I just came across your blog today and read this post with interest. I hadn’t yet heard of this discovery.

I wondered what you meant when you said, “Critics should take note and check that item off their list of objections to the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.”

To me the greatest challenge has not necessarily been the logistics of such an endeavor as creating an entire book on golden plates, it was rather the fact that no such plates are known to exist. And the language in which the plates were said to be translated also does not exist. The difficulty within the text itself (DNA contradicting the Lamanites being Jewish, no known geographical location for the BoM events, anachronisms within the text such as metal works, coins, elephants, horses in the New World) are not as significant as the fact that we have no original source or material for the Book of Mormon. We can argue about the translation of the Bible by comparing the English version to the Greek manuscripts. Extant sections of the New Testament date to within 100 years of Christ. But no such comparable original material exists for the Book of Mormon, making it impossible to test its translation.

I did enjoy reading your article, but wondered if you might reconsider the wording of that last statement. It doesn’t appear, to me at least, to be factually true.

God bless,

Stephanie

I am curious about something though if you could explain it to me. (Trust me it is not for a battle between us, I just feel the best way to end let us call it “misunderstandings” and “judgment” is to understand and I cannot understand without asking.)

I was watching a show on the Mormon network (I cannot recall what that is now) but anyways they said that Joseph Smith said, “God is man.” How did he come to that conclusion? That was the only thing on the show that I was not really clear about.

You know some friends and myself were discussing the Mormon faith and of course the usual of “how wrong you guys have it” and I had to say this in your defense. I do not know what happened out there with Jospeh Smith but I know this. Something did happen as he was willing to die for it, as Peter and Paul were willing to die for their beliefs. One is not willing to die for something unless they really feel it is the truth. I just know in my heart something did happen, that would make him lay down his life for it. I think a lot of the time that is what people miss about the Mormons.

Anyways enough of my babbling, if you would not mind answering my question though I would appreciate it. Thanks, Sandy

My comment about being flexible was directed toward the post, not your comment.

In regard being angry. It is alright to be angry at wrong. But it is not right to be angry at the person doing it.

Christ taught us to love all people regardless of what they do. But the Scriptures also tell us that God hates evil. So don’t feel bad about hating evil, that isn’t a sin.

However I am a little confused regarding your statement about “flexability” I try to be flexible in all things. That is not saying I always win at that, as when someone attacks my Church or beliefs I can get angry if they do not stop. I try to be angry and sin not, but sometimes that does not happen. Thank God He is so merciful.

Just wanted you to know not all people persecute Mormons and what history I do know of your Church I find interesting. God Bless, Sandy

This same idea was thrown at me at 13 when I initially came along to the church. But as a Protestant at the time I was heavily indoctrinated with the idea that the Bible was the only word of God. Thus in spite of several attempts to read the book I felt I was reading a carbon copy of the Bible and couldn’t get into it.

It took the efforts of 2 missionaries at different times in answering my objections from the Bible to soften my opposition. Then the Holy Ghost moved in for the kill.

I have also experienced this on my mission where I had to do the same for a Baptist.

I agree however that people would be best to focus on that idea. I’m just saying, “be flexible.”

Persecution is coming in all forms these days which is very sad to me. It seems there are those in these days who feel they have a monopoly regarding who is going or who is going to be kicked out of heaven. All I know is this, God has the final say on a soul. God is a collector of souls and they belong to Him alone.

I think people are going to be very astonished when and if they get to heaven who all is going to be there.

I also have a blog http://jesuskeepmesafeinyourheart.wordpress.com You are welcome there anytime, for I am one person who does not or at least I try very hard not to ever persecute anyone for the Church they go to. I also will not allow other’s comments on my blog if they are in anyway persecuting another religion.

God Bless, Sandy

Science and the Mormons

The Mormons are a religious sect that emerged from Christianity in the United States in the Nineteenth Century. They added to the Bible their own scripture, the Book of Mormon, translated by Joseph Smith from an original text in a language he called Reformed Egyptian. According to the mythology of the Mormons, in 1827 the angel Moroni gave Smith these texts, which were engraved on golden tables. Smith could understand them without learning their language through the divine magic of two special lenses that he used to read them while he translated them.

Smith and his followers were persecuted by traditional Christians, who forced them to travel slowly and with great sacrifices until they reached what is now Utah, where their descendants dominate the religious and social life of this American state.

According to the Mormons, the Indians of the Americas came from Egypt more than 2,000 (two thousand) years ago. They used this myth to convert many Indians to their religion. “We were taught that all the blessings of our Hebrew ancestors made us a special people,” said Jose a Loyaza, a lawyer in Salt Lake City, the capital of Utah. “And this identity gave us a sense of transcendental affiliation, a special identity with God.” But Loyaza gradually learned that there was another outrageous irony to his faith.

He rejected his religion after learning that evidence provided by comparative DNA studies between American Indians and Asians conclusively proved that the first humans that migrated to the Americas came not from the Middle East but from Asia.

For the Mormons this genetic confirmation of the origin of the Indians in the Americas is a fundamental collision of science against religion. It is in direct conflict with the Book of Mormon, which, according to their religion, is a completely error-free historical work that must be interpreted literally.

The Book of Mormon is also fundamentally racist. It narrates that a tribe of Hebrews from Jeruselem went to the Americas in 600 B.C. and split up into two groups, the Nephites and the Lamanites. The Nephites carried the “true” religion to the new world and were in constant conflict with the Lamanites, who practiced idolatry. The Nephites were white (in 1980 the Mormons changed the word to “pure”), and the Lamanites received from God “The curse of blackness.”

The Book of Mormon also narrates that in 385 A.D. the Lamanites exterminated all the other Hebrews and became the principal ancestors of the American Indians. But the Mormons insist that if the Lamanites returned to the “true” religion (Mormonism, quite naturally), their skin would eventually become white like the skin of the Nephites that their ancestors had exterminated.

But despite these outrageous racist insults, many Indians and Polynesians (who also, according to the Mormons, are the descendants of the Lamanites) converted to Mormonism instead of telling the Mormons to go fuck themselves. (Through some perverse mechanism in human psychology, these converts are like homosexual priests who support the Roman catholic church or other gay people who support any type of Christianity.)

“The fiction that I was a Lamanite,” said Damon Kali, a lawyer in Sunnyvale, California, whose ancestors came from Polynesian islands, “was the principal reason that I converted to Mormonism.” He had been a missionary for the Mormans before he discovered that genetic evidence proved that the Lamanites were only a religious myth, and he could not continue his efforts to convert others to Mormonism.

Officially the Mormon church insists that nothing in the Book of Mormon is incompatible with the genetic evidence. Some Mormons are now saying that the Levites were a small group of Hebrews that went to Central America and after many generations of marrying with the natives they met, their Hebrew DNA disappeared into the DNA of their neighbors.

In 2002, officers of the church started a trial to excommunicate Thomas W. Murphy, a professor of anthropology at Edmonds Community College in Washington, an American state at the extreme northwest of the continental United States.

His trial attracted a lot of attention in the American public communications media, which ridiculed the church and insisted that Murphy was the Galileo of Mormonism. The general contempt provoked by this publicity seriously embarrassed the officers of the church, and they stopped the trial.

- Doug & Laurel

Thanks!
Laurel & Doug