The LDS newsroom tells this to the public at their website.
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/book-of-mormon

If it is a record of great ancient civilizations, which ones and when? Lds.org has charts that show when things happened.

Adam and Eve were about 4,000 BC (6,000 years ago).
http://lds.org/gospellibrary/materials/OT_Timeline_000.pdf

The Jaradites were about 2,200 BC (about 4,000 years ago). Lehi was about 600 BC (about 2,600 years ago).
http://www.lds.org/gospellibrary/materials/BofMChart000.pdf

Mormons imagine that the Mesoamerican stone structures were built by Book of Mormon people. But science shows that things might have begun before the Jaradites, and not in Mesoamerica.

Does North America Hold the Roots of Mesoamerican Civilization?
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6063/1620.summary

"High pyramids and great plazas are the hallmarks of ancient Mesoamerica, from the 3000-year-old Olmec cities along the Gulf of Mexico to the inland metropolis of Tenochtitlan encountered by the Spanish conquistadors. Yet the oldest examples that call to mind this familiar style are found nearly 1000 kilometers to the north in the muddy bayous of Louisiana. Five millennia ago, Native Americans here began to build high mounds of earth flanked by flat plazas that resemble Mesoamerica's classic architecture. A small band of archaeologists suspect that these ancient settlements laid the foundation not only for the North American mound-building tradition that eventually culminated in the great city of Cahokia (see main text) but perhaps also for Mesoamerican civilization."

An interesting comparison of America to people in the Bible is that the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara is the first in Egypt. It dates to about 4,700 years ago. The Louisiana mound complex dates to 5,400 years ago making it older than Egypt's oldest pyramid and older than any Book of Mormon people.

Plant domestication in America had already occurred by 4,400 years ago. More than half of all the world's crops now in cultivation were first domesticated in the Americas, many before Adam and Eve.

LDS websites do not say which "great ancient-America civilizations" the Book of Mormon is supposed to be about. That is how pseudohistory gets promoted, with ambiguity and vagueness. But if you try to point all of this out to Mormons, chances are you will be accused of using anti-Mormon materials. You might get called a bigot or a hateful person.

Faith is an emotional response, not the result of historical research.

Believers

Think about that word. It's a job description. Believers believe, just like the Book of Mormon musical song says. They don't care about years and numbers--scientists disagree about the facts anyway and always change their mind. Everyone knows that--you take a drug and the next thing you know the scientists are saying it causes cancer.

Facts smacts. They are waiting to feel the Holy Spirit...they want to earn the blessings. They have been told if they do their part, God is bound.

The power to bind God and you are offering what? The date of sandal straps?

Thisis the paradigm of the believer and in it, you are the one who is ridiculous.


Anagrammy

Their disregard for science is how they steal Native American cultures without remorse. The Book of Mormon is no different than the Afrocentricity claims about the Olmecs.

Robbing Native American Cultures: Van Sertima's Afrocentricity and the Olmecs
Current Anthropology, Vol. 38, No. 3, June 1997
http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/vansertima.pdf

"This article is an attempt to address the issues articulated by by students and concerned educators with regard to the validity of Van Sertima's hypotheses and the failure of the academic establishment to confront them in a systematic way. It is important for anthropologists and archaeologists to deal with this question because of its prevalence and because it diminishes the real accomplishments of Native American cultures."

"Archaeology has a responsiblity to prevent pseudo-archaeologists from robbing humanity of the real achievements of past cultures."

If they have spare time, people like to build things. Isolated peoples may build things which look roughly similar because there are limited materials (rocks, dirt) and these have engineering limitations. There's only so many ways they may be stacked up without falling. Pyramids of a few limited sorts last longest for obvious reasons. Trying to draw parallels and relations between different people's pyramids is silly.

Yes, Mormons are silly.

The book is a work of fiction.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/26/2012 07:00PM by canadianfriend.

Don't they believe something like Maya = Nephites, Aztecs = Lamanites?

Some Mormons do. It is irrelevant though because science shows American earthwork structures before the Book of Mormon and even earlier than Egypt's pyramids.

A Mound Complex in Louisiana at 5400-5000 Years Before the Present
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/277/5333/1796.abstract

DNA shows the Book of Mormon to be a fraud.

Native Americans have Asian DNA.
They are NOT of Semitic descend as the Book of Mormon claims.

Mormons try to explain that the Near Eastern DNA is so diluted in the Asian DNA that it cannot be found. But when the archaeology is added to the argument like the study in this post, it makes it worse for Mormonism.

The Asian DNA people were building earthwork structures that resemble not only the North American mounds but also the Mesoamerican rock structures and they were doing this before the Jaradites, even before Noah.

I'm finally getting around to reading Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel".

It is just mind boggling how much sense he makes of civilization's history, and how little it resembles anything remotely like the BoM.

It's mind boggling as well that any TBM - like Romney - claims to have read it and still believes.

Those who have not read Guns, Germs and Steel can get an idea about it from this paper by Jared Diamond.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v418/n6898/pdf/nature01019.pdf

The simplistic theories, bible-based, were prevalent in the 18th and 19th centuries. Going to the bible, then going off on an imaginative tangent was happening all the time.

Finding ways to explain the origin of Native Americans was a hobby of many men. So was finding ways to justify taking their lands and killing them. "They were dark-skinned because of a curse, and remnants of people who killed the righteous whiter people." Very convenient and salve for the conscience.

Have you read this book?

Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492-1729 by Lee Eldridge Huddleston, 1967

It is a valuable scholarly book on the theories ("imaginary tangents") that have been made up about how the American Indians got to America. It is valuable for debunking diffusionist claims.