I have already dealt with the so called contradictions you brought up. And by the way, just because a thing hasn't been found doesn't mean it ain't there. by the way horses? That's the oldest one in the anti-mormon book. It's already been proven that horses were here pre-columbus, but the anti's have been blabbering on about it for so long they don't know how to stop. You think that is gonna rock my faith?
Why don't you guys get a life and go practice what you believe and stop trying to tear down others faiths?
happy reading!
and please, I double dog dare you to actually read this and repeat back to me that you comprehend it. Then if you have a problem with something, let address one issue at a time so we can take time to answer your "honest" questions.
Book of Mormon Problems: Plants and Animals
Also please bear in mind and take note that nearly all the sources quoted are from non-mormon sources, even though a scientist is a scientist, mormon or not, it shouldn't matter.
Yeah non-Christian idiots like Copernicus that told the church that the world was round should have kept their collective mouths shut and let the church propagate extra-biblica teachings that the earth was flat.
Pre-Columbus horses were in the genre of Eohippus......and were about the size of large dogs, and also became extinct a very long time before man walked the soils of N. or S. America.
Eohippus, is the early genre of the modern or present day horse that the Europeans brought with the first Spanish landfalls in the New World.
In the fossil record, it disappeared from these continents millions of years before man's landfall here.
Hyracotherium - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
You have better chances of proving the existence of unicorns than hanging onto the BOM's fantasia of alleged facts about the history, flora, and fauna, of these two continents.
At least Jesus made sense in the bible, and so did His disciples. They didn't fill the bible with these long-winded tales that rival Princess Bride, and the Land of Nimh.
In the bible, we have solid, coherent, writings that teach, exonnerate, encourage, each and every believer on their true identity/life in Christ, through His 100% encompassing attonement for all mankind past, present and future.
Even Narnia makes more sense than Mormon doctrine as it is allegorically based on actual bible doctrine. There are myriads of allegorical books, with "Pilgrim's Progess" being another great milestone of Christian based literature. Author Jonathan Edwards would turn over in his grave to know that millions of people worldwide have "bought" into such nonesense of LDS doctrine.
Christian doctrine from the bible is not authored with any intent, but to "call" the lost, feed the sheep, and glorify God, not man.
Since you refuse to read the links I post, you end up looking like and idiot. I won't let you get off that easy though. Sorry about the length of this but at least you couldn't say I didn't cite my sources. And it ain't like you never posted long winded entries before so I don't wanna hear it about the length. Read and weep:
Yes, the fossil record is now clear on that point, but it is widely thought that they were extinct before Book of Mormon times. However, that assumption may be incorrect. I quote from a review by Matthew Roper in Review of Books on the Book of Mormon, Volume 4, 1992, p.208:
Scholars no longer doubt that horses were present in the New World during the Pleistocene period. Although many believe that horses were extinct long before the Book of Mormon era, there is still disagreement as to just how long horses survived in the New World. Some scholars believe that horses could have survived as late as 3000 B.C. [see discussion in Welch, ed., Reexploring the Book of Mormon, 98-99]. Ivan Sanderson states that "there is a body of evidence both from the mainland of Central America and even from rock drawings in Haiti . . . tending to show that the horse may have been known to man in the Americas before the coming of the Spaniards." Sanderson further suggests that it is conceivable that "isolated small populations of horses or horse-like animals continued to exist until much later times in outlying corners of the two continents where conditions were suitable to their requirements and where they were free from whatever animal foes or parasitic diseases caused their extermination" elsewhere [Ivan T. Sanderson, Living Treasure (New York: Viking Press, 1941), 39-40]. Pre-Columbian horse remains that showed no signs of fossilization have actually been found in several sites on the Yucatan Peninsula ["Once Again the Horse," F.A.R.M.S. Update, June 1984; John Welch, ed., Reexploring the Book of Mormon, 98-100]. In 1957, Mayapan, a Post-Classic Mayan site, yielded the remains of horses at a depth of two meters under ground. They were "considered to be pre-Columbian on the basis of depth of burial and degree of mineralization"[Clayton E. Ray, "Pre-Columbian Horses from Yucatan," Journal of Mammalogy 38 (May 1957): 278].
In the Yucatan area, horse remains were found during archaeological investigations in three caves (see Henry Chapman Mercer, The Hill-Caves of Yucatan: A Search for Evidence of Man's Antiquity in the Caverns of Central America, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1896, p. 172, as cited in Reexploring the Book of Mormon, p. 99). These remains were associated with signs of human activity (potsherds), and bore with no sign of fossilization. More recently, 1978 excavations at the Loltun Cave in the Maya lowlands also yielded the remains of horses (see Institute of Maya Studies, Miami Museum of Science, Newsletter 7, no. 11, Nov. 1978, p. 2, as cited in Reexploring the Book of Mormon, p. 99).
