers found that contact between Polynesian individuals and a Native American group related to present-day Indigenous people in Colombia occurred as early as A.D. 1150—two centuries earlier than indicated by the 2014 DNA study. The place where the researchers could detect the earliest sign of contact was in Fatu Hiva, an island in the South Marquesas. Fatu Hiva is much farther from South America than Rapa Nui, but it could be more easily reached than Rapa Nui due to favorable trade winds and currents, notes archaeologist Paul Wallin of Uppsala University in an editorial accompanying the study in Nature. Wallin, who also worked at the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, notes that the new results suggest that South Americans reached eastern Polynesia even before Polynesians from points west arrived, which would prove Heyerdahl “partly right.”

Found this article today and was reminded of this thread https://razib.substack.com/p/a-whole-new-world “So with all this, are we equipped to say who the first Americans were? I think when all is said and done, we will find that the earliest humans in the New World were more closely related to the Australians and Papuans, rather than modern East Asians. In other words, the first modern humans who were present in the New World did not contribute much ancestry to today’s Native Americans at all. Only the ancestors of today’s indigenous South Americans genetically absorbed these earlier people who preceded the Beringians. This must have occurred more recently than 15,000 years ago when the Beringians arrived, and if the evidence for variation in ancestry in contemporary Amazonians is replicated, pockets of these earliest Americans may have persisted down to the relatively recent past.” It’s looking like there were people in the Americas before the ancestors of today’s Native Americans arrived, and those people resembled the present-day inhabitants of the Andaman Islands.

Turns out @Fair Dinkum, that the Book or Mormon is a surprisingly accurate history of Austronesia. The SE Asian civilizations of Rahma and Komara rose and fell at the same time as the Land of Ramah and Cumorah in the Book of Mormon. Komara was founded by a warrior named Maroni, and around the close of the Book of Mormon these Komarans sailed into the Indian and Pacific Oceans carrying their genes from as far east as Madagascar and as far west as Brazil. The Comoros Islands were named after the Kumr or Komara of Southeast Asia. Here's one reference among many. Oh and the geography of ancient Komara and Rahma match the geographies of Cumorah and Rahma in the Book of Mormon. Land Northward Zarahemla Land Southward

That's right, so not much substance to the argument that the Church could not have been established anywhere but the United States in the mid-19th century. The Church as we know it today was practically established in the middle of the desert of Mexico by European immigrants.

The church would not have survived had the early Saints remained in the United States. They literally left because they had no religious freedom or rights.

Or it demonstrates that Jospeh was not the author of the Book of Mormon. My opinion is that the Zelph and Prophet Onandagus story was Joseph trying to expand the Book of Mormon narrative to align with Samuel Mitchell's hypothesis that there was a great battle between a fair skinned race (white Lamanites) and a darker skinned race (Lamanites) in Onondaga County, next to Wayne County. Samuel Mitchell had recognized the characters on the Anthon transcript as being an authentic oriental script, so it made sense to align the BOM narrative to Mitchell's theory.

Thanks for these references. I'll have to pick up Schooling the Prophet. I'm looking for any references of Joseph discussing any of the stories or characters in the Book of Mormon. Were there any times he, for example, spoke of Nephi breaking his bow, or the Lehites building their ship to cross the waters, or retelling King Benjamin's speech to his followers? I don't find anything, and it seems unusual.

Can anyone point me to examples or references of Joseph speaking publicly to his followers about the characters, geography or events found in the Book of Mormon?