Greg Trimble's 11 Book of Mormon evidences

If you have Mormon friends on social media, chances are you've been presented with links to some pretty interesting Mormon logic. One post I've recently seen from a popular blog makes the case for The Book of Mormon in 11 poorly thought out proofs. The proofs are stated as questions and are the typical examples offered by general authorities of why The Book of Mormon is true which means they're the kinds of things you can say in church meetings to make yourself feel important and everyone else feel comfortable, but predictably they are not very convincing.

Here are the eleven questions that will prove the authenticity of The Book of Mormon and my brief responses.

1. Could an uneducated boy come up with 531 pages of ancient scripture on his own that was historically accurate and prophetic in nature?

Answer: Yes, absolutely. Please open your copy of the book to essentially any page that isn't copied almost verbatim from the King James Bible (that might be harder than it sounds). Now tell me how many verses you have to read before you find one that sounds like an uneducated young man (calling someone in his early 20s a "boy" is condescending and inaccurate) er-ing and um-ing a dictation from his head. Not many. Joseph Smith loaded his book so full of place keepers, redundancies, filler and slip ups that I'm amazed when I make it through a single verse without feeling the need to edit.

Keep in mind that this is how it reads even after the Church's editing of all the more egregious frontier farmer speech.

2. Would it be possible for that boy to understand and include ancient Hebrew literary writing styles such as idioms and Chiasmus, some of which weren’t even discovered until long after Joseph Smith was gone ?

Answer: Easily. He read the Bible a lot. He, like every other human being who reads, would absorb and reproduce the style of what he reads to some degree. As for chiasmus, it's an extremely common organizational tool that certainly appears in Jewish literature but is not in any way limited to it. I made a chiasmus on accident once, others are more carefully thought out. You can find chiasmus in children's literature as easily as you find it in adult literature from all over the world, European literature included. This just came to mind, maybe Jews wrote it:

(A) Hickory dickory dock! 
(B)/(C) The mouse went up the clock.
(C) The clock struck one,
(B) The mouse ran down.
(A) Hickory dickory dock!

And quit insisting Joseph was a "boy" when he wrote The Book of Mormon; he was a married man.

3. How would Joseph Smith have been able to know so much about the Middle East, especially the Arabian Peninsula where Lehi and his family traveled? The book includes findings in that region that no one had discovered yet.

Answer: The "knowledge" about the Middle East found in the Book of Mormon could have been derived from having been shown a map. What do you think has been discovered there after the printing of The Book of Mormon that was included in the text? The "NHM" alter? Come on, give us what you've got. Everything apologists have thrown out there has been debunked.

4. How could Joseph Smith come up with roughly 200 new names in the Book of Mormon and then have them turn out to be Semitic in nature?

Answer: He read the Bible a lot. He reused many of those names, modifying them as he saw fit. It wouldn't be hard to throw in a few more made up names that look similar to what's found in the Bible.

5. If you think Joseph Smith couldn’t have written this book, then where did it come from? If one says the devil put him up to it…then why would Satan want to publish another testament of Jesus Christ and a book that does nothing but promote righteousness. Jesus said that a house divided against itself would fall.

Answer: Only a moron would say the devil wrote or inspired the writing of The Book of Mormon. It's origins are clearly early 19th century publications and popular thought.

6. Who were the “other sheep” that would hear Jesus’s voice in John 10:16?

Answer: The "Gentiles", in other words, the non-Jews.

7. Why are there volumes of books written by non-LDS authors stating that Christ came and visited the America’s a couple thousand years ago just like it says in 3rd Nephi? (See Example “He Walked The America’s”) How would Joseph Smith have known this when at the time no one even considered it?

Answer: No one has a monopoly on stupidity, ethnocentrism and wishful thinking. The one book you linked us to is very revealing about yourself as a thinker.

8. If we have the stick of Judah (record of the Jews or the Bible), then where is the stick of Joseph that is referenced in Ezekiel 37:15-20? The Book of Mormon is the only explanation for this scripture. Lehi was a descendant of Joseph. Think Joseph Smith could have gotten that right by sheer chance?

Answer: This is a misinterpretation of the Bible.

9. How could there be so many witnesses of the Book of Mormon and the plates and not one of them deny their testimony even when some of them became bitter toward Joseph Smith? With so many people involved…a hoax of this magnitude could never go uncovered.
 
Answer: People do and say all sorts of things for friendship, family and their reputation. Historian Dan Vogel has some presented some important information for you to consider.

