Those who live in glass houses, pt. 16
(Part sixteen of a series.)
On August 24, 2022, Jonathan Neville wrote:
“SITH teaches that [Joseph and Oliver] misled everyone about the translation.”
This, from the man who claims that Joseph Smith merely pretended to translate when he used a seer stone in front of other people as a “demonstration” that all who observed him believed to be the actual process of translation.
This, from the man who claims that Joseph pretended to translate the Isaiah portions of the Book of Mormon, but instead he memorized Isaiah from the King James Bible and recited it back to his scribes.
As I said in my previous “glass houses” post, it takes true audacity—or cluelessness, or both—for a man like Jonathan Neville to accuse fellow Latter-day Saints of doing precisely what he himself does on nearly a daily basis.
—Peter Pan
On August 24, 2022, Jonathan Neville wrote:
Some people wonder why I discuss SITH on this page which originated as a discussion about M2C (the Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory). One reason is that both theories share the claim that Joseph and Oliver were unreliable speculators who misled the Church. M2C teaches that Joseph and Oliver misled everyone about Cumorah. SITH teaches that they misled everyone about the translation.
“SITH teaches that [Joseph and Oliver] misled everyone about the translation.”This, from the man who claims that Joseph Smith merely pretended to translate when he used a seer stone in front of other people as a “demonstration” that all who observed him believed to be the actual process of translation.
This, from the man who claims that Joseph pretended to translate the Isaiah portions of the Book of Mormon, but instead he memorized Isaiah from the King James Bible and recited it back to his scribes.
As I said in my previous “glass houses” post, it takes true audacity—or cluelessness, or both—for a man like Jonathan Neville to accuse fellow Latter-day Saints of doing precisely what he himself does on nearly a daily basis.
—Peter Pan
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It's funny how I've been studying various geographic BOM models for the better part of 30 years, and I've never come across any "M2C" advocate who "claimed" that Joseph and/or Oliver deliberately "misled" anyone. Such a claim was never implied nor explicit in all my readings. I was still in my 20s when I realized that Joseph and Moroni never identified the NY hill by any name in any canonized source.
ReplyDeleteNeville's nationalistic, "NY1C" (fully intended as the pejorative counter to his dismissive acronyms, gotta figure out how to incorporate MORGOTH as another one, for consistency's sake) interpretation of the data and ideas presented stretches credulity beyond its breaking point if one actually reads Sorensen, Allen, Hauck, et.al. and genuinely wants to understand what they're doing. They are NOT trying to answer questions of any salvific importance. Knowing the precise latitude and longitude of anything will not save anyone. Even the precise location of the Tomb (is it the Tomb of the Holy Sepulcher, or is it the Garden Tomb, or is it someplace that hasn't been desecrated by tourism?) is ultimately unknown. As Henry Jones said, "Indiana, let it go."