"Corrupt and evil" requires evidence of corruption and misbehavior. I've shown that your claim of the Church being fundamentally corrupt and evil to be false, since an organization that is fundamentally corrupt and evil could not do so many good things.
If the motivation for doing those "good things" is to increase the membership of your church or to improve its reputation, they aren't "good" at all, they are merely utilitarian.
So you finally admit you haven't read any of the sources I've provided?
Quite to the contrary: I read your sources. In fact, finding out what sources Mormon recruiters use these days to spread their lies was the reason why I was interested in this discussion. I also provided some reasons to you of why they are wrong (but that's obviously pretty pointless with you).
And now you're admitting that you had an agenda all along
And you don't have an agenda? Your agenda is to convert as many people to your cult as possible. And to do that, you have pretty much license to say whatever you want.
I was clear from the beginning that I consider the Book of Mormon a forgery and that I consider your religion immoral. Your mistake if you thought you could convert me.
Well, you an produce code that runs fast on your particular processor, but that doesn't mean it runs fast on other processors, even if they have the same instruction set.
Knowing there are consequences - or that there might be - does not prevent you from acting according to what is morally right or wrong.
It doesn't prevent me from acting morally because my obligation is to act morally. It does prevent you from acting morally because your obligation is to follow a set of rules and commandments.
Anyway, thank you for this discussion, and it is clearly pointless to continue this: you obviously have been brainwashed and your mind is closed to any kind of rational argument or discussion.
I wish you well and hope that you'll eventually manage to get out of the cult that you found yourself in.
You have consistently refused to read the sources I provide for you;
You know, the only thing I can't figure out about people like you is whether you really believe the garbage you're spreading, or whether you're PR drones paid by a wealthy religious cult.
Either way, people need to stand up and speak out against your organization because you are, fundamentally, corrupt and evil. Fortunately, more and more people are doing just that.
A big problem with 3D porn (and other 3D) is that you get an absolute size scale. If you see a complete man or woman on your 30" color LCD and view it from anything like normal viewing distances, it doesn't work well: either you see a normal sized person far away through a small window, or you see a tiny figure right where your screen is. That's OK for midget porn or voyeurism, but it doesn't work so well for more standard porn.
If you want regular-sized people at regular distances, you need life-size displays... which means 3D projectors.
The ability to discern between good and evil allows us to understand the reasons behind the rules.
So, in different words, you agree with me: in Christianity, morality is not defined by obedience to God's, it is based on more fundamental reasons behind those rules.
Consequences such as...?
Why do you want to know? Do you only do the right thing if someone promises you that you'll be a god or that you get 70 virgins?
I'm not here to recruit you. Just go out and look beyond your cult to find anything more spiritually meaningful.
If this were an academic translation, you would overlook these little translation anachronisms without a second thought.
So, when it suits your purpose, you assume that the Book of Mormon is very specific, but when it contradicts reality, you dismiss the contradictions as "little translation anachronisms".
Sorry, but the use of iron, steel, or ridable horses aren't "little translation anachronisms"; there is no translation error that can account for these.
So, back on topic: every single objection disappears if it really is a translation.
See above. In addition, it isn't just a translation, your church claims it's a divinely inspired translation, performed with the aid of seer stones. The idea that God would permit his message to be wrongly translated under his guidance is ridiculous.
Yes - if you take away everything a religion teaches, that religion becomes meaningless.
Not at all. Your faith claims that your God meddles in human affairs and sends messages about the world; prove those wrong and your faith is wrong. That's why you are so desperately clinging to believing something as implausible as the Book of Mormon.
My faith doesn't have such beliefs. Its truths are universal and eternal. It doesn't take prophets or angels or revelations.
Yes. I doubt the file size limit is there because Google doesn't like big files, it's there because it's hard on the infrastructure to upload/download bigger files in one step.
Your assumption that I haven't read it is wrong. I did read it, along with the Bible, the Quran, Buddhist scriptures, and a whole range of other religious texts.
But now that I list actual, grave problems with the Book of Mormon, you just clam up. Typical.
It's not just my opinion, I gave you arguments. In this case, he tries to argue that it is plausible that some of these animals and technologies in North America and we just haven't found them. But the Book of Mormon doesn't describe these as rare curiosities, it describes some of them as being in everyday use. Domestication of ridable animals and larger herbivores and the development of iron and steel completely transform societies; for any native American society that has used them and left other artifacts, we would have found at least some of them in the archaeological record. That is just one of many fundamental problems with the Book of Mormon. And it's only one of many problems with Jeff Lindsay's site.
