LDS LDS---YIKES!

[mmksparbud]

Does any of the original language spoken before the tower of Babel was destroyed still exist?

And what has that to do with anything that has been said? That was the start of languages----all different languages. It has nothing to do with the fact that after that, anyone who spoke Chinese who then associated with those who spoke Italian, had to learn the other's language. After being around each language there is a natural tendency to incorporate words into each language from the other. The dominant language will still be spoken, with words from the other thrown in that all do understand.
This is an English speaking country as the dominant language. I had to learn it. There are English only speaking people---like my stepmother---who learned what a few Spanish words were--she would throw those in. When speaking Spanish, some English words are thrown in----Tex-Mex it's called. It is not a whole totally different language but the blending of the 2---that is how it works everywhere---except, of course, in the Never-Never land of JS.
And who knows how many words of the original language are actually still in the languages of the world?

 

[mmksparbud]

They are in Mexico museums for every one to see, at least, those who will see, lots of people have eyes to see, but still cannot see.

For instance, in the history of Mexico, there is a legend that says that the first people in their land came from the great tower of Babel (Popol Vuh).

In the main historical museum in Mexico city there is a long beautiful tapestry that is a painting of the early history of Mexico. It has at the beginning a portrayal of the beginning of human habitation in Mexico. It looks like the people are coming out of 8 caves out in the water and then step on turtles that bring them to shore.

This is a very interesting tapestry, because the BOM tells the story of the Jaredite people that came from the tower of Babel around 2200bc in 7 barges and landed on the eastern coast of Mexico. I can see that their departure from their barges would be a fairly dramatic event that would have stories told forever.

Today, there are 2 main peoples that are talked about in early Mexican history before Columbus. The Olmec, and the Maya. Of course later were the Aztec. According to the experts, the Olmec (Jaredites) people came here between 1700-2100bc and were pretty much gone by the time the Maya came into prominence, around 300bc.

The BOM also tells us that the Jaradites (Olmec) people were gone because of a civil war. And that Maya (Nephites/Lamanites) got some of their records and published their prophet in the BOM.

So besides the records of the Mexican history that miraculously made it out of the Spanish conquest, the only other record in the world that mirrors their early history is the BOM. How interesting is that? Oh, and JS made it all up. Pretty good guessing, right?

Really? All over the world, there are stories of the flood and people emerging from it. That in Mexico there were 8 that emerged has nothing to do with JS writings but the story of Noah and the 8 people saved. Here are 25 flood stories---there are over 200 of them.
25 Great Flood Stories Found Around The World

Some people insist that the flood of the bible was taken from the Gilgamesh---it's the other way around. They got it from the actual flood,. Just because they may have written it down first doesn't mean their version is the original one.

 

[He is the way]

And what has that to do with anything that has been said? That was the start of languages----all different languages. It has nothing to do with the fact that after that, anyone who spoke Chinese who then associated with those who spoke Italian, had to learn the other's language. After being around each language there is a natural tendency to incorporate words into each language from the other. The dominant language will still be spoken, with words from the other thrown in that all do understand.
This is an English speaking country as the dominant language. I had to learn it. There are English only speaking people---like my stepmother---who learned what a few Spanish words were--she would throw those in. When speaking Spanish, some English words are thrown in----Tex-Mex it's called. It is not a whole totally different language but the blending of the 2---that is how it works everywhere---except, of course, in the Never-Never land of JS.
And who knows how many words of the original language are actually still in the languages of the world?

That is my point, no one knows, but God does.

 

[mmksparbud]

That is my point, no one knows, but God does.

Yes, and there still is no reformed Egyptian!!!

 

[Peter1000]

I can't believe this "Reformed Egyptian" stupidity continues on unabated, as though we have not discussed it probably hundreds of times. Talking to Mormons about stuff that is definitively known through the historical record, like what forms of Egyptian actually existed and where and when, is like talking to a wall. A very stubborn wall.

But for the benefit of those who will learn, let's look at the BOM timeline. This is from the LDS website, so there's no accusing me of being "anti-Mormon" for pointing out how it just doesn't work:

As you can see, it is said to start in earnest in 600 BC, and end c. 420 AD. What forms of Egyptian were used during this time?

Written Egyptian emerged during the historical period of the "Old Kingdom", roughly 2800-2150 BC (Lopriento 1997:436), with its earliest identifiable complete sentence dated to approximately 2690 BC (Allen 2013:2), meaning it emerged rather early in this period. This kind of Egyptian is sometimes called "Old Egyptian", "Early Egyptian", or "Ancient Egyptian", depending on the discipline, but it is not quite of the type you would associate with the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptian monuments like the temples and pyramids, as it had yet to develop into a fully-fledged writing system (it was not regularized, not all the characters used in hieroglyphic writing were present, etc). Most of the images we see of hieroglyphic writing in popular books and films are more likely to date from the Middle Egyptian period, starting at about 2000 BC (recall that the Ebers papyrus from my other post was dated to 1550 BC, so it within this period), as it is during the Middle Egyptian period that the production of texts and monuments really increased, as the system was regularized and the character set exhibited by this stage of the language (~ 700 total characters) stayed basically the same until the advent of the Coptic alphabet in the early Christian centuries (or perhaps pre-Christian; there is some debate on this) in Egypt. The Middle Egyptian period was also when the Hieratic cursive script developed, which would form the basis of the Demotic (popular) writing of Late Egyptian during the Ptolemaic period, beginning around the 14th century BC. Both Middle Egyptian and Late Egyptian survived in some form into the Christian period, with the last known inscription in the Demotic script dating to 452 AD (notably long after the order to close the pagan temples was given by the emperor Theodosius in the 380s).

