No, I’ll do you all a big favor and won’t tune in – how’s that? (please please don’t answer)

Said before several times, let sleeping dogs lie.

What is this for you? Therapy?

If so carry on. I wouldn’t want to come between you and your therapy with a real discussion.

In many ways harder for me because I am cut off from all three. We have a nice life here and hope to return to it soon. (website at bayviewtonga.com)

I look at the physical work you have established here, an expensive temple included with church meeting halls, two large high schools and a lot of employment opportunities for the people and can’t complain.

Different kinds of truth no doubt, aren’t there?

It would be pretty rough having my wife move away from me to another country.

Well we both have no doubt read some of “the truth” but I doubt very much if you could recognize it or process it if you have this programmed view of things. The truth in the case of “the hoax” has a lot of facets which can easily be added together to get a picture both of how and why the hoax was committed, the underlying spiritual stature of the man who produced it, etc. It is the overall picture you get of things.

I won’t go into specifics here because it will just piss you off. As a researcher in biochemistry, I would come up with an hypothesis based on what I thought was going on, then set out to disprove it, and perhaps the same approach could be taken here. Lets just take an example, The B of M has the American Indians coming from Israel, saying they are Laminites who came with Lehi (wasn’t it?) and populated the Americas. Then they gave rise to the Polynesians who were American Indians in the Pacific (a title of a book by Thor Heyerdahl who your church highly regards). This latter would be a Mormon and maybe not a B of M belief,but they are related. So you see we have this vast population giving rise to an even vaster one of today. Now this isn’t exactly hypothesis as it is presented as fact in the “book” but will take it as such for our purpose of finding truth. To disprove the hypothesis, all we need do is determine whether they could indeed have come from Israel based on their inheritors. So you see, this is what Michael Crawford has done. Now you apologists come along to disprove Crawford, but they mistakenly change the original hypothesis and substitute a sub population, which they say got filtered out as far as determining origins.

But, of course it is much deeper than that, we would have to go back to earlier findings than Crawford’s to see if anything more can be determined about the American Indians, and indeed there is lots of information which confirms Crawford (or rather he confirms) but there is no information, to my knowledge at least, that they came from Israel, and, indeed,virtually no information that a sub-population did either.

Well we gradually arrive at a picture that we can feel content with. The case is so strong that it caused Crawford to ask release from his position as bishop and resign from the LDS Church. He wasn’t able to “faith” his way out of it.

But you see there is much more evidence which you tell me is old hat to you so I don’t want to insult your intelligence or further bore you. Just a small tibit is the size of the Book, the weight of the plates, this being calculated as about a half ton, adding the brass, lead and gold, and he was able to carry it under his arm. Amazing guy.

The thing about this is, getting back to your question, it is far easier to verify an absence of truth than it is to see the truth. I can easily disprove what Smith said about things based on what evidence we have, but I can’t allow for a lot of other truths that people can hypothesize but are probably not truths at all. A lot has to do with trimming the fat that people can come up with, using Occom’s razor perhaps. I would do this with something like Christ’s being married.

Yeah, truth may be like Aristotle’s Nomena and Phenomena. We can experiment with the latter, but there might be an ideal truth behind it all, as Aristotle proposed. We are striving to know the ideal truth itself, but sometimes have only the results of that truth’s existence to work with. Einstein’s theories are like that, and he did us the great service of suggesting what the proofs might be and we followed his ideas and sure enough, they were true within limits.

The above may prove your hypothesis that I’m arrogant, but you might need to feel my tail or ears to confirm I’m a jackass, but believe what you want to. But remember, you asked the question of how we can know truth. The above is how I go about things, theyre may be others, like praying and getting a warm feeling in the heart, but being beware whether you might just have heart burn.

To you it would be awful if your family became Christians (I mean your immediate family), because they would go from sainthood and the possibility of a progression to godhood to what, a long wait at the gates or something? Purgatory in the old Catholic sense. It might be a long time before you saw them again, and there are temple vows to consider and the sealing processes and all that. That might be hard for you to take, but, you see, that really does get down to what has been taught to you and how you have been made to react to it. So you seeing me as a sad, sad little man is from your perspective as a Mormon, the programming you have undergone (I like programming better than conditioning as the latter has the connotation of brainwashing, and I wouldn’t want to think that. Programming has to do what you are taught, what you have been made to take as fact, or faith based factas you have been taught.

But I feel a little as though I’m trying to teach you something, and I know you are beyond that.

You have shown in the above post and the previous one, some concern for me and my family as it relates to all this, and I’ve tried to make it clear that it really isn’t a problem with me, though I can see it would be from your paradigm. It is all a matter of how things are looked at, from whose eyes.

Pretty idiotic discussion huh – oh well…