No matter how many weak coincidences you can find, there are so many grave problems that even if we take an "on balance" view of assessing its authenticity, it just cannot be true.
You don't believe the book in the first place; why should I trust your opinion over mine?
You shouldn't trust my opinion, you should look at the facts and start thinking logically. Apply the same criteria (e.g., narrow interpretation of words) to evidence against authenticity as you do for your coincidences. Go read the critical literature. Rationally, on balance, you'll find that the Book of Mormon simply cannot be true.
Who are you to tell me that my understanding of my book of scripture is wrong?
And who are you to tell others (as you do) that your book of scripture is right and that they should join your cult despite such obvious factual problems?
Who are you to mislead people so fundamentally about the nature of the world, morality, and their souls? Who are you to go around promising that they will become gods if only the submit to your church's authority, a self-serving temporal message if ever there was one? Your church has a problem with the truth and they have brain-washed you into recruiting for them.
I haven't told you my faith, other than that I used to be Christian but am not anymore (so I'm not trying to recruit you into anything). I made my decision after carefully studying many religions, including yours. Can you say the same for yourself?
You need to take a good, hard look at the rubbish you believe in and your reasons for believing it. You're violating and hurting yourself by believing it and you're violating and hurting other people by spreading it.
is wrong. The Book of Mormon doesn't talk about these animals, plants, and technologies as being rare oddities. It talks about major domesticated species and major technologies, plus societies that were using them as part of their regular activities. This is not analogous to the huns' or Vikings' horses or to Middle Easter lions.
Also, you can't have it both ways: either, the terms in the Book of Mormon have specific meanings or they do not. You can't pick a specific meaning when you want to make an argument for something (cement) and a non-specific meaning when the book is erroneous (horses, pigs, steel, iron, etc.)
And if you had ever read the Book of Mormon, you'd see right in the footnote at the bottom of the page [lds.org] where it talks about the people becoming experts in cement use because they didn't have enough trees:
So, you are saying then that we should interpret terms like "cement" literally as referring to specific items that we now understand by those terms. Since you take the term "cement" literally, we should do this for other terms as well (after all, the translation of the Book of Mormon was divinely guided).
What do we find? A dozen things that did not exist in the Americas but that the Book of Mormon talks about. Domestication of horses and cattle, the development of iron and steel and wheels have profound effects on entire continents, yet no native American societies had them. Even if Smith got the names wrong, they didn't even have anything remotely similar for many of those items (but then most of your other arguments go out the window anyway; if a pig isn't a pig, why should cement be cement?).
The Book of Mormon is permeated by fundamental contradictions to the archaeological record. And that's not even taking into account the linguistic contradictions.
It's a monumentally magic leap of logic to go from that to your earlier statement that the Book of Mormon cannot be what it claims to be. (Yes, those were your words. Want me to link you to a specific post?)
I read the Book of Mormon a few years ago, along with reading the Bible again, the Quran, Buddhist scriptures, and assorted other religious texts.
There is ample discussion of inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and errors in the Book of Mormon available in many places. The Wikipedia articles are actually a fairly good summary and have plenty of references:
I'm enough of an expert in some of these areas to know that the criticism is valid and establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the Book of Mormon is not what it claims to be. If you believe otherwise, a good place to start would be a point-by-point response to those Wikipedia articles.
The pages you have pointed to, on the other hand, get basic facts of linguistics wrong. For example, the relationship they claim between Egyptian, Phoenician, Hebrew, and modern writing is wrong.
Of course, this obsession with writings, revelations, histories, apparitions, and historical events is just a symptom of a much deeper spiritual problem with your faith: take away the revelations and writings and there's little left. It's a problem Mormonism shares with Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
Based on my readings, the Bible pretty consistently describes morality in terms of God's will. Do you have any counter-examples?
Genesis is clear about humans having the capacity to distinguish good and evil; good and evil are not defined by blindly following rules.
Within the Bible, God's will and obedience to it can be understood in analogy to parenting. I may tell my children not to smoke, but the good that comes from obeying that command is not to be found in the obedience itself, it is in the harm that it prevents. And just because obeying that command in one context is the right thing to do doesn't mean it's the right thing to do in another context. Furthermore, once my children are adults, they have to make those choices for themselves.
You reject the notion of an afterlife in which God judges us for our actions during this life.
Yes, but I don't reject the notion of an afterlife in which our choices here and now have consequences. In particular, I think you have made bad choices, and I believe you will suffer the consequences.
I believe this life is primarily a means to an end.
It's fascinating that you can make such a statement without even realizing how obscene it is.
It could be argued that the Bible teaches that something is immoral if and only if it is against God's will.
