Some bits of doctrine as taught by the Church:

"The book of Ether gives a history of a civilization, the
Jaredites, who left the Old World at the time of the Tower of
Babel, approximately 2200 B.C."
--Robert D. Hales, of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, General
Conference October 2006.

https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2006/10/holy-scriptures-the-power-of-god-unto-our-salvation?lang=eng

From "The Pearl Of Great Price Student Manual:"

"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.)"

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

So the Church tells us that the Tower of Babel (crucial for
Book of Mormon chronology of the Jaredites) occurred around
2200 B.C. Before then the world all spoke one language, we are
told.

Now go here and compare what is known about WRITTEN language:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_first_written_accounts

Note:

Examples of written Egyptian dating to 2690 B.C.E.

Examples of written Sumerian dating to 2600 - 2500 B.C.E.

Examples of written Akkadian dating to 2400 B.C.E.

Examples of written Eblaite dating to 2400 B.C.E.

Examples of written Elamite dating to 2300 B.C.E.

Many Christian Religions are willing to consider the flood and
the Tower of Babel stories to be mythical. However Mormonism
has painted itself into a corner by the Jaradites in the Book
of Mormon being from the Tower of Babel "confusion of the
tongues."

Thus here are five examples of DIFFERENT written languages that
were in existence BEFORE the time of the tower of Babel. as
needed to make the Mormon scriptures true.

By the way, there was continuous Egyptian civilization from
long before the 2400 B.C.E. date for Noah's Flood until long
afterwards.

History is anti-Mormon.

Hey Baura

Good point. One more thing to add to the list of stupid things you have to believe, in order to believe in Mormonism.

as always, solid post, baura

i think that the garden of eden, the flood and the tower of babel are actually extremely significant problems for mormonism that just aren't talked about enough - whenever i can i like to link to this:

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

there are no explanations - in fact, the explanation from that talk basically boils down to: facts? we don't need no facts because we just believe...

another thing to consider is proto-writing - not only do we have solid examples of writing from before the supposed tower of babel but we can also see the development of those writing systems over hundreds or even thousands of years - there is just no way for them to explain it away

I read half of the referenced Ensign article. Wow. Just wow. That people of even moderate intelligence can accept the logic--illogic, even ridiculousness--of that article, which was written in 2006, in the twenty-first century is astounding. It's not just "facts be damned, we just belief." If it were, it might not be so bad. Instead, it represents a systematic program of tearing down rational thinking, and methods of rational thinking, to replace rational thinking with utter idiocy. Once rationality has been destroyed, idiocy--TSSC's self-serving idiocy--can be installed without complaint from the victim. It's atrocious. Really.

Every single thing about the article is distortion and lies. For example, in defending an historical, worldwide flood, against geologist critics who point out, scientifically, how it is that we know a worldwide flood didn't really happen, the article actually steps the reader through a silly explanation of how so-called modern geology works. The article claims that modern geology, and it's criticism of a worldwide flood, is the product of an idea formulated in 1795, which states that geologic processes of the past are similar to those of the present. The article says that this idea, though compelling, is really just an idea, it's not a fact; and Mormons know that God has been involved with parting seas and moving mountains and causing floods, and therefore, the Mormon "idea" that God intervenes and creates discontinuous causes for geological events is an equally valid idea. In other words, scientific geology is based on an idea: geologic processes are continuous; Mormon geology is based on a different idea: God intervenes making geologic processes discontinuous. Consequently, belief in the Mormon religion is no different than belief in the "religion" of science. One simply picks one's beliefs.

This concept utterly misrepresents the last 200 plus years of geological scientific inquiry. This article-writer doesn't know that geology is not laboring under assumptions thought-up in 1795. Seventeen f'ing ninety-five! This article was written in 2006!

A world-wide flood did not happen. It's not a question of causation, as in, there's no mechanism in the present that would cause a worldwide flood, therefore, there can be no mechanism in the past that would have caused a world-wide flood. It's that there is abundant evidence from all over the world that a recent, world-wide flood never happened. Never killed all the humans and animals, never laid waste the ground. Never happened. The time of the flood may have seemed a long, long time ago to OT bible-writers and ignoramuses like JS and his cohorts; but to geologists, the time of the flood was yesterday. Geologists know what happened yesterday, and their knowledge is not based on applying an assumption thunk up in 1795.