While there is some debate as to when Coptic became established as the language of Christian Egypt, pretty much every source I've consulted agrees that it is in place by the 4th century AD. Coptic survived into the Medieval period, probably dying out as a spoken language in around the 14th century AD (reports of an 18th century traveler from Europe meeting people who spoke the language fluently cannot be corroborated, and one guy's personal travel log doesn't really mean anything anyway), but surviving for a few more centuries as a written language, if only for translation purposes (there are actually Coptic-Ge'ez grammars from if I recall correctly around the 17th century, showing that it was still profitable for the Ethiopians to learn the language, since many of their texts were translated from what they had received from Egypt during the Coptic period; they never spoke it themselves, however).

With that short summary, we have covered a period extending well before the beginning of the BOM history and well past its end, and across all that time we can tell what was spoken and written. Nowhere in any of it do we find any 'Reformed Egyptian', and the protestation of the ignorant that "We are reading a Reformed Egyptian (a short hand Egyptian) reformed over a thousand years of time in a completely foreign country, far far away from Egypt" is not possible to take as a defense, because that is simply not how languages work.

I know I've made this comparison before, but if we want to look at a language with an even greater time of separation from its original setting, in a new country surrounded by speakers of other languages (etc., etc., so as to best match Peter's feeble defense), we can look at Cypriot Maronite Arabic. CMA evolved from the Arabic dialects spoken by waves of Maronites immigrating from their traditional homeland in Lebanon and Syria to Cyprus to escape the Muslim invasions of their land in the 7th century, an immigration that lasted up until the 13th century (Versteegh 2011:536-537). As it still exists today (barely; it is reported that all speakers are over the age of 30, and none of the 3,656 people who registered as "Maronites" in the 2011 Cypriot census reported it as their first language), we can say without exaggeration that it is a language that is the product of some ~1,380 years of isolation from its motherland and parent language/dialects (the Muslim conquest of the Levant having taken place 634-638, so 1,385 to 1,381 years ago). 1,380 years is considerably longer than the entire span of the BOM timeline as presented in the above graphic, which is only 1,020 years (600 BC to 420 AD).

So in that time, do we see CMA develop from a mix of Levantine/Eastern Arabic dialects into something completely unintelligible and unrecognizable relative to what its speakers started out with as their phonological and syntactic base(s), in manner similar to how the "Egyptian Grammar" found at the Joseph Smith Papers Project is full of nonsense that is transparently gibberish like "Toan low ee tahee takee toues" and "Enish-go-an=dosh"?

Let's see. Full disclosure: I don't know Levantine Arabic (I was taught Modern Standard Arabic, which is kind of like "newscaster speech" which nobody speaks natively, and have since then only spent large amounts of time around Egyptians, whose dialects are quite different than what is spoken in Lebanon/Syria/Jordan or Iraq), so I'll have to do a comparison with MSA instead.

From the wiki page on CMA, we have the example sentence of:

I ate bread with olives, some honey and drank some cow's milk

In CMA, which has been surrounded by Greek speakers for 1,000+ years, it is

Kilt xops ma zaytun, xaytċ casel u şraft xlip tel pakra

(notes: the C with the dot over it is like the "ch" sound in "church", while the s with the tail is like the "sh" sound in "shop"; x is like the "ch" sound in the German pronunciation of "Bach", or the Scottish "Loch"; c by itself is a sound that we don't have in English or most other European languages called a voiced pharyngeal fricative or voiced pharyngeal approximant; you can listen to it here, if you want to...I will keep to these conventions when writing out the Modern Standard Arabic equivalent below.)

In MSA (simplified with case endings removed, since this is not a lesson in Arabic grammar), it would be something like (I put it through Google Translate so that you can all put that English sentence into the same program and see that I'm not making it up, though I did modify the transliteration to get rid of some of the 'dummy' vowels that it places between consonants and keep the transliteration as used in the CMA sentence):

أكلت الخبز بالزيتون وبعض العسل وشربت حليب البقر
akalat alxubz bilzaytun wa bacḍ alcasl wa şrubt ḥalib albaqar

Here are all the cognates (words with the same origin) in the sentence, with their MSA forms on the right, and their CMA forms on the left:

Kilt = Akalat
xops = xubz
casel = casl
u = wa
şraft = şrubt
xlip = ḥalib
tel pakra = albaqar

Do you notice something? This is every word except for xaytċ (CMA) vs. bacḍ (MSA), which for all I know could reflect some specific Syro-Lebanese vocabulary (perhaps inherited from Syriac?) that I don't know.

