...feel free to disavow most ANYTHING that upsets their tight little world view.
Posted on 11/08/2007 5:23:05 PM PST by Colofornian
The LDS Church has changed a single word in its introduction to the Book of Mormon, a change observers say has serious implications for commonly held LDS beliefs about the ancestry of American Indians.
Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints believe founder Joseph Smith unearthed a set of gold plates from a hill in upperstate New York in 1827 and translated the ancient text into English. The account, known as The Book of Mormon, tells the story of two Israelite civilizations living in the New World. One derived from a single family who fled from Jerusalem in 600 B.C. and eventually splintered into two groups, known as the Nephites and Lamanites.
The book's current introduction, added by the late LDS apostle, Bruce R. McConkie in 1981, includes this statement: "After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are the principal ancestors of the American Indians."
The new version, seen first in Doubleday's revised edition, reads, "After thousands of years, all were destroyed except the Lamanites, and they are among the ancestors of the American Indians."
LDS leaders instructed Doubleday to make the change, said senior editor Andrew Corbin, so it "would be in accordance with future editions the church is printing."
The change "takes into account details of Book of Mormon demography which are not known," LDS spokesman Mark Tuttle said Wednesday.
It also steps into the middle of a raging debate about the book's historical claims.
Many Mormons, including several church presidents, have taught that the Americas were largely inhabited by Book of Mormon peoples. In 1971, Church President Spencer W. Kimball said that Lehi, the family patriarch, was "the ancestor of all of the Indian and Mestizo tribes in North and South and Central America and in the islands of the sea."
After testing the DNA of more than 12,000 Indians, though, most researchers have concluded that the continent's early inhabitants came from Asia across the Bering Strait.
With this change, the LDS Church is "conceding that mainstream scientific theories about the colonization of the Americas have significant elements of truth in them," said Simon Southerton, a former Mormon and author of Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA and the Mormon Church.
"DNA has revealed very clearly how closely related American Indians are to their Siberian ancestors, " Southerton said in an e-mail from his home in Canberra, Australia. "The Lamanites are invisible, not principal ancestors."
LDS scholars, however, dispute the notion that DNA evidence eliminates the possibility of Lamanites. They call it "oversimplification" of the research.
On the church's official Web site, lds.org, it says, "Nothing in the Book of Mormon precludes migration into the Americas by peoples of Asiatic origin. The scientific issues relating to DNA, however, are numerous and complex."
Mormon researcher John M. Butler and DNA expert further argues that "careful examination and demographic analysis of the Book of Mormon record in terms of population growth and the number of people described implies that other groups were likely present in the promised land when Lehi's family arrived, and these groups may have genetically mixed with the Nephites, Lamanites, and other groups. Events related in the Book of Mormon likely took place in a limited region, leaving plenty of room for other Native American peoples to have existed."
In recent years, many LDS scholars have come to share Butler's belief in what is known as the "limited geography" theory. By this view, the Nephites and Lamanites restricted their activities to portions of Central America, which would explain their absence from the general American Indian genetics.
Kevin Barney, a Mormon lawyer and independent researcher in Chicago, welcomes the introduction's word change.
"I have always felt free to disavow the language of the [Book of Mormon's] introduction, footnotes and dictionary, which are not part of the canonical scripture," said Barney, on the board of FAIR, a Mormon apologist group. "These things can change as the scholarship progresses and our understanding enlarges. This suggests to me that someone on the church's scripture committee is paying attention to the discussion."
No, my house is not shifting, you are blowing smoke from different angles.
Isn’t that nice. Have you read any of the rest of it?
Now, now, accusations of that sort belong on your home site, along with the rest of the DUmmies.
It's worse than that. Eyewitness testimony is that Joseph would peer into a hat, using his so-called seer stone that would yield a phrase by phrase dictation. He would call it out; the person recording it would read it back to him for accuracy.
If all that was needed was a seer stone dictator, why even bother with gold plates? From a divine preservation perspective, why bother having your people etch something that would take years to record on gold plates if no reader is ever going to benefit from them?
