No monuments? You've got to be kidding me. You're pretending the vast swaths of native American ruins don't exist?
They exist, they just don't relate in any way to the Middle East.
No linguistic traces? I've already linked you to ample information on the subject.
Yes, bogus claims.
Your DNA complaint is based on the premise that the Book of Mormon claims all native Americans are direct descendants of a group of Jews from Jerusalem. That is not the case.
I'm saying there is not a shred of DNA evidence for the presence of Jews. You simply come up with all sorts of reasons why we haven't seen it.
As is discussed the above-linked article regarding languages, the evidence suggests that the group of Jews arrived in the Americas and merged into a much larger group of natives.
No, it does not.
In fact, you apparently refuse to provide any evidence whatsoever - you merely refer to a vague complaint about linguistics (which I have thoroughly debunked) and DNA (regarding which again I have given you more than sufficient information to study before you renew your complaints).
You haven't "debunked" anything; you're simply pointing at a bunch of junk science created by Mormons with a political and religious agenda. Show me peer-reviewed, non-religiously affiliated studies and journals, together with multiple independent fact checking.
You haven't even formulated any clear hypotheses; your hypothetical Jews are all over the continent; sometimes they coincide with major American civilizations, sometimes they languish in obscurity. You simply haven't even been able to come up with a single plausible timeline and scenario that would explain what we see today.
The linguistic claims are bogus: four vaguely similar words do not establish a relationship between langugaes.
The claims for incscriptions and coins are unsubstantiated.
By whom? By Anthon? Anthon's own comments on the matter are inconsistent. I'm unaware of other attempts. Cite or retract.
Anthon's response is not relevant to the point; the point is that Smith had the means, opportunity, and motivation to have the writings authenticated and pulled back when he realized he couldn't.
"little"? I've given six specific examples (each comprising two specific facts, when you include the time period) - examples that contradicted contemporary scientific opinion and later turned out to be demonstrably true.
You haven't pointed out any physical evidence. All you point to is coincidences between your book and events, coincidences that are easily attributable to chance. If you want to claim they are not chance, you have to prove it.
Physical evidence would mean the presence of DNA, of linguistic traces, of buildings and monuments, of documents, of tools, of metal, etc. that are clearly attributable to Middle Eastern cultures. Leaving aside the Book of Mormon, there is no physical evidence for the presence of people from the Middle East in the Americas prior to the arrival of Columbus.
Because it was more important that the religion be established than that the archeological community have the intellectual curiosity satisfied.
It's not an either/or choice. A rubbing takes a few minutes. And, in fact, Smith tried to have his work authenticated and failed.
I'm still waiting for examples of "linguistic and genetic facts" that contradict the Book of Mormon.
There's a large literature on it; I'm not going to repeat it here. Just look it up.
I've already given one example of a technology that you yourself would have previously used as evidence of your claims: cement.
I didn't bring up cement, you did. And lots of cultures use cement, so there is nothing surprising about finding it in the Americas. Furthermore, you haven't been specific about what exactly you mean. What kind of cement? Roman cement? Are you claiming that the cultures that used it were the same cultures as described in the Book of Mormon? Or what?
Had you been alive at the time, you would have said "it is known archeological fact that there was no cement use in that time period or area".
19th century archaeology was very different from 20th century archaeology and had explored only a tiny part of the world, so their errors don't translate to today.
You're making an absurd leap of logic. It's like saying "all civilizations that ever lived on earth have left traces of their existence." In reality, it is only true that all known civilizations have left traces of their existence; it is neither provable nor disprovable that other trace-less civilizations have existed.
We're not talking about any civilization, we're talking about a literate Middle Eastern civilization that supposedly came to the Americas within Roman times, fought wars, used metal, and used technology. That kind of civilization is expected to leave tangible artifacts, DNA, and linguistic traces; none have been found at all, even though we have found lots of other unexpected and rare finds.
You have to come up with an explanation for this discrepancy: why are there no monuments, no writing, no DNA, and no linguistic traces?
Such as? We're talking about civilizations, not doctrines, remember.
Such as the existence of wars, earth quakes, and (from other sources about Rome) the use of cement and other technologies.
Again, you're confusing "we haven't found evidence yet" with "evidence does not exist, period".
I'm not. We have had more of a century of intensive archaeological exploration of the Americas. It is very unlikely that the major events described in the Book of Mormon have left no trace.
You have failed to show any evidence that they're "weak" coincidences
I don't need to show that. The null hypothesis is that these are accidents. That is also consistent with mainstream scholarship; nobody needs people from the Middle East to have come to the Americas to explain any actual physical evidence.
If you want to claim that they are not accidents, you need to do the work.
Do you seriously think that Apple is capable of performing security audits on every app they approve? The primary criteria in their approval process are going to be whether the app might be offensive to someone and whether it competes with Apple's core business.
Do you have any evidence that he ever met a Jew skilled in Hebrew translation? I've sure never seen any. You'll have to forgive me for my skepticism of your claims, but you're making a lot of uncorroborated assumptions and stating them as if they were fact.
It is a fact that there were Jews in Pennsylvania in the 18th and 19th century. It's a fact that Smith traveled around his state a lot. It's a fact that religion was of central importance to Smith's life since his childhood. It's a fact that many religious Jews are able to recite at least some Hebrew and translate it into English. You can check those facts easily for yourself. Taken together, these facts mean that there are much simpler, more plausible explanations for the language of the Book of Mormon than that an angel handed him a bunch of tablets and he was using seer stones to translate them.
and yet, what motivation could he have had for such an elaborate deception?
Who knows? What motivation did Ted Haggard, David Koresh, or Mohammed have? Many of these people are also capable of self-deception, and Smith probably was as well.
And yet you cannot show any Book of Mormon claims that contradict known archeological fact.
