An email I just sent a TBM relative of mine:

According to the Pearl of Great Price Student Manual

https://www.lds.org/manual/the-pearl-of-great-price-student-manual/the-book-of-abraham?lang=eng

we have the following chronology:

******BEGIN QUOTE*******

Who Is Abraham and When Did He Live?

Adam and Eve and the Fall (approximately 4000 B.C.), Enoch
(approximately 3000 B.C.), Noah and the Flood (approximately
2400 B.C.), and the tower of Babel (approximately 2200 B.C.)
preceded Abraham’s time. Abraham, who was born in about 2000
B.C., was the father of Isaac and the grandfather of Jacob,
whose name was changed to Israel. (See Bible Dictionary,
“chronology,” 635–36.)

******END QUOTE*******

My understanding is that, in Mormonism, Noah's flood is a real
event--that the entire earth was flooded and everyone on it
killed except for Noah, his sons, and their wives.

One problem is that there were continuous civilizations on the
earth from well before 2400 B.C. to well after 2400 B.C.

Narmer unified Egypt into a single nation around sometime
before 3000 B.C. There were separate kingdoms of upper and
lower Egypt before then. The "old Kingdom" continued until
around 2125 B.C. Egypt was a continuous civilization (with
intermediate periods of fractured governmental control) for
around 4000 years. There is no time for a world-wide flood.

The same can be said of Mesopotamian civilization. The
historical record for these civilizations extends back
centuries before 2400 B.C.

Of course things like geology and dendrochronology tells us
that there has been no such worldwide flood in the past 10,000
years.

The date of 2200 B.C. for the Tower of Babel is another
problem. The great pyramid had already been in existence for
300 years by then, and we have records going back nearly 1000
years before this date in separate languages. Mesopotamian and
Egyptian writing systems both came into existence around 3200 B.C.

The insistence of the literal reality of the flood and the
tower of Babel story, is just among the many reasons I can't
take Mormonism seriously.

I have read that the Egyptians kept very detailed records of the seasonal flooding of the Nile. No worldwide floods were recorded right through the period that one (Noah's) supposedly occurred.

Your historical points are well considered, baura. I have the same problems with the fantastic claims of the Mormonites.

This was the key understanding that broke me free of Mormonism.

Mormonism requires these events for the BoM to be true because of the book of Ether.

They similarly need a literal Adam and Eve, no death before the fall that drop them squarely into Young Earth Creationism.

It's a nightmare.

The Book of Mormon was simply speaking as a book.

HA!

"My understanding is that, in Mormonism, Noah's flood is a real
event--that the entire earth was flooded and everyone on it
killed except for Noah, his sons, and their wives." - This one sentence sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale. I mean really? How convenient that everyone dies EXCEPT Noah's family. Yeah OK, I believe, NOT!

Once upon a time there was a flood. The entire earth was flooded. There was a man named Noah who only had sons. When the flood covered the whole earth, only Noah and his sons and their wives were left. Everyone else died. FAIRY TALE TIME!

"Noah's Flood and Tower of Babel make Mormonism fake" - and 6 million other falsehoods in TSCC.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2014 04:07PM by verilyverily.

The existence of Abraham is another problem, as well as Israel, Moses, etc... Even though the writing systems were well-established for centuries prior and during that time period, there isn't any contemporary evidence that corroborates any of their existence, or that Biblical version of history at all. Even archaeology can't support the existence of King David, or Solomon's temple. In fact, there's no evidence that there was any sort of king in Jerusalem at that time at all.

I don't believe anything in the Bible that takes place prior to 700BC.

Come on you guys. You know the answer to all of these questions and doubts of yours. Doubt your doubts and then get on with believing as you are told - pronto.

While Christians and Jews can accept the stories as allegory, mormons are in a difficult position because of the BoM, etc. Only mormons "know" where the Garden of Eden was and that the languages were indeed confused at Babel because of the BoM and "latter-day revelation". Real cog-dis. It doesn't even meet the "laugh test in Brooklyn".

