Rajah Manchou

On 1/23/2022 at 5:47 AM, JustAnAustralian said:

The useful charts youtube channel has got around to doing the book of mormon.

It's addressed from an academic never-mormon point of view (the guy is jewish), so of course he ends up claiming that it's not legit, but overall it's quite an interesting watch. (and debunks the spaulding manuscript theory).

What does everyone else think?

Thanks for sharing this link, I really enjoyed that presentation 

14 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Thanks for the info.  Hadn't seen this before.  The chapters follow the 1830 edition, and the paragraphs appear to be numbered more or less along the lines of the 1830 paragraphs, although I did find one difference in a quick look through.

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?

On 3/1/2022 at 8:53 AM, Hamba Tuhan said:

A few years ago, one of my former housemates and I went camping. I could tell that something was off from the beginning. He was both less fun and less interesting. But it was only on the drive back home that he let me know that he'd left the Church. Then he pulled that offensively patronising 'I won't tell you what I've discovered because then you would leave the Church too' schtick. I called out the arrogance inherent in that statement and assured him that there was close-to-zero possibility that he knew anything I didn't already know. But he had to stick by the narrative that his deconversion hadn't been a choice in any way and that I would inevitably follow him into apostasy if he didn't mercifully leave me in my state of blissful ignorance. 

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.

1 hour ago, Robert F. Smith said:

That quote from John Dehlin admits that there are a range of reasons why people adopt the LDS faith.  The reverse is also true, even though I get many denials of the fact on this board -- people unwilling to admit that there is a wide variety of reasons why LDS members might leave the faith.

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

44 minutes ago, smac97 said:

I think he's in a bubble. Salt Lake City. Woke, upper-middle-class Cottonwood Heights, caucasian people, right? Their political love of {things like} Black Lives Matter.

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?

3 hours ago, Bill “Papa” Lee said:

Since we have members in a few countries, and around the U.S. and Canada on this discussion board. How are things going with COVID, and with the current rise in violence, both in our major cities and around the globe? 

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.

On 12/1/2021 at 11:27 AM, kimpearson said:

I will be honest.  I am beginning to doubt the narrative that early LDS settlers mostly treated the native Americans kindly.  The more I read it looks like those early settlers smiled and played nice as they knowingly took over land and drove the native Americans out of any area the settlers wanted.  I can find no evidence that any church leaders or members ever said the native Americans should be treated equally as human beings and land should be purchased only if offered for sale.  It appears native Americans were almost universally viewed by leaders and members as something less than the good civilized white folk.  I think the Church and its members are telling a very slanted story of how they treated native Americans.

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. 

11 hours ago, rodheadlee said:

CFR

1 hour ago, mrmarklin said:

I’m pointing out that it could have happened. A lot of people smarter than me think it did. Your assertion in the OP is far from definitive. 
So we’ve been arguing over nothing.  There are no definite facts. 

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.”

On 9/23/2021 at 10:32 PM, Fair Dinkum said:

It's long been known that the Islands of the Pacific were populated by a seafaring people migrating out of South East Asia not the America's.  Further studies have only doubled down on this reality.  All scientific specialties including DNA, Archeology, Palaeobotany, Paleolinguistics to name just a few, all support this SE Asian migration.  Other then some South American DNA that was introduced after the Book of Mormon timeline, in approximately 1200 AD and the sweet potato and gord, see here there is little to no reason we should refer to Pacific Islanders as Laminates.

A new study just released in Nature seen here adds further support for this migration from south east Asia and not from the Americas.

The evidence seems overwhelming that Pacific Islanders are not descendants of Lehi, in direct conflict with LDS tradition.  The church seems to have supplanted the actual culture of the Pacific Islanders with one found in the Book of Mormon of which this island population had no connection to.

What if any evidence is there, other than that which I've shared, that would support our LDS tradition? If it exists, I would like to see it.  Otherwise is it time for the church to just admit they were wrong and give these people back their true identity and culture?