I have told you before: the Book of Mormon describes animals and technologies that clearly did not exist in the Americas, and it contradicts linguistic and genetic facts.
You said it yourself - "considerably more" than 99% of the (empirically testable) claims made by the Book of Mormon would have to prove true before you would even start to consider that it might be what it purports to be.
What I said was that a significance level of 99% would be standard for this; that has nothing to do with the number of testable claims.
You will continue to insist the book cannot be what it claims to be, merely because it claims to be inspired of God.
No, I insist that the book cannot be what it claims to be because there is lots of physical evidence suggesting that it is not authentic and little physical evidence suggesting that it is.
Do you realize that if Joseph had merely said "I found this book buried in a hill" and handed the gold plates to a university for translation, the book would be hailed as the greatest native American archeological find to date?
Yes. So why is it that he neither left the book, nor rubbings or tracings of it, nor any other physical evidence.
Now, if we suppose that God exists as described by the scriptures, then we must also suppose that there is an afterlife as described by the scriptures; as such, killing people who are unwilling to repent does not erase them from existence, it merely moves them to the afterlife "early".
Well, by that reasoning, if people kill each other, it shouldn't be a problem either, right? I mean, what's the problem with killing or dying at all in your religion if it merely gets people to paradise or hell faster?
You seem to be arguing that there's no such thing as free will
I have no idea what "free will" means and I didn't bring it up; don't muddy the waters by dragging in another concept. Let's stick to what you said.
You said God can predict whether people are going to repent or not, and that he was justified in destroying Sodom because he could accurately predict that nobody in Sodom was going to repent.
But if God can do this in Sodom, he presumably can do it elsewhere as well. So, why did he exterminate the inhabitants of Sodom, but doesn't exterminate all the other people who aren't going to repent? The same reasoning that applies to the people of Sodom applies to every human being: according to you, an omniscient God can predict whether they are going to repent or not, so why have the non-repenters go on living and commit sins?
No. I'm saying, if God tells a people which knows the gospel "you really need to shape up, or I'll have to destroy the city", and they decide to ignore him, well then he'd better follow through - what kind of impotent God doesn't follow through on his promises? This is common sense.
If I tell you "get down on your knees or I kill you" and you don't comply, it's still murder if I shoot you dead. Pre-announcing the murder or making it dependent on something else doesn't change that.
Nowhere does the Bible ever encourage violence against non-Christians. If you think it does, please cite specific verses.
It was you who said that it was moral for God to kill the inhabitants of Sodom because they rejected him. Therefore, killing people who reject God is a moral act according to you.
And what reason would there be for the story of Sodom to be in the Bible if not to tell everybody loud and clear that anybody who rejects the God of the Bible deserves to die?
Instead, if a people is said to have rejected God, then they both know his teachings and knowingly decided to ignore them.
Yes, so do I, and so do millions of other atheists in the US alone. Most of us were raised Christian and concluded that the Bible is false and that either God doesn't exist or that he is evil. So what? Does that mean you think we deserve to die?
There has been a lot of study in the area of how certain native American languages are similar to Hebrew, for example, and there's obviously plenty of archeological records of them.
Lots of languages are similar. The question that matters here is whether they are related. Native American languages are not related to Hebrew. That is actually strong evidence against the history given in the Book of Mormon.
How could Joseph Smith have accurately guessed the time period of cement use, when experts in the field didn't believe cement was used by the ancient Americans at all?
Smith wrote a book about people coming from the Middle East to the Americas, and he just described the technologies that would go along with such an event. So, he didn't "guess", he just described what he knew about those people.
As it turns out, civilizations develop in parallel: many civilizations practice baptism, many have been building with cement, many experience natural catastrophes, etc.
You could take the Book of Mormon and change "America" with "India" or "China" and you'd find just as many coincidences.
I'm unaware of Joseph Smith providing samples of supposedly Book of Mormon-era writing which is neither American nor Middle Eastern. Could you, perhaps, provide references for that claim?
The Anthon Transcript contains a bunch of characters that supposedly come from the Book of Mormon.
Here's a question for you: what is the statistical probability that someone could make dozens of random guesses about an ancient civilization, including guesses about economic practices, warfare tactics, population migrations, technology and architectural practices, and the historic time frames for each of those things, and turn out to be right about all of them?
I think the probability is very high that he accidentally guessed all these things; I have explained why. Your argument is based on the belief that the probability is very low, but you have failed to support that belief with an argument. You can find a thousand weak coincidences and they don't prove anything. Smith transferred some generic statements from the Bible to the Americas, and after some digging, people found some correlates for some of those statements.
However, some of the statements Smith made didn't work: he placed languages, animals, and technologies in the Americas that simply did not exist here.
So, you have a bunch of weak coincidences and a bunch of strong blunders. The conclusion is pretty clear: the Book of Mormon is fabrication.
What I meant was, you're creating discrepancies in morality where none exist, in an attempt to show that discrepancies exist.
Oh, there are discrepancies alright, you simply aren't willing to see them. Either there is absolute morality, something that applies to every self-aware being, or there is not. Either it is right to kill those who reject God and "won't repent" or it is not. You just keep shifting positions depending on which biblical story you're apologizing for. You're starting from the assumption that God can do no wrong and then try to make the Bible fit your assumptions, instead of looking objectively at the Bible and asking: what does this actually tell you about God?
If I build a house, is it not morally acceptable for you to demolish it without cause, but it is morally acceptable for me to demolish it without cause. Surely you'll agree with that? Thus, God being the architect and owner of the human race (so to speak), God has the right to destroy it as he sees fit, though we do not.
So, by your analogy, God owns us completely, like property. No, I absolutely don't agree with that: it is an offensive and immoral suggestion. It's also un-Christian: even in Christianity, we aren't God's cattle, we are God's children.