This is just but one of multitudes of stupidity in this article. (I particularly liked when the author said the equivalent of "many fictional characters have testified to the historicity of Noah, saying he was an historical, not mythical person." Oh, well. That settles that, doesn't it.)

I would really like to see the doctoral study which examines the effects of this kind of mental muddle on the rational thinking needed for daily life. Do people who follow and believe in this kind of convoluted destruction of rational thought processes, and who replace critical, rational, thinking with authority-induced stupidity and confusion, have trouble problem-solving in their actual, day-to-day existences? Do they find themselves caught up in black-and-white thinking, paralysis, depression, or other non-functional thinking styles?

And what of this author? How can a powerful person be so deluded about the real facts of the world around him and how experts in fields such as geology deduce those facts? No wonder people concerned about the future of the country and its youth, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, go nuts over this stuff.

Yes, history is positively anti-mormon. The evidence just won't conform, even when it's tortured.

Isn't it marvelous that the pure and holy Adamic language can be written in so many seemingly unrelated ways? Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, and Elemite! Incredible.

Yes, brother Leap.

But Anti-Mormon philologists, guided by Satan, have deciphered
ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Akkadian etc. and have arrogantly
declared them to be separate languages, not just separate
writing systems for the same language as we, who have received
greater light and knowledge, know that they must be.

My exmo brother studied Asian languages at UC Berkeley. He earned a BA in Altaic tongues (Korean, Mongolian and Manchurian). When he told our TBM father about the history of developing languages, Dad said, "What an interesting theory. Of course we know that all languages came from the Tower of Babel when the Lord confounded the speakers."

Four years of focused studying, late hours, wide reading and a teaching gig in Mongolia along with a degree from one of the top ten universities on the planet. All of it disregarded, because of something Joseph Smith copied from the Old Testament.

My father owes my brother an apology, don't you think?

In addition to a Mormon or two, I've had Xtian fundies add their two cents to subjects I took at the university level. This would include ancient history, geology and anthropology. Now granted, these were electives, but I had to fight down the same impulse I had each time. And that was to say, "Gee, thanks for sh***ing all over my education."

With these being only electives for me, I can imagine how hurtful that was to your brother regarding his intensive education.

You may have lost in the father lottery, Don, but I think you won in the exmo brother drawing.

Christians are generally able to understand that the stories are allegorical but the BoM puts TSCC in a real problem. But JS also does with many other absurdities to compound the error like Adam-Ondi-Ahman. I wonder if any mos back in the 1830s named their child Zelph?

My understanding is that there are a variety of spoken languages in China; but they all use the same written language. This is because Chinese written language is ideographic, rather than phonic.

Since China is (more or less) on the opposite side of the Earth from New England, it all balances out.

See, the BoM is true.

<end sarcasm>

My take on this; Joseph Smith was an intelligent person. He lacked education, but sought after knowledge tenaciously. He strikes me as a smart guy who overreached his knowledge base... He went so far as to hire a Jewish guy to tutor him in Hebrew and read extensively. His imagination overran his knowledge, though. This is revealed in inconsistencies such as you brought up here. He read the bible and made a vast number of interpolations in order to build his religion. He missed the mark by overshooting it.

Mormonism requires you to jam round pegs into square holes. I even saw otherwise excellent geology profs at BYU go through metal gymnastics to justify the flood etc....

I understand a pay check is way more important than 5 minutes of pain, but you would think it had to be a periodic thorn in the side.

Also, wanted to add that the literal mountains of fossils hundreds of millions of years old really puts the thumb screws on the "no death before the fall" doctrine. Without this doctrine Mormonism kind a falls apart.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/01/2014 07:29PM by perky.

I must add to this that there is evidence in Australia that the Aboriginal people had language LONG before any of these dates. And it was not the 'universal' form of language. A conservative date for the arrival of Australian Aboriginal people is 40,000 years ago and this is the generally accepted date by all academics. They had to cross a 100 mile stretch of water in water craft to reach the new continent, and this would have required some form of language. The co-operation needed to accomplish this feat would have required a language, even if it was a sign language.


This puts all of the BofM stuff totally in the shade.


