Here's a thought: the apologists claim to have found a number of candidates for Bountiful. Why not throw in a couple of rubber duckies equipped with a gps tracking device to see where the winds and the currents would have taken Nephi's boat?

It's been done before and shouldn't be too expensive for a multi-billion dollar corporation to prop up their core product:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Friendly_Floatees.png

Every time the church tries to prove its truth claims with verifiable techniques (Book of Abraham, archealogy in meso America) it fails miserably.

I wouldn't expect them to try again...ever...

It's been done already, in 1959,by a guy named Devere Baker. He wrote a book about it called "The Raft"; his vessel was called the "Lehi IV" (I guess he tried it three previous times).

There is also the linguistic evidence allowing us to trace Lehi's progress. See "Lehi In The Pacific" by L. Duwayne Samuelson at http://packham.n4m.org/pacific.htm

See also my rebuttal, linked there.

Richard, that was hilarious.
As I read the "original" article, time and again I said to myself, "What a pile of nonsense, but I can see why mormons buy into these made-up connections."

Then I read your rebuttal. Brilliant :)

I also enjoyed this with a good laugh.

Oh, come on. Poi rhymes with Oy. The name of the purple paste is obviously Hebrew in origin. Also, the famous pig roast started as a Mosaic sacrifice but was perverted by pagans into a luau feast after Lehi left the Hawaiian islands. It's similar to what happened to football worship in Texas.

Like so many things with the BoM, a Pacific crossing makes no sense. To get from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, they'd need to go through Indonesia, where some of the strongest currents on the planet flow in the wrong direction. They could go around the south side of Australia, where the currents tend to flow eastward, but that's a long, stupid way to go, especially if you you're going to end up in some yet-to-be-discovered spot Central America (as the Limited Geography Theory claims). They could go around Africa to the Atlantic, but, again, that's an unnecessarily long and dubious way to go. It would have been much easier and faster to go through the Mediterranean to the Atlantic where the dominant currents take them to the north coast of Brazil, into the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. But that would have messed up JS's tale of them trekking down the Arabian Peninsula and all that nonsense.

But we mustn't forget religion's universal escape clause when it claims ridiculous or impossible things happened: God can do magic. "Um, God temporarily changed the world's currents, delivering the Lehites to the New World. Yeah, that's it."

http://www.firmlds.org/feature.php?id=15

>The Phoenicia Ship Expedition has now demonstrated unequivocally that Lehi's voyage could have left the Arabian Peninsula and sailed around Africa to the America's rather than attempting to cross the earth's largest ocean at its widest point, as proposed by Mesoamerican theorists.

He's in an argument with the old FARMS/Maxwell Institute crowd, and he's brought up the Ancient Aliens/Bigfoot-er History Channel as a basis for his claims. Of course if you look at the map he has pictured, the Phoenicia (which was a voyage aimed at exploring a possible early circumnavigation of Africa beginning in Arabia) wound up far out in the Atlantic. That's still a long ways from the Ohio Valley.

>The History Channel recently released a documentary called "Who Really Discovered America?" which explores a number of possible incursions into the America's by the ancients. In the film they discuss the Book of Mormon account of the voyage of Lehi and his family. Unfortunately, they consulted with Mesoamerican theorists in concluding that Lehi's voyage would have taken them from the Saudi Arabian peninsula to the western shores of Mesoamerica.

Those of us with some familiarity with the subject reviewed that "Who Really" program and concluded it was a piece of crap.

All of this, of course, was why I created my "Great Lehi Boatbuilding and Sailing Challenge," inviting interested sorts to re-create Lehi's voyage using only ancient technology, circa 600 B.C. Fortunately, as far as I know, there have been no drownings.

> All of this, of course, was why I created my
> "Great Lehi Boatbuilding and Sailing Challenge,"

I knew you'd show up on this thread :-) How's it hangin', bro? Any news about the John Varrah Long diaries?

I think you've got mine, but I upgraded last fall, and things are a bit scattered for me, and mormnisme is all I remember. Use SL_Cabbie@yahoo.com if need be, although the other is easiest.

I've got some stuff I can update, but I'm not going to put it on the board.

YOU JUST DON'T GET IT!

The currents were all changed to accommodate the journey by a being with unlimited power.

And why didn't a being with unlimited power just teleport them to the New World? THAT would be a story.

The accounts of sea voyages in the Book of Mormon are clearly the fantasies of a land locked farm boy. It's also clear that none of the Mormon apologists have ever traveled on the open ocean in a small boat.

I just had the chance to travel up the coast of Norway several hundred miles over a couple of days and thought about the skill of crew piloting the boat through rocks, islands and heavy seas on the exposed coast compared to the nonsense of the Liahona and the Jaradite subs Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, and Syd Rigdon were delusional.

The Phoenicians were the greatest sailors at the time of Lehi -and they stuck to coastal journeys. Polynesians, Micronesians, Vikings, never would have taken the route Church apologists suggest. I've often thought it would be interesting to put Monson, Packer and Perry in a sailboat on the Church property on Catalina Island in the winter during a big swell and see if they could make it to San Pedro, 21 miles by the power of the priesthood. I've done it but I don't think a mormon prophet could.

I'm happy to hear from someone with some actual nautical experiences, and I hope you'll continue to sink those mythical vessels with facts and common sense.

The "hyper-diffusionist" crowd gained a foothold when the Atlantic magazine produced a three-part tabloid piece, "The Diffusionists Have Landed" which relied extensively on the claims of John L. Sorenson, the original "Tapir John" himself.

Sorenson, of course, was a believer in the "Pacific Crossing Route," but the Meldrumite crowd has Glenn Beck on their side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPX6qg4zZRI

Meldrum's co-conspirator, Wayne May, appears in this one between some actual scholars (who were livid at the way their interviews were selectively edited). Beck appears at the 3:44 mark, and he offers some real howlers if your sense of humor tends toward the bizarre and the pathos.

The patriarch of the "Apostate Branch" of my formerly Mormon family--my grandfather--served a mission to New Zealand in the 1920's. He informally abandoned his beliefs after returning (and my g-g-grandfather called him a "snake-in-the-grass" because my grandmother followed him out of the church). I've often wondered if that voyage home wasn't the source of his realizing the BOM was a fraud because of the impossibility of an ocean migration by any route. He was also deeply troubled by seeing Maori families split up when some would be baptized and others rejected the gospel.

rt Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Here's a thought: the apologists claim to have
> found a number of candidates for Bountiful. Why
> not throw in a couple of rubber duckies equipped
> with a gps tracking device to see where the winds
> and the currents would have taken Nephi's boat?
>
We can dub the expedition Con-tiki.