And children are not slaves or property of their parents, they are human beings in their care. You can teach your children, you can punish them, but killing them is wrong, no matter how much they may misbehave. And if they misbehave, ultimately, it is the fault of the parents for not intervening earlier.
God says "No, Abraham, if I find righteous people, I'll spare everyone for their sakes."... Seems pretty level-headed to me.
God is exterminating the inhabitants of Sodom because they follow a different religion and reject him. So, you are saying that you think that genocide of non-Christins "seems pretty level-headed" to you.
I'm sorry, I don't agree. The inhabitants of Sodom were no threat to God and he had no justification for killing them. If they rejected God, that was their choice (it's a choice that God actually honors in the Mormon afterlife, as I understand). There was no reason to exterminate them, he could have just let them live our their existence on earth.
And by relating this story in the Bible, not only did God admit to his sin, he also encouraged millennia of violence by Jews and Christians against those who hold different religious beliefs. So, the story of Sodom is also a complete failure in terms of teaching humanity about what is right and wrong.
No fictional book, certainly not one written by an uneducated American farmboy, has ever fabricated from whole cloth so many details about an ancient people in a relatively unknown part of the world that decades later turned out to be entirely accurate, as has turned out to be true for the Book of Mormon.
So, let me get this straight. 2500BC and 600BC a bunch of people from the Middle East go by ship to the Americas and disappear about 400AD. They found a civilization, worship God, fight wars, and generally do the kinds of things civilizations do. Yet, there is no genetic, linguistic, or archaeological record of them. The civilizations that we do find in the Americas have their own historical sites, writing systems, technologies, genetics, and religions, all completely unrelated anything Middle Eastern.
And while we find all those historical artifacts associated with hundreds of native American cultures, at the same time, the Book of Mormon is full of animals and artifacts for which there is not a shred of evidence in the Americas prior to European arrival. And the few bits of writing system we get from Smith are neither American nor Middle Eastern. They have also not been found anywhere else in the Americas--no graffiti, no scrolls, no engravings, no tombstones, no monuments, nothing.
If Joseph had fabricated his history based on then-current knowledge of the Mayans, for example, wouldn't the people of that time period in the Book of Mormon have been described as peaceful? If, as you claim, it was a fabrication, then he was committing a grievous error by deliberately contradicting known scientific opinion! How fortunate, then, that several decades later he turned out to be correct.
As you pointed out, Smith probably knew nothing about ancient American history or scientific opinion. He just based his writings on what he knew, religious writings related to the Middle East. It's not particularly surprising that this turned out to be a better prediction of American societies than 19th century romanticism.
What? The question was to you - how many coincidences and lucky guesses do there have to be before you will begin to consider the possibility that the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be?
Me and my church cannot answer that question for you, it's silly to pretend we can - I was asking for your opinion!
And I'm telling you: it's a question of mathematics and statistics, not opinion.
The usual level at which people are willing to even start considering extraordinary claims is a 99% significance level, although considerably more evidence would be required for something as extraordinary as the claims about the Book of Mormon.
How many "coincidences and lucky guesses" it takes to reach that level of significance is not a matter of opinion, it's a question of mathematics and logic. And the person claiming that something is non-accidental (i.e., you) is responsible for doing the necessary experiments and math to figure it out.
He was an uneducated farmboy, and he wasn't a skilled linguist until a decade after the Book of Mormon was published.
People don't need to be academically trained in order to be able to pick up languages, accents, and styles quickly. It's a skill, not an academic subject.
had he been plagiarizing, inventing, and accurately predicting future discoveries as people like you claim he was
He wasn't "accurately predicting future discoveries". Repeating claims that are in dispute in a conversation as fact is a common technique among religious groups to get their followers to accept it. That's a technique you seem to have picked up without even having been taught it (or have you been taught it and are you applying it deliberately)?
Where, exactly, do you posit he traveled that enabled him to "pick up some [Hebraic] phrases and constructs" - including the chaismus, which was not recognized as a Hebraic literary construct until recently - with a good enough understanding to use them properly?
(See below.)
You see, people like you want me to believe that Joseph Smith was: a) uneducated (as he had no access to formal education)
He didn't need access to formal education. He need some practical skill and experience with using language, and he got plenty of that from his family.
b) highly educated (being a skilled linguist and an accurate-to-the-point-of-clairvoyance historian), despite not having access to such education until later in his life
You have failed to establish that there is anything "highly accurate" about his writing. It's the usual religious drivel, and parts of it by coincidence appear to fit real-world events; Muslims are pointing out similar coincidences for the Quran.
c) extremely lucky regarding dozens of then-insane guesses about ancient American history which later turned out to be remarkably accurate both in content and timeframe
Again, you haven't established that. (In fact, Mormons don't seem to be able to make up their mind which volcano is supposed to be responsible.)
d) possessed of a photographic memory such that the hastily-written, fictional Book of Mormon would be found to contain no internal inconsistencies after almost two hundred years of examination.
Smith was apparently trained at memorizing and reciting texts. Unlike modern authors (who are not trained that way), he could have composed the texts in his head and then written them out.
People like you also claim that the Bible contains no internal inconsistencies, yet that is evidently false.
e) capable of writing six to seven pages per day, almost every day for almost three months.
Many people write a lot more than that. Furthermore, being taught to speak and preach (which he seems to have been) would be a good preparation.
In other words, in an effort to convince me Joseph Smith was a fraud, you're trying to convince me Joseph was the smartest writer who has ever lived.
Smith was clearly skilled in several areas; complete dunces don't go on founding large religious organizations. But no supernatural explanation is needed to explain either the text, its content, or its authorship.
Where, exactly, do you posit he traveled that enabled him to "pick up some [Hebraic] phrases and constructs" - including the chaismus, which was not recognized as a Hebraic literary construct until recently - with a good enough understanding to use them properly?
