Indian Ocean Identified as Source for New World Populations

[mfbukowski]

18 hours ago, RevTestament said:

Perhaps when I finish I will give you the honors of proof-reading it so you can see what I mean. There is nothing wrong with reading scriptures, and being able to relate to where it happened, when, etc. I am not trying to use science to prove anything spiritual, but my guess is the spiritual will be able to confirm its truth. That can mean a lot to a Christian newbie and hopefully to Millennials. 

My premise is you cannot build faith out of a void. True religion does change lives out of stories. I believe God loves a good story, which is why He used the Israelites to teach us through the stories of their lives. I also believe this is why testimonies can change lives. You had to read the stories for God to confirm them to you. Without that there would be no story of Jesus, resurrection, etc to confirm...

There are religions without narratives, like Buddhism

Prospective Protestants with no biblical knowledge answer altar calls because their hearts are moved.

Save The Whales et al give people purpose in life based on moral perceptions alone. So does the Democratic party and Republicans

Mindfulness meditation gives people peace and a sense of unity with the cosmos with no narratives

Those are the church's competition for souls in today's world.

I cannot even imagine that we have gotten a single convert due to BOM geography models. 

For people already programmed by previous paradigms, you have a point.they cannot reconcile the competing world views

We need converts now who have not been programmed, and what we have in spades is the spirit and personal revelation, humanism and the exaltation of man, materialism, and forever families

Nobody cares about History they want life changing experiences and something to live for

They want and need values. We have all that 

Derailing OP. Poster removed.

[strappinglad]

For some reason there is a desire within many to " see for themselves " . That is why there are pilgrimages and pageants that folks flock to . They obviously don't expect to see Jesus recreate the resurrection just for them, but they want to stand where Jesus stood and see some of the places that He saw. Mormons go to Nauvoo or Carthage to get a sense of history and maybe get a spiritual feeling from the place. That hope may be misguided according to some but it is a ' reality ' . We don't know what will serve as a catalyst for belief . Needed or not, it wouldn't hurt to have some evidence to hold up to the mockers. Sure it would likely be immediately dismissed but still...

Edited July 29, 2016 by strappinglad

[jkwilliams]

3 minutes ago, strappinglad said:

For some reason there is a desire within many to " see for themselves " . That is why there are pilgrimages and pageants that folks flock to . They obviously don't expect to see Jesus recreate the resurrection just for them, but they want to stand where Jesus stood and see some of the places that He saw. Mormons go to Nauvoo or Carthage to get a sense of history and maybe get a spiritual feeling from the place. That hope may be misguided according to some but it is a ' reality ' . We don't know what will serve as a catalyst for belief . Needed or not, it wouldn't hurt to have some evidence to hold up to the mockers. Sure it would likely be immediately dismissed but still...

I have wanted to drive up to Palmyra and Kirtland (where my ancestors joined the church), and it kind of makes me sad I didn't see it as a believer. Is that weird? I sort of worry I might feel an enormous sense of loss. 

But you're right that what matters is that religion is meaningful to people's lives. 

[RevTestament]

4 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

You might want to have a look at my “Moses Our Teacher (Moshe Rabbenu),” 2010, version 3, online at https://www.scribd.com/doc/51104640/Moses-Our-Teacher-Moshe-Rabbenu .

Thank you. That certainly hits the highlights. It seems tho that excavations revealed that Avaris was not completely destroyed by Ahmose, but that the palace was kept, and the city outfitted as a forward storage city (ie not "treasure" city) for the invasion of Canaan.  This city was later added onto by Ramses II and named Pi-Rameses. This vicinity is indeed where the Hebrews had lived for hundreds of years. ie this is the place

Edited July 30, 2016 by RevTestament

[RevTestament]

1 hour ago, mfbukowski said:

There are religions without narratives, like Buddhism

Mindfulness meditation gives people peace and a sense of unity with the cosmos with no narratives

I view Buddhism as a philosophy of life rather than "a religion." The Buddha did not believe in God. 

Personally, I believe stories got added after the fact about the world of spirits, etc, probably thanks to converts from Hinduism. Nevertheless I find the eightfold path to be valuable.

Quote

Prospective Protestants with no biblical knowledge answer altar calls because their hearts are moved.

Save The Whales et al give people purpose in life based on moral perceptions alone. So does the Democratic party and Republicans

And do those Protestants find the truth of the restored gospel? Without seeing how they have been led astray will they look to the LDS faith for a fuller truth?

Quote

Those are the church's competition for souls in today's world.

I cannot even imagine that we have gotten a single convert due to BOM geography models. 

Maybe because none of them quite fit. It's not just geography which must fit, but also culture, etc

Quote

For people already programmed by previous paradigms, you have a point.they cannot reconcile the competing world views

We need converts now who have not been programmed, and what we have in spades is the spirit and personal revelation, humanism and the exaltation of man, materialism, and forever families

Nobody cares about History they want life changing experiences and something to live for

They want and need values. We have all that 

But you say they have been programmed, and therefore we can't reach them. What if we can deprogram them?

