Honorentheos Posted July 22, 2017 Posted July 22, 2017 Your argument requires the seed to be good, that this represents the thing itself being worthy of trust. Assuming this is practically the definition of having a bias. If it's true, or a good seed, it doesn't need us to nourish it. Again and again the language is of protection, of enabling this presupposed truth that one desired to believe into full fruit. The conditions for bias are built into everything you are saying. If this were not so, it would have built in the ever-present possibility that one is mistaken. The seed could bloom and seem delicious...and then turn out to be completely misguided. Were Alma 32 valid as an approach to finding truth, it must inherently include not just room for skepticism but demand refuting the seed being good yet it being resilient in the face of challenge. It's all about bias. And this begins with choice.
Robert F. Smith Posted July 22, 2017 Posted July 22, 2017 5 hours ago, bcuzbcuz said: i........................................................... But Joseph Smith didn't work with standard translations. Most of the time the golden plates were not even in the same room as him and he was guided by the seer stone(s) to interpret symbols, with God as a mediary. Joseph Smith translate horses when horses didn't fill the bill and he translated elephants when elephants would not have existed. So cureloms were créatures he didn't recognize.But god would have recognized them and give them a word that would later fit in place. Just show me a curelom and I'll be satisfied Actually there is no real reason why horses and elephants could not have been present (elephas in Jaredite times, and equines in Nephite times). A few decades ago, the distance in time from their theoretical extinction was too great, but now we know that we were mistaken, and both existed much later. Indeed we have the genetic evidence for much later in each case. However, we are not discussing horses and elephants (names we recognize), but rather cumom and curelom, which we do not recognize. You claim to have done extensive modern language translation (so have I), but seem unable to conceive of ancient language translation being a problem. You use the God excuse, suggesting that God automatically inserts modern, scientific names of anything in a text such as the BofM. Seems odd to say, since nothing in the nature of the BofM suggests that. Indeed, time after time, the BofM does just what the Bible does in explaining odd terms by translating them into the vernacular when known, and not doing so when unknown. It is always dirty pool to demand more of the BofM than we demand of other ancient docs. A further problem is that Joseph appears not to have done the translation anyhow. He simply read the words off to his scribes --merely transmitting an Early Modern English translation, which pushes the debate back a century or two, still leaving the translation problem. What we do know is that, when we have a name or term which is unknown to us now, it is sometimes translated for us in the BofM text -- usually a correct etymology, which would be impossible just by chance. 1
hagoth7 Posted July 26, 2017 Posted July 26, 2017 On 7/2/2017 at 8:58 PM, Honorentheos said: Do cureloms exist today? Could one see one in a zoo? I took a picture of a few out-standing in their field last weekend. And talked with the one tending them.
Recommended Posts