Yes, that is obviously your view of morality. See above for what I think of it. But it also isn't consistent with the Bible.
I still say your objection is rooted in the fact that you don't believe in an afterlife.
Oh, dear, have we gone off script? Is your neat division into Christian/materialist falling apart? Why do you ignore me when I'm telling you: I'm an atheist, not a materialist. I don't reject faith or an afterlife, I reject your kind of faith and afterlife as intrinsically immoral.
3) I ask you for evidence of your claims. 4) You refuse to provide it.
My view is just the existing, mainstream archaeological view: the Americas got settled via the Bering bridge somewhere 13000-40000 years ago. Except for Viking contacts, they developed independently until Columbus landed.
That view is consistent with all accepted archaeological evidence. It's backed by tens of thousands of research papers and archaeological digs. So, I'm not making any claims and I don't have anything to prove; just open any mainstream textbook on American pre-history and follow the references to the literature--they are all the evidence I need for my position.
Seriously: if you refuse to read the research I cite
"Citing" means referring to the scholarly, peer-reviewed literature. All you ever do is point to Mormon apologetic web sites.
And I do read the sites you point to, and all I can say is: you don't convince me.
You're pretending I've tried to "come up with" a timeline during this discussion.
No, I have faulted you for not coming up with specific dates and times. By not being specific, you make it impossible to disprove your theories. You use Mayan cement, coins in North America, word similarities in some obscure language, and any other coincidence you can find to argue for your position, without any regard for whether they fit into a single consistent historical timeline.
You need to come up with at least one historical timeline of places, people, and events that is consistent with the known archaeological record. I don't think you can.
That is, you don't believe in an afterlife, and as such, you don't believe we'll be held accountable for our behavior during this life.
I'm an atheist, not a materialist; that means that I specifically reject your God and gods like him: your God is an irascible, irrational mass murderer, and people worship him because they believe he's powerful and promises big rewards in the afterlife. Whatever form judgment takes, anybody who worships in that way is not righteous and will suffer the consequences of their choice.
If you assume God will judge you for your actions during this life, then clearly God is in a position to determine how long your life should last and how you leave it.
That's true only if you follow a philosophy that denies any intrinsic value to life itself and views life as a purely utilitarian event. I find that view morally objectionable. That view has also frequently been used to justify murder at the hand of human beings; it's a gateway to religious violence against others.
If your objection is that you don't believe in an afterlife, then stop arguing this nonsense about whether God is justified in doing what he does, and address the real issue - the fact that you don't believe in an afterlife
No, my objection (which is independent of my personal religious beliefs) is that Christian and Mormon beliefs are internally inconsistent: for you, there are two different sets of morals, those that apply to men and those that apply to God, despite the fact that the Bible clearly says that right and wrong are universal.
Your opinion that they are coincidences does not mean they are not evidence. It merely means you are choosing to disregard them.
Neither does your opinion that they are mean that there is a causal relationship.
No, but they also didn't say "it cannot be true", as you are doing.
I'm not saying "it cannot be true". There is a slight possibility that some Mediterranean people came to the Americas a couple of millennia ago. There simply is not a shred of evidence for it. And unlike the Viking sagas, there is only a single source--the Book of Mormon--that claims this.
"It can thus far be explained by coincidence, and therefore it cannot be what it claims to be."
There are two things we're discussing: pre-Columbian Jewish presence in the Americas, and the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. The first is independent of the second: Jews may or may not have come to the Americas regardless of whether the Book of Mormon is genuine or fake. But if Jews didn't come to the Americas, the Book of Mormon is definitely fake (and by "fake" or "fraud" I don't necessarily mean that Smith was a con artist, he may just have been deluded).
The status of pre-Columbian Jewish presence in the Americas is "unproven"; there is no compelling physical evidence and everything archaeologists see can be easily explained without pre-Columbian Jewish presence. At this point, it's only a remote possibility.
As for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, there are three things wrong with your arguments.
First, you demand that I show that these are coincidences, but that's logically impossible. The two sides of such an argument are "this is highly improbable" or "this can be plausibly explained by chance"; note that the argument is not symmetric. That's the way statistics works. And you haven't made the "highly improbable case" convincingly.
Second, a problem with your whole line of argumentation is that you treat each coincidence separately. But Smith made only one decision: he described Jews coming to America and living through biblical stories. Anything they did, experienced, or left that is consistent with that basic premise is not an independent coincidence. So most of your "coincidences" just collapse to a single one: some aspects and experiences of native American societies were similar to some aspects and experiences of Jewish societies. No matter whether that was because of a Jewish presence or by chance (more likely the latter), Smith only made a single choice/guess.
