This one is Book of Mormon Geography.
https://www.lds.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/book-of-mormon-geography?lang=eng

It begins with "The Book of Mormon includes a history of an ancient people who migrated from the Near East to the Americas."

What a joke!

It says "The Church takes no position on the specific geographic location of Book of Mormon events in the ancient Americas."

Of course not. Let the Heartlanders and the Mesoamerican believers divide between each other, just keep paying tithing.

"Church members are asked not to teach theories about Book of Mormon geography in Church settings but to focus instead on the Book of Mormon’s teachings and testimony of Jesus Christ and His gospel."

The message is to believe whatever you want to about where it allegedly happened in the Americas, just don't teach it in church.

I'm sure Russ will take it up with God the next time they chat. That, and the cure for cancer, of course. Oh, the Israelis may have already answered that question for themselves.

So you can’t use a map of Middle Earth as part of the lesson?

babyloncansuckit Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> So you can’t use a map of Middle Earth as part of the lesson?

Haha Good one! I just read about the largest-ever museum exhibit on Tolkien, with his original drawings, beautiful stuff of Middle Earth.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6640337/JRR-Tolkien-Hobbit-Lord-Rings-letter-exhibition-Morgan-Silmarillion-projects.html

My parents got written by buy scholars This lols like another ice of the church falling apart. Where is modern day revelation to give us truth

Does this mean the older Church maps showing Lamanites are all lies?

"The message is to believe whatever you want to about where it allegedly happened in the Americas, just don't teach it in church."

Yeah, why muddy the message when it's already muddy enough.

Just for grins, I consulted Wikipedia on BoM geography. There are Hemispheric Models (yes, plural), Central American Models, Heartland Models, South American Models, Great Lakes Theories (not sure why the shift to theories), the African Theory, the Malay Theory, and the Isle of the South Seas Model.

My wife says that one of the things that turned her off about Christian religions is that nobody can agree upon what the Bible says. It's quite apparent in this aspect of the BoM that nobody agrees on what it says either; and that doesn't even take into account the disagreements among the spin-off Mormon religions.

Laying their smackdown on these...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Book_of_Mormon_geographical_setting#Heartland_models

Do you remember the film strip "Ancient America Speaks" with the Central/South American artifacts?

Hmmm....

That was church produced media, correct?

I don't think a stance like that would be reversed or "forgotten" if they still thought there was any truth to it.

They want members eat their Jello and stop trying to make sense of it.

Take their vitamins and get plenty of iPad dreams.

So how do ancient native ruins in Mexico and Central America, act as evidence for the BOM, when those ruins have absolutely nothing to do with the BOM?
A Mormon leap of illogic.

The Church takes no position. They have relegated Joseph Smith's position to just opinion, no different than anyone else's.

The essay says this:

"Since the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830, members and leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have expressed numerous opinions about the specific locations of the events discussed in the book."

"While traveling with Zion’s Camp in 1834, Joseph wrote to his wife Emma that they were “wandering over the plains of the Nephites, recounting occasionally the history of the Book of Mormon, roving over the mounds of that once beloved people of the Lord, picking up their skulls and their bones, as a proof of its divine authenticity.”

There is no evidence for the Book of Mormon in today's archaeological understanding. This is proof that Joseph Smith was wrong in his letter to Emma. The church's answer is to just throw Joseph Smith under the bus and keep right on believing. Apologists put together essays for the church while the apostles and prophets get no revelation.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2019 03:31PM by mikemitchell.

One of Joseph Smith's biggest blunders was to claim that the gold plates were stashed in the hill Cumorah, thus identifying the exact location in Manchester, New York where two great Book of Mormon battles supposedly took place: the first between Shiz and Coriantumr (Jaredites), and the second between the Lamanites and Nephites.

According to the book of Mormon, it was near this little hill in Manchester, New York where the battle between Shiz and Coriantumr (where did JS come up with those crazy names) claimed 2,000,000 lives. That's a pretty big number considering that 620,000 soldiers died in the Civil war.

I wonder how those 2,000,000 stayed alive? What did they eat? We know from earlier chapters in Ether that the people lived in great cities and had granaries, fruit, cattle, oxen, sheep swine horses, silks, linens, gold, silver, etc. They also had "weapons of war" which consisted of "shields, and breastplates, and head-plates."