The real tragedy of The Flood was that the other thousands of well-seasoned sailors worldwide, who must have been out on the water, or at the very least had quality boats down at the local yacht club, suddenly lost their ability navigate and fish. I guess those sinners were too busy inventing written language, building pyramids, and playing with their pet unicorns.

Indeed :))

O those guys were all baptized by god by full immersion, just like the earth. rol-i

But do you FEEEEEEL it? You're going with all those solid scientific, geological, historical, archeological, linguistic facts. Facts are of the devil. Facts are God's way of trying to trick us... I mean test our faith. See how well Satan has worked on you? If you look at facts, most Old Testament stories and all of the Book of Mormon are just complete phony baloney. That's why we have the feelings test. It's the only way God can get through to you when Satan and his minions have poluted your mind with all that bad stuff. It's easy: 1) convince yourself that you want to believe it's true. 2) Pray and ask if it's true. 3) See if you feel good. You don't even have to feel convinced. Just have a good feeling. And there you have it.

I was already "losing my testimony" due to some horrific personal experiences as a young kid, but plain good old-fashioned history proved to me that TSCC was dead wrong. For instance, I was in elementary school in the '80s, and I was reading about ancient Chinese culture, circa 5000 BCE. Things like that, and dinosaurs, provided proof to me that TSCC, and their young earth belief, was dead wrong.

The Tower of Babel is especially problematic because the historicity of the Book of Mormon relies directly on it.

The record directly, states that the Jaredites left during the Tower of Babel, so if the Tower of Babel did not literally occur at approximately 2200 bc the BoM is not true.

It was just a "spiritual" flooding. Not to be taken literally. It just meant there was a flood of false teachings that covered the earth. Noah and his family were the only righteous people at the time. They got two of each animal to send them out as missionaries to teach the other animals to be righteous as well.

If the BoM were not so poorly written I would have read it before joining and never joined. But I could not get beyond the second page before falling asleep. After thirty years I got a copy of the original and found it easier. Then I knew to a certainty it was false.

You just learn to separate faith and science. You have to. 'It'll be explained eventually', and stuff like that. You start thinking maybe dinosaurs were actually from another planet or maybe God keeps hiding all the evidence because he wants everything to be by faith.

It's sad that I had to be in my 30's before I did a double take.

they are stuck with both issues because they are spoken of as literal events in their special Mormon scriptures

from the Ensign:

"There is a third group of people—those who accept the literal message of the Bible regarding Noah, the ark, and the Deluge. Latter-day Saints belong to this group. In spite of the world’s arguments against the historicity of the Flood, and despite the supposed lack of geologic evidence, we Latter-day Saints believe that Noah was an actual man, a prophet of God, who preached repentance and raised a voice of warning, built an ark, gathered his family and a host of animals onto the ark, and floated safely away as waters covered the entire earth. We are assured that these events actually occurred by the multiple testimonies of God’s prophets."


"Many prophets from two different continents and different eras have identified Noah as a historical, not a mythical, character. These include Enoch (see Moses 7:42–43), Abraham (see Abr. 1:19), Amulek (see Alma 10:22), Moroni (see Ether 6:7), Matthew (see JS—M 1:41–42), Peter (see 2 Pet. 2:5), Joseph Smith (see D&C 84:14–15; D&C 133:54), and Joseph F. Smith (see D&C 138:9, 41). The Lord Jesus Christ himself spoke to the Nephites of the “waters of Noah” (3 Ne. 22:9). Recent latter-day prophets and apostles have similarly spoken of Noah. For example, Elder Howard W. Hunter, then of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, asked, “Because modernists now declare the story of the flood is unreasonable and impossible, should we disbelieve the account of Noah and the flood as related in the Old Testament?” 3


"For some in the modern world, the historicity of the tower of Babel story, as with the Flood, is often discounted. One modern school of thought considers the account to be nothing more than an “artful parable” and an “old tale.” 11 But Latter-day Saints accept the story as it is presented in Genesis. Further, we have the second witness of the Book of Mormon. The title page of the Book of Mormon explains that the book of Ether “is a record of the people of Jared, who were scattered at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people, when they were building a tower to get to heaven.” The book of Ether itself then tells of when “Jared came forth with his brother and their families, with some others and their families, from the great tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people, and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth” (Ether 1:33)."