Third, one can't nail you down on a consistent story. You keep pointing to native Americans and how these people used cement and those people have some words that sound Hebrew and somewhere else people have found writing that looks like ancient Hebrew, but that's not anything consistent. If you want to make an archaeological argument, you need to come up with an archaeological hypothesis and history that is both consistent with physical evidence and the Book of Mormon and you have not done that. I don't think it's even possible. Only once you have actually formulated a theory can people like me go look for arguments against it; without formulating a theory, you just keep shifting your position as it is convenient for you.
You can't have it both ways - you're trying to say that things the Book of Mormon gets right are merely coincidence, and then you turn around and pretend those coincidences don't exist.
I'm not "pretending that they don't exist", I'm saying they are not statistically significant; everything you describe is plausibly explained by chance (look up "coincidence").
If you're going to continue to pretend that demonstrable empirical evidence doesn't exist, then I see no reason to continue this discussion.
I'm just applying the same standards to Mormons that everybody applied to Vikings: despite far more--and more credible--textual evidence, people didn't accept pre-Columbian Viking presence in the Americas as an established fact until L'Anse aux Meadows. Find something similar and then you have a case. Until then, you have just a story.
The problem with killing is, as I have repeatedly stated, with the exception of self-defense, we do not have the right to take someone else's life - only God does.
You keep saying that God has the right to kill at will, but you haven't been able to come up with a single consistent argument supporting that view. You tried to argue that one has a moral right to destroy anything one creates or owns, but that's obviously not true. You tried to argue that we are God's children, but kiling one's children is morally wrong. You tried to argue that God killed the inhabitants of Sodom to prevent a greater evil, but then the question arises why isn't doing the same thing now; furthermore, being omnipotent, God has non-lethal means at his disposal to prevent Sodom's acts from affecting anybody else. And God certainly didn't act in self-defense when destroying Sodom. No, you simply need to face the fact: you are worshiping a mass murderer. Your God meets the definition of a mass murderer. Where we differ is that you think it's OK, while I think it's not.
I responded that by your logic, if I kill someone right now, it's not my fault - it's my dad's fault for not teaching me better.
I said nothing of the sort. You're an adult: if you kill someone, it's your legal and moral responsibility, not your parents or anybody else's. If you were a child, your parents would be legally and morally responsible to keep you from harm and to prevent you from harming others. That's because while children also have free will, they are immature.
No, the problem with free will is yours: you said that God had perfect foreknowledge of the future actions of the people of Sodom and tried to use that to justify his act of mass murder. How can God have perfect foreknowledge if people have free will? And if he had such perfect foreknowledge, why doesn't he use it to help other people? The notion that an omniscient God exists and acts in the world is absurd because it conflicts with free will, it's one of many absurdities and contradictions in your belief system.
Free will exists; it's omniscience that's absurd.
The bottom line? I don't know - the reason isn't given, so it could be anything. It's silly to assume a malicious motive where no motive is given one way or the other.
The reason is given clearly: the people weren't "righteous". Where we differ is that you think that that is justification for an act of mass murder and I think it is not.
No, I've said it's morally acceptable for God to wipe them out. I have never said it's morally acceptable for humans to wipe each other out.
Yes, you keep saying that. Obviously, to you, whatever God does is automatically moral, be it mass murder or anything else. To me, it is not. Murder is wrong, whether committed by an omnipotent being or by a mere human. And the BIble sides with me on that: according to the Bible itself, there aren't two sets of rules; rather, we have the same understanding of morality as God.
Of course not. It doesn't affect my salvation if you choose to reject the gospel; it's your choice, and it only affects you.
I didn't ask whether it "affected" you or whether you cared. Since you seem to think that the mass murder of the inhabitants of Sodom was justified, you must think that the death of anybody who rejects your God is justified.
Slashdot Mirror
"Corrupt and evil" requires evidence of corruption and misbehavior. I've shown that your claim of the Church being fundamentally corrupt and evil to be false, since an organization that is fundamentally corrupt and evil could not do so many good things.
If the motivation for doing those "good things" is to increase the membership of your church or to improve its reputation, they aren't "good" at all, they are merely utilitarian.
So you finally admit you haven't read any of the sources I've provided?
Quite to the contrary: I read your sources. In fact, finding out what sources Mormon recruiters use these days to spread their lies was the reason why I was interested in this discussion. I also provided some reasons to you of why they are wrong (but that's obviously pretty pointless with you).
And now you're admitting that you had an agenda all along
And you don't have an agenda? Your agenda is to convert as many people to your cult as possible. And to do that, you have pretty much license to say whatever you want.
