Mormons: We are Christians, too

Captain wrote:

The twenty-seventh and twenty-ninth chapters of the book of 2 Nephi explain the conditions under which the Lord has brought forth the Book of Mormon in modern times and his purpose in doing so:

To show the human race the vanity of their wisdom and to show them "that I know all their works" (2 Nephi 27:26—27).
To teach the meek and correct ancient misunderstandings (2 Nephi 27:25, 30).
To serve as a great central rallying point for the work of the last days: "a standard unto my people," recalling them to their covenants (2 Nephi 29:1—2).
To stand beside the Bible as "the testimony of two nations,... a witness unto you that I am God, that I remember one nation like unto another" (2 Nephi 29:8).
"That I may prove unto many that I am the same yesterday, today, and forever; ... for my work is not yet finished" (2 Nephi 29:9).
It is "written to the Lamanites ... and also to Jew and Gentile ...—Which is to show unto the remnant of the House of Israel what great things the Lord hath done for their fathers; and that they may know the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off forever—And also to the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that JESUS is the CHRIST, the ETERNAL GOD, manifesting himself unto all nations" (Title Page to the Book of Mormon).
At a time when men "cast many things away which are written and esteem them as things of naught" (2 Nephi 33:2), the Book of Mormon, containing "the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles and to the Jews also; ... was given by inspiration, and is confirmed to others by the ministering of angels, and is declared unto the world by them—Proving to the world that the holy scriptures are true, and that God does inspire men and call them to his holy work in this age and generation, as well as in generations of old; Thereby showing that he is the same God yesterday, today, and forever. Amen" (D&C 20:9—12).

does it? Using the BOM as authority, evidence...I bought one for a dollar at the DI last week. 1964...

The bottom line is this:

If you use the same empiracle methods on the Bible as you do the Book of Mormon, then you prove the Bible to be untrue.

If the Bible is untrue, then Christianity is likewise untrue.

A famous early account of life in Mesoamerica just after the Spanish Conquest is the 1566 record of Friar Diego de Landa about his observations in the Yucatan. At a used book sale, I recently acquired an English translation of his work, Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, translated by William Gates (New York: Dover Books, 1978), originally published as Relación de las cosas de Yucatan, 1566, first published in English in 1937 as Publication No. 20 of the Maya Society, Baltimore. No English translation was available for Joseph Smith to study, even if he had been a bookwork with a vast frontier library. Much of what we know about Mayan culture - which is still precious little - derives from the writings of this friar, who, I'm sorry to report, persecuted the inhabitants of the Yucatan and burned many of their records that could have told us much more. But from his descriptions, we do see a number of things that might make some sense as possible remnants from contact with ancient Book of Mormon peoples. One of the most striking things is the existence of Mayan rites with close connections to the Book of Mormon concept of baptism. Here is an excerpt from pages 42 to 45 of the English translation:

Sec. XXVI. Method of baptism in Yucatan; How it was celebrated
Baptism is not found anywhere in the Indies save here in Yucatan, and even with a word meaning to be born anew or a second time, the same as the Latin word renascer. Thus, in the language of Yucatan sihil means 'to be born anew," or a second time, but only however in composition; thus caput-sihil means to be reborn. Its origin we have been unable to learn, but it is something they have always used and for which they have had such devotion that no one fails to receive it; they had such reverence for it that those guilty of sins, or who knew they were about to sin, were obliged to confess to the priest, in order to receive it; and they had such faith in it that in no manner did they ever take ft a second time. They believed that in receiving it they acquired a predisposition to good conduct and habits, protection against being harmed by the devils in their earthly affairs, and that through it and living a good life they would attain a beatitude hereafter which, like that of Mahomet, consisted in eating and drinking.

Their custom of preparing for baptism was as follows: the Indian women raised the children to the age of three, placing for the boys a small white plaquet, fastened to the head in the hair of the tonsure; the girls wore a thin cord tied very low about the waist, to which was attached a small shell over the private parts; to remove these two things was regarded among them as a sin and disgraceful, until the time of the baptism, which was given at about the age of ten; until this ceremony was received they did not marry.