Also so much of what happened in Australia is ignored by the the Bible. Where are the koalas and kangaroos on the Ark???

I giggle a lot over it all, it is just plain RIDICULOUS!!!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/01/2014 07:30PM by fluhist.

I recently completed watching the "Great Courses" course on
"The Story of Human Language."

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/story-of-human-language.html?cid=1600

The instructor did two things that I thought were applicable.
He said that he was convinced that human language was at least
70,000 years old.

He also showed a list of parallel words between Japanese and

English. He spent less than a minute on the list saying that
if you work hard enough you can find similarities like this
between any two languages, and that this didn't show a relation
between English (an Indo-European language) and Japanese.

That got me to thinking about the crap that Mopologists do,
specially with the Book of Abraham. They find SOMETHING in an
ancient culture (Egypt's a good one since Egypt was in business
for at least 2500 year as a major world power--note that is
over TEN TIMES as long as the USA has been a nation) and then
find SOME way to link it to SOMETHING in the BOA or BOM etc.
Then they say, "how could Joseph Smith have known . . ."

The answer is, "Joseph Smith didn't know, and the sporadic
parallels you cherry pick and take out of context are not
indications of any relation any more than the list of
word-parallels the professor in the language course displayed
are evidence that Japanese is related to English."

There is a problem at almost every turn, on every level. Has anyone ever tried to count all the problems? Is it even possible?

A TBM relative recently returned to Utah from a seniors mission in Taiwan. While there he and his wife (who is Chinese) were able to find some of her genealogical records, in his words, "going back 4500 years."

Being an ancient, literate civilization, Chinese records aren't like ours; they have the reputation of being both detailed and reasonably accurate, so that wasn't an issue. But I couldn't help tweaking him about it anyway.

I congratulated him on finding records back to 2500 BC, but then reminded him that such a date would not only be 300 years before the Tower of Babel (when the world was still speaking pure Adamic), but 100 years *before* Noah's flood. I expressed my delight that his wife's ancestors were able to survive the flood outside of the Ark. I added that Bruce R. McConkie, Joseph Fielding Smith, and Mark E. Petersen would not be pleased with the heresy, and maybe Jeff Holland too.

He didn't reply to my email.

Awesomeness.

Nicely done!

And what about this:

Genesis 10:
10:1 Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.,
10:2 The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.
10:3 And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah.
10:4 And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim.
10:5 By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.


Especially the part about "every one after his tongue."

Or is this supposedly after the tower of Babel?

I think that would be more evidence that Genesis was compiled
from multiple sources, much as the two conflicting creation
accounts (Genesis 1, and Genesis 2) do.

what do they say about the thousands of different species of animals the ark would have needed? and ones that are only in far away places, polar bears, penguins.

"The book of Ether is not necessarily to be taken as literal history, as some of the information in it may be of a more legendary, or folk tale, origin, but the eternal, spiritual truths it imparts still resonate for us, even today."

Postdate to...say....March 27th, 2016, and let's see what happens.

Good work Baura, as usual ;-)

I agree with everything said on this thread, but another thing struck me in the chronology given by LDS:

According to them, in 2400 BC everything was washed away by the flood leaving only Noah, his family and various fauna 2-by-2, yet it only took them 200 years to replenish the earth enough to build the Tower of Babel...

They must have been so busy baby-making, how did they ever find the time or energy to build the Tower?

Or is it just another fairy story?

Tom in Paris
who's finally on holiday at last !

Great post baura. They definitely paint themselves into a corner. But it looks like the church may be starting to admit that the BoM is not completely historical. The BoM translation essay does admit that the BoM is more spiritual than historical.

for this discussion. I am very isolated. For a long time I was very insulated. I am grateful to read this intelligent conversation about key issues that have long bothered me.

Just the Chinese language alone, both spoken AND written, goes back almost 5,000 years. Don't they consider this? Or was China not actually part of the world that counts?

I think that's it. They only cred about the Middle East...er, North America.

Yeah but who knows, diverse written languages might have all been based on a common tongue. Different ways of writing it down invariably arose as writing evolved you see.

As to any confusion among the spoken word speakers, it could well be due to uh regional accents.

Not making apology here, just that I am wont to babble on.

Excellent video by nonstampcollector illustrating some of Noah's problems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_BzWUuZN5w