I was clear from the beginning that I consider the Book of Mormon a forgery and that I consider your religion immoral. Your mistake if you thought you could convert me.
Well, you an produce code that runs fast on your particular processor, but that doesn't mean it runs fast on other processors, even if they have the same instruction set.
Knowing there are consequences - or that there might be - does not prevent you from acting according to what is morally right or wrong.
It doesn't prevent me from acting morally because my obligation is to act morally. It does prevent you from acting morally because your obligation is to follow a set of rules and commandments.
Anyway, thank you for this discussion, and it is clearly pointless to continue this: you obviously have been brainwashed and your mind is closed to any kind of rational argument or discussion.
I wish you well and hope that you'll eventually manage to get out of the cult that you found yourself in.
You have consistently refused to read the sources I provide for you;
You know, the only thing I can't figure out about people like you is whether you really believe the garbage you're spreading, or whether you're PR drones paid by a wealthy religious cult.
Either way, people need to stand up and speak out against your organization because you are, fundamentally, corrupt and evil. Fortunately, more and more people are doing just that.
Instead of flaky Outlook/Exchange setups, they should use technology designed for low bandwidth and intermittent connections, like uucp.
A big problem with 3D porn (and other 3D) is that you get an absolute size scale. If you see a complete man or woman on your 30" color LCD and view it from anything like normal viewing distances, it doesn't work well: either you see a normal sized person far away through a small window, or you see a tiny figure right where your screen is. That's OK for midget porn or voyeurism, but it doesn't work so well for more standard porn.
If you want regular-sized people at regular distances, you need life-size displays... which means 3D projectors.
Well, we can't do much about the inverse square law, but we can easily switch to linear units. :-)
Obviously, you put this thing in the microwave, set it to High, and let it charge for 30 minutes.
(Please let it cool down before removing it from the oven.)
The ability to discern between good and evil allows us to understand the reasons behind the rules.
So, in different words, you agree with me: in Christianity, morality is not defined by obedience to God's, it is based on more fundamental reasons behind those rules.
Consequences such as...?
Why do you want to know? Do you only do the right thing if someone promises you that you'll be a god or that you get 70 virgins?
I'm not here to recruit you. Just go out and look beyond your cult to find anything more spiritually meaningful.
If this were an academic translation, you would overlook these little translation anachronisms without a second thought.
So, when it suits your purpose, you assume that the Book of Mormon is very specific, but when it contradicts reality, you dismiss the contradictions as "little translation anachronisms".
Sorry, but the use of iron, steel, or ridable horses aren't "little translation anachronisms"; there is no translation error that can account for these.
So, back on topic: every single objection disappears if it really is a translation.
See above. In addition, it isn't just a translation, your church claims it's a divinely inspired translation, performed with the aid of seer stones. The idea that God would permit his message to be wrongly translated under his guidance is ridiculous.
Yes - if you take away everything a religion teaches, that religion becomes meaningless.
Not at all. Your faith claims that your God meddles in human affairs and sends messages about the world; prove those wrong and your faith is wrong. That's why you are so desperately clinging to believing something as implausible as the Book of Mormon.
My faith doesn't have such beliefs. Its truths are universal and eternal. It doesn't take prophets or angels or revelations.
Yes. I doubt the file size limit is there because Google doesn't like big files, it's there because it's hard on the infrastructure to upload/download bigger files in one step.
Your assumption that I haven't read it is wrong. I did read it, along with the Bible, the Quran, Buddhist scriptures, and a whole range of other religious texts.
But now that I list actual, grave problems with the Book of Mormon, you just clam up. Typical.
Your opinion is that he is wrong.
It's not just my opinion, I gave you arguments. In this case, he tries to argue that it is plausible that some of these animals and technologies in North America and we just haven't found them. But the Book of Mormon doesn't describe these as rare curiosities, it describes some of them as being in everyday use. Domestication of ridable animals and larger herbivores and the development of iron and steel completely transform societies; for any native American society that has used them and left other artifacts, we would have found at least some of them in the archaeological record. That is just one of many fundamental problems with the Book of Mormon. And it's only one of many problems with Jeff Lindsay's site.
No matter how many weak coincidences you can find, there are so many grave problems that even if we take an "on balance" view of assessing its authenticity, it just cannot be true.
You don't believe the book in the first place; why should I trust your opinion over mine?
You shouldn't trust my opinion, you should look at the facts and start thinking logically. Apply the same criteria (e.g., narrow interpretation of words) to evidence against authenticity as you do for your coincidences. Go read the critical literature. Rationally, on balance, you'll find that the Book of Mormon simply cannot be true.