Whenever one desired to have his child baptised, he went to the priest and made his wish known to him, who then published this in the town, with the day chosen, which they took care should be of good omen. This being done, the solicitant, being thus charged with giving the fiesta, selected at his discretion some leading man of the town to assist him in the matter. Afterwards they chose four other old and honored men to assist the priest on the day of the ceremony, these being chosen with the priest's cooperation. In these elections the fathers of all the eligible children took part, for the fiesta was a concern of all; those so chosen were called Chacs. For the three days before the ceremony the parents of the children, as well as the officials, fasted and abstained from their wives.

On the day, all assembled at the house of the one giving the fiesta, and brought all the children who were to be baptized, and placed them In the patio or court of the house, all clean and scattered with fresh leaves; the boys together in a line, and the girls the same, with an aged woman as matron for the girls, and a man in charge of the boys....

[Landa then describes how the priest purifies the house and casts out demons, and refers to the priest carrying a hyssop made of a short stick and the tales of serpents like rattlesnakes (the aspersarium).]

The chacs then went to the children and placed on the heads of all white cloths which the mothers had brought for this purpose. They then asked of the largest ones whether they had done any bad thing, or obscene conduct, and if any had done so, they confessed them and separated from the others.

When this was done the priest called on all to be silent and seated, and began to bless the children, with long prayers, and to sanctify them with the hyssop, all with great serenity. After this benediction he seated himself, and the one elected by the parents as director of the fiesta took a bone given him by the priest, went to the children and menaced each one with the bone on the forehead, nine times. After this he wet the bond in a jar of water he carried, and with it anointed them on the forehead, the face, and between the fingers of their hands and the bones of their feet, without saying a word. The liquor was confected out of certain flowers and ground cacao, dissolved in virgin water, as they call it, taken from the hollows of trees or of rocks in the forest, after this annointing they were taken to a lake or river and held under the water for one breath....

The fiesta then ended with long eating and drinking; and the fiesta was called em-ku, which means 'the descent of the god.'

Fascinating! A major Mayan ritual was associated with being born again, purification, cleansing from sin, confession of sins to a priest, changing one's nature to be a better person, and gaining salvation in the afterlife - all very LDS and Christian concepts (at least early Christianity - some of these concepts have been lost in some parts of modern Christianity). It was readily recognizable as a Native American form of baptism by a Catholic friar in the sixteenth century. The ritual, like Christian baptism, was performed by a priest, to whom candidates for baptism confessed their sins, if serious sins were present - again similar to the restored Christian practice in LDS religion. White cloth was associated with the ritual, as in the LDS practice (though for LDS baptism, the candidates dress completely in white.) Christian baptism underwent many changes in the centuries after the loss of apostles, and Unlike the Aztecs, though, the Yucatan form of baptism is for children in the range of 3 to 12 years. And, as in Christian baptism, the ceremony is associated with "the descent of the god" - akin to the description of baptism in Romans 6, where Paul explains that it is a symbol of the death and resurrection of Christ.

Could the three days of fasting of the adults before the baptism ritual be associated with the symbolism of Christ being in the grave for three days? Perhaps. The three-day concept could be tied to ancient lost knowledge of the death and resurrection of Christ.

And before baptism, the soon to be baptized people were anointed with sacred water, being anointed on the head and elsewhere, a practice which could very well have derived from knowledge of anointings in the ancient temple.

Related to de Landa's account of baptism in Mesoamerica is the later account of Mexican-born Spaniard, Mariano Veytia (1720-1778; full name: Mariano Fernandez de Echevarria y Veytia), who recorded what he learned from native Mexicans about their ancient history. His writings, which were not even printed in Joseph Smith's day and only recently have been translated to English, are available in the book Ancient America Rediscovered, translated by Ronda Cunningham, compiled by Donald W. Hemingway and W. David Hemingway (Springville, Utah: Bonneville Books, 2000). The following excerpt from Veytia is taken from pages 167-169 of Ancient America Rediscovered:

Still flooding huh?

I swear, this guy will take four pages of convoluted flood to somehow try to refute the simplest Christian teachings.

Occam's Razor applies to Christianity also Captain.

So your conclusions about the research of Primitive Christianity are false and fabrication.

Captain,

I'll pay you a $100 fee for just debating me. I won't even do a bet. You can get $100 if you choose to have a one hour debate with me in any voice-chat enabled forum.

Only rule is that we get equal speaking time, no more than a 55/45 split (you don't get to dominate the discourse).

What do you say?

That's not the bottom line.

1. The Book of Mormon came out of a void from 1830. There were no actual ancient documents to even attest that it's "writers" existed or that the context of their writings existed.