Well, given that it wasn't recognized by scholars "until recently", writers had obviously been using it for a long time without recognizing what they were doing, so academic recognition isn't necessary for people to use the construct. Writers would just pick it up and apply it in their text, and that's what Smith also did.
As to where he picked it up, there were plenty of Jews around that he could have asked for sample translations from Hebrew religious texts, and plenty more people trained in the classics.
b) Joseph met someone with said perfect knowledge of Hebrew language structure who taught him what to include in the book - including the chiasmus which was not yet recognized by experts in Hebrew literature - in order to make his fraud appear legitimate
Smith didn't need to produce grammatically correct Hebrew. All Smith needed was to produce a text in his native language that sounded like a stilted translation from some ancient language. That's not rocket science, it just takes a few snippets of text to work from. Smith was skilled at language and traveled widely: both obtaining a few samples of badly translated Hebrew and then imitating them would have been easy for him, in particular given his and his family's fascination with religious matters.
You tell me, which is more likely?
The most likely explanation is that Smith picked up some phrases and constructs while traveling and then liberally used them to produce something that sounded like a translation from some ancient language. At the same time, the Mormon church is exaggerating the complexity and significance of these constructs.
I have paid for Microsoft's shitty products for two decades and never received any kind of meaningful customer service. I really doubt Google can do any worse than that.
Given that God will not punish me for killing the invader
If you have a choice between incapacitating and killing and you choose killing, you certainly violate the commandment against killing.
Consider: God, being omnipotent, knows the future.
That's actually called "omniscience", and it's different from omnipotence.
Thus, if God knows that an entire city full of people is not going to repent, then it is more merciful to kill them now, so they can't sin anymore!
Well, that's not the explanation God gave to Abraham; he didn't say "I'm killing them because none of them are ever going to repent". But, hey, maybe he just doesn't know how to express himself.
So, if God is omniscient like that, why do any of us have to go through the motions? Since he already knows who is going to repent and who isn't, he could just get rid of all the people who aren't going to repent right here and now just like, according to you, he got rid of the people of Sodom for that reason. He would save me from committing more sins that way, for example. Or why did he favor the people of Sodom with an early death but lets the rest of us merrily sin away?
And what does "not going to repent" mean anyway? I mean, sure, none of them might would have repented if had let them continue their fun sex orgies. But did he try appearing as a burning bush? Why didn't he just do to them whatever he did to Paul?
Also, how plausible is it that a city of tens of thousands of people does not contain a single innocent person? Taking the notion of an omnipotent God at face value, it is far more probable that God destroyed Sodom in a fit of uncontrollable rage, then realized he screwed up and made up a story to cover his tracks.
No, I'm saying it's justifiable for God to kill people who reject him.
So, you are a moral relativist then? It's not OK for you to murder people, but it is OK for God to murder people?
That doesn't square with the Bible. The Bible is clear about the fact that we all have the same knowledge of right and wrong as God.
It's easy to point out discrepancies when you're conjuring them from thin air.
Where else do you want me to conjure them from? There is no physical evidence for your God; all there is is the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and various other kinds of documents. "Thin air" is your problem, not mine.
Despite answering "Neither" to my list of options, you in fact chose option 1, "made a series of guesses with unparalleled accuracy".
There's nothing "unparalleled" about them. Every major religion makes claims like this about its holy books.
How many guesses have to be lucky before you'll actually consider the possibility that it's true?
That's a very good question. In different words, how many agreements like that are chance coincidences and how many are starting to amount to evidence. That's a question you and your church need to answer. Right now, you're just waving your hands.
Years after the Book of Mormon is published, archeologists discover that, lo and behold, there is plenty of physical evidence of a large set of volcanic eruptions in the same time frame as those describe in the Book of Mormon.
There are large volcanic eruptions in the Americas every few decades. Furthermore, the Book of Mormon isn't even very specific about what happened.
The Book of Mormon describes the ancient american peoples as having practiced baptism by immersion
Baptism by immersion exists independently in many religions and cultures and Smith described it because it's part of Christianity. So, there's nothing to be explained here.
So, which is it?
Neither. Smith fabricated a book in the style of prose he was familiar with. And the Mormon church is now trying to justify its existence (and keep the money coming) by highlighting those parts that accidentally appear to have real-world parallels.
You're willing to admit that the law knows there are circumstances where killing another person might be admissible
No, that's a completely unrelated question.
Committing a crime is rational if the expected benefit outweighs the risk. Under the law, committing crimes can be rational because penalties are finite and there's a chance you don't get caught. Under Christian/Mormon theology, the penalty is eternal/infinite and you always get caught, so the expected benefit never outweighs the risk.
This God, who was willing to spare an entire city of wicked people for the sake of a single good person, is the same one you're saying maliciously tortured and murdered innocent people?
Were there no babies in Sodom? No travelers? And why would God go through the charade of having Abraham look for anybody righteous? Did God simply not know, or was he playing games with Abraham?
And even if there was nobody righteous there, given that you claim that free will exists, all those people still would have had the opportunity to change their ways if God hadn't killed them first. Paul certainly wasn't righteous, yet even he got that opportunity.
Furthermore, what God says according to the story he was "willing to do" doesn't matter, what matters is what he actually did, and that was kill tens of thousands of people without an adequate justification.
You know, I recall one very specific story where God wanted to destroy a pair of cities because they had fully and completely rejected him,
So, you are saying it is moral and justifiable to kill people who reject your God? That means you must think it's OK for you to kill me because I fully and completely reject your God.
How does that square with your claim that you tolerate and respect people with different beliefs from yours?
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No monuments? You've got to be kidding me. You're pretending the vast swaths of native American ruins don't exist?
They exist, they just don't relate in any way to the Middle East.
No linguistic traces? I've already linked you to ample information on the subject.
