Longest Thread Ever
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So here is Wikipedia on the subject of BofM horses:
While reasonable people can vary in their estimates of importance and significance based on a few passing references to horses, I note that there are no calvary units in the wars described in the Book of Mormon,and no messengers racing between cities on horseback, and no mention of plowing fields using animals in harness. Nothing at all similar to either the cowboy culture of the West, or the carts and wagons used in the early American settlements.
Early explorers in the Great Basin named Skull Valley that because there were some large skulls scattered on the desert around some springs sixty miles west of Salt Lake City, in 1845. With the aid of some translators in the company, the question was raised with the Indians, the goshute band. The Indians described something we would suspect as being wooly mammoths within their living memories, and a hard winter when there was snow in the valley perhaps ten feet deep. The mammoths froze, and the indians ate them.
fairly recent extinction events in the Great Basin include the camel and the sabre-toothed tiger. Indeed, anthropologists studying prehistoric America make it out as a very inhospitable place for humans with significant populations of bears and wolves as well.
The above article from Wikipedia does not claim there were not horses here at all before recent times, but that there was an extinction event presumed to be uniform across two continents around ten thousand years ago, maybe thirteen thousand years ago, coinciding with the end of the last Ice Age, incidentally.
The claim of New World extinction is a pretty stiff claim, and with obviously some possible questions. OK, let's list the places where there has been a careful study of artifacts with radiocarbon dating, and place them on the maps. See any holes? And then, if the the animals were scarce or perhaps unusual and worthy of notice as such, and not of general abundance or even being used in daily life. . . .. well, it's like somebody looking for Lion bones in modern America to substantiate a claim that we had circuses going around the country with a caged lion act.
At the moment this thread is longer than the Buckner thread. Crazy.
I don't consider the non-existence of pre-columbian horses in NA as a means to discredit the BofM. I have no dog in the fight nor would I care to disprove a faith-based belief.
My interest is purely academic.
Just wanted to be sure that was understood before any additional conversation.
My interest is purely academic.
Just wanted to be sure that was understood before any additional conversation.
I'm not sure God has a dog in this fight either. And I rather expect the authorities/management of the LDS Church don't either. If somebody did an actual analysis of LDS authoritative statements, tracing sources attributed as basis for LDS beliefs, isolating actual teachings unique to the Book of Mormon, and not found in the Bible, as one "source", it would surprise many members that the Book of Mormon ranks about fourth place as a source of current teaching, after the authorities who quote one another, after sociologists and anecdotal references, after the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price, after the New Testament.
I'm not sure I have a dog in this fight etiher. In 1978 I read the Solomon Spaulding Manuscript Found, and more or less concluded with the idea that Sydney Rigdon who worked for several years in the printshop where the manuscript was supposedly gathering dust, might have worked on the story idea a bit. Given that he was I think an Amherst or some other early American graduate of a theological program. Later, as an innovative Campbellite preacher with a congregation of some hundreds of followers, he was found preaching ideas essentially the same as those found in the Book of Mormon, within a hundred miles of where Joseph Smith lived and where Joseph found the gold plates, allegedly. And with most of those followers became a significant majority of early converts, enough to cause the new Josephite church to settle nearby in Kirtland. Just seemed to raise some questions about some tail wagging the boy wonder prophet.
The Book of Mormon contains a set of religious beliefs not found in any place or time other than frontier America centering on Signey Rigdon, and including the fairly common belief of many of that time that the Indians were a remnant of the Lost Tribes of Israel.
From an intellectual standpoint, the fact that Manuscript Found is a chronicle of two nations warring across the Ohio River, between a white race and a brown race allegedly the antecedents of the American Indians.. . . The Kentucks. . . . with the white race being of Roman and Christian origin, sailing across the ocean a few hundred years after Jesus, just seems a bit too serendipitously similar to the major historical theme of the Book of Mormon. I'm not sure the Bible Belt Baptists are ready to claim Mormons as their spawn just yet, but they are showing signs of having pre-emptive designs on some major distinctly Mormon ideas like the fatherhood of God over mankind and families being reunited as families in the hereafter.
