Mormon Heretic

A friend of mine recommended a book by Kary Doyle Smout called  The Creation/Evolution Controversy: A Battle for Cultural Power.  Kary is an Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, and specializes in rhetoric.  I usually delve more into historical topics, so this was a bit of a change for me, but I enjoyed it.

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I don’t ever think I’ve done 2 posts in one day before, but I want to address this other issue that we have been discussing in the Strangite post.  I’d like to discuss both Biblical and Book of Mormon archaeology.  Most people believe the Bible is on solid archaeological footing, but that isn’t actually true.  Many books have questionable authorship, and many places remain unidentified.  In a previous post, I discussed Questions about the Exodus: there isn’t a shred of evidence that it actually happened.  During Passover celebrations in 2001, Rabbi David Wolpe created international headlines in Israel by proclaiming to his Jewish congregation in Los Angeles, “the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.”

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John Hamer, Mike Karpowicz, and Vickie Cleverly Speck gave a very interesting history of the Strangite movement.  What’s a Strangite you say?  Speck filled in many details: she said that James Strang was baptized into the LDS church just 4 months prior to the death of Joseph Smith.  Strang claims to have a letter from Joseph Smith making him the new leader of the LDS movement, and claims to been visited by Smith at the moment of Smith’s death.  An angel later anointed Strang with oil as the new prophet.  Amazingly, Strang counted many of the Smith family (including  Joseph’s brother William) as followers, and other prominent members, such as Martin Harris.

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It’s the pits when you have to choose between sessions, and I made a difficult choice in the morning.  I had wanted to attend Kathleen Flake’s session on LDS Adoption Theology, but instead attended Ken Ballentine’s documentary, Trouble in Zion. (Saints Herald has already blogged about it, and there is a Facebook page.  I also mentioned that I wanted to see it from the LDS Film Festival earlier this year.)

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I thought I’d give a quick rundown of my first day here at the Mormon History Association meetings here in Independence, Missouri, and tell you of some of the cool people I’ve met here.  The first activity we had was to go to the Harry S Truman Library.  I didn’t realize President Truman grew up in Independence, Missouri.  I enjoyed going to the museum and meeting several people there.  As I have learned more people on the bloggernacle and Mormon history, I recognized Emily Jensen of the Mormon Times.  As I introduced myself to her, I was surprised to learn than she had read my brief blog post from yesterday.  I had just posted it a few hours prior, and she told me that she knew that Mormon Heretic was here at MHA, and she was hoping to meet me!  I was really surprised when she told me that she reads my blog regularly.

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I have to thank Ray for sending me an email with this link from a website called Online Christian Colleges.  They listed a  post on their blog titled, 50 Best Blogs About Mormon Living.  Ray let me and Clean Cut know that our 3 blogs were list.  I hope Ray doesn’t mind me sharing his observation:

I have no idea how they came up with this list, but all three of us are on it!  (and I like the descriptions of the blogs, which means someone actually has read them closely enough to describe them)

Ray

Sorry there was no post last week.  I had planned to put this one up, but this has turned out to be one of my longest posts since my Priesthood Ban post.  This post is over 6000 words (14 pages), so be forewarned.  I’ve combined three different videos, so that’s why it took so long.  I’ll color code these quotes so you know which videos these quotes come from.   The videos are Science of the Exodus, by National Geographic; Exodus Decoded, by Simcha Jacobovici; and Exodus Revealed, by Discovery Media Group.

What I found interesting was the fact that there were many similarities.  The same experts and evidence often appeared in multiple videos, yet often different conclusions were provided.  It reminds me of the debate concerning Book of Mormon evidence.

During Passover celebrations in 2001, Rabbi David Wolpe created international headlines in Israel by proclaiming to his Jewish congregation in Los Angeles, “the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.”

For more than 1700 years, Christians have been looking for Mount Sinai, the place where Moses received the 10 Commandments.  Constantine’s mother, Helena was probably the first Christian in search of Christian artifacts in the 4^th century.  Read more…

It’s time to get back to Terryl Givens book, By the Hand of Mormon.  While acknowledging archaeological data isn’t as strong as other aspects of the Book of Mormon, Givens seems to feel Mormon academics have made some impressive contributions.  Givens starts with Hugh Nibley on page 118:

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I came across this recent article at Christianity Today describing meetings between evangelicals and Mormons.  Here are some interesting excerpts from the article:

LDS president Thomas S. Monson and his two counselors permitted Standing Together, an alliance of 90 Utah evangelical churches, to use the historic Salt Lake City Tabernacle for a September 13 revival meeting. Throngs of evangelicals and Mormons enjoyed gospel songs and prayed together.

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A friend of mine let me know about this news item at Signature Books.  Apparently, one of their authors (David Wright) has a new book published by Oxford University Press.  For those of you who don’t know, Oxford is known as a pretty tough place to publish.  They have pretty high scholarly standards, so getting published there lends one some great credibility.  So, the original press release at Signature stated that the Ten Commandments were plagiarized from Hammurabi.  The old quote from the site is below.  However, David Wright brought to my attention a correction in the press release.  I will show both of them.

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I’ve been reading a book by Apostle Dallin Oaks called Carthage Conspiracy.  Oaks is a lawyer, former Utah Supreme Court judge, former dean of the University of Chicago Law School, and president of BYU from 1971-1980 (updated 8/9/2009).  He wrote the book in 1975, and analyzes the trial of the assassins of Joseph Smith.  I plan to do a future post on the book, but let me say that when we look at Mayor(s) Daley and Gov. Blagojavich (sp?), it seems that crooked Illinois politics are alive and well, just as they were in the days of Joseph Smith.  The trial was a travesty, though I admit that Mormon unwillingness to assist the prosecutor in convicting these murderers did not help matters.  Apostle John Taylor, who was shot in the melee, went into hiding rather than testify.  Certainly this didn’t help the Illinois prosecutor in trying to convict the murderers.

I want to look at one specific incident in the book describing events in Missouri, and contrast LDS views with CoC views on the topic.  I want to review a specific statement from Prophet/President Veazey.  While Pres Veazey wasn’t addressing any particular events, I think the event I want to illustrate could have been something he might have been referring to.

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Ok, this is a post to tackle a few issues.  #1, Bishop Rick did request a post: “Personally, I would like to see a post that shows how evolution could fit inside the Genesis account of creation. I predict a lively discussion there.” I did do a post on Evolution, but he didn’t know me then (My blog was very new.)  However, it was quite lively over at Mormon Matters! This current post can also be considered a follow-up to my previous post on Science and Religion.

Also, the conversation veered off the road on my Malay post, going into the space-time continuum.  So, since I like to compartmentalize things, I thought I’d open up a new post where space-time continuum, advanced civilizations, etc can be talked about.  So, this is basically a science post where you can post anything to do with science vs religion.  I don’t care about threadjacking here, as long as it shows some reference to science.  I do want to pull a quote from Nachminides, as we start this discussion.  I posted this previously on my DNA post: Read more…

Thanks to FireTag for letting me know about a recent statement by the current prophet of the Community of Christ.  He talks about scriptural literalism.  The videos can be found on the CoC website, and this quote comes from Chapter 4.  Let me quote from Pres. Veazey directly: Read more…