long ago ideas

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago." - Friedrich Nietzsche. Long ago, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery conquered false claims that the Book of Mormon was fiction or that it came through a stone in a hat. But these old claims have resurfaced in recent years. To conquer them again, we have to return to what Joseph and Oliver taught.

Monday, April 24, 2017

The Times They Are A-Changin'

 According to his web page, Bob Dylan first performed his famous song in 1963. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’


As far as I can tell, his most recent performance was fifty years later, in 2013, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_nKf7BNqhA

50 years of change. Lots of opinions about what has changed for the better, what has changed for the worse.

As the saying goes, there are two things people hate:
1. The way things are; and
2. Change.
_____________________

I think we're finally seeing another big change.

For nearly 100 years, scholars who concocted and then promoted the two-Cumorahs theory* have dominated LDS thinking about Book of Mormon geography. They've accomplished this largely by not explaining the major premise for their theory; i.e., their claim that Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery didn't know what they were talking about.

But the times, they are a changin.

More and more LDS people are coming to understand what has been going on. They are rejecting the two-Cumorahs theory and the theory it supports: the theory that the Book of Mormon events took place in Mesoamerica.

Whenever you read another lame defense of the Mesoamerican theory, or another list of illusory "correspondences" between Mayan culture and the imaginative interpretations of the Book of Mormon, just think to yourself, The times, they are a-changin'.

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* This is the theory that the "real" Cumorah is in Southern Mexico, but the hill in New York was wrongly named Cumorah and it is a false tradition started by unknown people but adopted inexplicably by Joseph Smith.

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