Feynman vs M2C

Richard Feynman‏ @ProfFeynman
11 hours agoMore

You should, in science, believe logic and arguments, carefully drawn, and not authorities.

https://twitter.com/ProfFeynman/status/1055118750939299840

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M2C intellectuals:

You should, in science, believe authorities, not logic and arguments, carefully drawn.

Book of Mormon Scholarship

One of my favorite bloggers has posted a couple of gems lately. One we'll discuss now is titled "Quality Book of Mormon Scholarship." Another is "Dead Prophets," which we'll discuss tomorrow.

Coming from the Executive Director of Book of Mormon Central Censor (BOMCC), a guy I really like, respect and admire but just happen to disagree with on a couple of points, it is a predictable (and probably necessary for BOMCC) justification for, and defense of, censorship. In this case, censorship is framed as a filter based on "quality." Let's take a look at this "quality" filter.
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In this post, I'm focusing on a major subset of Book of Mormon scholarship; i.e., work produced by those scholars who promote M2C (the Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory).

Censorship is essentially an appeal to authority, which is basically all M2C has going for it.

We're expected to believe M2C because the M2C experts tell us they're right. That's the classic appeal to authority. But when you look at any of the M2C papers, books, videos, etc., you quickly see additional logical fallacies--usually in the first paragraph.
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The notion that some objective measure of "quality" is decisive is an illusion. All Book of Mormon scholarship is ultimately subjective, as we can see from the comparable example of Biblical scholarship (discussed below), but this is especially true of M2C scholarship.

That said, it is important to assess the credibility, reliability, and accuracy of anyone's work. Errors of fact or logic ought to be pointed out and discussed. Assumptions should be made clear and explicit.

This is where M2C Book of Mormon scholarship fails. 

The fundamental premise that drives all M2C scholarship is a shared belief that the prophets and apostles are wrong about the New York Cumorah. But the M2C scholars rarely, if ever, state that assumption clearly and explicitly so their readers understand the bias they seek to confirm.

Instead, the M2C intellectuals bury their bias in a word salad that mixes the clear, unambiguous and consistent teaching about the New York Cumorah with the equally clear, unambiguous and consistent teaching from the prophets and apostles that we don't know for sure where the other events in the Book of Mormon took place.

Furthermore, the M2C bias against the teachings of the prophets is purely a subjective decision. They frame it as "evidence based" because that looks like "quality" scholarship, but their bias is merely the result of circular reasoning, based on their a priori conclusion that Book of Mormon events took place in Mesoamerica.
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The "Quality Book of Mormon Scholarship" blog post is unintentionally ironic because it completely ignores what real experts on Mesoamerica think, which is that M2C is nonsense.

"Quality data"

The only scholars who still promote M2C are the ones who have sunk costs in M2C (mostly at BYU) and those who defer to them.

Take any M2C publication and ask a non-M2C Mesoamerican scholar to plot it on the "quality data" chart featured in the blog post. If they can plot the M2C publication at all, it will be in those little blocks on each end titled "Very un-likely observations."


Despite all the M2C content produced by self-described M2C experts, the entire M2C theory is pure confirmation bias based on illusory evidence. 

That's why no one outside the M2C bubble believes it.

The tragedy of M2C is its fundamental premise (bias) that the prophets and apostles are wrong about the New York Cumorah.

Everything else M2C teaches is designed to confirm that bias. 
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What qualifies someone to write for the M2C citation cartel? The blog post lists 7 "quality" elements, but it omits the only true qualification.

To be part of the M2C citation cartel, the fundamental requirement is that you repudiate the teachings of the prophets and apostles about the Hill Cumorah in New York.

Rejecting the teachings of the prophets and apostles is the one thing all M2C intellectuals agree upon. 

It's what qualifies them as M2C intellectuals. It's the driving force behind everything published by Book of Mormon Central Censor that relates to geography.

With repudiation of the prophets as their fundamental premise, it's no surprise the M2C intellectuals have to rely on logical fallacies, illusory evidence, and their private interpretations of the text that are designed to validate their theories--one of the best examples of circular reasoning you'll find anywhere.

That said, beyond M2C, many LDS scholars do great work. Even the Interpreter publishes some good material. I refer to Book of Mormon Central Censor for lots of things, especially Royal Skousen's books. (I'm increasingly skeptical about some of the other material on BOMCC, but I don't have time to get into that here.)
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The list of "quality" criteria in this blog post looks like something the scribes and Pharisees would have enforced. In New Testament times, they ran a citation cartel no different from the one being run by today's M2C intellectuals, complete with content-based censorship.

How, then, should we assess Book of Mormon scholarship?