10. How could the Book of Mormon never contradict itself while being an extremely complex book? After all these years…someone would have found something…but no.

Answer: The Book of Mormon is relatively straight forward in its narrative. It basically just tells the same story over and over again. The repetition is numbing, not profound. Despite the simplicity of the repeated narrative, contradictions and errors have in fact been found (you just have to be brave enough to read something other than LDS apologetic literature). It also contradicts known archealogy, natural history, and the history of religious and political thought; it contradicts other Mormon scripture; it contradicts current LDS beliefs (e.g. temporary suffering in hell vs. eternal suffering and the nature of the Godhead).

Even though The Book of Mormon isn't horribly riddled with internal contradictions, why does that somehow make it true? Many authors manage to avoid totally screwing up their stories, does that mean their books are true? Absolutely not.

11. How do I feel while I read the Book of Mormon? Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t trust your feelings. We are spiritual beings, and if we can’t trust our feelings, then what do we have? Over and over again in the Old and New Testament we’re told that we can trust that “still small voice” to guide us in our decisions. (1 Kings 19:12) I can write evidence after evidence to back up the Book of Mormon but each of those evidences I found were only secondary to the whispering of the Spirit I felt that day before I began waxing up my surf board.

Answer: Epistemology is a tricky thing. You're insisting that emotions are all we have. That's an unfortunate move on your part because we have a lot more than that: we have other senses to work with and we have logic. But if you're going to insist on feelings let's look at your feelings. Let's say you wake up from a dream about your wife cheating on you and you feel hurt and angry. You can't look at her the same for weeks. Did she really cheat on you? Are your feelings reliable? And what about others' feelings? Why do you seem so willing to disregard anyone's feelings and impressions that don't align with your own? What makes you think yours are the only true ones when members of essentially every other religion will use the same evidence as proof of their religion being true?

P.S. I wrote this blog immediately after reading the questions. The answers were too easy. I then went back to the blog to read the comments and saw that several people had written their responses as well. Several were similar to my own but I definitely encourage others to read through them.

Mr. Satan

"The biggest lie Satan can sell you is that he doesn't exist!"

I know you don't have to sit through LDS meetings to hear this frightening warning. No matter where you hear it, the point is clear: you had better not stop believing in Satan. That muthafuckahz the real thing! And he's scary as shit!

The horns are maybe more symbolic than literal, it's true, but let's just take a moment to recognize that many, many people have had visions of a Satan with horns and wings. They're tradition at this point, and Lord knows we Mormons love tradition.

And the folks who love Satan most really prefer this more traditional approach.

Now consider for just a moment how badly Satan wants you for himself.

Terrifying! Of course, Mormons know better than the Church of Satan (those satanist assholes have totally been deceived), they know he doesn't look like a goat or have horns or wings. He looks like us, for he is our spirit brother born of our Heavenly Parents. Some say he looks a bit like Barack Obama. Others think he's white.

More important than what our fallen brother looks like is what he wants. Satan wants you to suffer, brothers and sisters. He wants you to be fucking miserable for all eternity because that's exactly the kind of heartless, bodiless bastard he is (that's right, he was too rebellious to be given a body). He tempts and torments you at all times setting traps and waiting for you to fall into sin. I don't even like to think about his evil ways.

"Taste my happiness, y'all mothafuckahz! We got this!"

Good thing other people have thought about it for me. Take Bible scholars for example. These dudes have looked very carefully at the use of the Hebrew word satan (שָּׂטָן), which means "adversary", to understand where Satan comes from. As it turns out satan is a term that describes a variety of human and celestial beings who in some way create opposition for someone else. The Devil (meaning  "slanderer"), Great Lucifer the Fallen, the Father of All Lies, doesn't come onto the scene until hundreds of years later on in the tradition of satans when the Hebrew tradition was able to absorb more of the dualism from surrounding religious traditions, at which point Satan, Yahweh's mortal enemy, was born into the world. Here's a brief explanation in video form:

So where does this leave us with regards to a scary bogeyman named Satan? Do we trust Joseph Smith's tweaking of the Christian tradition or do we recognize the tradition has untenable origins and that we've been caught up in one of the longest running ghost stories on earth today?

Pay attention to how frequently our prophets, seers and revelators use the "because Satan" argument. Why should we find that argument convincing?