Still, the point is clear, is it not? 1,380 years of separation -- geographically, culturally, and linguistically -- from their homeland and the languages they used at the start of their communities in the new land of Cyprus, and what they have developed from the parent language is very far from unintelligible gibberish (though it is true that CMA is not intelligible to mainland Arabic speakers, it is clearly still a form of Arabic; it has not evolved into something else that would not be recognizable as Arabic, as you can clearly see here). It has regular correspondences, like p in CMA for b in MSA (standard varieties of Arabic do not have "p" unless they are in close contact with languages that have it, like Iraqi Arabic which is in close contact with Kurdish and Assyrian, and also borrowed a lot from Turkish during the Ottoman times; Kurdish, Eastern Assyrian, and Turkish all have "p"), and predictable changes, e.g., the definite article "al" in MSA is dropped in CMA, except for in tel pakra, which I suspect it has retained as part of the fixed grammatical construction for genitive clauses, i.e., "milk of the cow"; Maltese, another Arabic descendant that has actually evolved into its own separate language under the heavy influence of Italian, does this: spirtu ta' aħwa "spirit of brotherhood", cf. MSA بروح الاخاء bi-ruḥi al-ixa'; spirtu is obviously an Italian/Romance loanword, but ta' aħwa is their equivalent of the Arabic al-ixa'.

No "eee ma moh hee ha hoh wee woh" or whatever for the Cypriot Maronites, despite over a thousand years of isolation on an island where everyone around them was speaking Greek (which is not genetically related to Arabic).

To our Mormon readers and friends:

I don't make long posts like this explaining patiently why your defenses are not acceptable so that you can reply "WELL, BUT WE DON'T KNOWWWW FOR SUUUURE" or "THAT'S JUST, LIKE, YOUR OPINION, MAN", so if that's all you have to say, save it for the next stake meeting, because I don't want to see it, and frankly it's just really freaking embarrassing. Just don't bother. I am qualified to give these simple, hopefully clear explanations that show how actually existing languages evolve. There are no exceptions to this, because anything that would have evolved in such a short time (and yes, given that Egyptian was first written down over 4,000 years ago, ~1,400 years is a short time) to not resemble its claimed parent can rightly be said to have its true parentage elsewhere. It's the same with all kinds of evolution: modern housecats did not evolve from some animal transparently unrelated to the felidae family in the biological blink of an eye. Their ancestors are much more easily traceable to earlier felidae or felidae-type ancestors than they are to eagles, or lizards, or whatever. You cannot presuppose drastic changes without extremely compelling evidence, and the BOM is not only not at that level, it is not any level of evidence.

And that really is the bottom line. It is long past time for all who believe in the BOM and its narrative to stop abusing a perfectly fine science like linguistics (not to mention all the other sciences its partisans abuse in an attempt to root their religious text in the real world) by proposing things that are absolutely ludicrous and contrary to the way that literally every other language that has ever actually existed has evolved. There is absolutely no shame in deciding to embrace the more honest alternative and say something like "Yes, there is no real evidence for this, but I believe in it because I believe in my religion, and this is what my religion tells me happened. Maybe we'll find evidence for it some day, but we haven't yet, and that's okay. I still believe." That is fine and honorable. It is not honorable, believable, or even really tolerable (to someone who actually knows linguistics, anyway) to have to put up with the kinds of defenses that Mormons usually choose to attempt to forward instead of doing this, which frankly make the Mormon religion far less believable than anything any 'anti-Mormon' source or person could say.

That is seriously the nicest way I can think to put that. Please, as a linguist and as someone who does not like to see Mormons humiliated (because even if I disagree with you, you are still fellow people created by God, and also I am well aware that there is not scientific evidence for all of the beliefs of traditional Christianity, either; God doesn't really like to come into the lab for interviews and testing, y'know?), I am really trying to get you all to understand what an incredible disservice you are doing to your own effort to bolster your religion by grasping at pseudo-scientific straws when that is not necessary or helpful. If you love your God and your religion, stop doing that.

I would agree with you at this time (before I do a little more study) that the evidence for the existence of Reformed Egyptian documents does not exist.

The people who wrote the record for the Nephites, were a narrow group of ruler types that were brought up to take over the record as a young person. They were trained in writing the record because it was in a Reformed Egyptian, not natural for anyone except this trained scribe.

This large record was eventually buried in a hill called Cumorah. Before they were buried, a man by the name of Mormon started to abridge this large record around 350ad, on gold plates, because gold was not as hard as other metals and could be written on, and the writing would be preserved. His son, Moroni finished the abridgment around 420ad and took this final record and hid it in a stone box, on a hill in upper New York.

So the Lamanites, who almost annihilated the Nephites destroyed any records found from the Nephites and the Spaniards destroyed almost all records of what was left when they conquered the existing people.

