The Lehites' neighbors

You know what would really help us in our search for Book of Mormon lands? The names a few neighboring peoples. We all know that the America's have been populated by human beings for at least the past 15000 years, so why don't we have any mention of these first inhabitants in the records of the Jaredites, or the Lehites, or the Mulekites. We get all manner of "-ites" deriving from these three sets of settlers, but no manner of neighbor.

The LDS Church has currently decided to take the stance that the Book of Mormon peoples integrated extensively with the populations already in the Americas to the extent that virtually all Near Eastern DNA markers have disappeared somehow.

All it would have taken to clear up this whole mess would have been a mere name of a tribe or two, even a verifiable name or two of individuals of an origin other than Jaredite, Lehite, or Mulekite. Just one. Anything to match up with what scholars know about pre-Contact peoples.

It's just hard to take The Book of Mormon seriously when there are holes this big running throughout its supposed history of 2200 BCE - 400 CE.

Lehi's land of inheritance

I grew up in a time when the LDS Church was saying that the Nephites and Lamanites once lived throughout North and South America. North America was "the land northward," South America was "the land southward," and the isthmus of Panama was "the narrow neck of land" spoken of in The Book of Mormon. By the time I got to seminary discussions about Book of Mormon geography was a little more vague. We were shown an unbiased rendering of the geography described that looked like this:

So pretty much the Church was still teaching that The Book of Mormon characters were living just north and south of the isthmus of Panama. Latin Americans were Lamanites to us then.

Currently this North/Central America-South America configuration (a.k.a. the hemispheric models) have fallen out of favor and have been replaced by limited geography models. The most popular camp has set its sights on the pyramid-building peoples of Mesoamerica and are proposing maps such as this one:

Far less popular but still a notable second are the theories placing the main events of The Book of Mormon in the American heartland.

Not too far from those theories are the ones who look to the Great Lakes area where Joseph lived and where the gold plates were discovered.

One advantage to this last map is that it actually corresponds nicely with a number of towns Joseph Smith would have heard about or potentially seen on a map.

Hey, if the shoe fits...

The fact is we have no facts other than the claims Joseph made. Now, as time buries brother Joseph ever deeper and people seek facts through science rather than visions, our knowledge of where this whole "ancient history" might be sinks farther and farther into speculation.

Scriptural errors

"And now, if there are faults they are the mistakes of men; wherefore, condemn not the things of God, that ye may be found spotless at the judgment-seat of Christ." (Title page of The Book of Mormon)

This would be a great "Get out of jail free card" for the ancient writers of The Book of Mormon if the faults and mistakes in their writings were not the same faults and mistakes of the translators of the King James Bible.

The Book of Mormon repeats verbatim the mistranslated words, it often keeps the non-textual words and phrases added by KJT translators, it promotes  misunderstandings of the Bible popular in Joseph Smith's time, and it doesn't even align with the "inspired" corrections of the JST.

To suggest that the Lehite prophets possessed the KJT is absurd. To suggest that God filled Joseph's illuminated translating mind with the texts he was already familiar with instead of giving him the actual translation of the gold plates defeats the purpose of bringing out new and improved scripture.

We need to think about this a little bit. If a student turns in homework with the same mistakes as another student, what is the teacher to think? If Thomas Monson came out tomorrow with a new book of freshly translated ancient scripture from Australia and a large part of it quoted verbatim sections from the Doctrine & Covenants and, say, the Book of Enoch, how would we feel about that?

Tribal hunting

Mormons believe in the "literal gathering of Israel ... and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes," according to the tenth Article of Faith.

The gathering and restoration project has to happen because in the 8th century BCE Assyria invaded Israel and carried off most of the Israelites. Amazingly enough, the Assyrians pretty much managed to capture every member of all of the tribes living in the Northern Kingdom: Asher, Dan, Ephraim, Gad, Issachar, Manasseh, Naphtali, Reuben, Simeon, and Zebulun. Members of Levi who were residing in the Northern Kingdom were also carried away, but other Levites were hanging out with the tribes of Judah and Benjamin in the Kingdom of Judah. Their separation is obviously a very bad thing and needs to be fixed.

This makes for a very exciting game of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, but with Israelite tribes instead of Carmen. 

Back when Joseph Smith wrote the Articles of Faith, much of the world was still an unknown. The tribes could have been hiding anywhere. Many settlers of the American continents believed the tribes would be there, but there was no need to completely exclude the nooks and crannies of Africa, the far reaches of Asia, the Down Under, and the many isles of the sea. The search was on.

Mormons have sent missionaries to every region of the world and have found converts among all peoples, and all we've found are a bunch of Josephites (Ephraim and Manasseh). In fact, the vast majority of Mormons have been assigned to the tribe of Ephraim. It's a little discouraging. Especially when we can't even keep track of the other Josephites. 