Many years after the battle between Shiz and Coriantumr, the Lamanites and Nephites also had a great battle in Cumorah (Manchester, NY). It must have been quite a place where great battles were fought and magnificent cities once stood.

It's odd that today nothing but arrowheads remain. What happened to the human bones, swords, gold, silver, and spacious buildings? Horse and cattle bones? There's got to be something hidden beneath the soil in Manchester, NY!

"(where did JS come up with those crazy names)"

I wonder if he was laughing at the time, thinking these people are sooo gullible.

The whole story sounds like a big load of bull-Shiz to me.

Orson Pratt, November 15, 1874, Journal of Discourses, Vol. 17, p. 274:
"[The Book of Mormon] pretends to be a history of the coming of a small colony, two or three families, from the city of Jerusalem, led by the hand of the Lord. They built a ship by the command of the Lord, and were guided by his hand across the ocean; they landed on the western coast of South America, about six hundred years before Christ; and after that they worked their way up towards the narrow strip of land we call the Isthmus, and founded settlements and, finally, about fifty years before Christ, sent forth their colonies into the north wing of the continent, which we call North America, and in process of time the whole land became peopled and overspread with millions of people…"

Anthony W. Ivins, Conference Report, April 1904, p. 55:
"…Then came Moroni with the record contained in the Book of Mormon, lifting the veil from off this great continent of ours, and giving to us the key by which the mysteries of these great ruins in Mexico, Central America and Northern South America (many of which I have seen myself) may be unlocked, and by which the hand-dealings of God with the mighty peoples who have occupied the American continent are known…"

Spencer W. Kimball, Conference Report, October 1959, pp. 57-58, 60:
"The Lord calls you 'Lamanites,' a name which has a pleasant ring, for many of the grandest people ever to live upon the earth were so called. In a limited sense, the name signifies the descendants of Laman and Lemuel, sons of your first American parent, Lehi; but you undoubtedly possess also the blood of the other sons, Sam, Nephi, and Jacob. And you likely have some Jewish blood from Mulek, son of Zedekiah, king of Judah… When your prophet Lehi led you out of Jerusalem about 600 years B.C., you brought with you the best of the culture of Egypt and Palestine and of the then known world… When Columbus came, your tribes had covered the islands of the Pacific and the Americas from Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow…"

It was just church leaders speaking as men without any authority or revelation. The church's newest statement removes any validity for all of those things.

"Since the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830, members and leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have expressed numerous opinions about the specific locations of the events discussed in the book."

In D&C 54:8, the Lord says: "you shall take your journey into the regions westward, unto the land of Missouri, unto the borders of the Lamanites."

It appears that God was speaking as a man.

when he was filling in as "acting god" so that the real god could go on a vacation.

If the modern mopologists were clever, they would see some big potential in Brigham Young's preachings about Adam being god.

Instead of lamely trying to airbrush out the previous doctrines/teachings about Africans and the priesthood or problematic elements of the temple ordinances, by pretending that nobody knows where those things came from and claiming that they were just "practices" or "traditions," they could instead just blame it all on Adam screwing up when he was serving as "acting god" for a few decades.

Then the barely thinking members would shrug and say: "Oh, that makes sense. One would expect some mistakes from an archangel who was just temporarily filling in for god. He did an okay job of it, all things considered."

Yeah, I'd have trouble with Adam as God in this context.

Greek thinking, which is relatively clear on these topics, posits a real God and an arrogant, ambitious, jealous lesser god or demiurge. Creation was done by the demiurge, which explains why it is so screwed up.

I have long thought that there is some God in the background, and that Elohim was the infantile god who wanted attention and adoration so much that he created this world. He then got pissed off and destroyed it all, then populated it again, etc. Your scheme, however, would put Adam in there as what--a demi-demiurge?

This theology stuff is just too complex for me. I'm going to grab my purse and head back to Sodom and Gomorrah. . .

as long as you're headed that way, could you bring back some salt?

I'm running low on my Himalayan pink salt, and I hear the pillar salt from that area is quite good.

Take it from me: the salt is the least of Sodom's attractions.

You wouldn't believe the jazz bars!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2019 12:43AM by Lot's Wife.

in a good way.

Now I realize that it's just a messy, smoldering and chaotic junkyard full of poorly fashioned lies waiting to be cannibalized for parts to be used in constructing new lies.

