Failure to communicate

"What we've got here is failure to communicate."

As a relative newcomer to the public discussion of the geography issues, I have been interested to see how the two sides approach the issues. They keep talking past one another. 

In Cool Hand Luke, Paul Newman immortalized the line, "What we got here is a failure to communicate." He was actually reprising a line first uttered by the Captain in the scene above. The line has been quoted in several movies and TV shows.

It should be quoted more often in the context of Book of Mormon geography.

By definition, Mesoamericanists don't think the Book of Mormon took place in North America. As a former Mesoamericanist myself, I empathize with their position and I understand their paradigm. It's a difficult one to break out of. In a future post I'll explain what changed my mind, but here I want to say that, in my opinion, the Mesoamericanists have never looked at the North American setting with any objective other than to disprove it.

I've posted quite a few entries examining the fallacies inherent in the Mesoamerican setting. I've previously discussed the reasons why Mesoamericanists are so dogmatic about their theory, so I won't rehash them here. Many of those reasons are understandable. But they are no excuse for closed minds and refusing to communicate.

I'm hopeful that both sides of the issue will engage in more dialog and exchange of ideas. The failure to communicate makes it impossible for everyone to reach a consensus.

I'll repeat what Roger Terry said, because I fully believe it:  "Obviously, if one of the models answered all the questions presented by the scriptural text, there would be consensus on where the Book of Mormon history actually occurred."

In my view, one of the models does just that. I'm going to start explaining it around Sept. 15. But first, there is more groundwork to do on the Mesoamerican theory.

:)

Stay tuned.