There are useful comparisons with Biblical scholarship. For centuries, scholars have debated the meaning, origins, and application of the Bible. Equally "qualified" experts reach many different conclusions on various details. They propose completely different interpretations. In some cases, they formed new churches based on the product of their scholarship. Some think the Bible is an authentic history; others consider it a compilation of myths.

Biblical scholars debate their respective credentials, experience, expertise, and other qualifications, as well as the content of their work.

Much of what we observe in Biblical scholarship is also true of Book of Mormon scholarship, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Like Biblical scholars, M2C scholars engage in debate and disagree about various details and interpretations. However, they all agree that the prophets and apostles are wrong about the New York Cumorah.

In my view, that disqualifies their work, regardless of any purported "quality" filter.

The only trustworthy Book of Mormon scholarship is scholarship that embraces, not repudiates, the teachings of the prophets.  

gnats and camels, plus F2C

People have been wondering why I haven't been blogging as often as I used to. I get a lot of message from people asking about this and that.

Ganga Talao

The short answer is, that from the perspective of those of us living in and around the Indian Ocean, M2C* is "manifestly absurd," to paraphrase BYU Professor John Sorenson (who actually applied that term to the teachings of the prophets about the New York Cumorah).

Latter-day Saints in this part of the world looks not to Mesoamerica but to America* as the home of the prophets, the site of the restoration of the Gospel and the establishment of the Church, the source of most missionaries and financial support and leadership and teachings, including not only the Book of Mormon but also the Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, and General Conference addresses over the decades.

They all accept the New York Cumorah because of the Introduction to the Book of Mormon: "After Mormon completed his writings, he delivered the account to his son Moroni, who added a few words of his own and hid up the plates in the Hill Cumorah."

People here still believe the prophets.

For the most part, they don't even realize that a handful of LDS intellectuals who consider themselves "hired by the prophets to guide the Church" are still trying to persuade members of the Church to reject the prophets and accept their teachings instead. These include a core of intellectuals who form the M2C citation cartel, headed by Book of Mormon Central Censor, the Interpreter, and BYU Studies.

Nobody in this part of the world has even heard of these intellectuals or their organizations, and no one cares what they think, anyway. 

Which is awesome, compared with the number of American Latter-day Saints who have chosen to follow the intellectuals instead of the prophets. 
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The problem is that the M2C citation cartel is effectively censoring the words of the prophets that they don't like. Any time now, they will undoubtedly arrange to change the Introduction to the Book of Mormon to censor the term Cumorah the way the revisionist historians have censored the term in the book Saints.

From my perspective, these intellectuals are "Blind guides, who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel." Matt 23:24, KJV.***

They strain at the simple, clear, consistent and persistent teachings of the prophets and apostles that the Hill Cumorah of Mormon 6:6 is in western New York.

And they swallow the manifestly absurd idea, never taught by a single prophet or apostle, that the Hill Cumorah of Mormon 6:6 is somewhere among the mountains of Mesoamerica.

BYU's fantasy map

Or worse, they swallow the even greater absurdity that Cumorah exists only in the fantasyland concocted by BYU and CES intellectuals.

[BTW, the new term for this is F2C - Fantasyland/2 Cumorahs theory.]

I don't think M2C is sustainable. Certainly F2C is not sustainable.

M2C was at least grounded in the real world.

F2C converts the Book of Mormon into a parable, a development that is already disastrous.
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By now, I think it's evident to most Church members that there is a clear distinction between the teachings of the prophets and the teachings of the intellectuals on many issues. The one I discuss most often in this blog has to do with the Hill Cumorah.

I really like the way we have a clear choice to make.

for behold, ye are free; ye are permitted to act for yourselves; for behold, God hath given unto you a knowledge and he hath made you free. Helaman 14:30

The M2C scholars don't want you to have knowledge. That's why they censor the teachings of the prophets. They know that most members of the Church who have full knowledge of the teachings of the prophets and the intellectuals, will choose the prophets.

So far, here in Africa I haven't met anyone who has chosen the scholars over the prophets. I wish I could say the same about Utah.
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I do have another post scheduled for tomorrow, but don't expect more daily posts any time soon.

:)

 
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* The Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory
**The United States of America. 
*** Most translations render this as "strain out a gnat," which makes more sense and is a good metaphor for the way the Church History Department "strained out" the word Cumorah from the book Saints. That's a topic I've discussed on my Saints Review blog, here:
https://saintsreview.blogspot.com/

Basketball in Africa

Our front yard. Notice our neighbor's Hindu temple
where he worships daily with chimes and a horn.

I'm working on some significant projects involving Church history* and the Book of Mormon that I'll be discussing in upcoming weeks and months, but in the meantime, people wonder what we do here in Africa besides go to the beach.

