News Flash: Academia Conspires Against Mormonism

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

"Warren Jeffs has been taken into custody by Las Vegas police. Details coming up...", said the voice on the radio.

"Holy crap!", said the voice in my head. I immediately called Donna to relay the news. I knew should would not have heard yet as this is the time of day she is busy getting little bodies out the door for school.

Her response was surprisingly tepid, "Oh."

I pressed a little for a response, "Don't you think that's good news? This guy has been marrying off little girls to old men."

"Mm Hmm." She was not willing to engage in the conversation.

"You don't think he's wrong, do you?!?"

"Well, if I do, you'll jump right to how Joseph Smith was exactly the same", she assumed.

"Actually, I just called to tell you the news. It is interesting though that the parallel between Jeffs and Smith is so obvious that you could make that jump. Doesn't it scare you that your faith in Joseph Smith puts you in a position where you have to defend Warren Jeffs?"

"No, but Ken (our shrink) told me it would be better to just avoid conversations about religion with you."

"Well, for one, that's bad advice. It would be better to just learn how to handle conflict like an adult rather than ignoring it. And two, this isn't a conversation about religion. It is a conversation about the most wanted pedophile in America being caught by the police."

"You just want to attack my faith and beliefs", she said.

-sigh-

I could see she wasn't interested in using the part of her brain that lets her follow the logical flow of a conversation. She felt attacked for some reason.

"I don't want to argue with you about your belief or faith. I would be willing to talk about objective issues about Mormonism some time. There are some things that are observable that aren't about faith."

"Like what?", she sneered.

"Like Joseph Smith's so-called translation of the Book of Abraham from papyrus. Believe what you will about the pre-mortal existence, I won't address that, but it is objectively observable that the scrolls which Smith claimed were the source of the writing of Abraham do not translate to the text Smith claimed it does. Plus, the scrolls are nearly 2000 years too new. A fact which is not disputed by anyone involved, including the LDS church."

"Pff, then why would they still think they are the writing of Abraham?"

"That is really the question, isn't it? There's also the issue that, though at the time ancient Egyptian was not widely translatable, today it is. Countless hundreds of people at most major universities in the world can now effortlessly translate ancient Egyptian thanks to the Rosetta Stone."

"Well, maybe all those hundreds of people are wrong."

I sat stunned. Donna is not stupid. She is not uneducated. She has chosen ignorance. She has chosen to belive that all of the academic world was out to get the Mormons. All the work of all those people to translate ancient hieroglyphs, most of whom had no knowledge, interest, or agenda in or of the Book of Abraham... They are all in on this hoax called Egyptology.

These must be the same guys who sit up at night and carve dinosaur bones so we'll all be fooled into believing the earth is older than 6000 years old.

I'm not sure how much more of this I can take.

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Filed under: Donna | Mormonism

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