So no, the Lamanites never had the records written in Reformed Egyptian, and neither did the Spaniards, and neither does anyone else. The only thing we know is that the gold plates existed and were written in Reformed Egyptian by Moroni, per our religious training.

The only proof we have is the testimony of around 15 people that did see them and did lift them up and saw the writing. 3 men were presented the plates by an angel in the middle of the day. To me, that is plenty of evidence for their existence.

 

[dzheremi]

And that's fine, Peter. So long as you say "This is something we believe in as per our religious training" or something else that makes it clear that you are not claiming to have evidence that you do not have, then there's no reason why anyone should oppose you. It's not my business as a linguist to sit here dumping on your community for having religious beliefs (I mean, I disagree with them, but I definitely think you should be free to have them, and tell other people about them), but I can't in good conscience let linguistic claims that are not recognized in the academic field be presented as though they are (or ought to be despite a total lack of evidence) because members of your religion believe in them as a matter of religious belief.

I hope you understand the distinction and see that this is not a matter of religious enmity, but of professional/academic/scientific standards to which all are equally held. I've worked alongside atheists, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Muslims, Jews, etc., all with equal success, because in the professional world those identities are not allowed to shape our work.

 

[He is the way]

And that's fine, Peter. So long as you say "This is something we believe in as per our religious training" or something else that makes it clear that you are not claiming to have evidence that you do not have, then there's no reason why anyone should oppose you. It's not my business as a linguist to sit here dumping on your community for having religious beliefs (I mean, I disagree with them, but I definitely think you should be free to have them, and tell other people about them), but I can't in good conscience let linguistic claims that are not recognized in the academic field be presented as though they are (or ought to be despite a total lack of evidence) because members of your religion believe in them as a matter of religious belief.

I hope you understand the distinction and see that this is not a matter of religious enmity, but of professional/academic/scientific standards to which all are equally held. I've worked alongside atheists, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Muslims, Jews, etc., all with equal success, because in the professional world those identities are not allowed to shape our work.

Lack of evidence proves nothing.

 

[dzheremi]

Lack of evidence proves nothing.

With all due respect, I'm not sure you are understanding the nature of the objections I have made in this thread. Of course lack of evidence doesn't prove anything. That's what I've been saying this entire time.

It is foundational to any scientific pursuit that if you make the claim, you must back it up with evidence. It is not the responsibility of the scientific/academic establishment to seriously entertain any particular claim for which no evidence exists. This is why traditionally science has stopped short of tackling religious claims and questions directly, since the miracles often associated with religious beliefs and claims are by their very nature extra-scientific. This does not mean that nothing that has religious implications can be examined scientifically, only that the beliefs and claims of religions do not belong to the scientific arena. For example, science can describe the effects that crucifixion has on the human body, but it cannot make any definitive pronouncements concerning the Christian belief that Jesus Christ rose from the dead three days after being crucified.

Since Mormons make claims in scientific areas that are not accepted due to their complete lack of evidence, there is no reason to take these claims seriously just because they undergird religious beliefs. Put bluntly, science does not exist to aid religious narratives, and since the claims of Mormons in the area of language and linguistics are not only not supported by evidence, but are actually in some cases directly contradicted by available evidence (as already presented in this thread), it is right that those claims be rejected without prejudice towards the Mormon faith as a religion, or towards Mormon people as people.

Basically, if you didn't make scientific claims, you wouldn't get blowback from people who actually engage in the relevant sciences. You wouldn't have to actually change anything that you believe, only your way of approaching it so as to not make claims that attempt to present your beliefs as though they are backed up by scientific evidence when they are not. As I have already written several times to our friend Peter1000 (who I would really recommend imitating in this regard, as he has accepted this distinction), "I believe in this as part of my religion" is perfectly fine and respectable; "Scientific disciplines show my religious narrative to be confirmed by real world evidence" when in fact they do not is neither fine nor respectable.

 

[He is the way]

With all due respect, I'm not sure you are understanding the nature of the objections I have made in this thread. Of course lack of evidence doesn't prove anything. That's what I've been saying this entire time.

It is foundational to any scientific pursuit that if you make the claim, you must back it up with evidence. It is not the responsibility of the scientific/academic establishment to seriously entertain any particular claim for which no evidence exists. This is why traditionally science has stopped short of tackling religious claims and questions directly, since the miracles often associated with religious beliefs and claims are by their very nature extra-scientific. This does not mean that nothing that has religious implications can be examined scientifically, only that the beliefs and claims of religions do not belong to the scientific arena. For example, science can describe the effects that crucifixion has on the human body, but it cannot make any definitive pronouncements concerning the Christian belief that Jesus Christ rose from the dead three days after being crucified.

Since Mormons make claims in scientific areas that are not accepted due to their complete lack of evidence, there is no reason to take these claims seriously just because they undergird religious beliefs. Put bluntly, science does not exist to aid religious narratives, and since the claims of Mormons in the area of language and linguistics are not only not supported by evidence, but are actually in some cases directly contradicted by available evidence (as already presented in this thread), it is right that those claims be rejected without prejudice towards the Mormon faith as a religion, or towards Mormon people as people.