Who are you to tell me that my understanding of my book of scripture is wrong?
And who are you to tell others (as you do) that your book of scripture is right and that they should join your cult despite such obvious factual problems?
Who are you to mislead people so fundamentally about the nature of the world, morality, and their souls? Who are you to go around promising that they will become gods if only the submit to your church's authority, a self-serving temporal message if ever there was one? Your church has a problem with the truth and they have brain-washed you into recruiting for them.
I haven't told you my faith, other than that I used to be Christian but am not anymore (so I'm not trying to recruit you into anything). I made my decision after carefully studying many religions, including yours. Can you say the same for yourself?
You need to take a good, hard look at the rubbish you believe in and your reasons for believing it. You're violating and hurting yourself by believing it and you're violating and hurting other people by spreading it.
BTW, Jeff Lindsay's argumentation
http://www.jefflindsay.com/LDSFAQ/FQ_BMProb2.shtml
is wrong. The Book of Mormon doesn't talk about these animals, plants, and technologies as being rare oddities. It talks about major domesticated species and major technologies, plus societies that were using them as part of their regular activities. This is not analogous to the huns' or Vikings' horses or to Middle Easter lions.
Also, you can't have it both ways: either, the terms in the Book of Mormon have specific meanings or they do not. You can't pick a specific meaning when you want to make an argument for something (cement) and a non-specific meaning when the book is erroneous (horses, pigs, steel, iron, etc.)
And if you had ever read the Book of Mormon, you'd see right in the footnote at the bottom of the page [lds.org] where it talks about the people becoming experts in cement use because they didn't have enough trees:
So, you are saying then that we should interpret terms like "cement" literally as referring to specific items that we now understand by those terms. Since you take the term "cement" literally, we should do this for other terms as well (after all, the translation of the Book of Mormon was divinely guided).
What do we find? A dozen things that did not exist in the Americas but that the Book of Mormon talks about. Domestication of horses and cattle, the development of iron and steel and wheels have profound effects on entire continents, yet no native American societies had them. Even if Smith got the names wrong, they didn't even have anything remotely similar for many of those items (but then most of your other arguments go out the window anyway; if a pig isn't a pig, why should cement be cement?).
The Book of Mormon is permeated by fundamental contradictions to the archaeological record. And that's not even taking into account the linguistic contradictions.
horses
http://scriptures.lds.org/en/search?search=horse&do=Search
elephants
http://scriptures.lds.org/search?search=elephant
chicken
http://scriptures.lds.org/search?search=chicken
goat
http://scriptures.lds.org/search?search=goat
domesticated cattle or cows
http://scriptures.lds.org/search?search=cattle
http://scriptures.lds.org/search?search=cow
compass
http://scriptures.lds.org/search?search=compass
steel
http://scriptures.lds.org/search?search=steel
swine
http://scriptures.lds.org/search?search=swine
chariot
http://scriptures.lds.org/search?search=chariot
rust and iron
http://scriptures.lds.org/search?search=rust
http://scriptures.lds.org/search?search=iron
silk
http://scriptures.lds.org/search?search=silk
It's a monumentally magic leap of logic to go from that to your earlier statement that the Book of Mormon cannot be what it claims to be. (Yes, those were your words. Want me to link you to a specific post?)
I read the Book of Mormon a few years ago, along with reading the Bible again, the Quran, Buddhist scriptures, and assorted other religious texts.
There is ample discussion of inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and errors in the Book of Mormon available in many places. The Wikipedia articles are actually a fairly good summary and have plenty of references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Book_of_Mormon
In particular:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_and_the_Book_of_Mormon
I'm enough of an expert in some of these areas to know that the criticism is valid and establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that the Book of Mormon is not what it claims to be. If you believe otherwise, a good place to start would be a point-by-point response to those Wikipedia articles.
The pages you have pointed to, on the other hand, get basic facts of linguistics wrong. For example, the relationship they claim between Egyptian, Phoenician, Hebrew, and modern writing is wrong.
Of course, this obsession with writings, revelations, histories, apparitions, and historical events is just a symptom of a much deeper spiritual problem with your faith: take away the revelations and writings and there's little left. It's a problem Mormonism shares with Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
Based on my readings, the Bible pretty consistently describes morality in terms of God's will. Do you have any counter-examples?
Genesis is clear about humans having the capacity to distinguish good and evil; good and evil are not defined by blindly following rules.