Yes, bogus claims.
Your DNA complaint is based on the premise that the Book of Mormon claims all native Americans are direct descendants of a group of Jews from Jerusalem. That is not the case.
I'm saying there is not a shred of DNA evidence for the presence of Jews. You simply come up with all sorts of reasons why we haven't seen it.
As is discussed the above-linked article regarding languages, the evidence suggests that the group of Jews arrived in the Americas and merged into a much larger group of natives.
No, it does not.
In fact, you apparently refuse to provide any evidence whatsoever - you merely refer to a vague complaint about linguistics (which I have thoroughly debunked) and DNA (regarding which again I have given you more than sufficient information to study before you renew your complaints).
You haven't "debunked" anything; you're simply pointing at a bunch of junk science created by Mormons with a political and religious agenda. Show me peer-reviewed, non-religiously affiliated studies and journals, together with multiple independent fact checking.
You haven't even formulated any clear hypotheses; your hypothetical Jews are all over the continent; sometimes they coincide with major American civilizations, sometimes they languish in obscurity. You simply haven't even been able to come up with a single plausible timeline and scenario that would explain what we see today.
On the contrary [fairmormon.org]:
The linguistic claims are bogus: four vaguely similar words do not establish a relationship between langugaes.
The claims for incscriptions and coins are unsubstantiated.
By whom? By Anthon? Anthon's own comments on the matter are inconsistent. I'm unaware of other attempts. Cite or retract.
Anthon's response is not relevant to the point; the point is that Smith had the means, opportunity, and motivation to have the writings authenticated and pulled back when he realized he couldn't.
"little"? I've given six specific examples (each comprising two specific facts, when you include the time period) - examples that contradicted contemporary scientific opinion and later turned out to be demonstrably true.
You haven't pointed out any physical evidence. All you point to is coincidences between your book and events, coincidences that are easily attributable to chance. If you want to claim they are not chance, you have to prove it.
Physical evidence would mean the presence of DNA, of linguistic traces, of buildings and monuments, of documents, of tools, of metal, etc. that are clearly attributable to Middle Eastern cultures. Leaving aside the Book of Mormon, there is no physical evidence for the presence of people from the Middle East in the Americas prior to the arrival of Columbus.
Because it was more important that the religion be established than that the archeological community have the intellectual curiosity satisfied.
It's not an either/or choice. A rubbing takes a few minutes. And, in fact, Smith tried to have his work authenticated and failed.
I'm still waiting for examples of "linguistic and genetic facts" that contradict the Book of Mormon.
There's a large literature on it; I'm not going to repeat it here. Just look it up.
I've already given one example of a technology that you yourself would have previously used as evidence of your claims: cement.
I didn't bring up cement, you did. And lots of cultures use cement, so there is nothing surprising about finding it in the Americas. Furthermore, you haven't been specific about what exactly you mean. What kind of cement? Roman cement? Are you claiming that the cultures that used it were the same cultures as described in the Book of Mormon? Or what?
Had you been alive at the time, you would have said "it is known archeological fact that there was no cement use in that time period or area".
19th century archaeology was very different from 20th century archaeology and had explored only a tiny part of the world, so their errors don't translate to today.
You're making an absurd leap of logic. It's like saying "all civilizations that ever lived on earth have left traces of their existence." In reality, it is only true that all known civilizations have left traces of their existence; it is neither provable nor disprovable that other trace-less civilizations have existed.
We're not talking about any civilization, we're talking about a literate Middle Eastern civilization that supposedly came to the Americas within Roman times, fought wars, used metal, and used technology. That kind of civilization is expected to leave tangible artifacts, DNA, and linguistic traces; none have been found at all, even though we have found lots of other unexpected and rare finds.
You have to come up with an explanation for this discrepancy: why are there no monuments, no writing, no DNA, and no linguistic traces?
Such as? We're talking about civilizations, not doctrines, remember.
Such as the existence of wars, earth quakes, and (from other sources about Rome) the use of cement and other technologies.
Again, you're confusing "we haven't found evidence yet" with "evidence does not exist, period".
I'm not. We have had more of a century of intensive archaeological exploration of the Americas. It is very unlikely that the major events described in the Book of Mormon have left no trace.
You have failed to show any evidence that they're "weak" coincidences
I don't need to show that. The null hypothesis is that these are accidents. That is also consistent with mainstream scholarship; nobody needs people from the Middle East to have come to the Americas to explain any actual physical evidence.
If you want to claim that they are not accidents, you need to do the work.
Do you seriously think that Apple is capable of performing security audits on every app they approve? The primary criteria in their approval process are going to be whether the app might be offensive to someone and whether it competes with Apple's core business.
Do you have any evidence that he ever met a Jew skilled in Hebrew translation? I've sure never seen any. You'll have to forgive me for my skepticism of your claims, but you're making a lot of uncorroborated assumptions and stating them as if they were fact.
It is a fact that there were Jews in Pennsylvania in the 18th and 19th century. It's a fact that Smith traveled around his state a lot. It's a fact that religion was of central importance to Smith's life since his childhood. It's a fact that many religious Jews are able to recite at least some Hebrew and translate it into English. You can check those facts easily for yourself. Taken together, these facts mean that there are much simpler, more plausible explanations for the language of the Book of Mormon than that an angel handed him a bunch of tablets and he was using seer stones to translate them.
and yet, what motivation could he have had for such an elaborate deception?
Who knows? What motivation did Ted Haggard, David Koresh, or Mohammed have? Many of these people are also capable of self-deception, and Smith probably was as well.
And yet you cannot show any Book of Mormon claims that contradict known archeological fact.
I have told you before: the Book of Mormon describes animals and technologies that clearly did not exist in the Americas, and it contradicts linguistic and genetic facts.