Basically, if you didn't make scientific claims, you wouldn't get blowback from people who actually engage in the relevant sciences. You wouldn't have to actually change anything that you believe, only your way of approaching it so as to not make claims that attempt to present your beliefs as though they are backed up by scientific evidence when they are not. As I have already written several times to our friend Peter1000 (who I would really recommend imitating in this regard, as he has accepted this distinction), "I believe in this as part of my religion" is perfectly fine and respectable; "Scientific disciplines show my religious narrative to be confirmed by real world evidence" when in fact they do not is neither fine nor respectable.

It is not just members of The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints that make claims in scientific areas that are not accepted due to their complete lack of evidence. In fact the flood mentioned in the Bible lacks scientific evidence. The age of man is also disputed, as are other things. It takes faith to believe in God. It also takes faith to believe in the Book of Mormon and the Bible. However we believe that the spirit is made of matter which is also stated in the video that Phoebe Ann posted.

 

[Peter1000]

Really? All over the world, there are stories of the flood and people emerging from it. That in Mexico there were 8 that emerged has nothing to do with JS writings but the story of Noah and the 8 people saved. Here are 25 flood stories---there are over 200 of them.
25 Great Flood Stories Found Around The World

Some people insist that the flood of the bible was taken from the Gilgamesh---it's the other way around. They got it from the actual flood,. Just because they may have written it down first doesn't mean their version is the original one.

You are right about one thing. Moses did not take Gilgamesh and use it as the model for his flood story. Moses saw the flood in its totality and wrote about it from personal experience as the revelation of God poured into him. Gilgamesh was a corrupted story of the flood written down by a corrupt Babylonian priesthood years after the flood.

However, you whitewashed what I said about early Mexican tradition that 8 families walked out of 8 caves out in the water, and that turtles brought them to shore, and that they came from the area of the tower of babel and the confusion of tongues.

You did that because the BOM also tells that story of the Jaredite people (Olmec) that were in the area of the tower of babel and got caught up in the confusion of tongues. But the Lord was with them and a group of 7 families were saved with the same language and were brought to the sea and departed the land in 7 barges that eventually landed on the east coast of mexico. This event would have been recorded as a primary event of the first inhabitants of Mexico after the flood, that still exists today in a little different manner but very similar to the original story.

Give the BOM credit when credit is due.

 

[dzheremi]

It is not just members of The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints that make claims in scientific areas that are not accepted due to their complete lack of evidence.

When did I ever say that it is only LDS who do this? There's that creationist museum in Kentucky (?) run by and funded by Evangelical Protestants of some type, for instance. Of course it is not only LDS who do this. It just so happens that LDS make claims that I can evaluate from an academic and scientific perspective, because I have had the necessary training and received the necessary specialized degree in this subject (linguistics). If we had a biologist or a geologist here, I'm sure they could take on some of the claims made at the creationist museum, but we don't have that. Instead you're all stuck with me. So I do what I can to correct misuse of the one science I know and am actually qualified to talk about at least to a certain level, such as I already have by providing basic examples that show why the LDS claims are not believable. Luckily for all of us, it doesn't really take any more than that to counter the non-scientific claims made by the LDS in this area. (I don't have a Ph.D., but I do have a master's and a bachelors, so I've been through a good deal of schooling in this subject in particular, and am not speaking from a place of presumption based on any religious narrative, but from a place of informed analysis, having done the work to understand how language actually works in the world, not according to what a religious text that was not even written with linguistics in mind tells us.)

In fact the flood mentioned in the Bible lacks scientific evidence. The age of man is also disputed, as are other things. It takes faith to believe in God. It also takes faith to believe in the Book of Mormon and the Bible.

Of course, and what is faith but "the substance of things hoped for" and "the evidence* of things not seen"? (* 'evidence' not meaning scientific evidence, obviously, as the Bible is not a science textbook)

However we believe that the spirit is made of matter which is also stated in the video that Phoebe Ann posted.

Well, you're definitely wrong about that, but okay...that is your religious belief.

 

[mmksparbud]

You are right about one thing. Moses did not take Gilgamesh and use it as the model for his flood story. Moses saw the flood in its totality and wrote about it from personal experience as the revelation of God poured into him. Gilgamesh was a corrupted story of the flood written down by a corrupt Babylonian priesthood years after the flood.

However, you whitewashed what I said about early Mexican tradition that 8 families walked out of 8 caves out in the water, and that turtles brought them to shore, and that they came from the area of the tower of babel and the confusion of tongues.

You did that because the BOM also tells that story of the Jaredite people (Olmec) that were in the area of the tower of babel and got caught up in the confusion of tongues. But the Lord was with them and a group of 7 families were saved with the same language and were brought to the sea and departed the land in 7 barges that eventually landed on the east coast of mexico. This event would have been recorded as a primary event of the first inhabitants of Mexico after the flood, that still exists today in a little different manner but very similar to the original story.