It's exactly what you would expect from a habitual liar who, having told numerous lies to numerous different people, often involving materially conflicting narratives, finds himself having to continually adjust and blend the stories due to the different people he's lied to starting to talk to each other, compare notes and ask questions.

Nowadays, from talking to some missionaries a year ago, I get the impression that the Mormons are emphasizing more than ever the belief that the personage known as Jesus NT was the very same personage known as Jehovah in the OT, which led me to ask them whether it seemed odd then that the whole atonement thing was one guy sacrificing himself to himself in order to appease himself, knowing full well that he was and always would be immortal, omnipotent and omniscient, hence knowing full well that his sacrifice actually resulted in the sacrifice of nothing of importance?

They just shrugged and mumbled, and asked me if I wanted to join them in praying to Jesus/Jehovah.

Wally Prince said "It's exactly what you would expect from a habitual liar who, having told numerous lies to numerous different people, often involving materially conflicting narratives, finds himself having to continually adjust and blend the stories due to the different people he's lied to starting to talk to each other, compare notes and ask questions."

That is how I see it too.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2019 06:10AM by mikemitchell.

Lot's Wife said "In D&C 54:8, the Lord says: "you shall take your journey into the regions westward, unto the land of Missouri, unto the borders of the Lamanites."

"It appears that God was speaking as a man."

It seems to me that apologists have taken over the task of defining the doctrine while the so-called apostles and prophets deal in real estate ventures of malls, condominiums, agriculture and buying up land in Florida and Nebraska. I'll give apologists credit for one thing. Their twisting mental gyrations helped me to decide to take my journey out of Mormonism.

More than half of the book is nonsense and cartoon characters.

(Barges with holes in the bottoms and tops and tight like unto a dish, a lady dancing for a decapitation, glowing rocks, slippery treasures, Korihor dying a painful death as punishment for publicly expressed skepticism, Nephi having zap power, a small family miraculously spawning a population numbering in the millions and warring with each other on a scale rivaling the biggest wars of the 19th and 20th century, all within just a few centuries....)

The other half is plagiarized, cut and pasted from various 19th century sources that were available at the time and in the area that Joseph Smith was operating in. Doctrinal "innovations" are simple and obvious attempts to pick one side or another regarding the doctrinal controversies that raged in the early 19th century. Original text supporting the 3-in-1 trinity doctrine was later changed to support the separate personages doctrine (even though the original text supposedly came directly from God through a magic stone.)

Most of the things that get big emphasis in the LSD Church are not even taught in the Book of Mormon. Nothing about temples or endowments or doing ordinances for dead people. The Book of Mormon condemns the exact type of "plural marriage" that Joseph Smith practiced.

Why would any sane person want to focus on any of that? There are much better comic books to focus on.

It is a small step from this statement to disavowing the historicity of the Book of Mormon altogether. They will concentrate on the moral teachings they derive from the book rather than the truth of the actual stories. When the Spirit testifies the book is true, it will mean the Spirit is telling you the book’s doctrine (as interpreted by the leaders in SLC) is true. It won’t mean Moroni was a literal person.

I wonder how they will deal with Joseph Smith if they go that direction. I was taught that the Book of Mormon is the keystone of the church, it all stands or falls on that. If the Book of Mormon is true, Joseph Smith had to have been a prophet. If it isn't real, he was a fake. If they disavow the historicity of the Book of Mormon altogether, there is that nagging problem of the story of the gold plates. Why have records of a perished people, written in reformed Egyptian, preserved on non-corrosive metal and stored for over 1000 years in a hillside in New York if none of it was real? But I have no doubt that apologists will be able to come up with some kind of spin that will satisfy the gullible and make my head hurt.

Easy. Everything that Joseph experienced actually occurred through the ministry of the Holy Ghost in a spiritual manner. That is why the Holy Spirit can testify to you it is true. It was all inspired by God.

There is no easy answer that can explain away the claim of those physical gold plates.

That it's ok to cut off someone's head to preserve a record?

Or that God punishes by turning one's skin dark?

Oh, those moral teachings!

It makes these things easier to accept if they can claim they never really happened. It then just becomes a matter of good triumphing over evil.

Justin, I like what you are saying because it is the kind of thing the apologists will do. I don't like how it makes my head hurt, but its entertaining to get a taste of what might come.