That seems pretty significant: the discovery of pre-Columbian, non-fossil horse remains from Book of Mormon times in the Book of Mormon setting of Mesoamerica. Careful work remains to be done in dating and classifying these remains. But it should be clear that references to horses in the Book of Mormon are insufficient grounds for rejecting the book as fraudulent. This doesn't prove the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, but helps establish the possibility of plausibility on one minute issue - and should serve to warn us about the risky and tentative nature of conclusions drawn from arguments of silence (failure to find something does not necessarily mean it never existed).
Further, there is linguistic evidence for American horses before Columbus:
"No systematic research has been done comparing the names of animals in the Near East and Mesoamerica. Just as we saw with the metals, perhaps also with beasts: clarifying links may appear through linguistic studies. A hint of the possibilities derives from work on the Yuman language group (located around the lower Colorado River, near the U.S.-Mexican border). Reconstructing the protoculture associated with the ancestral Yuman language by comparing the descendant tongues, an investigator reconstructed a word for "horse" on strong evidence [Howard W. Law, "A Reconstructed Proto-Culture Derived from Some Yuman Vocabularies," Anthropological Linguistics 3 (1961):54]. That is, the indications are that a term for horse was shared by those people long before European horses arrived. The evidence is not foolproof, of course, but it does demand some alternative explanation if we are not to suppose early knowledge of the horse."
(John L. Sorenson in An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon, Deseret Book Comp., SLC, UT (1985), p. 297.)
I received e-mail from someone with ties to the Cherokee tribe (may have been a member of the tribe), a people legendary for their skills with horses. He claimed that Cherokee tradition maintains that they had horses before the Spaniards came and that Cherokee had a long and ancient tradition of working with horses, horses that were native to this continent. I am not familiar with Cherokee traditions, but I have never heard scholars explain why the Indians of North America suddenly proved to be far better horsemen than the Spaniards ever were once the Spaniards (supposedly) introduced the horse to this continent. Skills and traditions involving horses and other animals don't emerge suddenly - it's the kind of thing that would seem to require many generations of development. I do have one interesting piece of evidence that I encountered on a trip to Canyonlands National Park in southern Utah. There is a famous slab of stone with ancient petroglyphs there called "Newspaper Rock." The carvings on the rock date from roughly 100 A.D. to 1500 A.D., overlapping into the post-Spanish period. There are many carvings that may have been made over the centuries, but right in the middle of the rock, one of the most prominent carvings - in the place that I would choose as one of the first places to carve - is a man riding a horse. Was there a big blank spot conveniently left after centuries of carving for a late Indian to carve something he saw from the Spaniards, or was this a more ancient carving depicting something of importance to Indian culture? (Update from 2002: it may be that the central horse carving was inscribed over earlier, older carvings that had become covered with tarnish, as was suggested to me in 2002 in correspondance with someone familiar with Newspaper Rock.)
A recent article in National Geographic News, "Remains Show Ancient Horses Were Hunted for Their Meat," by Hillary Mayell, May 11, 2001, reports that ancient spear points have been found with identifiable horse protein on them, indicating that horses were hunted for food. These horses are believed to have gone extinct 10,000 years ago, though again, pockets of them may have survived in some places, such as Book of Mormon lands. They were probably smaller than modern horses, perhaps unsuitable for riding - which the Book of Mormon does not require - but plenty big for herding and eating, as the Book of Mormon does imply.
Could other species be meant? To the index at the top
It may be naive to assume that the word "horse" necessarily refers to the species of we know today. The Hebrew word for horse , "sus", has a root meaning of "to leap" and can refer to other animals as well - including the swallow (J. L. Sorenson, Review of Books on the Book of Mormon, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 345). Since deer also leap, it is not impossible that the early Nephites might have described them with a word related to "sus" or even the word "sus" itself. (Sorenson notes also that "ss" in Egyptian means horse, while "shs" is antelope). Could the "horse" of the Book of Mormon be Mesoamerican deer?
John L. Sorenson has suggested the latter possibility and has pointed to archaeological specimens showing humans riding on the backs of animal figures, some of which are evidently deer. Also Mayan languages used the term deer for Spanish horses and deer-rider for horsemen. Indians of Zinacantan, Chiapas, believe that the mythical "Earth Owner," who is supposed to be rich and live inside a mountain, rides on deer. In addition, the Aztec account of the Spanish Conquest used terms like the-deer-which-carried-men-upon-their-backs, called horses (see Bernardino de Sahagun, The War of Conquest: How It Was Waged Here in Mexico, trans. A. J. Anderson and C. E. Dibble [Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1978], pp. 28, 35, 55, 60).
--Quoted from Reexploring the Book of Mormon, John Welch, ed., Deseret Book, SLC, UT, 1992, p. 98).
Further work needs to be done to better understand what "horses" in the Book of Mormon actually refers to and how they were used. If anything, though, the occurrence of the "horses" in the Book of Mormon should serve as an invitation for further scholarship, not as a reason for ending it.
For additional information, see the Chapman Research page on Horses in the Book of Mormon.
Therefore the earth is flat.........