What's even more discouraging is that, even though many people claim to be the lost tribes, researchers who have sought out the Lost Tribes have found no trace of them anywhere. Where haven't we looked? How in the world can Israel hide from today's DNA analyses? It's like the whole Lost Tribe thing was just made up by some ignoramus in the 7th or 8th century CE. But don't lose hope. They'll show up some day soon!

Tough love

Learn to be white in a just a few years! It's easy!

As if the LDS Church's quest for spiritual and cultural domination over the earth weren't enough to make to make me doubt, finding out about the Indian Placement Program and electroshock conversion therapy use on homosexuals at BYU certainly brought to mind some fresh thoughts about what Christ-like love ought to look like. The justifications for keeping First Nations children physically distant from their families in order to culturally distance them from their traditions point nowhere near the love and acceptance one might expect from Jesus. Likewise the use of physical and psychological torture to reform homosexuals points nowhere near Christ-like behavior. These are two programs (the IPP admittedly much bigger than McBride's experiments) that have to cause members to scramble for answers. How can these sorts of things be inspired? How offensive is it that Mormons expect First Nations people to turn off their identity? Why do Mormons think homosexuals can do it? How can they be justified in the name of a loving god? How is it that the LDS Church and BYU have not apologized for these damaging programs?

Turning off the gay was supposed to be as easy as hitting the lights!

UPDATE: A Mormon Stories episode on the Indian Placement Program has just been added (4/4/14). Listen to it here.

Losing the Lamanites

Back in the day Joseph Smith regularly spoke with Nephite angels and had no trouble at all locating their evil kin, the Lamanites. They were all over the place and they were commonly referred to as Indians. Joseph knew exactly where the Lamanites overtook the Nephites in a great final battle, he found the remains of a Lamanite warrior named Zelph (as revealed to him by God) once, and he even took direction (from God) to send missionaries to western Missouri to convert the Lamanites residing there.

We knew exactly who the Lamanites were and it wasn't uncommon growing up to hear someone say to a young man with a mission call to Central or South America "Oh wonderful! You'll get to teach those wonderful people about their own family history!"

Today the Church isn't nearly as certain about who's a Lamanite. In fact, the Church now openly admits that it cannot find any Lamanites at all. But don't worry! Lack of evidence is not evidence of non-existence! (The existing evidence, however, does discredit the notion of Nephites and Lamanites ever physically existing.) So believe on, dear brothers and sisters! Everything has been explained sufficiently for our needs, and, on the plus side, the Church's statement indicates that it has finally officially accepted human evolution as legitimate, truthful science!

Or you can read why Simon Southerton thinks we should doubt on.

The Testaments

 (This is Jeremy Hoop, not Ben Stiller.)

You know what shook my faith? The Testaments: Of One Fold and One Shepherd, that Church-made feature about Jesus' visit to the Nephites "somewhere in the Americas". Talk about hyper-sentimental dog shit. I cringed through the entire film wondering how in the world the LDS Church (a church considering itself to be led directly by Christ's own resurrected hand) dare produce such an embarrassment of a film.

The story is sappy as all hell. Helam sees the star of Bethlehem as a teen and sets his heart on one day seeing the Messiah. In the 33-year interlude, Helam has a family; his wife has died and his son, Jacob, has become a rebellious pain in the ass who totally forsakes "the traditions of his fathers" in favor of a secular life in the court of evil Kohor. Jacob eventually changes his mind after witnessing the murder of a prophet of God by Kohor's stooges. Helam's disappointment and pain over his son is only compounded when he loses his sight and can no longer hope to see Jesus in the flesh. Then Jesus shows up in the sky, lands on the temple steps, and sets everything right. The end.

The movie plays the pain-of-lost-family card as much as it can to drive home the sense of fear and despair that is so crucial to the film. To say the music is heavy-handed would be an understatement. The Testaments manages to pound all subtlety to smithereens and send it out of screen with a sneeze. I found the movie horribly distasteful and I didn't want to be associated with it.

To top off my discomfort, the makers of the film decided to place the film squarely into a Mayan context. Seeing a bunch of white and Polynesian Mormons running around Mayan temples with with Mayan headdresses felt disrespectful to the Mayan, kind of like putting on blackface. Besides, the connection of the Nephites/Lamanites/(and all manner of "-ites") doesn't work. They weren't speaking a Hebrew dialect, weren't writing in Reformed Egyptian, weren't talking about the Messiah and American Revolution-related concepts of freedom and civil duty, and were not divided into "-ites". But in the film they're running around like there are singles wards and playing with non-Book of Mormon animals, like monkeys. 

I suppose it didn't help much either that Tomas Kofod was a damned ugly white Jesus...

...but my faith remained in tact. The Testaments is just a film after all, my faith was in the Living Christ and his living church!