The fact is the gold plates were irrelevant to what came out in the Book of Mormon; the original Greek & Hebrew was irrelevant to what came out in Joseph Smith's version of the Bible (called the JST), as he didn't know Greek & Hebrew; the original funeral document content of what Smith called the "Book of Abraham" was irrelevant since not only did Smith not know what he called "Reformed Egyptian," there wasn't even such a language. (Yeah, right, Israelites frequently used the languages of their enemies)
Do you know what a boring fellow you are?
Diversionary rule #1: when you can't aptly address the message, take aim @ the messenger.
(Els, for someone supposedly as "boring" as you are, you sure seem to nab the attention of a fair # of folks...rather than a sleepy-eyed reaction, they seem to be wide awake)
LOL, good one!
1. The conquistador, Pedro Pizarro, reported in his account of the great Spanish invasion of South America in the 1500s, that while the masses of Andes Indians were small and dark, the members of the ruling Inca family were tall and had whiter skins than the Spaniards themselves. He talks of them having blue eyes, corn-blonde hair and white skins. (Heyerdahl, ibid., page 351).
Heyerdahl reported that this is reflected in the mummies found in South America - on the Pacific coast, in the desert sand of Paracas, there are large burial caves in which numerous mummies have been perfectly preserved.
Some of the mummies were found to have the stiff black hair of the Indians, while others, which have been kept in the same conditions, have red, often chestnut-colored hair, “silky and wavy, as found amongst Europeans, they have long skulls and remarkably tall bodies. Hair experts have shown by microscopic analysis, that the red hair has all the characteristics that ordinarily distinguish a Nordic hair type from that of Mongols or American Indians.” (Heyerdahl, ibid., pages 351, 352).
Pizarro asked who the white skinned redheads were. The Inca Indians replied that they were the last descendants of the Viracochas. The Viracochas, they said, were a divine race of White men with beards. They were so like the Spanish that the Europeans were called Viracochas the moment they came to the Inca Empire. The Incas thought they were the Viracochas who had come sailing back across the Pacific. (Heyerdahl, ibid., page 253).
When the Spaniards came to Lake Titicaca, up in the Andes, they found the mightiest ruins in all South America - Tiahuanaco. They saw a hill reshaped by man into a stepped pyramid, classical masonry of enormous blocks, beautifully dressed and fitted together, and numerous large statues in human form. They asked the Indians to tell them who had left these enormous ruins.
The well known chronicler, Cieza de Leon, was told in reply that these things had been made long before the Incas came to power. They were made by White and bearded men like the Spaniards themselves. (Heyerdahl, ibid., page 253).
The White men had finally abandoned their statues and gone with the leader, Con-Ticci Viracocha, first up to Cuzco, and then down to the Pacific. They were given the Inca name of Viracocha, or “sea foam’, because they were white skinned and vanished like foam over the sea.
Also, here’s an old FR discussion on some of this stuff:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1714661/posts
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2. Both Daniel Boone and Lewis and Clark said they encountered blue eyed blond Indians during their explorations, mapping excursions.
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All of this of course is only one piece is a huge genetic puzzle. The Book of Mormon clearly states that there were many nephites who denied their faith and fled southward and joined in with the armies of the lamanites in the final battle. The genetics were there, and who knows how many other European or Viking expeditions were here. We are arrogant if we think Columbus was the first one here from the old world.
Okay, I disavow you.
LOL, I love the way these posts conincided...thanks, seven, for proving elsie’s point so clearly.
Actually, you are more amusing than upsetting.
Ditto....I get a kick out of BOTH your personalities ;) This one is easier to follow, though.
Since there aren't a whole lot of blue eyed blondes among the Sephardic Jewish population, it stands to reason that members of the "lost tribes of Israel" wouldn't be blue eyed or blonde.
Vikings, however, were fine seafarers ...
You noticed that? And they thought they were being so cleverly deceptive about it!
Why... what are you thinking?
You dirty old man you!
I guess it's better than me being stupid.
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