You said it yourself - "considerably more" than 99% of the (empirically testable) claims made by the Book of Mormon would have to prove true before you would even start to consider that it might be what it purports to be.
What I said was that a significance level of 99% would be standard for this; that has nothing to do with the number of testable claims.
You will continue to insist the book cannot be what it claims to be, merely because it claims to be inspired of God.
No, I insist that the book cannot be what it claims to be because there is lots of physical evidence suggesting that it is not authentic and little physical evidence suggesting that it is.
Do you realize that if Joseph had merely said "I found this book buried in a hill" and handed the gold plates to a university for translation, the book would be hailed as the greatest native American archeological find to date?
Yes. So why is it that he neither left the book, nor rubbings or tracings of it, nor any other physical evidence.
Now, if we suppose that God exists as described by the scriptures, then we must also suppose that there is an afterlife as described by the scriptures; as such, killing people who are unwilling to repent does not erase them from existence, it merely moves them to the afterlife "early".
Well, by that reasoning, if people kill each other, it shouldn't be a problem either, right? I mean, what's the problem with killing or dying at all in your religion if it merely gets people to paradise or hell faster?
You seem to be arguing that there's no such thing as free will
I have no idea what "free will" means and I didn't bring it up; don't muddy the waters by dragging in another concept. Let's stick to what you said.
You said God can predict whether people are going to repent or not, and that he was justified in destroying Sodom because he could accurately predict that nobody in Sodom was going to repent.
But if God can do this in Sodom, he presumably can do it elsewhere as well. So, why did he exterminate the inhabitants of Sodom, but doesn't exterminate all the other people who aren't going to repent? The same reasoning that applies to the people of Sodom applies to every human being: according to you, an omniscient God can predict whether they are going to repent or not, so why have the non-repenters go on living and commit sins?
No. I'm saying, if God tells a people which knows the gospel "you really need to shape up, or I'll have to destroy the city", and they decide to ignore him, well then he'd better follow through - what kind of impotent God doesn't follow through on his promises? This is common sense.
If I tell you "get down on your knees or I kill you" and you don't comply, it's still murder if I shoot you dead. Pre-announcing the murder or making it dependent on something else doesn't change that.
Nowhere does the Bible ever encourage violence against non-Christians. If you think it does, please cite specific verses.
It was you who said that it was moral for God to kill the inhabitants of Sodom because they rejected him. Therefore, killing people who reject God is a moral act according to you.
And what reason would there be for the story of Sodom to be in the Bible if not to tell everybody loud and clear that anybody who rejects the God of the Bible deserves to die?
Instead, if a people is said to have rejected God, then they both know his teachings and knowingly decided to ignore them.
Yes, so do I, and so do millions of other atheists in the US alone. Most of us were raised Christian and concluded that the Bible is false and that either God doesn't exist or that he is evil. So what? Does that mean you think we deserve to die?
There has been a lot of study in the area of how certain native American languages are similar to Hebrew, for example, and there's obviously plenty of archeological records of them.
Lots of languages are similar. The question that matters here is whether they are related. Native American languages are not related to Hebrew. That is actually strong evidence against the history given in the Book of Mormon.
How could Joseph Smith have accurately guessed the time period of cement use, when experts in the field didn't believe cement was used by the ancient Americans at all?
Smith wrote a book about people coming from the Middle East to the Americas, and he just described the technologies that would go along with such an event. So, he didn't "guess", he just described what he knew about those people.
As it turns out, civilizations develop in parallel: many civilizations practice baptism, many have been building with cement, many experience natural catastrophes, etc.
You could take the Book of Mormon and change "America" with "India" or "China" and you'd find just as many coincidences.
I'm unaware of Joseph Smith providing samples of supposedly Book of Mormon-era writing which is neither American nor Middle Eastern. Could you, perhaps, provide references for that claim?
The Anthon Transcript contains a bunch of characters that supposedly come from the Book of Mormon.
Here's a question for you: what is the statistical probability that someone could make dozens of random guesses about an ancient civilization, including guesses about economic practices, warfare tactics, population migrations, technology and architectural practices, and the historic time frames for each of those things, and turn out to be right about all of them?
I think the probability is very high that he accidentally guessed all these things; I have explained why. Your argument is based on the belief that the probability is very low, but you have failed to support that belief with an argument. You can find a thousand weak coincidences and they don't prove anything. Smith transferred some generic statements from the Bible to the Americas, and after some digging, people found some correlates for some of those statements.
However, some of the statements Smith made didn't work: he placed languages, animals, and technologies in the Americas that simply did not exist here.
So, you have a bunch of weak coincidences and a bunch of strong blunders. The conclusion is pretty clear: the Book of Mormon is fabrication.
Yes, we hate cars going at 210mph or at 85mph through towns because they kill people
He shouldn't have gotten a $500 fine, he should have lost his license and have his car impounded. Hopefully, next time he will.
What I meant was, you're creating discrepancies in morality where none exist, in an attempt to show that discrepancies exist.
Oh, there are discrepancies alright, you simply aren't willing to see them. Either there is absolute morality, something that applies to every self-aware being, or there is not. Either it is right to kill those who reject God and "won't repent" or it is not. You just keep shifting positions depending on which biblical story you're apologizing for. You're starting from the assumption that God can do no wrong and then try to make the Bible fit your assumptions, instead of looking objectively at the Bible and asking: what does this actually tell you about God?
If I build a house, is it not morally acceptable for you to demolish it without cause, but it is morally acceptable for me to demolish it without cause. Surely you'll agree with that? Thus, God being the architect and owner of the human race (so to speak), God has the right to destroy it as he sees fit, though we do not.
So, by your analogy, God owns us completely, like property. No, I absolutely don't agree with that: it is an offensive and immoral suggestion. It's also un-Christian: even in Christianity, we aren't God's cattle, we are God's children.
