One of the fun things about watching people try to argue religion *from an outside perspective* is that you can see the low blows people will make without feeling personally hurt anymore. Non-Mormon Christians will often point to the doubtful historicity of the Book of Mormon and then say, “Aha!”…
Category: Book of Mormon
Hellmut’s Deconversion
I have been miserable at Church ever since my mission. I still couldn’t get out because I had to act on my testimony even though I experienced Church as toxic every Sunday. To me, the mission experience was dehumanizing and sacrilegious reducing converts to trophies and missionaries to tools. Any…
We All Could Kill Children But What About God?
On the occasion of Ronan’s remembrance of the Coventry bombing, I am exploring theodicy with Jon and Right Trousers. I would agree with Right Trousers that the choices of the survivors can give meaning to the suffering of the victims. At least, we are taking responsibility for our actions. But…
Nephites in the Amazon?
Here’s some good news for those Book of Mormon believers who’ve been hodling on to the “we just haven’t found them yet” theory of where all the Nephite cities went: Unlike ancient Andean civilisations, the Kuikuro and other indigenous peoples from the Amazon had little stone close at hand. They…
“The smartest religious book is ‘The Book of Mormon'”
Okay, I know this isn’t a serious study, but I thought it was kind of funny. A student at Cal Tech decided to plot the ten most popular books at a given University (according to Facebook) on a graph with the University’s average SAT/ACT score. The study is here. (Hat…
Why “Reformed Egyptian”?
If you suppose the Book of Mormon is a work of fiction, it opens a different set of questions to explore than if you suppose that it is true. For example, why did the author choose to have his characters write in “Reformed Egyptian” instead of Hebrew or something else?…
According to logicians, I can prove a negative
I caught this post on the eSkeptic newsletter by a logician arguing that you can prove a negative based on induction (great reading for anyone interested). As that is the case, here are a few negatives I’m ready to prove: Modern Horses in America: 1. If horses had existed in…
BYU editorial on word change
In case you missed it, the BYU newspaper came out with an editorial on the word change in the BofM. The logic employed in this editorial is a brilliant representation of the flawed logic that I usually see in apologetics (though there are a few regular commenters on here who…
As if the BofM word change wasn’t enough…
Now there is pretty clear evidence that the Native Americans came across in a single migration around 12,000 years ago. A recent article in PLoS found that the genetic evidence among Native Americans in South, Central, and North America indicates a single migration. Mormon apologists are going to have to…
We’ll bring the world his truth
Whether or not it was my family’s version of mormonism, or I was actually taught it as being part of mormonism – I somehow got the message that I could influence people’s choices and decisions. If I said “if you just thought about it this way…” someone would rethink their…