Shinehah, Olea, and Kokaubeam

We learn in The Book of Abraham God's name for the Sun, the moon, and the stars: Shinehah, Olea, Kokaubeam. Jah-oh-eh turns out to be God's word for the earth. Good to know, right? One might think that knowing these divinely appointed names would result in their adoption into the common Mormon lexicon. I mean, once it was revealed that God's name is Elohim and that Jesus is Jehovah, the LDS Church really latched onto that and takes care to reenforce this knowledge, and yet when you go to church and listen to your lessons or to the temple and watch the Creation film you won't hear the Sun, the moon, the stars, or the earth referred to by their true names even once! Why is that? 

It's also a little strange that God hasn't been very consistent or insistent with these names when speaking to his prophets. The scriptures are full of references to the heavens and their various features and yet they contain God's preferred names only once, in Abraham 3! The closest you get to seeing these names in other scripture is in the Old Testament where the ancient Hebrew שֶׁמֶשׁ (she-mesh) at least starts with the same consonant as Shi-ne-hah and is followed by a similar vowel,  יָרֵחַ (ya-rey-ahh) sounds quite a bit like O-le-a, and the Hebrew for star כּוֹכָב (ko-khav) is almost identical to the pluralized Ko-bau-beam (-im is a Hebrew plural noun ending). I guess Hebrew really is closest to Adamic after all! God must have been revealing bits and pieces of his native tongue to Joseph, like the whole "Pay-lay-ale!" thing. 

But I still have a nagging doubt about these divine names found in Abraham 3. Didn't Joseph start learning Hebrew just after he purchased The Book of Abraham? Oh, really? Less than a year later? And when was the translation finally finished? Not before 1838? Hm... When was the translation finally published? 1842! So Joseph had about six years to dapple in Hebrew before going public with this thing. Do you think it might be possible that he was trying to show off his newly acquired Hebrew translating skills?

Not a smart move for an abecedarian. He's left too obvious a trail.

Of course, if Joseph's freestyling Hebrew isn't goofball enough, you can still relish in the other blunderful names found in the papyri translations (Elkenah, Enish-go-on-dosh, Kolob, Korash, Libnah, Mahmackrah, Oliblish, Olimlah, Raukeeyang, Shaumau, Shulem). Hebrew rip offs, pseudo-Egyptian, and a touch of fantasy make having faith in The Book of Abraham very problematic.

It's all Greek to us

Joseph Smith had a very difficult time distinguishing Hebrew names from Greek and Latin ones. One of his biggest blunders shows up in Doctrine and Covenants 110, which reccounts the supposed visitations to Joseph and Oliver Cowdery in the Kirtland temple. In verse 12 Joseph says "Elias appeared, and committed the dispensation of the gospel of Abraham, saying that in us and our seed all generations after us should be blessed," which sounds totally cool and only slightly confusing (why's Elias officiating for the gospel of Abraham, and what the hell is Abraham's gospel anyway?). The problem occurs in the next verse when "Elijah the prophet, who was taken to heaven without tasting death, stood before us." The problem is that Elias is the Romanized Greek version of the Hebrew name Anglicized as Elijah. In other words Elias and Elijah are the same person, the former spelling of his name appears in the New Testament and the later form is found in the Old Testament.

LDS Church leaders have since decided that (1) there must have been some other prophet out there during Abraham's time named Elias (a Greek dude was hanging around with Abraham?) and that (2) Elias is probably a title for a forerunner prophet. I'm not making this shit up.

The more likely possibility seems to be that Joseph just didn't know the difference between Hebrew and Greek versions of the name in question.

Corroborating evidence to this latter theory is found in The Book of Mormon when Nephi uses the terms "Messiah," a Hebrew term, and "Christ," a Greek term - both literally meaning the anointed - in the same verse. Twice. Isn't that amazing? Nephi, a Hebrew is using messiah correctly (as a title) but using the Greek word Χριστός as Jesus' proper name. Nephi and Joseph need some serious help with their Greek.

Not that their Hebrew was any better. In 3 Nephi Jesus gives the Nephites chapter four of Malachi and the Nephites write down that "the Son of Righteousness" shall arise whereas Malachi wrote about "the Sun of righteousness." Now unless Jesus was speaking to the Nephites in English, it would have been very difficult for them to hear shamesh (Hebrew for sun) and then write down ben (Hebrew for son). What are the chances that Joseph's scribe screwed things up and the mistake going uncorrected all these years? What are the chances that Joseph thought he was being clever and screwed up?

