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.

Wednesday, August 2, 2023

Misc. topics: my blogs, SITH, M2C

My blogs.

Many people read this blog on the website https://www.moronisamerica.com/. Be sure to use the https prefix instead of http (without the s).

That website incorporates this and other blogs. I don't own or manage it, but it's a useful resource for many people.

It also features what Tim Ballard (The Sound of Freedom movie) wrote about the book Moroni's America: "Finally, a complete, honest and faithful look at Book of Mormon geography that deals with all the tough questions... A definite game changer!"

(click to enlarge)


Some of my blogs were also available on my Amazon author page, but Amazon deleted blogs from author pages in December 2022.

https://www.amazon.com/author/jonathanneville

Other websites quote from or copy my blogs. I don't keep track of them.

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More on SITH.

It's difficult for people in our day to appreciate the real-world challenges faced by the early Latter-day Saints. An example is the 1834 book Mormonism Unvailed.

Without understanding the historical context, people today are easily misled by those who advocate the stone-in-the-hat (SITH) theory of the origin of the Book of Mormon, which Mormonism Unvailed set forth as an alternative to the Urim and Thummim account provided by Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery.

Compare the claims of Mormonism Unvailed with what the SITH scholars are teaching today. Other than the term "peep stone" in lieu of "seer stone," the following account from Mormonism Unvailed is indistinguishable from what Book of Mormon Central, the Interpreter, and even the Gospel Topics Essay teach today. It looks like the script from Dan Peterson's Witnesses movie.

The translation finally commenced. They were found to contain a language not now known upon the earth, which they termed "reformed Egyptian characters." The plates, therefore, which had been so much talked of, were found to be of no manner of use. After all, the Lord showed and communicated to him every word and letter of the Book. Instead of looking at the characters inscribed upon the plates, the prophet was obliged to resort to the old ''peep stone," which he formerly used in money-digging. This he placed in a hat, or box, into which he also thrust his face. Through the stone he could then discover a single word at a time, which he repeated aloud to his amanuensis, who committed it to paper, when another word would immediately appear, and thus the performance continued to the end of the book. 

https://archive.org/details/mormonismunvaile00howe/page/18/mode/2up

Apparently these fine LDS scholars find the SITH narrative in Mormonism Unvailed so credible that it supersedes what Joseph and Oliver taught.

Continued at:

https://www.ldshistoricalnarratives.com/2023/08/mormonism-unvailed-in-joseph-smith.html

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More on M2C.

My previous post on this blog dealt with the origins of M2C as set forth by BMAF (the corporate entity behind Book of Mormon Central).

Here's another examination of the origins of M2C that provides more historical context. 

https://www.lettervii.com/p/origin-and-rationale-of-m2c.html

The M2Cers don't like to talk about Stebbins and Hills, so you wouldn't know about them if you just read what Book of Mormon Central publishes.

To his credit, John Sorenson in his Source Book did acknowledge that RLDS scholar/author L.E. Hills was the first to produce a map that showed Cumorah in southern Mexico. The work of all the so-called experts since then who promote M2C, including Jack Welch and Dan Peterson, is derivative of Hills' theory.

It's always amusing that the simulation gave us a man named "Hills" to develop M2C (the "two hills Cumorah" theory.)

 

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