https://www.lds.org/ensign/1998/01/the-flood-and-the-tower-of-babel?lang=eng

Also problematic is the interpretation of Genesis 10:25 as meaning that all the earth's landmasses were joined together just a few thousand years ago:

"President Joseph Fielding Smith wrote: 'If … the earth is to be restored as it was in the beginning, then all the land surface will again be in one place as it was before the days of Peleg, when this great division was accomplished. Europe, Africa, and the islands of the sea including Australia, New Zealand, and other places in the Pacific must be brought back and joined together as they were in the beginning.'”

http://www.lds.org/manual/doctrine-and-covenants-student-manual/sections-132-138/section-133-the-lords-appendix-to-the-doctrine-and-covenants?lang=eng

this was before we discovered mid ocean rifts and had a decent knowledge of plate tectonics. Joseph Fielding Smith ptobably figured that the continents floated on top of the ocean.

JF Smith, down the memory hole.

The new Ensign, and JF Smith course manual, will attempt to kill member's desires to study JF Smith's many books full of fundie craziness. Tell enough to let the members think they know enough about him, but leave out all the currently "non-faith promoting" stuff and non-pc crapulence.

Yes, I was very disappointed at the new Joseph Fielding Smith manual, too. There is no doubt that it was written so that members would look no further into his writings. I thank Gawd that a Mormon gave me a copy of a volume of his "Answers to Gospel Questions: Volume 2" early on. It permanently innoculated me against Mormonism because, if nothing else, old Joe Fielding Smith--like his son-in-law McConkie--was presented LDS doctrine without all the whitewash.

neolithics sights in the Levant date as early as 17,000 bp.

"...we Latter-day Saints believe that Noah was an actual man, a prophet of God, who preached repentance and raised a voice of warning..."

Seems that Noah was about as successful as a lot of the missionaries--he didn't get many investigators, and Zero baptisms...

What do you mean *zero* baptisms?! Back in the days of Noah everyone on earth got dunked!

Granted they were held down a little too long...

squeebee Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> What do you mean *zero* baptisms?! Back in the
> days of Noah everyone on earth got dunked!
>
> Granted they were held down a little too long...

Such a very spiritual baptismal service. <tongue out>

Yes, but they didn't "schedule" their baptisms!

Besides languages vastly predating the Tower of Babel, the story of the Jaredites crossing never-populated lands before their ocean crossing on their way to America (an implied empty land itself) is contradicted in all directions.
Every possible land route from Babylon was amply populated a very long time before the Jaredites. The Americas were populated quite a long time before the Jaredites.

BoM apologists say nothing precludes the presence of other populations in America besides the BoM peoples, but this contradicts the BoM which all but says it.

There was no continent to cross or arrive at in 2500BC that had never been populated. All of Eurasia and all of the Americas were long-settled by then.

This statement from Oaks sums up the whole argument. You can't mingle reason and religion or you will get either bad science or a phony religion!

Good science reveals phony religion

Phony religion reveals no reasoning in science.

-----------------------
"Latter-day Saints should strive to use both science and religion to extend knowledge and to build faith. But those who do so must guard against the significant risk that efforts to end the separation between scientific scholarship and religious faith will only promote a substandard level of performance, where religion and science dilute one another instead of strengthening both.

For some, an attempt to mingle reason and faith can result in irrational scholarship or phony religion, either condition demonstrably worse than the described separation."



—Dallin H. Oaks, Life's Lessons Learned: Personal Reflections (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Co., 2011), 58-59.

Edit/comment:according to Oaks one should not use reasoning in religion. That sums up mormonism as a fake.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/18/2014 09:22AM by oldklunker.

Dallin Oaks must know that Mormonism is false. The same goes for other leaders who are reasonably intelligent and educated. How could it be otherwise? Yet apparently some really smart people do believe these religious fantasies. I doubt Oaks does. He probably sees it as "good for the members," and is simply lying in order to build "faith" (gullibility) among members.