More Here

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.  

On 9/23/2021 at 10:32 PM, Fair Dinkum said:

What if any evidence is there, other than that which I've shared, that would support our LDS tradition? If it exists, I would like to see it.  Otherwise is it time for the church to just admit they were wrong and give these people back their true identity and culture?

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

9 hours ago, CV75 said:

Rather, their rights were not honored or protected after the bill of rights ensured the organization of the Church as part of the initiation of the Restoration. 

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.

On 8/22/2021 at 4:17 AM, SeekingUnderstanding said:

Well there was the very creative Zelph (the white Lamanite) story. I would imagine that telling too many stories about the characters would become problematic without significant notes since you wouldn’t want to contradict the revealed text. 

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.

21 hours ago, InCognitus said:

Also, there is a book that appears to be on the topic of your question that I have not read, but I have seen it reviewed in BYU Studies.  It is Gerald E. Smith. Schooling the Prophet: How the Book of Mormon Influenced Joseph Smith and the Early Restoration (Provo, Utah: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, BYU, 2016).  I'd like to hear from anyone who has or has read this book.  The review of the book, by Mark Layman Staker, can be found in BYU Studies Quarterly, 55:3 here or here in PDF.  

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.

14 hours ago, Kevin Christensen said:

If Joseph could inform the family on such issues before the publication of the Book of Mormon, why did not not do the same for his followers ever again? 

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?

19 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

Do we have Dr. John's curriculum so that we can see and compare it?

Yes. Someone had gone to Dartmouth and scanned them, but I can't find the link at the moment. Another resource is Richard Behrens:
Dartmouth Arminianism And Its Impact on Hyrum Smith And the Smith Family
Dreams, Visions, and Visitations: The Genesis of Mormonism

19 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

I don't follow, I'm afraid. Are you suggesting that Spaulding's nephew went to India and convinced a tribe that they were Israelites waiting for a golden book? 

I'm suggesting that the origin story of the Book of Mormon narrative might seem remarkable to us today, but it appears to have been fairly commonplace among those who attended Dartmouth in the late 18th and early 19th century, including Hyrum Smith. For example, Behrens goes into some detail about Levi Spaulding's (Solomon Spaulding's nephew) conversion following a vision of light.

Like I said earlier, I'm happily on the fence about Book of Mormon origins, and find all hypotheses to be almost equally interesting. I just don't see how it can be argued that the Book of Mormon could not have a natural explanation when there are other stories of such visions and golden books in the same time period told by people from the same school.

11 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

http://solomonspalding.com/SRP/saga2/sagawt05.htm

Do you think it likely that the Spalding MS was the source of the Book of Mormon, and would it somehow bridge the gap with Early Modern English?

I've always liked the idea that Asael Smith's cousin Dr. John Smith, who taught Solomon Spaulding and Ethan Smith, was the inspiration (in the prophetic sense) of all three related narratives:

1. Spaulding's Manuscript
2. View of the Hebrews
3. Book of Mormon

Dr. Smith taught Hebrew and curated the Hebrew collection at Dartmouth Library. He also ran his own bookshop. He wrote the curriculum that was still in place when Solomon Spaulding's nephews, Ehtan Smith's nephew and Hyrum Smith all attended Moor's Academy at Dartmouth together around 1815. 

Dr. John's curriculum plus the stories about Native Americans (and Asian Indians) receiving the Gospel floating around Dartmouth in 1815 would have been a very likely source of the Book or Mormon narrative. All the elements were there under one roof.

What's most interesting to me, is that this narrative was also carried by Spaulding's nephew from Dartmouth to India in the 1820s. I've been to the small village in Burma (named Chummerah) where, a year before the publication of the Book of Mormon, American missionaries discovered a tribe of Israelites who were waiting for Americans to return their lost Golden Book (inscribed on gold plates) containing their ancient spiritual history. 

Considering the timing (1812-1830) and the actors (eg. Spaulding's nephew and Hyrum Smith's classmate), I don't see how this could be a simple coincidence.