Our training facility with a basketball court,
up the road from our house.

We have a sports training facility near our house that includes a basketball court, volleyball court, a running track, and various workout machines. So far, I haven't found a lot of people here who play these sports, but we're working on that.

This Saturday we're climbing the mountain in the background of these photos. We're posting some of our activities on my wife's blog, here: https://makingmemoriesinmauritius.blogspot.com/

Those of you who follow our blogs can see this is a different house from the condo where we lived before.

We moved closer to town to avoid the traffic, although we can still see the ocean from this training facility.

We do still go to the beach, just not every day the way we used to when we could just walk down from our condo. Plus, spending a few weeks in Utah in September got us a little pasty. The other day we were snorkeling for quite a while and I got a tad sunburned, so we took a few days off from beach activities.
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*Recently I've been told about several more examples of Church members who think that Joseph Smith never mentioned the Hill Cumorah in New York. That's the inevitable result of the revisionist Church history being advocated currently, as exemplified in the inexcusable censorship in the Saints book that I've discussed before, such as here: https://saintsreview.blogspot.com/.

Unless and until Saints is corrected, the revisionist Church history will become the only version Church members around the world will ever know.

Letter VII hidden in the Joseph Smith Papers

If you go to the Joseph Smith Papers and search for "Cumorah," you will get 16 results--and not one of them goes to Letter VII.

The M2C citation cartel has effectively censored Letter VII for a long time because it unequivocally and specifically explains it is a fact that the Hill Cumorah of Mormon 6:6 is in New York.

Now that Letter VII is breaking through and thousands of Church members are discovering it, the cartel has tried to persuade Church members to disbelieve the prophets who originally wrote Letter VII and their successors who have taught. There was an awesome post on Book of Mormon Central Censor not long ago that purported to tell Church members how to "understand and use" Letter VII. We discussed that here: http://bookofmormonwars.blogspot.com/2018/07/m2c-intellectuals-terrified-of-letter.html

That's not working out so well. Most Church members who discover Letter VII, especially in context, believe the teachings of the prophets and reject the intellectuals who repudiate the prophets.

Nevertheless, the censorship continues, as we saw in the new Saints book.
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Many Church members find it significant that Joseph Smith had his scribes copy Letter VII (along with President Cowdery's other letters about Church history) into his personal history. 

This means anyone can find it right in the Joseph Smith Papers.

But there's a problem with the search engine in the Joseph Smith Papers. Let's call it a "quirk" because we don't want to believe the editors of the Joseph Smith Papers have intentionally omitted Letter VII from their search engine.

But the fact is, if you go to the Joseph Smith Papers and search for "Cumorah," you will get 16 results--and not one of them goes to Letter VII.

The links go to the first edition of the Book of Mormon, the early versions of D&C 128, and even President Cowdery's Letter VIII--but not to Letter VII.

(Curiously, the search results give you a link to only one of the Cumorah references in Letter VIII. It omits this one, found near the beginning of Letter VIII. "I have now given sufficent on the subject of the hill Cumorah—it has a singular and imposing appearance for that country, and must ex[c]ite the curiosity curious enquiry of every lover of the book of Mormon."

The page in the Joseph Smith Papers you won't find by searching
for "Cumorah." Instead, you have to search for "Camorah," even
though both words are plainly visible on the page.

If you want to read what President Cowdery said about the New York Cumorah, you can search for Camorah, which is the typo in the original text. That will take you to the page in Letter VII. Of course, no one knows about that typo.

Here is the link: http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1834-1836/90

For more fun, once you get to that page of Letter VII, search for "Cumorah" and the search engine will give you 7 new references to Cumorah, 2 from Letter VII and 5 from Letter VIII. You can click on this link to see that search result. Only one of those references shows up when you search for "Cumorah" on the main Joseph Smith Papers search box.

As I said, surely there's an innocent quirk somewhere.

But it seems to me, on its face, that it is difficult to create a search engine that will find one word (Camorah) but not a nearby word (Cumorah) on the same page.
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There's another bonus.

Your searches for Cumorah will not take you to the critical quotation from Lucy Mack Smith about Cumorah. If you've been reading this blog, you know that this quotation was carefully censored from the Saints book, as well.

Here's what Lucy wrote:

“Stop, father, Stop.” said Joseph, “it was the angel of the Lord— as I passed by the hill of Cumorah, where the plates are, the angel of the Lord met me and said, that I had not been engaged enough in the work of the Lord;"

It's important to realize that Lucy put this in quotations, and that this even occurred before Joseph got the plates. He could only have learned the name of the hill from Moroni, as Oliver Cowdery and Parley P. Pratt taught the people during their mission to the Lamanites in 1831.