And children are not slaves or property of their parents, they are human beings in their care. You can teach your children, you can punish them, but killing them is wrong, no matter how much they may misbehave. And if they misbehave, ultimately, it is the fault of the parents for not intervening earlier.
God says "No, Abraham, if I find righteous people, I'll spare everyone for their sakes." ... Seems pretty level-headed to me.
God is exterminating the inhabitants of Sodom because they follow a different religion and reject him. So, you are saying that you think that genocide of non-Christins "seems pretty level-headed" to you.
I'm sorry, I don't agree. The inhabitants of Sodom were no threat to God and he had no justification for killing them. If they rejected God, that was their choice (it's a choice that God actually honors in the Mormon afterlife, as I understand). There was no reason to exterminate them, he could have just let them live our their existence on earth.
And by relating this story in the Bible, not only did God admit to his sin, he also encouraged millennia of violence by Jews and Christians against those who hold different religious beliefs. So, the story of Sodom is also a complete failure in terms of teaching humanity about what is right and wrong.
No fictional book, certainly not one written by an uneducated American farmboy, has ever fabricated from whole cloth so many details about an ancient people in a relatively unknown part of the world that decades later turned out to be entirely accurate, as has turned out to be true for the Book of Mormon.
So, let me get this straight. 2500BC and 600BC a bunch of people from the Middle East go by ship to the Americas and disappear about 400AD. They found a civilization, worship God, fight wars, and generally do the kinds of things civilizations do. Yet, there is no genetic, linguistic, or archaeological record of them. The civilizations that we do find in the Americas have their own historical sites, writing systems, technologies, genetics, and religions, all completely unrelated anything Middle Eastern.
And while we find all those historical artifacts associated with hundreds of native American cultures, at the same time, the Book of Mormon is full of animals and artifacts for which there is not a shred of evidence in the Americas prior to European arrival. And the few bits of writing system we get from Smith are neither American nor Middle Eastern. They have also not been found anywhere else in the Americas--no graffiti, no scrolls, no engravings, no tombstones, no monuments, nothing.
That's the evidence, and it's pretty damning.
If Joseph had fabricated his history based on then-current knowledge of the Mayans, for example, wouldn't the people of that time period in the Book of Mormon have been described as peaceful? If, as you claim, it was a fabrication, then he was committing a grievous error by deliberately contradicting known scientific opinion! How fortunate, then, that several decades later he turned out to be correct.
As you pointed out, Smith probably knew nothing about ancient American history or scientific opinion. He just based his writings on what he knew, religious writings related to the Middle East. It's not particularly surprising that this turned out to be a better prediction of American societies than 19th century romanticism.
What? The question was to you - how many coincidences and lucky guesses do there have to be before you will begin to consider the possibility that the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be?
Me and my church cannot answer that question for you, it's silly to pretend we can - I was asking for your opinion!
And I'm telling you: it's a question of mathematics and statistics, not opinion.
The usual level at which people are willing to even start considering extraordinary claims is a 99% significance level, although considerably more evidence would be required for something as extraordinary as the claims about the Book of Mormon.
How many "coincidences and lucky guesses" it takes to reach that level of significance is not a matter of opinion, it's a question of mathematics and logic. And the person claiming that something is non-accidental (i.e., you) is responsible for doing the necessary experiments and math to figure it out.
He was an uneducated farmboy, and he wasn't a skilled linguist until a decade after the Book of Mormon was published.
People don't need to be academically trained in order to be able to pick up languages, accents, and styles quickly. It's a skill, not an academic subject.
had he been plagiarizing, inventing, and accurately predicting future discoveries as people like you claim he was
He wasn't "accurately predicting future discoveries". Repeating claims that are in dispute in a conversation as fact is a common technique among religious groups to get their followers to accept it. That's a technique you seem to have picked up without even having been taught it (or have you been taught it and are you applying it deliberately)?
Where, exactly, do you posit he traveled that enabled him to "pick up some [Hebraic] phrases and constructs" - including the chaismus, which was not recognized as a Hebraic literary construct until recently - with a good enough understanding to use them properly?
(See below.)
You see, people like you want me to believe that Joseph Smith was: a) uneducated (as he had no access to formal education)
He didn't need access to formal education. He need some practical skill and experience with using language, and he got plenty of that from his family.
b) highly educated (being a skilled linguist and an accurate-to-the-point-of-clairvoyance historian), despite not having access to such education until later in his life
You have failed to establish that there is anything "highly accurate" about his writing. It's the usual religious drivel, and parts of it by coincidence appear to fit real-world events; Muslims are pointing out similar coincidences for the Quran.
c) extremely lucky regarding dozens of then-insane guesses about ancient American history which later turned out to be remarkably accurate both in content and timeframe
Again, you haven't established that. (In fact, Mormons don't seem to be able to make up their mind which volcano is supposed to be responsible.)
d) possessed of a photographic memory such that the hastily-written, fictional Book of Mormon would be found to contain no internal inconsistencies after almost two hundred years of examination.
Smith was apparently trained at memorizing and reciting texts. Unlike modern authors (who are not trained that way), he could have composed the texts in his head and then written them out.
People like you also claim that the Bible contains no internal inconsistencies, yet that is evidently false.
e) capable of writing six to seven pages per day, almost every day for almost three months.
Many people write a lot more than that. Furthermore, being taught to speak and preach (which he seems to have been) would be a good preparation.
In other words, in an effort to convince me Joseph Smith was a fraud, you're trying to convince me Joseph was the smartest writer who has ever lived.
Smith was clearly skilled in several areas; complete dunces don't go on founding large religious organizations. But no supernatural explanation is needed to explain either the text, its content, or its authorship.
Where, exactly, do you posit he traveled that enabled him to "pick up some [Hebraic] phrases and constructs" - including the chaismus, which was not recognized as a Hebraic literary construct until recently - with a good enough understanding to use them properly?