The Bible certainly has been written in the ancient times, based on events that we know to have occurred. There was an Egypt, there was a Pharaoh, there were Hittites, there was an Alexander, there was a Maccabbes and so on AD INFINITIUM.

on the OTHER hand, IN ABSENTIA, there is nothing to present here and now, or through any legacy that can attest to ANYTHING in Mormonism.

So where the Bible might have one or two missing historical pieces out of 1000 parts already found in it.

The Book of Mormon lacks ONE discovery to corroborate it. Ad NAUSEUM.

So flood THAT

Captain wrote:

The bottom line is this:
If you use the same empiracle methods on the Bible as you do the Book of Mormon, then you prove the Bible to be untrue.
If the Bible is untrue, then Christianity is likewise untrue.

Osirica wrote:

Still flooding huh?
I swear, this guy will take four pages of convoluted flood to somehow try to refute the simplest Christian teachings.
Occam's Razor applies to Christianity also Captain.
So your conclusions about the research of Primitive Christianity are false and fabrication.

He's trying to compete with Noah on the flooding.

As if sheer volume will win this debate. In and amongst his volumes of cut-and-paste that he posted today, there wasn't one word that could be used to meet the burden of proof demanded by even one of his bucketful of claims. And it's spelled "empirical," captain... If you're the same crazy 15 year old I think you are.

Captain wrote:

The Great Retreat
For a century the Book of Mormon continued to be regarded as an unspeakable affront to the claims and the very existence of the Bible. But in our own day a strange thing has happened: A large influential number of diligent Bible students have declared that the Bible itself is nothing but mythology, and that in order to mean anything to modern man it must be "demythologized" or "deeschatologized"; ......
<further plagiarism excised

Note to all - these above pastings were not Captain's original work; 100% of it was plagiarized and stolen from Hugh Nibley's work APPROACH TO THE BOOK OF MORMON...

Link to the full text, including the chapter beginning with "THE GREAT RETREAT," that Captain pasted here verbatim, is here:

http://ar1.podbean.com/pb/8d31ba9fa256c1cf7d9...

For those who don't know who Hugh Nibley is, here's the beginning of his Wikipedia article, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Nibley

----------

Hugh Winder Nibley (March 27, 1910 – February 24, 2005) was an American author, Mormon apologist, and professor at Brigham Young University (BYU). His works, while not official positions of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), mainly attempt to demonstrate archaeological, linguistic, and historical evidence for the claims of Joseph Smith, and are highly regarded within the LDS community.
A prolific author and professor of Biblical and Mormon scripture at BYU, he was fluent in numerous languages,[2] including Classical Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, Coptic, Arabic, German, French, English, Italian, and Spanish. He studied Dutch and Russian during World War II. He also studied Old Bulgarian and Old English, and his fluency in Old Norse was reportedly sufficient to enable him to read an entire encyclopedia in Norwegian.[citation needed]
Nibley wrote and lectured on LDS scripture and doctrinal topics, publishing many articles in LDS Church magazines. His An Approach to the Book of Mormon was adopted in 1957 as a religious lesson manual by the LDS Church.

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Captain, I'm sick of your cut and paste. It's not profound - it's a waste of bandwidth and space on topix, because all of this text you've pasted here is available elsewhere on the net. All you have to do is provide a link instead of six separate pastings. If you have nothing original to contribute to what Nibley has said, just give the link and be done with it.

If you can't argue for your faith on your own, and need to instead paste verbatim what others say, don't claim that you're proving anything other than you know how to hit control-V.

Captain wrote:

A famous early account of life in Mesoamerica just after the Spanish Conquest is the 1566 record of Friar Diego de Landa about his observations in the Yucatan. At a used book sale, I recently acquired an English translation of his work, Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, translated by William Gates (New York: Dover Books, 1978), originally published as Relación de

<remaining plagiarism excised>

The post that begins with the above was plagiarized from Jeff Lindsay, available here:

http://www.jefflindsay.com/bme23.shtml

No citation, just mountains of cut and paste...

Captain, I'm neither impressed with your "nuggets" nor your capacity for independent thought. You seem to just want to go to the apologist sites and do a control-c/control-v. It's not impressive. It's juvenile. You'd get an F in any university course if plagiarism is your method of debate or argument.