Give the BOM credit when credit is due.

I would give it its due if I could. As I said there are over 200 (actually over 600) stories from all over the world about the flood. BOM has nothing on those 600 stories. It's not whitewashed---it's reality. Want some more?

Flood Stories from Around the World

There are over 600 global flood stories from around the world

Flood Legends From Around the World

Why Does Nearly Every Culture Have a Tradition of a Global Flood?

 

[Peter1000]

I would give it its due if I could. As I said there are over 200 (actually over 600) stories from all over the world about the flood. BOM has nothing on those 600 stories. It's not whitewashed---it's reality. Want some more?

Flood Stories from Around the World

There are over 600 global flood stories from around the world

Flood Legends From Around the World

Why Does Nearly Every Culture Have a Tradition of a Global Flood?

We are not talking about flood stories. The Jaradites were at the tower of babel and in the confusion of tongues, they were led by the Lord to the sea and built 7 barges and sailed to the east coast of Mexico. We are talking migration from the land of babel to Mexico, not the flood story.

The Codex Ixtililxochitl talks about the history of pre-Columbus Mexico and mentions that the first inhabitants of Mexico came from the tower of Babel. The Popol Vuh talks about the first inhabitants came from the land where the language was confused, they call it Tulon (not sure if I am spelling it right). It also talks of 8 caves that they came out of, which lines up real close to 7 barges which opened up when they reached the east coast of Mexico and they came upon the land and started to work it. The land of the confusion of the language is the tower of or land of Babel.

So thank you for the flood stoies, but irrelevant in this discussion as to the first inhabitants of Mexico, which fits nicely with what the BOM has to say.

 

[Peter1000]

When did I ever say that it is only LDS who do this? There's that creationist museum in Kentucky (?) run by and funded by Evangelical Protestants of some type, for instance. Of course it is not only LDS who do this. It just so happens that LDS make claims that I can evaluate from an academic and scientific perspective, because I have had the necessary training and received the necessary specialized degree in this subject (linguistics). If we had a biologist or a geologist here, I'm sure they could take on some of the claims made at the creationist museum, but we don't have that. Instead you're all stuck with me. So I do what I can to correct misuse of the one science I know and am actually qualified to talk about at least to a certain level, such as I already have by providing basic examples that show why the LDS claims are not believable. Luckily for all of us, it doesn't really take any more than that to counter the non-scientific claims made by the LDS in this area. (I don't have a Ph.D., but I do have a master's and a bachelors, so I've been through a good deal of schooling in this subject in particular, and am not speaking from a place of presumption based on any religious narrative, but from a place of informed analysis, having done the work to understand how language actually works in the world, not according to what a religious text that was not even written with linguistics in mind tells us.)



Of course, and what is faith but "the substance of things hoped for" and the Bible is not a science textbook)



Well, you're definitely wrong about that, but okay...that is your religious belief.

How can you possibly make a statement that the spirit definitely is not made of matter? JS said it, and we have faith that he was taught by the Lord that the spirit has matter. So we at least go by faith.

To emphatically deny it, seems to be rather brave and bravado statement, not having too much evidence yourself on the subject. Or am I wrong? Does your pope say something about the make-up of the spirit?

 

[mmksparbud]

We are not talking about flood stories. The Jaradites were at the tower of babel and in the confusion of tongues, they were led by the Lord to the sea and built 7 barges and sailed to the east coast of Mexico. We are talking migration from the land of babel to Mexico, not the flood story.

The Codex Ixtililxochitl talks about the history of pre-Columbus Mexico and mentions that the first inhabitants of Mexico came from the tower of Babel. The Popol Vuh talks about the first inhabitants came from the land where the language was confused, they call it Tulon (not sure if I am spelling it right). It also talks of 8 caves that they came out of, which lines up real close to 7 barges which opened up when they reached the east coast of Mexico and they came upon the land and started to work it. The land of the confusion of the language is the tower of or land of Babel.

So thank you for the flood stoies, but irrelevant in this discussion as to the first inhabitants of Mexico, which fits nicely with what the BOM has to say.

Yes we are. There is no evidence for the BOM story -- there are certainly more stories about the flood then there are stories that talk about the BOM--which is none.
The Codex Ixtililxochitl is a depiction of the 18 calendar months of the Aztec and their deities and feasts.
You are in need of quoting where it mentions Babel for the is no mention of it, that I have seen. It is written in Spanish, between 1568-1578. The Aztec story of creation consists of about 5 suns--The Popol Vuh tells the story of creation in 4 different ways, with the final one being humans were created from corn. There are some people who believe that the tower of Babel was actually in Mexico. Noah’s ark landed in the land of Ararat (in Mexico). The range of mountains where it landed are the Gordyaeans, now called the Cordilleras, south of Mexico City. The specific mountain where the ark landed is Mt. Adjusco, at the site of the Cholula Pyramid. That according to some guy who wrote a book about it and I can't remember his name. But then, there are those on this website who think Noah's ark landed in New Jersey---or was built there. I get keep them all straight.

