Unfortunately, you bought into the lies the church has been telling for a long time.
Do you really suppose that starting in by accusing your opponents of “lying” is a productive way to begin any sort of discussion?
I am rapidly losing patience with this baseless, scurrilous, unsupported accusation. Do you, alone of all the accusers, actually have some evidence to support it? If so, kindly put up. If not, please retract it.
Difficult as it may be for you, please make the effort to stretch your mind far enough to grasp this fact:
Your opinions are not self-evidently and compellingly true. It really is possible for people to honestly disagree with you. There really are people who do.
Among those people are believing Latter-day Saints. Including, but not limited to, the leaders of the Church.
And I have not the
slightest reason to believe that
even one of them is less honest than you are.
It would raise the tone of the discussion if you could refrain from casting any more unjustified aspersions.
Church elders and texts have long identified the hill some three miles distant from the Smith family farm as the one and only Hill Cumorah.
But how many of these elders and texts are actually authoritative? Please see my thread
here.
We have two statements from Emma Smith quoting her son identifying it as such so who are you to make this claim?
I am someone who reads the Book of Mormon and knows what it says. Cumorah is identified
in the book as a place close to a geographical feature known as the Narrow Neck of Land. No known geographical feature in upstate New York fits this description.
It is also identified
in the book as the place where Mormon buried all of the Nephite records
except the plates that he delivered to his son, Moroni, and which Moroni later gave to Joseph Smith.
Who is Emma Smith’s son that his opinion should have doctrinal weight?
The Hill Cumorah is always referred to in the singular, never the plural, and the fact that the church has an annual pageant and a gift shop there clearly indicates that the church’s position is still solid as to where the events recorded in the BOM allegedly took place.
That’s right; the Church makes its doctrinal positions known by building gift shops.
It couldn’t possibly be, could it, that the New York drumlin is and remains important because that’s where Moroni’s plates were buried, and where Joseph Smith retrieved them?
Nah. That couldn’t be it.
It wasn’t until 1842 that Joseph Smith came up with the idea of putting the fictional BOM events in Meso-America, coincidentally after he read John Lloyd Stephens’ book Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán…
Yes.
Huge coincidence.
No doubt part of a vast Church-orchestrated cover-up. Which explains why the
Times and Seasons article in which Joseph raised this theory
explicitly referred to the Stephens book.
It never ceases to amaze me how people can look right at a piece of evidence and fail to grasp its significance. Joseph appears to have started out, as did many Church members, by assuming a hemispheric geography for the Book of Mormon. After all, since he did not write the book, but merely translated it, the events and people it mentions were not his creation, so he couldn’t be expected to completely understand it. What’s striking here is that he was prepared to
modify his opinion in the face of better evidence.
Which makes him more open-minded than many of his critics; but that’s just by the way.
To say otherwise is to contradict the very church itself since my copy of the BOM student manual clearly states, by way of a quote by President Marion G. Romney, that the Hill Cumorah is the one in western New York near Palmyra.
Yes, I am aware of the Romney statement. There is no evidence that President Romney ever gave serious consideration to Book of Mormon geography as an area of study. Also, please refer again to
this thread.
Not only that, but my 1963 copy of the BOM shows a picture of the hill itself and the statue of Moroni, stating that it is exactly what it claims to be. In fact, the caption below the picture of the hill, complete with grazing cows, states: “The Hill Cumorah, near Manchester, New York, where Joseph Smith obtained the gold plates from which the BOM was translated.”
A fact that I have not disputed.
Your opinion is just that and has been thoroughly undermined by the works of your own church. I suggest you do more research before you make such mistakes of fact in the future.
Wow. A Catholic trying to tell a lifelong Latter-day Saint what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches.
It’s always good for entertainment value. A bit like watching a dog walking on its hind legs.
And your church puts its faith in Joseph Smith, not the Biblical Jesus.
That’s false.
The LDS interpretation of Jesus is as a sideshow barker, hawking exaltation because he’s sort of the church’s mascot, a pitiful product of incestuous conception.
You couldn’t make that any more vile and offensive if you tried, could you?
Regards,
Pahoran
Wow, wait a minute. I also want to point out that science has proven creationism wrong, and that the world is much older than 10,000 years, yet many people believe that both are true. Simply because science proves something wrong, does not mean that people cant believe them. While I understand you disagree with Pahoran, you can at the very least respect his opinion.