It is inevitable. The unwillingness to say the Hill Cumorah is in New York means they are already admitting Joseph Smith’s story can’t be taken literally. The two Cumorah theory was a Hail Mary from the start.

All those years that apologists insisted Martin Harris really did see the plates and that the "spiritual eyes" story was an anti-Mormon lie will probably be flushed down the shitter. Then the gaslighting will come. "We never said that the gold plates were real". The sheeple will say "We were always taught that Martin Harris and all of the witnesses saw the plates with their spiritual eyes". Its amazing what they are willing to sacrifice to defend the church. Honesty was always the first thing to be thrown out from day one. Now they throw away dead prophets and apostles without batting an eye. Joseph Fielding Smith's strong words against two Cumorahs is all but forgotten by folks my age, younger members don't even know what he said.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2019 11:04AM by mikemitchell.

When you pull your blinders that tight, it's not just The peripheral vision that is being blocked. How long before they will be handing out white canes at Sacrament Meeting?

"The Church takes no position on the specific geographic location of Book of Mormon events in the ancient Americas."

Gee, if only they had a living prophet kind of guy, who could ask Elohim what the actual geography is, and teach it to the saints...

It takes no position on the exact locations of...

The Lost Ten Tribes
The Arch of The Covenant
The Urim and Thummim....

Joseph could receive details such as exact dollar figures by revelation, but his successors can't get a general idea (North vs. South America) where the BofM events took place. I hope they are ashamed of themselves and recommit to fasting and prayer.


D&C 124 concerning the Nauvoo House, which I think he planned to be Booty Call central so Emma wouldn't walk in on him


62 Behold, verily I say unto you, let my servant George Miller, and my servant Lyman Wight, and my servant John Snider, and my servant Peter Haws, organize themselves, and appoint one of them to be a president over their quorum for the purpose of building that house.

63 And they shall form a constitution, whereby they may receive stock for the building of that house.

64 And they shall not receive less than fifty dollars for a share of stock in that house, and they shall be permitted to receive fifteen thousand dollars from any one man for stock in that house.

65 But they shall not be permitted to receive over fifteen thousand dollars stock from any one man.

66 And they shall not be permitted to receive under fifty dollars for a share of stock from any one man in that house.

I mean really. They couldn't through Smith get the time period of Father Abraham right in their Egyptian. The location of Book of Mormon lands seems trivial in comparison.

Mormons don't seem to care about any of this at all.

I had conversation earlier this week with a Mormon professional.

I asked him about prophets, and how past prophets and prophecies could so easily be disavowed by current prophets. I pointed out how contradicting prophecy destroys the concept of prophet. He told me that my question merely illustrated that I don't know what "prophet" means. Then he gave me word salad that combined the concepts of "imperfection--only Jesus is perfect," prophets are men and speak as men, along with some concept that the guys in SLC are just as put-off by how Mormons view Mormonism as I am--or something. I'm making his arguments more coherent than he made them himself because of all the necessary twisting, turning, and double-speak he had to engage in in order not to make the contradictions too blatant.

In other words, he created a system that allowed his definition to be non-falsifiable by any actual "facts-on-the-ground"; summation: motivated reasoning.

It seems that he too is so conditioned to seeing religion as complex and inscrutable that he doesn't insist that his definitions make sense in any conventional way. They make sense to him and, to him, that's conviction.

Yes, where we see deus ex machina as nothing more than a cheesy plot device, TBMs accept is as reality.

Three years ago I attended a fireside in which was saw a video made by BYU. Several BYU professors took the travel of Lehi from the BoM and were able to document the land and places as described by Lehi when they fled into the wilderness to the big sea. They had maps and pictures and the pictures matched what was said in the BoM. And the maps matched the land formations as mentioned in 1st Nephi.

Do you mean to tell me that the top brethren are going to say these guys were wrong at BYU? That their facts do not fit the BoM narrative? These were BYU professors with testimonies sharing this 10 year research project paid by the Church. It sure seemed to fit what Nephi wrote about in the descriptions of where they travelled.

So I guess we know why they stopped the pagents. When you attend the pagent they say this is the hill that JS recieved the plates. This is the place Moroni visited him. I guess the brethren really do not know but have been lying to the masses that attended the pagents for years.

When I was a kid we attended the pagent and had sacrament meeting at base of hill. GA's would give talks and testify this is the place of the final battles, etc. I guess I was lied too.

Wait maybe Russ is lying.