Within the Bible, God's will and obedience to it can be understood in analogy to parenting. I may tell my children not to smoke, but the good that comes from obeying that command is not to be found in the obedience itself, it is in the harm that it prevents. And just because obeying that command in one context is the right thing to do doesn't mean it's the right thing to do in another context. Furthermore, once my children are adults, they have to make those choices for themselves.
You reject the notion of an afterlife in which God judges us for our actions during this life.
Yes, but I don't reject the notion of an afterlife in which our choices here and now have consequences. In particular, I think you have made bad choices, and I believe you will suffer the consequences.
I believe this life is primarily a means to an end.
It's fascinating that you can make such a statement without even realizing how obscene it is.
It could be argued that the Bible teaches that something is immoral if and only if it is against God's will.
Yes, that is obviously your view of morality. See above for what I think of it. But it also isn't consistent with the Bible.
I still say your objection is rooted in the fact that you don't believe in an afterlife.
Oh, dear, have we gone off script? Is your neat division into Christian/materialist falling apart? Why do you ignore me when I'm telling you: I'm an atheist, not a materialist. I don't reject faith or an afterlife, I reject your kind of faith and afterlife as intrinsically immoral.
3) I ask you for evidence of your claims.
4) You refuse to provide it.
My view is just the existing, mainstream archaeological view: the Americas got settled via the Bering bridge somewhere 13000-40000 years ago. Except for Viking contacts, they developed independently until Columbus landed.
That view is consistent with all accepted archaeological evidence. It's backed by tens of thousands of research papers and archaeological digs. So, I'm not making any claims and I don't have anything to prove; just open any mainstream textbook on American pre-history and follow the references to the literature--they are all the evidence I need for my position.
Seriously: if you refuse to read the research I cite
"Citing" means referring to the scholarly, peer-reviewed literature. All you ever do is point to Mormon apologetic web sites.
And I do read the sites you point to, and all I can say is: you don't convince me.
You're pretending I've tried to "come up with" a timeline during this discussion.
No, I have faulted you for not coming up with specific dates and times. By not being specific, you make it impossible to disprove your theories. You use Mayan cement, coins in North America, word similarities in some obscure language, and any other coincidence you can find to argue for your position, without any regard for whether they fit into a single consistent historical timeline.
You need to come up with at least one historical timeline of places, people, and events that is consistent with the known archaeological record. I don't think you can.
That is, you don't believe in an afterlife, and as such, you don't believe we'll be held accountable for our behavior during this life.
I'm an atheist, not a materialist; that means that I specifically reject your God and gods like him: your God is an irascible, irrational mass murderer, and people worship him because they believe he's powerful and promises big rewards in the afterlife. Whatever form judgment takes, anybody who worships in that way is not righteous and will suffer the consequences of their choice.
If you assume God will judge you for your actions during this life, then clearly God is in a position to determine how long your life should last and how you leave it.
That's true only if you follow a philosophy that denies any intrinsic value to life itself and views life as a purely utilitarian event. I find that view morally objectionable. That view has also frequently been used to justify murder at the hand of human beings; it's a gateway to religious violence against others.
If your objection is that you don't believe in an afterlife, then stop arguing this nonsense about whether God is justified in doing what he does, and address the real issue - the fact that you don't believe in an afterlife
No, my objection (which is independent of my personal religious beliefs) is that Christian and Mormon beliefs are internally inconsistent: for you, there are two different sets of morals, those that apply to men and those that apply to God, despite the fact that the Bible clearly says that right and wrong are universal.
Your opinion that they are coincidences does not mean they are not evidence. It merely means you are choosing to disregard them.
Neither does your opinion that they are mean that there is a causal relationship.
No, but they also didn't say "it cannot be true", as you are doing.
I'm not saying "it cannot be true". There is a slight possibility that some Mediterranean people came to the Americas a couple of millennia ago. There simply is not a shred of evidence for it. And unlike the Viking sagas, there is only a single source--the Book of Mormon--that claims this.
"It can thus far be explained by coincidence, and therefore it cannot be what it claims to be."
There are two things we're discussing: pre-Columbian Jewish presence in the Americas, and the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. The first is independent of the second: Jews may or may not have come to the Americas regardless of whether the Book of Mormon is genuine or fake. But if Jews didn't come to the Americas, the Book of Mormon is definitely fake (and by "fake" or "fraud" I don't necessarily mean that Smith was a con artist, he may just have been deluded).
The status of pre-Columbian Jewish presence in the Americas is "unproven"; there is no compelling physical evidence and everything archaeologists see can be easily explained without pre-Columbian Jewish presence. At this point, it's only a remote possibility.
As for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, there are three things wrong with your arguments.
