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, May 25, 2020

How priming works

BYU fantasy map that primes
students to think M2C
Many Church members are asking, "Why have so many LDS intellectuals repudiated the teachings of the prophets about the New York Cumorah?"*

Others ask, "Why have so many LDS people followed the M2C** intellectuals?"

One answer is priming and imprinting. 

Thanks to CES, BYU, and the M2C citation cartel, the M2C interpretation of the Book of Mormon is imprinted on the minds of the Saints throughout their lives. The next step--persuading faithful Saints that the prophets are wrong about the NY Cumorah--follows fairly easily.

To see how priming and imprinting works, try this experiment. The links go to short audio clips.
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Assume I have a device that doesn't connect to your body but can send speech in an inaudible way using sine-wave speech.
1) Listen to this 1st:
mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt. 2) Listen to this 2nd: mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt. Listen to 1 again.  
Observations?

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If you do the experiment, you see how a meaningless noise suddenly sounds like speech once you are primed. 

Once people have been primed by the M2C interpretation, they read the Book of Mormon with that interpretation in mind. As one of the M2C promoters said, he "can't unsee" Mesoamerica when he reads the Book of Mormon.

That doesn't mean the Book of Mormon describes Mesoamerica; far from it. But once you are primed to understand it a particular way, it is difficult to become unprimed and read it afresh.

Then, when people learn more about how Mesoamerica doesn't fit with the Book of Mormon, they conclude the Book of Mormon must not be true. It's a travesty because the problem is not the Book of Mormon; the problem is M2C.
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*Lately, some of the intellectuals have begun saying the location of Cumorah "doesn't matter." They resent me pointing out that they are repudiating the teachings of the prophets. Others say the prophets never actually taught that Cumorah is in New York, as if the historical record doesn't exist. Church historians have actually changed Church history to purge the New York Cumorah from the record by censoring it in the Saints book, volume 1.

**M2C is the acronym for the Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory, which teaches that the prophets are wrong about the New York Cumorah. 
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