And while Jesus was pretty clear on the Fatherhood of God over mankind and Himself, the Catholics left no scrap of reference to families in eternity in the Christian tradition, if ever it was taught after Jesus. That Jesus considered his family important is evident to me from the story of Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha. Just how important. . . is today not permissible authorized teaching among Mormons, but these women who were at events throughout Jesus' biblical chronology were listed variously as women who turned to Jesus to settle a quarrel over household chores, blaming Him for not being there when their brother died for the presumption that He could have prevented it, and as being the women who were intending to care for his corpse on the morning he reportedly got up and walked to where the Apostles were gathered in mourning.
However, all in all, I find the most intriguing fact in the whole Book of Mormon element of Mormonism to be the fact that Joseph Smith, Hyrum Smith, with the survivor friends John Taylor and Wilford Woodruff spent the last few hours, of Joseph Smith's (and Hyrum's) life reading a few passages from the Book of Mormon, turning down a page of two for a way to mark the places, and bearing testimony to one another of it's factual origin.
The Biblical account of Jesus on the way to the Cross is without parallel as a testimony of His sense of mission in his life, but the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum is as close a parallel as there is, and to me just as compelling.
Mormonism maintains today, a sense that no basis is necessary except being a live link with God. Whatever the history or science may say, a Mormon is a Mormon on the faith that God is God, and that God still cares for us.
I have a DVD set of discussions about the Book of Mormon which attempt to locate the place of Book of Mormon peoples in the area of the Mound Builders of the upper Mississippi/Ohio area. . . . fascinating compilation of references from Joseph Smith to support this idea.
He was certainly aware of the Mound Builder civilization, as some anti-Mormon schemers attempted to expose his "fraud" as a translator with a ruse. They got some copper plate,and scratched symbols on it like those described on allegedly ancient artifacts, dipped the plates for a while in some acid to produce an appearance of great age, and buried them in a local mound known to be from Indian origin. They covered the site with some common groundcover materials from the forest floor locally, waited for rain to obscure the shovel work, and hired some local Mormon boys to dig the mound, pointing them to the location of the buried plates.
When the Mormon boys dug out the "old" plates they predictably begged their employer to let them take the plates to Joseph Smith to find out what the writings said. Gaining the permission, it was a great commotion en route with the excited speculations about the new find. Joseph Smith accepted the plates, made some speculative comments on what they might be, and asked for some time to come up with a definitive translation. A few days later, he returned the plates to the owners, and refused to comment any further. He knew they were fake. Could make a few waggish comments like "it takes one to know one" and such, I suppose. He could have been intrigued with the possibilities of a grand new book of creative scripture, I suppose. But he chose to just distance himself from this, seeing no worthwhile purpose in arguing about the attempted entrapment.
He was certainly aware of the Mound Builder civilization, as some anti-Mormon schemers attempted to expose his "fraud" as a translator with a ruse. They got some copper plate,and scratched symbols on it like those described on allegedly ancient artifacts, dipped the plates for a while in some acid to produce an appearance of great age, and buried them in a local mound known to be from Indian origin. They covered the site with some common groundcover materials from the forest floor locally, waited for rain to obscure the shovel work, and hired some local Mormon boys to dig the mound, pointing them to the location of the buried plates.
When the Mormon boys dug out the "old" plates they predictably begged their employer to let them take the plates to Joseph Smith to find out what the writings said. Gaining the permission, it was a great commotion en route with the excited speculations about the new find. Joseph Smith accepted the plates, made some speculative comments on what they might be, and asked for some time to come up with a definitive translation. A few days later, he returned the plates to the owners, and refused to comment any further. He knew they were fake. Could make a few waggish comments like "it takes one to know one" and such, I suppose. He could have been intrigued with the possibilities of a grand new book of creative scripture, I suppose. But he chose to just distance himself from this, seeing no worthwhile purpose in arguing about the attempted entrapment.
well, we're helping to roll that stone, too. It's back up now by maybe ten, on the logjam I've created here it might stay there for a while.
Don't worry, I'm here to get the posts flowing again.
A Moe, babe, and Colton sandwich. Interesting.
Stifle Tower
Punch Bowl Re-Filler
Well there goes my appetite for lunch.
and the sleeping honeydoo lioness that is my wife is in her lair, recharging her to-do list. It's a small window. Must do what I can while I can.