First, you demand that I show that these are coincidences, but that's logically impossible. The two sides of such an argument are "this is highly improbable" or "this can be plausibly explained by chance"; note that the argument is not symmetric. That's the way statistics works. And you haven't made the "highly improbable case" convincingly.
Second, a problem with your whole line of argumentation is that you treat each coincidence separately. But Smith made only one decision: he described Jews coming to America and living through biblical stories. Anything they did, experienced, or left that is consistent with that basic premise is not an independent coincidence. So most of your "coincidences" just collapse to a single one: some aspects and experiences of native American societies were similar to some aspects and experiences of Jewish societies. No matter whether that was because of a Jewish presence or by chance (more likely the latter), Smith only made a single choice/guess.
Third, one can't nail you down on a consistent story. You keep pointing to native Americans and how these people used cement and those people have some words that sound Hebrew and somewhere else people have found writing that looks like ancient Hebrew, but that's not anything consistent. If you want to make an archaeological argument, you need to come up with an archaeological hypothesis and history that is both consistent with physical evidence and the Book of Mormon and you have not done that. I don't think it's even possible. Only once you have actually formulated a theory can people like me go look for arguments against it; without formulating a theory, you just keep shifting your position as it is convenient for you.
There are certainly some good ideas but the writing is trapped in the 1950s.
That's why a screen adaptation with some changes could actually greatly improve on the original.
You can't have it both ways - you're trying to say that things the Book of Mormon gets right are merely coincidence, and then you turn around and pretend those coincidences don't exist.
I'm not "pretending that they don't exist", I'm saying they are not statistically significant; everything you describe is plausibly explained by chance (look up "coincidence").
If you're going to continue to pretend that demonstrable empirical evidence doesn't exist, then I see no reason to continue this discussion.
I'm just applying the same standards to Mormons that everybody applied to Vikings: despite far more--and more credible--textual evidence, people didn't accept pre-Columbian Viking presence in the Americas as an established fact until L'Anse aux Meadows. Find something similar and then you have a case. Until then, you have just a story.
The problem with killing is, as I have repeatedly stated, with the exception of self-defense, we do not have the right to take someone else's life - only God does.
You keep saying that God has the right to kill at will, but you haven't been able to come up with a single consistent argument supporting that view. You tried to argue that one has a moral right to destroy anything one creates or owns, but that's obviously not true. You tried to argue that we are God's children, but kiling one's children is morally wrong. You tried to argue that God killed the inhabitants of Sodom to prevent a greater evil, but then the question arises why isn't doing the same thing now; furthermore, being omnipotent, God has non-lethal means at his disposal to prevent Sodom's acts from affecting anybody else. And God certainly didn't act in self-defense when destroying Sodom. No, you simply need to face the fact: you are worshiping a mass murderer. Your God meets the definition of a mass murderer. Where we differ is that you think it's OK, while I think it's not.
I responded that by your logic, if I kill someone right now, it's not my fault - it's my dad's fault for not teaching me better.
I said nothing of the sort. You're an adult: if you kill someone, it's your legal and moral responsibility, not your parents or anybody else's. If you were a child, your parents would be legally and morally responsible to keep you from harm and to prevent you from harming others. That's because while children also have free will, they are immature.
No, the problem with free will is yours: you said that God had perfect foreknowledge of the future actions of the people of Sodom and tried to use that to justify his act of mass murder. How can God have perfect foreknowledge if people have free will? And if he had such perfect foreknowledge, why doesn't he use it to help other people? The notion that an omniscient God exists and acts in the world is absurd because it conflicts with free will, it's one of many absurdities and contradictions in your belief system.
Free will exists; it's omniscience that's absurd.
The bottom line? I don't know - the reason isn't given, so it could be anything. It's silly to assume a malicious motive where no motive is given one way or the other.
The reason is given clearly: the people weren't "righteous". Where we differ is that you think that that is justification for an act of mass murder and I think it is not.
No, I've said it's morally acceptable for God to wipe them out. I have never said it's morally acceptable for humans to wipe each other out.
Yes, you keep saying that. Obviously, to you, whatever God does is automatically moral, be it mass murder or anything else. To me, it is not. Murder is wrong, whether committed by an omnipotent being or by a mere human. And the BIble sides with me on that: according to the Bible itself, there aren't two sets of rules; rather, we have the same understanding of morality as God.
Of course not. It doesn't affect my salvation if you choose to reject the gospel; it's your choice, and it only affects you.
I didn't ask whether it "affected" you or whether you cared. Since you seem to think that the mass murder of the inhabitants of Sodom was justified, you must think that the death of anybody who rejects your God is justified.