Edited July 30, 2016 by RevTestament

[Rajah Manchou]

7 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

There are religions without narratives, like Buddhism

The Buddhism you are referring to is a subset rising out of the interaction of Theravada with western practitioners: American Buddhism. Its pragmatic and mostly involves sitting in a room trying to clear the mind of thought. Most Asian Buddhists I know find this approach to be foreign, boring and colorless. On the other side of the Buddhist spectrum are Vajrayana Buddhists who devote inordinate amounts of time creating sacred geographies within their physical world which they imbue with symbols and meaning. The tree across the street becomes a Tree of Life bearing sacred fruits. The hill on the outskirts of the village becomes an archive for sacred golden texts buried by a saint long ago to preserve the Truth from corruption of mundane philosophies. The island across the Immense Sea becomes a holy kingdom full of righteous people that will one day live among us. 

Tibetan Buddhists take their geographies very seriously and some spend a good deal of time seeking out the sacred spaces and narratives mentioned in their texts:

“This snow mountain and the holy lakes, all three, are a meditation place which was prophesied by the Buddha. And, if one does not respond to those who criticize them, then not only will these slanderers heap up sins but the greatness on this meditation place will also be violated!”

7 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Mindfulness meditation gives people peace and a sense of unity with the cosmos with no narratives

Those are the church's competition for souls in today's world.

Again, mindfulness meditation is a western interpretation of Buddhist practice. A lot of Buddhists complain that this form of meditation is not Buddhist because westerners do not have a proper view of the soul (which doesn't exist in Buddhism) and they treat their meditation like a religion that is in competition with other beliefs. It's this vs. this. To say that mindfulness or meditation is somehow in competition with the church for souls is somewhat like saying that prayer is in competition with that Taylor Swift song stuck in your head.

7 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

I cannot even imagine that we have gotten a single convert due to BOM geography models. 

I've recently re-converted to the Book of Mormon as an ancient text precisely because I have found new meaning in the geography. 

Edited July 30, 2016 by Rajah Manchou

[Robert F. Smith]

I highly recommend two books:

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Univ. of Chicago, 1998), online at https://new.vk.com/doc247723334_424296483?hash=51c68aaa21bcd290ba&dl=b78a73dd71fc1aca33 .

Alexandra David-Néel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929/1932/ reprint Kessinger, 2004), online at http://selfdefinition.org/tibetan/Alexandra-David-Neel-Magic-and-Mystery-in-Tibet-hardback-scan.pdf .

[Rajah Manchou]

19 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

I called the paper you cited to the attention of a geneticist who deals with this stuff regularly, and he replied as follows:

"Interesting paper, but it doesn't bring a whole lot of new things to the table. Multiple ancient source populations for the Native American gene pool has been advocated by David Reich and others (including a paper from a couple of years ago by my group) for the past few years. the current paper simply reaffirms that concept including some ancient DNA that have been published relatively recently."

Thank for sharing that. 

10 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

I highly recommend two books:

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Univ. of Chicago, 1998), online at https://new.vk.com/doc247723334_424296483?hash=51c68aaa21bcd290ba&dl=b78a73dd71fc1aca33 .
Alexandra David-Néel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929/1932/ reprint Kessinger, 2004), online at http://selfdefinition.org/tibetan/Alexandra-David-Neel-Magic-and-Mystery-in-Tibet-hardback-scan.pdf .

Lopez is one of the best. And he has had a lot to say about Joseph Smith as an American treasure text finder. I believe I've shared from Lopez before, but i'll do so again because I think it is so critical to understanding the relevance of a physical/historical text. 

"In Tibetan Buddhism there is a genre of literature called terma, which literally means “treasure.” The idea is that the great tantric master Padmasambhava came to Tibet in the late 700’s and he couldn’t stay very long, and he had various things that he knew the Tibetans would need in the future. As the story goes, he dictated these scriptures in a kind of coded script and buried them all over the country—in mountains and rocks and at the bottom of lakes and inside pillars. Those texts began to be discovered some centuries later and were even discovered into the twentieth century. They have become one of the most important genres of Tibetan literature over the centuries. The Tibetan work that became The Tibetan Book of the Dead was such a text, buried in the eighth century and unearthed in the fourteenth century. Of course, scholars have to look at these buried “treasure texts” with a great deal of skepticism because they’re not written in Tibetan. They’re written in a language that only the person who discovers them can read and that person translates them into Tibetan so that others can read them. This is a controversial point in the field of Tibetan Studies because from one perspective—to use your term—they look a lot like frauds. It looks like someone trying to gain spiritual authority for himself by saying look what I just found. Nonetheless, they have become part of the canon. We have a structurally similar case of the discovery of sacred scriptures when Joseph Smith unearths the tablets of The Book of Mormon in upstate New York. To get back to the issue of how one can be both a critical scholar and also a religious person—I was very struck and moved by the story of Smith because everything he did occurred not on the other side of the world, but in upstate New York. This is not a place we would consider exotic. And it occurred not in the 700s, but in the early 1800s. It happened, in other words, in the light of history. American historians and Mormon scholars know a lot about everything that Smith did. We have letters and all sorts of pamphlets and papers—all the kinds of documents that we don’t have in the case of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. That places a different onus of credibility and authority on The Book of Mormon. It has been said that Mormonism or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the most American of all religions, and one reason it is so American is because it sanctified American soil. Smith dug down into the dirt of upstate New York and he found a sacred book. And the Tibetans did a rather similar thing. They couldn’t go to India anymore. Buddhism had essentially disappeared there. So how do you find new scriptures? You dig them up. In 2007 I gave some lectures in Puerto Rico, where Buddhism is becoming popular. Two Nyingma Lamas had been there to give some teachings. My hosts said, “They told us that Padmasambhava came to Puerto Rico and left some texts in the mountains.” - Donald Lopez

