Examining the claims of Jonathan Neville and the Heartland movement

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Still more assertions without evidence from Jonathan Neville

Jonathan Neville makes things up. He invents people, invents history, and invents his own facts. This is what people do when they don’t have the truth on their side: They lie.

Here’s just the latest example of one of Jonathan Neville’s lies: Neville asserts that his “M2C and SITH friends continue to get offended” by Heartland claims, and that “we see frequent examples on the web sites of Fairlatterdaysaints, CESLetter, the InterpreterFoundation, mormonstories, and everyone else who accepts M2C and SITH.”

If the “examples” are so frequent, Brother Neville, then it should be easy for you to give us just one or two examples, don’t you think? But, as usual, you don’t because you can’t.

While we’re on the subject of lying, Neville’s recent tactic of claiming that Latter-day Saint apologists “basically agree with the critics regarding fundamental aspects of the Book of Mormon” is complete and utter bovine offal. The anti-Mormon CES Letter and John Dehlin’s dreadful MormonStories podcast don’t “accept M2C and SITH.”

Those two sources both completely reject the historicity of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s claims to having translated it by the gift and power of God. They don’t believe in one Cumorah or two Cumorahs; they believe in zero Cumorahs, because they assert that there were no Nephites, no Moroni, and no gold plates. They don’t believe that Joseph Smith used a seer stone or the Nephite intepreters to translate the Book of Mormon; they believe that Joseph was a fraud who didn’t have any supernatural abilities to translate ancient texts.

Please, Brother Neville: Stop lying about people who disagree with you.

—Peter Pan
 

1 comment:

  1. Peter, you and your audience may be interested in a recent review I did of Jonathan Neville's latest interview with Mormon Book Reviews. In Part One I respond mostly to assertions made by the host, and focus more on claims made by Neville in Parts Two and Three. Neville, for instance, tries to discredit the seer stone translation because the four authors of the Gospels of the New Testament didn't use a seer stone - which is a ridiculous assertion for more than one reason. Or he claims it is a lost cause to expect to find any writing whatsoever in Book of Mormon lands - even though the Book of Mormon describes at least a semi-literate Lamanite nation.

    Here are the links to all three parts for any interested:

    Part One: https://latterdaylightandtruth.blogspot.com/2021/10/misrepresentation-and-miscellaneous.html

    Part Two (Regarding Jonathan Edwards and the Book of Mormon): https://latterdaylightandtruth.blogspot.com/2021/10/jonathan-edwardss-purported-influence.html

    Part Three (regarding baseless attacks, general misrepresentations, etc.): https://latterdaylightandtruth.blogspot.com/2021/10/misrepresenting-mesoamerica-book-of.html

    ReplyDelete

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