 

[dzheremi]

How can you possibly make a statement that the spirit definitely is not made of matter? JS said it, and we have faith that he was taught by the Lord that the spirit has matter. So we at least go by faith.

I hate to point out the obvious, but I DON'T BELIEVE IN JOSEPH SMITH, so it doesn't matter to me what he said, or that you believe in what he said. He's a false prophet, teaching false doctrines like this one. Nobody before him taught that the Holy Spirit was made of matter. That is a ridiculous, pagan notion, that has no support in the entire history of Christianity. Even your favorite go-to Christian saint, Justin Martyr, didn't teach that. He taught that matter preexisted with God and God formed things out of that preexisting matter, but not that the Holy Spirit was made out of matter. That's very different, even though he was also wrong and teaching based on the presumptions he had inherited from his pagan philosophical background.

To emphatically deny it, seems to be rather brave and bravado statement, not having too much evidence yourself on the subject. Or am I wrong? Does your pope say something about the make-up of the spirit?

No, Peter. Neither HH Pope Tawadros II nor any Christian leader of any traditional, historic church teaches anything like that.

You seem to be thinking along the lines of "Other people have to disprove what we believe or else they're presuming to know without evidence to be able to say definitively that we are wrong", but that's a foolish way of thinking. Notice how I don't say "I believe in XYZ, and you have to prove me wrong or else admit that you can't say that I am, because you don't know." If I believe something, I don't say everyone who believes otherwise has to prove me wrong; I show where the belief is coming from, from the examples in the scriptures, the fathers, the prayers of the liturgy, and the other traditional sources we have inherited as a Church, so that it is clear that I am not arguing from myself alone.

I'm not going to adapt my argument to your errant Mormon way of thinking and reasoning, because I am not a Mormon and I don't believe you have any knowledge or truth that we do not have in Christianity, as nothing that Joseph Smith brought that was new was of any benefit to anyone in any fashion. It was all lies from the devils who told him to reject Christianity in favor of his own made up religion based on visions and lies.

 

[He is the way]

When did I ever say that it is only LDS who do this? There's that creationist museum in Kentucky (?) run by and funded by Evangelical Protestants of some type, for instance. Of course it is not only LDS who do this. It just so happens that LDS make claims that I can evaluate from an academic and scientific perspective, because I have had the necessary training and received the necessary specialized degree in this subject (linguistics). If we had a biologist or a geologist here, I'm sure they could take on some of the claims made at the creationist museum, but we don't have that. Instead you're all stuck with me. So I do what I can to correct misuse of the one science I know and am actually qualified to talk about at least to a certain level, such as I already have by providing basic examples that show why the LDS claims are not believable. Luckily for all of us, it doesn't really take any more than that to counter the non-scientific claims made by the LDS in this area. (I don't have a Ph.D., but I do have a master's and a bachelors, so I've been through a good deal of schooling in this subject in particular, and am not speaking from a place of presumption based on any religious narrative, but from a place of informed analysis, having done the work to understand how language actually works in the world, not according to what a religious text that was not even written with linguistics in mind tells us.)



Of course, and what is faith but "the substance of things hoped for" and "the evidence* of things not seen"? (* 'evidence' not meaning scientific evidence, obviously, as the Bible is not a science textbook)



Well, you're definitely wrong about that, but okay...that is your religious belief.

I believe that it is not science vs religion, but rather science and religion. There are just many things about science and religion that we don't know yet. Eventually we will see that they are very much connected.

 

[Peter1000]

I hate to point out the obvious, but I DON'T BELIEVE IN JOSEPH SMITH, so it doesn't matter to me what he said, or that you believe in what he said. He's a false prophet, teaching false doctrines like this one. Nobody before him taught that the Holy Spirit was made of matter. That is a ridiculous, pagan notion, that has no support in the entire history of Christianity. Even your favorite go-to Christian saint, Justin Martyr, didn't teach that. He taught that matter preexisted with God and God formed things out of that preexisting matter, but not that the Holy Spirit was made out of matter. That's very different, even though he was also wrong and teaching based on the presumptions he had inherited from his pagan philosophical background.



No, Peter. Neither HH Pope Tawadros II nor any Christian leader of any traditional, historic church teaches anything like that.

You seem to be thinking along the lines of "Other people have to disprove what we believe or else they're presuming to know without evidence to be able to say definitively that we are wrong", but that's a foolish way of thinking. Notice how I don't say "I believe in XYZ, and you have to prove me wrong or else admit that you can't say that I am, because you don't know." If I believe something, I don't say everyone who believes otherwise has to prove me wrong; I show where the belief is coming from, from the examples in the scriptures, the fathers, the prayers of the liturgy, and the other traditional sources we have inherited as a Church, so that it is clear that I am not arguing from myself alone.

I'm not going to adapt my argument to your errant Mormon way of thinking and reasoning, because I am not a Mormon and I don't believe you have any knowledge or truth that we do not have in Christianity, as nothing that Joseph Smith brought that was new was of any benefit to anyone in any fashion. It was all lies from the devils who told him to reject Christianity in favor of his own made up religion based on visions and lies.