And here's another example of how important (and real) sacred geographies are to the Tibetans:

Locating the Copper-Colored Mountain: Buddhist Cosmology, Himalayan Geography, and Maps of Imagined Worlds

When you really get into the details of these "found text" spiritual traditions it becomes clear that the sacred geography of the Book of Mormon is just as complex and relevant as other ancient traditions. I don't know how Joseph Smith tapped into it, but it is unmistakable. I'm always surprised by how easily Tibetan Buddhists embrace the Book of Mormon as a revealed historical text while many Mormons (myself included) have a hard time doing so.

Edited July 30, 2016 by Rajah Manchou

[Robert F. Smith]

1 hour ago, Rajah Manchou said:

Thank for sharing that. 

Lopez is one of the best. And he has had a lot to say about Joseph Smith as an American treasure text finder. I believe I've shared from Lopez before, but i'll do so again because I think it is so critical to understanding the relevance of a physical/historical text. 

"In Tibetan Buddhism there is a genre of literature called terma, which literally means “treasure.” The idea is that the great tantric master Padmasambhava came to Tibet in the late 700’s and he couldn’t stay very long, and he had various things that he knew the Tibetans would need in the future. As the story goes, he dictated these scriptures in a kind of coded script and buried them all over the country—in mountains and rocks and at the bottom of lakes and inside pillars. Those texts began to be discovered some centuries later and were even discovered into the twentieth century. They have become one of the most important genres of Tibetan literature over the centuries. The Tibetan work that became The Tibetan Book of the Dead was such a text, buried in the eighth century and unearthed in the fourteenth century. Of course, scholars have to look at these buried “treasure texts” with a great deal of skepticism because they’re not written in Tibetan. They’re written in a language that only the person who discovers them can read and that person translates them into Tibetan so that others can read them. This is a controversial point in the field of Tibetan Studies because from one perspective—to use your term—they look a lot like frauds. It looks like someone trying to gain spiritual authority for himself by saying look what I just found. Nonetheless, they have become part of the canon. We have a structurally similar case of the discovery of sacred scriptures when Joseph Smith unearths the tablets of The Book of Mormon in upstate New York. To get back to the issue of how one can be both a critical scholar and also a religious person—I was very struck and moved by the story of Smith because everything he did occurred not on the other side of the world, but in upstate New York. This is not a place we would consider exotic. And it occurred not in the 700s, but in the early 1800s. It happened, in other words, in the light of history. American historians and Mormon scholars know a lot about everything that Smith did. We have letters and all sorts of pamphlets and papers—all the kinds of documents that we don’t have in the case of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. That places a different onus of credibility and authority on The Book of Mormon. It has been said that Mormonism or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the most American of all religions, and one reason it is so American is because it sanctified American soil. Smith dug down into the dirt of upstate New York and he found a sacred book. And the Tibetans did a rather similar thing. They couldn’t go to India anymore. Buddhism had essentially disappeared there. So how do you find new scriptures? You dig them up. In 2007 I gave some lectures in Puerto Rico, where Buddhism is becoming popular. Two Nyingma Lamas had been there to give some teachings. My hosts said, “They told us that Padmasambhava came to Puerto Rico and left some texts in the mountains.” - Donald Lopez

And here's another example of how important (and real) sacred geographies are to the Tibetans:

Locating the Copper-Colored Mountain: Buddhist Cosmology, Himalayan Geography, and Maps of Imagined Worlds

When you really get into the details of these "found text" spiritual traditions it becomes clear that the sacred geography of the Book of Mormon is just as complex and relevant as other ancient traditions. I don't know how Joseph Smith tapped into it, but it is unmistakable. I'm always surprised by how easily Tibetan Buddhists embrace the Book of Mormon as a revealed historical text while many Mormons (myself included) have a hard time doing so.

Thanks for both of those, Rajah.  Invaluable.  I understand that Lopez has made similar comments in his book on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.