Here is the page:

Another page about Cumorah you can't find in the JSP search engine
if you search for "Cumorah."

Good information more important than ever

General conference was tremendous, but I'll just comment on one element today.

The shift toward more home-based and individual study (the 2-hour Church meeting block) makes it more important than ever that Church members have good information.

As President Nelson has taught, "good inspiration is based upon good information."

The corollary: we can't expect good inspiration when we do not have good information.

The problem is, we can't trust materials produced by Church employees who promote, consciously or not, M2C.

We've seen how the Joseph Smith manual (Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith) censored a critical part of the Wentworth letter. This censorship means that millions of Church members around the world, in every language, will never know what Joseph Smith actually taught--unless they go to the original source (the March 1, 1842 Times and Seasons) or another reference that contains the full Wentworth letter.

Of course, these original sources have not been translated, which means that non-English speakers will never learn the truth. 

We've seen how the new book Saints censors critical references to the New York Cumorah and other related events/teachings in Church history. English-speakers can go to the original sources, but non-English speakers who have to rely on Saints will never learn the truth.

We've seen how the M2C citation cartel continues to censor this important information. One of the best recent examples is Opening the Heavens, as we've seen. At least that book hasn't been translated into other languages, so far as I know.

I encourage Church members to read original sources and avoid anything published by the citation cartel (BYU Studies, Book of Mormon Central Censor, Fairly Mormon, the Interpreter, etc.) unless you clearly understand their agenda.

The problem for non-English speakers remains, but we're working on solutions for them.

Misleading the Saints

Apparently there has been some Internet chatter by M2C advocates to the effect that I'm saying the M2C intellectuals and their followers have been misleading the Latter-day Saints.

Just to be clear... Of course the M2C intellectual are misleading the Saints.

If they weren't trying to mislead the Saints, why would they engage in censorship?

The very purpose for censorship and citation cartels is to mislead people by withholding information from them so they cannot make informed choices.

Censorship arises when people and organizations know their ideas cannot withstand scrutiny and comparison to alternatives.

Book of Mormon Central Censor, for example, will never allow a side-by-side comparison of M2C and the North American setting (Heartland, Moroni's America, etc.) because they know most Church member would reject M2C.

Naturally, everyone who works at Book of Mormon Central Censor supports this censorship. 

Some use social media to promote M2C, thereby further misleading members of the Church.

M2C intellectuals and their followers want members of the Church to believe their M2C-inspired interpretation of the text is the only interpretation that is "plausible" because it represents the consensus of the intellectuals in the citation cartel. It's absurd circular reasoning, and it's no wonder people outside the M2C bubble don't find it persuasive in the least, but people inside the M2C bubble love M2C because it confirms their M2C bias.

M2C intellectuals and their followers want members of the Church to believe the sciences (archaeology, anthropology, geology, geography, etc.) support only M2C. In reality, every theory of Book of Mormon geography relies on these sciences. That's why the teachings of the prophets about the New York Cumorah are essential. 

And that's why M2C intellectuals and their followers want members of the Church to believe the prophets have never taught the New York Cumorah. They don't want anyone to read (let alone believe) Letter VII and the other consistent and persistent teachings of the prophets about the New York Cumorah.

Hence, we get a carefully edited, M2C-compliant book such as Saints that censors the teachings of the prophets about Cumorah.

The only way they can maintain M2C is by censoring information that every member of the Church should know.
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Manual that misleads English-reading LDS

The classic example of misleading the Saints was the lesson manual titled Teachings of the Presidents of the Church--Joseph Smith.

The editing of the Wentworth letter in that manual is the best example of Orwellian tactics I can think of.

Manual that misleads French-reading LDS

Here we have Joseph Smith himself, specifically requesting that his article be published "entire, ungarnished, and without misrepresentation," but the Correlation Department specifically ignored Joseph's directions.

No one can look at the Joseph Smith manual and not realize that whoever edited it misled the Latter-day Saints.

Manual that misleads German-reading LDS

For millions of members of the Church around the world--especially those who do not read English--this manual is the main source of Joseph's teachings. Consequently, millions of Latter-day Saints have been misled by that manual.
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Manual that misleads Tagalog-reading LDS

Now, millions of members of the Church will learn a revised version of Church history in the book Saints.

These unsuspecting members of the Church will never learn what the prophets have actually taught, just as they will never learn the key passages from the Wentworth letter that Joseph wanted everyone in the world--including every Church member--to know.
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I favor using actual historical accounts instead of paraphrasing them to mislead members of the Church.

Manual that misleads Spanish-reading LDS

Based on what comes out through the Correlation Department, I suspect we'll see more and more censorship as the M2C intellectuals and their followers throughout the Church continue to mislead members of the Church to promote their M2C theories.