You are right, the bible and the fathers are silent as to the make up of the spirit.

So if JS says the make up of the spirit has to do with finer matter, what is that to you? You certainly cannot counter and say that is ridiculous, simply because nobody knows what the make up of the spirit is.

You can also say, since I do not believe in JS, I do not believe anything he says.

What you cannot say is that matter has absolutely nothing to do with spirit, simply because nobody knows what the makeup really is.

You might also say, that's interesting, nobody has ever said that before. It is interesting that JS would be delving into the world of the spirit with such a bold statement. I will have to study that sometime.


But for you to categorically reject JS and then make your own pompous statement, as if you knew all about the spirit world, is a little over the top too.

 

[BigDaddy4]

This is a very interesting tapestry, because the BOM tells the story of the Jaredite people that came from the tower of Babel around 2200bc in 7 barges and landed on the eastern coast of Mexico. I can see that their departure from their barges would be a fairly dramatic event that would have stories told forever.

Is this your speculation or has the lds church made an official declaration of where the BOM takes place? Last I heard, the lds church had no official statement on the location of Hill Cumorah.

 

[dzheremi]

You are right, the bible and the fathers are silent as to the make up of the spirit.

So if JS says the make up of the spirit has to do with finer matter, what is that to you? You certainly cannot counter and say that is ridiculous, simply because nobody knows what the make up of the spirit is.

You can also say, since I do not believe in JS, I do not believe anything he says.

What you cannot say is that matter has absolutely nothing to do with spirit, simply because nobody knows what the makeup really is.

I didn't say it has nothing to do with the Holy Spirit. I said that such speculation, or rather, the codification of it, has no support in the history of Christianity. You don't find the great saints like HH St. Irenaeus, HH St. Ignatius, HH St. Athanasius the Apostolic, St. Ephrem the Syrian, HH St. Cyril, St. Basil, St. Gegory, the three Macarii, and so on, writing about the 'makeup' of the Holy Spirit. If you knew Christian history, you know that 'pneumatology' or whatever you'd call it was defined to the extent that it needed to be to deal with the Pneumatomachi, the 'Spirit Fighters' (obviously not a name they gave to themselves) a.k.a. Macedonians of the late fourth, early fifth century who gathered in large numbers in Antioch and Alexandria. These groups were anti-Nicene (against the Creed), so-called 'Semi-Arian', and were called 'Spirit Fighters' because they denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit. This heresy is why the 381 version of the Creed adopted by the first Council of Constantinople was expanded to include explicit affirmations of the Holy Spirit's Godhood: "And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father, Who with the Father and the Son is [equally] worshipped and glorified, Who spake by the Prophets." Please read HH St. Athanasius' Letter to Serapion and HG St. Basil of Caesarea's On the Holy Spirit (both mentioned at the link) for more on the orthodox Christian understanding of this topic. You will note that in these writings, just like in all others that answered the Macedonians, no one asserts anything about a physical makeup of the Holy Spirit, because such an idea is alien to Christianity.

You might also say, that's interesting

But it's not interesting. It's heresy. Very old heresy, at that. It's boring to have to deal with things that Mormons think are brand new, but are really just the repackaging of ancient heretical ideas with some new verbiage.

nobody has ever said that before.

Nobody may have said that exact thing, but so what? It's not like there were never any people who held heretical views about the Holy Spirit before. Joseph Smith and his theology does not deserve serious consideration for apply ancient heretical ideas in new ways or to new things. It's still heresy.

It is interesting that JS would be delving into the world of the spirit with such a bold statement. I will have to study that sometime.

Do whatever you want, but it's wasting your time and poising yourself with heretical teachings. There are definitely better things to do. I know if I were to study Joseph Smith's views, I would want to compare them to the historical Christian views even if I didn't believe in those already, because of course Mormonism claims to be a restoration of the Church, including its original 'pre-apostasy' theology. So I would want to see that same view espoused in the earliest Church fathers...and I would have to conclude that Mormonism is not what it says it is, because the fathers who we have from before Nicaea do not write that the Holy Spirit is made out of matter.

But for you to categorically reject JS and then make your own pompous statement, as if you knew all about the spirit world, is a little over the top too.

'Pompous statement'? For one thing, I didn't write the Creed, for another thing, I'm not the one asserting something that is in contradiction to the entire history of Christianity based on supposed 'revelations' given to me from God that no one is allowed to question.

So who's really pompous here, Peter? This isn't even the pot calling the kettle black, because you didn't invent Joseph Smith's theology, either (read: Joseph Smith is the pompous one here; you are simply repeating his assertions because Mormonism doesn't allow you to do anything else), but to call anyone who doesn't adhere to your latter-day revelations 'pompous' for continuing to keep to traditional Christian teachings on this subject instead is certainly not in line with humility, which I would hope anyone calling someone else 'pompous' would display in their own conduct, so as to not seem like a gigantic hypocrite.