This is what the so called "DNA Mormons" engage in. Murphy and Southerton only have any standing if they start with the premise that the Book of Mormon requires Lehi to have entered an empty continent.
However, this is only possible because they have never read either the Book of Mormon or the thoughtful scholarly asssesments of it. Maybe Southerton thought he read the Book of Mormon, but never with a critical enough eye to notice that the only explantion of Sharem, let alone huge other things, was that he must have come from some other unexplained people.
The basic problem is that Southerton, Murphy and company began by assuming the Book of Mormon is fiction, so they avoid ever having to explain how their narrow and twisted understanding of certain verses would make the Book of Mormon a possibly real account.
When we give as the first grounds for consideration that the Book of Mormon must be internally consistent, we realize that the easiest why to explain Cumorah being in the heart of Jaredite country, being reached quickly by those south of the "narrow neck of land" and being the place of the major record deposits is that Moroni never called the hill in New YOrk Cumorah, that this is a later interpolation by W. W. Phelps, that Mormoni in his wandering to escape the Lamanites went from central Mexico (or maybe even Nicargua or Panama) to New York. This system works WAY better than assuming that all the mentions to Cumorah mean a minor hill in New York.
In the same way when Lehi says the land is not know to other "nations" it must be a land that he concieves of, and since he has never spoken of major continents as a "land" there is no reason to assume he means all the continents, and anyway "nations" are not people but some organized grouping of people.
The easiest way to eplain the major and fast increase in the Lamanite population is their subjection of a foriegn element. Hugh Nibley's arguements that with the amount of time the various kings of the Jaredites took to gather forces there is almost cetrainly people of the descendants of Jared in the land not brought in (especially if they are groups who broke away from the nation before Ether's profesy, which is in no way rules out by the text, since it largely focuses on the history of Jared's people).
The odd thing is that Sorenson is the one who wants to read the Book of Mormon as a book that tells us about real history, while Murphy for all his claims to a connection with reality will not grant that the Book of Mormon can be telling us the history of what real people do.
It is the anti-Mormons who are set in their ways, and it is the pro-Mormons who accept multiple interpretations of history. It is Sorenson who has worked for 40 years to prove trans-oceanic crossings before the Vikings, and it is his view that has been vierified and makes more sense of actual human history.
Columbus was not the first to venture into the ocean, and corn was grown in medieval India. Ancient Egyptian mummies have traces of coca (the soure of cocaine) and tobacco in them, which proves some sort of contact between peoples in the ancient Americas and ancient Egypt.
Those who dismiss the Book of Mormon as false must do so by ignoring the scientific and archeological advances of the last 20 years. Of course, they can continue to do this since archeology like so many disciplines has so advanced that discoveries in it have little effect on the general body of knowledge.
Friday, October 2, 2009
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In the ultimate straw-man argument some of the haters are trying to claim that the views put forth by myself and others who accept things like the survival of the Jaredites, the incorporation of other groups among the Nephites and Lamaites and post-Moroni immigrantion of the Navajo are apostates who break with the teachings of Spencer W. Kimball on these matters.
This is beause they ignore the fact that President Kimball was expressing spiritual concepts, and was clearly simplifying the Book of Mormon narritive to make his actual points. The quote from p. 601 of the teachings of Spencer W. Kimball in which he presents Ishmael and Lehi as the lone fathers of the various Native American groups is so simplified that it clearly is not meant to invoke even the whole history of obvious statements of the Book of Mormon.
The fact of the matter is that Elder Kimball's statement that some have quoted to try and disprove my ideas clearly ignores the Jaredites. This means that even totally clear inclusions of people found in the Book of Mormon itself are left out.
Beyound this, did President Kimball ever claim special revelation on this issue? I say he did not, he always presented these statmeents as his understanding of the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon is the normative control on matters of the Book of Mormon, and people who set up straw-man arguments miss this point.
The best way to understand the Book of Mormon is not though quick summaries by modern speakers but by reading its actual text.
This is a major problem.
I only bring this up because one person expresse opinions that seemed to indicate they had been swayed that there was a conflict between things said by people such as I and the statements of President Kimball.
Such conflicts only exist in the minds of two groups. One is the apostates who have rejected the historicity of the Book of Mormon and seek every opportunity to discredit it.
The other is the fundamentalists (in this sense used not for those who embrace polygamy, but those who insist on their own literalist interpretation of scripture) who want to keep an empty Americans, even though the Book of Mormon never once uses that term. They want to force Ether to mean all living people on the continant will be killed. They would tend to rad 3 Nephi as an account of continent wide destruction, and they would have Limhi's exploration party go from somewhere in Columbia to New York and back, even though such a long trip is totally out of line with any real search effort that his people would have made in the search for a city that in that situation would have also been somewhere in Columbia like them.
The Columbia situation might work, but if the Book of Mormon mainly occured in Columbia, it even more must involve references to another Hill Cumorah other than the one in New York than if we were to accept the Mexican or Nicaraguan setting for the Book of Mormon.
This is largely related to an article in the Deseret News built around statements by Ugo Perago. There is true irony in this, and I will explain it in a full post.
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