I found your online sources in about 30 seconds with google. Why don't you just link to them instead of paste them? It sure doesn't make you look smart.

Actually, all this cutting and pasting reminds me of Ms. Hannah. This was usually her MO. And she was last spotted on here in Wyoming... Coincidence??? Hrrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmm.....

This can't be the return of Kymie Virus, could it?

Captain wrote:

The twenty-seventh and twenty-ninth chapters of the book of 2 Nephi explain the conditions under which the Lord has brought forth the Book of Mormon in modern times and his purpose in doing so:
To show the human race the vanity of their wisdom and to show them "that I know all their works" (2 Nephi 27:26—27).
To teach the meek and correct ancient misunderstandings (2 Nephi 27:25, 30).
To serve as a great central rallying point for the work of the last days: "a standard unto my people," recalling them to their covenants (2 Nephi 29:1—2).
To stand beside the Bible as "the testimony of two nations,... a witness unto you that I am God, that I remember one nation like unto another" (2 Nephi 29:8).
"That I may prove unto many that I am the same yesterday, today, and forever; ... for my work is not yet finished" (2 Nephi 29:9).
It is "written to the Lamanites ... and also to Jew and Gentile ...—Which is to show unto the remnant of the House of Israel what great things the Lord hath done for their fathers; and that they may know the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off forever—And also to the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that JESUS is the CHRIST, the ETERNAL GOD, manifesting himself unto all nations" (Title Page to the Book of Mormon).
At a time when men "cast many things away which are written and esteem them as things of naught" (2 Nephi 33:2), the Book of Mormon, containing "the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles and to the Jews also; ... was given by inspiration, and is confirmed to others by the ministering of angels, and is declared unto the world by them—Proving to the world that the holy scriptures are true, and that God does inspire men and call them to his holy work in this age and generation, as well as in generations of old; Thereby showing that he is the same God yesterday, today, and forever. Amen" (D&C 20:9—12).

This text was stolen from here:

http://www.experts123.com/q/why-the-book-of-m...

Haw Haw wrote:

Actually, all this cutting and pasting reminds me of Ms. Hannah. This was usually her MO. And she was last spotted on here in Wyoming... Coincidence??? Hrrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmm.....
This can't be the return of Kymie Virus, could it?

Ur right!! I'm smelling Hannah and her sisters!!!
Hey Kym! How's the decorating business?

mormons are ...

hmmm..

mormon women folk should be saving their lamp oil.

I'm here..
lol
to light your lamps.

Captain, I've still been following your posts and yesterday was hillarious.

This is how I see it:

We have 3 homosexuals that have a vendetta against the Mormon Church.

1. Haw Haw the main idiot, who is like a mosquito that flies out of his little swamp puddle after certain posts to give a little sting.

2. NoMo, who is angry over the proposition 8 defeat in California and swears revenge against Mormons.

3. Daniel who is pretending to be a black woman named Osirica, and he just repeats the same one subject argument over and over, while denying any proof. No matter how compelling that proof is !

on the other side of the coin.

1. PPandF, who has fought these 3 idiots for months and months, he just trades them punches, but his faith is strong and he has great determination to stay in the fight.

2. Captain, you came in to fumigate the site, but the vermin are mad because sometimes you use store bought insect repellent and sometimes you use home made insect repellent on those cockroaches.

The lying, haters against the Mormon Church will search a thousand words looking for ONE misspelling to rail against the whole message or they will complain that readily available information is used to counter their lies and deceitfulness.

I can only hope that you and PPandF keep up on this site against those 3 homosexuals who hide their real reason of why they hate Mormons.

I really don't care if they are homosexuals, but it is obvious that it is the main core of their agenda on this site to slander the Mormon Church and to use dirty tactics to do so.

Besides it's all great intertainment.

By the way, I have been baptized and now I am a new member.

...definitely Hannah and her sister wives

Hannah is a very astute and nice person.

so there lol

Osirica wrote:

Captain,
I'll pay you a $100 fee for just debating me. I won't even do a bet. You can get $100 if you choose to have a one hour debate with me in any voice-chat enabled forum.
Only rule is that we get equal speaking time, no more than a 55/45 split (you don't get to dominate the discourse).
What do you say?

At least you see that 'Captain' would win.'dominate' He has more
legitimacy than do you. I know that for a fact, God has no gender,
you lost all validity with your thinking to me on that one !