22 minutes ago, LoudmouthMormon said:

As someone who groaned under the burden of an artist's depiction of Captain Moroni riding a tapir, I really have to say the tables have turned.

As someone who is happily on the fence about Book of Mormon historicity, I don't get the sense the tables have turned at all. Rather the arguments are getting more detailed and mature. instead of memes of Captain Moroni on a tapir people here are discussing the fine details about the hat that hid the light so that Joseph could view the stone.

7 hours ago, OGHoosier said:

As a rule, within 10 years I take it at face value, and though details can get fuzzy with time I still generally regard the core material of a firsthand account as essentially reliable unless the person is demonstrably cognitively troubled. Additional witnesses help. 

What is your opinion of the eight Conneaut witnesses published in 1834? 

10 minutes ago, halconero said:

My parents lived in Myanmar (Burma) for four years before moving back home last spring due to COVID-19. There were no language branches there, and they attended with the native-Myanmarese members, including the branch president highlighted in the October 2020 conference who learned from the picture Book of Mormon.

That branch president was woken up a few nights ago by the military, and forced out of his home at gun point to go clean the streets after a demonstration. A young sister, just returned from a mission in Thailand, went from wearing a name tag to wearing a bandana, broke democracy t-shirts, and organizing street marches against the junta. She is currently in hiding, and my mom has been messaging her encouraging words, messages of love, and even Ezra Taft Benson quotes about freedom over Facebook.

I've been in and out of Burma the past few decades, working with groups on the border. Many of them are also in hiding some have been thrown in prison. Although I agree with you that Oaks' talk will be comfort to the members of the Church in Myanmar, what is really critical at this point is that leaders in Congress condemn the military for not respecting the results of the election.

Inexplicably 14 members of the House voted against such measures. Presumably to make some political point about election fraud, thinking a vote to condemn the Myanmar military might somehow invalidate their claims of election fraud in the US.

14 House Republicans vote against a measure condemning military coup in Myanmar

I don't think those 14 give a rip about the Constitution. 

3 hours ago, The Nehor said:

It is a common silliness amongst ‘intellectual’ anarchy types. It wasn’t the main event or the purpose of the protests. There is another autonomous zone in Belgium if I remember right that has gone on for years. They usually collapse in a few months. It did. It was no threat.

Since we are forever doomed to eternal whataboutism, might as well remind that the CHAZ was not the first occupied zone in the Pacific Northwest. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_National_Wildlife_Refuge

Our church and faith is all over the wikipedia article on that one. If I recall correctly, there was even an armed Captain Moroni defending it.

1 minute ago, SteveO said:

You don’t know better.  There’s plenty of whataboutisms I could tick off that you’d probably just shrug your shoulders at.

You know, his words can just as easily apply to someone like you and how you view members who voted for “R” in November...

Dunno. Anyway, when I got to the end of Oakes’ talk I wondered if I could bring myself to vote across party lines if there was a more urgent and immediate requirement that took priority over my personal political views. I’m kinda embarrassed to admit that it’d be hard to do, and that’s a problem I should figure out.

8 minutes ago, SteveO said:

you just know better.

If someone I voted for had said the same thing, I probably wouldn’t know better. Party lines can be blinding.

I am hopeful President Oakes’ comments on not being afraid to jump parties when it’s needed will help us all cut through that.  

17 minutes ago, SteveO said:

Gimme a break.  You do know that came out as an outright lie that the Washington Post had to correct?

Nah, I listened to the recording. I just wanna find 11780 votes is exactly word-for-word quote, but I’ll drop it because when we discuss these things about America the thread gets closed. I’ll stick to talking about nameless countries. 

3 minutes ago, SteveO said:

It actually wasn’t hanging by a thread.  The legislature reconvened the same day.

Not at all hanging by a thread. I mean he only wanted to find 11,780 votes. That’s not too much to ask. Come on fellas, gimme a break.