The Book of Mormon also inserts the use of synagogues "after the manner of the Jews" in Nephite America even though synagogue worship did not exist at the time Lehi left Jerusalem. So where did the Jewish synagogue practice come from? Might Joseph have imposed New Testament era Jewish worship on people who would have been entirely ignorant of those practices?

"Just because we'll be living in the New World without any kind of telecommunicative technology doesn't mean we won't know exactly what our fellow Jews are up to in several hundred years."

Well how about Jews going to church? Laban and Zoram, two Jews living ca. 600 B.C.E., apparently were church goers, if that makes sense at all. It seems as though Joseph really liked Hellenizing his Hebrews.

Chiasmus

Mormon apologists love to bring up the existence of chiasmi in The Book of Mormon as a strong indication that the writing is seeped in Hebrew literary culture. It sounds great. For those of us who want to believe, this is when you pop the champagne cork and get to celebrating the truthfulness of The Book of Mormon.

However, it might not be a bad idea to hold off on celebrating and look at the pervasiveness of chiasmi in other literary works. What are we to make of the fact that, in addition to great authors like Shakespeare, nursery rhimes and children's books also use chiasmi? Finding a chiasmus is always fun, but does it really mean what we want it to mean?

PS. So looking back on what I wrote I found that I had unintentionally created a rather complex chiasmus. The only thing I added was "hold off on celebrating and" to the second paragraph. Check it out.

(A) Mormon apologists  
(B) love to
(C) bring up the existence of chiasmi
(D) in The Book of Mormon as a strong indication that
(E) the writing is seeped in Hebrew literary culture.
(F) It sounds great. For those of us who want to  
(G) believe, this is when  
(H) you pop the champagne cork and get to celebrating 
(I) the truthfulness of The Book of Mormon.

(I) However, it might not be a bad idea
(H) to hold off on celebrating and  
(G) look at the
(E) pervasiveness of chiasmi in other literary works.
(F) What are we to make of the fact that,  
(D) in addition to great authors like Shakespeare, nursery rhimes and children's books also use chiasmi?
(C) Finding a chiasmus is always  
(B) fun, but does it really mean what  
(A) we want it to mean?

As you can see (F) and (E) trade places in the second part, but I have to say I'm kind of proud of myself. I must be an ancient Hebrew at heart. Oh wait, I am! I'm totally the tribe of Ephraim!

Hebraisms in The Book of Mormon

Those doubters who would have you believe that Joseph Smith or some contemporary of his wrote The Book of Mormon have clearly not considered all of the Hebraisms in the text. If it wasn't written by Egyptian-writing Israelites, why are there indications that the English text Joseph translated came from a Hebrew-influenced source? The authenticity of The Book of Mormon is essentially proven thanks to literary and rhetorical devises typical in ancient Hebrew texts!

Who cares if those same literary and rhetorical devises can be found in literature from across the world and in different periods, including Jacobean England? Who cares if the translators responsible for the King James Bible created a widely dispersed and extremely popular English text based on Hebrew Old Testament writings? The KJT might have influenced other books that followed it, but not The Book of Mormon! I mean, how could it have? The Book of Mormon was compiled 1200 years before the KJT ever existed, right? 

Reading material.

Believing blood

One of the stranger beliefs of Mormonism postulates that the more Hebrew blood you have the more receptive to the truth of the Gospel and authority of the LDS Church you will be. Apparently belief is genetic and the Hebrews hold the majority of shares when it comes to believing... that they're the awesomest, most chosenest people of God.

Even awesomer than believing in the truth because you've got a lot of Hebrew is that if you're of the tribe of Ephraim you won't rebel!

"And the rebellious shall be cut off out of the land of Zion, and shall be sent away, and shall not inherit the land. For, verily I say that the rebellious are not of the blood of Ephraim, wherefore they shall be plucked out." (D&C 64:35-36, emphasis added)

So Ephraim just might be the least rebellious of all the believers of Israel. Very cool stuff (even if it's total nonsense).

It really gives you a sense of what the world lost when the blood of Joseph Smith, a pure Ephraimite, a pure non-rebellious believing blood type, was spilled at Carthage. What a fucking waste of the "best blood of the nineteenth century" (D&C 135:6)!

Joseph Smith III, half Ephraimite, half Moggle.

What's worse is that obviously Emma contaminated that blood because otherwise Joseph Smith III would have surely reunited with the saints in Utah. If only we could once again breed the purest of believers...

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!