That's my new term for the group of apologetic arguments of why we can't find the lamanites any more. It's not a theory about geography. It's not even a theory of anything.

It's simply a loophole.


I found a new version of this loophole from this site http://staylds.com/docs/HowToStay.html :

> Students of LDS Church history will confirm that a number of
> LDS tenants that were considered by most members to be hard,
> unchangeable doctrine have been largely wiped from the books:
> -Polygamy as a requirement for salvation
> -Valiance in the pre-mortal existence creating our conditions in earth life
> -Dynastic sealings
> -Multiple baptisms
> -Adam-God theory
> -Native Americans as descendants of Lamanites <<<
> -and so on…
> So if a certain tenant of LDS doctrine doesn't appeal to you,
> don't worry. Chances are that the church has already chosen to
> distance itself from the particular doctrine.


Notice how they snuck one doctrine that is still on the books? I suppose they anticipate its upcoming demise due to DNA science.


Another oldie and a classic (that is continually edited in an attempt to keep up with science):

http://en.fairmormon.org/Book_of_Mormon/DNA_evidence



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/19/2010 04:35PM by Jesus Smith.

I dug this one out of a brand new bullchip filter I installed just to read the FAIR article...

>Fundamentalist "suicide bombing"
>It should be remembered too that many sectarian critics use DNA science in a sort of "suicide bombing" attack on the Church. The fundamentalist Christian critics are happy to use DNA as a stick to beat the Book of Mormon, but do not tell their readers that there is much stronger DNA evidence for concepts which fundamentalist Christian readers might not accept, such as:
>evolutionary change in species
>human descent from other primates
>And, despite being inconsistent with DNA data, fundamentalist critics do not call on their congregations to abandon such literalistic Biblical concepts as:
>the earth being only 6,000 years old
>a Biblical Adam and Eve were the parents of all humanity only 4,000 years before Christ
>a world-wide, Noachian flood which exterminated all life except that which was in the Ark, occurred approximately 5,000 years ago
>The critics are often hypocritical—they claim the Saints should abandon the Book of Mormon on flimsy, dubious science, and yet do not tell their audience that they should (by the same logic) abandon religious beliefs of their own that have much more DNA evidence against them.

So what they are doing is telling the fundie evangies promoting the DNA research is, "Hey, this sh*t is gonna mess up your message, too. Might be best to shut up, ya know?"

Seriously...

And for those who might be influenced by the FAIR folks, here's a recent reply by Simon on these issues...

http://signaturebooks.com/?p=2784

>Those who believe that the Book of Mormon is a literal history of ancient America assert that seafaring Israelites landed in America and intermixed with local natives. Some Mormon literalists have conceded that since there were so few Israelites among millions of Siberians in the Americas, their genetic legacy is unobservable, while nevertheless remaining convinced that Israelites numbered among the ancestors of Native Americans.

>NO LONGER POSSIBLE TO HIDE

>“It’s no longer possible to say that the genetic evidence is unavailable because it became extinct,” Southerton explains. “If there were Lamanites in the Americas, they will be found. If there weren’t, we’ll learn that too. The recent technological advances have changed everything.”

As for FAIR, they are to be commended for the way they emulate Hugh Nibley and his fallback approach, which I've characterized as "when controversy arises, re-interpret the data accordingly; nobody's reading this crap anyway."

From the FairWiki article...

>Despite claims that Y-chromosome data do not support Book of Mormon claims, there are some markers which should be considered in another light:
>Douglas Forbes points out that Y-chromosome SNP biallelic marker Q-P36 (also known by the mutation marker M-242), postulated by geneticist Doron Behar and colleagues to be a founding lineage among Ashkenazi Jewish populations, is also found in Iranian and Iraqi Jews and is a founding lineage group present in 31 percent of self-identified Native Americans in the U.S.[4]

Using their tried and true "circular footnote" tactic, a FARMS publication, "DNA and the Book of Mormon" by David G. Stewart, Jr. is cited . . .

However,

http://signaturebooks.com/?p=3159

>There is compelling evidence to show that Native American Q-P36 lineages came from Siberia, not from Jewish populations. The Q-P36 lineage is a minor (~5%) lineage among the Ashkenazi (Behar et al., 2004), but it is most likely to have originated in surrounding European populations, where it occurs at similarly frequencies.3 The claim that the Q lineage is “scattered all over central Eurasia and concentrated in Turkistan” is extremely misleading. The Q lineage occurs at a frequency of about 10% in Turkistan; however, the highest concentrations of the Q lineage in populations outside of the Americas are in the Selkups and Kets (66-94%) adjacent to the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia. The Altai populations also contain the highest frequencies of the American Indian mtDNA founder lineages A, B, C, D and X. Since Siberian Altai populations contain high frequencies of both paternal and maternal DNA lineages that are most closely related to American Indian lineages, it is particularly likely that the Q-P36 lineage arose in Siberia.

I have already previously linked the work of linguist Edward Vajda that suggests a relatively modern relationship (well, around 20,000 years ago, anyway) between the language of the Ket people of Siberia and the Na-Dene family of Native American languages...

http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ea210/ket.htm

Not only is the DNA pointing to Siberian origins of the Q-P36 Y-chromosome haplogroup, the linguistic evidence is as well.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/19/2010 06:12PM by SL Cabbie.

Good pts, Cabbie. It isn't just DNA that is doing away with the Lamanite. It's a like a trifecta of linguistics, archeology and DNA ancestry.

Who runs this site?