Well, given that it wasn't recognized by scholars "until recently", writers had obviously been using it for a long time without recognizing what they were doing, so academic recognition isn't necessary for people to use the construct. Writers would just pick it up and apply it in their text, and that's what Smith also did.
As to where he picked it up, there were plenty of Jews around that he could have asked for sample translations from Hebrew religious texts, and plenty more people trained in the classics.
She looks like she's permanently screaming: NOOOOOOOOOOOOO GET ME OUT OF HERE.
b) Joseph met someone with said perfect knowledge of Hebrew language structure who taught him what to include in the book - including the chiasmus which was not yet recognized by experts in Hebrew literature - in order to make his fraud appear legitimate
Smith didn't need to produce grammatically correct Hebrew. All Smith needed was to produce a text in his native language that sounded like a stilted translation from some ancient language. That's not rocket science, it just takes a few snippets of text to work from. Smith was skilled at language and traveled widely: both obtaining a few samples of badly translated Hebrew and then imitating them would have been easy for him, in particular given his and his family's fascination with religious matters.
You tell me, which is more likely?
The most likely explanation is that Smith picked up some phrases and constructs while traveling and then liberally used them to produce something that sounded like a translation from some ancient language. At the same time, the Mormon church is exaggerating the complexity and significance of these constructs.
I have paid for Microsoft's shitty products for two decades and never received any kind of meaningful customer service. I really doubt Google can do any worse than that.
Given that God will not punish me for killing the invader
If you have a choice between incapacitating and killing and you choose killing, you certainly violate the commandment against killing.
Consider: God, being omnipotent, knows the future.
That's actually called "omniscience", and it's different from omnipotence.
Thus, if God knows that an entire city full of people is not going to repent, then it is more merciful to kill them now, so they can't sin anymore!
Well, that's not the explanation God gave to Abraham; he didn't say "I'm killing them because none of them are ever going to repent". But, hey, maybe he just doesn't know how to express himself.
So, if God is omniscient like that, why do any of us have to go through the motions? Since he already knows who is going to repent and who isn't, he could just get rid of all the people who aren't going to repent right here and now just like, according to you, he got rid of the people of Sodom for that reason. He would save me from committing more sins that way, for example. Or why did he favor the people of Sodom with an early death but lets the rest of us merrily sin away?
And what does "not going to repent" mean anyway? I mean, sure, none of them might would have repented if had let them continue their fun sex orgies. But did he try appearing as a burning bush? Why didn't he just do to them whatever he did to Paul?
Also, how plausible is it that a city of tens of thousands of people does not contain a single innocent person? Taking the notion of an omnipotent God at face value, it is far more probable that God destroyed Sodom in a fit of uncontrollable rage, then realized he screwed up and made up a story to cover his tracks.
No, I'm saying it's justifiable for God to kill people who reject him.
So, you are a moral relativist then? It's not OK for you to murder people, but it is OK for God to murder people?
That doesn't square with the Bible. The Bible is clear about the fact that we all have the same knowledge of right and wrong as God.
It's easy to point out discrepancies when you're conjuring them from thin air.
Where else do you want me to conjure them from? There is no physical evidence for your God; all there is is the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and various other kinds of documents. "Thin air" is your problem, not mine.
Despite answering "Neither" to my list of options, you in fact chose option 1, "made a series of guesses with unparalleled accuracy".
There's nothing "unparalleled" about them. Every major religion makes claims like this about its holy books.
How many guesses have to be lucky before you'll actually consider the possibility that it's true?
That's a very good question. In different words, how many agreements like that are chance coincidences and how many are starting to amount to evidence. That's a question you and your church need to answer. Right now, you're just waving your hands.
Are you a linguist and statistician?
Yes.
Years after the Book of Mormon is published, archeologists discover that, lo and behold, there is plenty of physical evidence of a large set of volcanic eruptions in the same time frame as those describe in the Book of Mormon.
There are large volcanic eruptions in the Americas every few decades. Furthermore, the Book of Mormon isn't even very specific about what happened.
The Book of Mormon describes the ancient american peoples as having practiced baptism by immersion
Baptism by immersion exists independently in many religions and cultures and Smith described it because it's part of Christianity. So, there's nothing to be explained here.
So, which is it?
Neither. Smith fabricated a book in the style of prose he was familiar with. And the Mormon church is now trying to justify its existence (and keep the money coming) by highlighting those parts that accidentally appear to have real-world parallels.
You're willing to admit that the law knows there are circumstances where killing another person might be admissible
No, that's a completely unrelated question.
Committing a crime is rational if the expected benefit outweighs the risk. Under the law, committing crimes can be rational because penalties are finite and there's a chance you don't get caught. Under Christian/Mormon theology, the penalty is eternal/infinite and you always get caught, so the expected benefit never outweighs the risk.
This God, who was willing to spare an entire city of wicked people for the sake of a single good person, is the same one you're saying maliciously tortured and murdered innocent people?
Were there no babies in Sodom? No travelers? And why would God go through the charade of having Abraham look for anybody righteous? Did God simply not know, or was he playing games with Abraham?
And even if there was nobody righteous there, given that you claim that free will exists, all those people still would have had the opportunity to change their ways if God hadn't killed them first. Paul certainly wasn't righteous, yet even he got that opportunity.
Furthermore, what God says according to the story he was "willing to do" doesn't matter, what matters is what he actually did, and that was kill tens of thousands of people without an adequate justification.
You know, I recall one very specific story where God wanted to destroy a pair of cities because they had fully and completely rejected him,
So, you are saying it is moral and justifiable to kill people who reject your God? That means you must think it's OK for you to kill me because I fully and completely reject your God.
How does that square with your claim that you tolerate and respect people with different beliefs from yours?