The Trickster God

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ed123
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by ed123 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 11:53 am

wtfluff wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 11:46 am
ed123 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 11:39 am
wtfluff wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 11:36 am
As expected, thanks for the extended rant. As others have mentioned: I have no desire to worship a god who "sends me to school" with no, real, clear instructions on how to "graduate," then punishes me for eternity for finite actions such as possibly believing evidence the same god provided to trick me.

If that's how a "loving heavenly father" shows love, I want nothing to do with it.
At least you know the terms and made your choice for now. But the Holy Ghost will lead you to those clear instructions when you are ready for them, when you come to yourself (it's my hope that you will).
Clear instructions provided by a ghost.

Got it.
Yes. At least we understand each other clearly. Thank you.

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jfro18
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by jfro18 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 12:00 pm

ed123 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 11:19 am
there is a NHM/Nahom, and reformed Egyptian that Joseph Smith presented for the word "Book of Mormon" which matches the hieratic and demotic.
I have yet to see a single non-LDS scholar that would claim Joseph's reformed Egyptian is legit in any way whatsoever.

That's a pretty bold claim without some sourcing, and why you're hitting resistance with some of these arguments I think.

ed123
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by ed123 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 12:03 pm

alas wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 11:44 am
Ed, I couldn’t follow your first post. It just didn’t make sense to me and I didn’t have time at that point to read through it several times to try to make sense of it.

Now, I can’t go back and see what you were trying to say, to see if you just worded your argument badly, or us NOMs misunderstood and attacked you for trying to tell us we had to accept your ideas hook line and sinker. You didn’t clarify, you just got offended and offensive instead of working to understand where we were misunderstanding you.

So, now that you are back, I hope you can try to understand where we misunderstood you. Because this really is a very nice bunch of people. But we do argue with people who preach at us. We even tolerate believers who discuss and explain their position. Many of us are married to believers, so we do tolerate them. But if you come into our home, and post, don’t expect it to become your home just because you started a discussion. This is a place for unbelievers and you need to understand that if you are going to come into our home. We respect you if you respect us. But if you demand we agree, then yeah, you are not welcome. You are going to have to work harder to get us to understand your argument, and using words that have a meaning, like “trickster God” we’ll, we apparently reacted to your words, not your real meaning.

I am still not clear what you mean by “trickster God” because to me a trickster God is not a God I am willing to worship.

So, my advice would be to start a new thread and don’t use words that have a meaning already defined.

If you say that God sometimes withholds consequences, yeah, I can agree with that. My dad was an abusive ass and he didn’t suffer very bad consequences of that. But the long term consequences are that he has lost his family. We just stopped loving him and wanting to be around him at some point. But he died before he understood that nobody really loves him any more. See, God withheld the full consequences.

But if you say that God purposely hides the artifacts of the Nephite people, so that we have to believe with evidence there that it is all false, then no, I can’t accept your argument as valid. Because I see lack of evidence when it reaches the point of the BoM says there were elephants and science says no elephants, I will go with science. That is not just lack of evidence either way, but evidence to the contrary.
Ok. This is fair. Let's go with this as our baseline then. Let's recognize that Trickster God was a loaded term, and a bad analogy.
Let's recognize that this place is an establishment over a number of years already with norms and is full of unbelievers and whether I fit here or not is going to take a while to figure out whether its a good fit. Got it.

Ok. Please try to understand, but feel free to reject this. God allowed naturally the conditions where things took on the appearance they did, where they have the appearance of frauds, etc. He didn't come down and hide all the Nephite artifacts. He allowed the situation come to pass where his words would coincide with the facts of how things would come to be, and how in their current state they would appear (as they do in current science). He doesn't jack around with our minds in the sense of making things appear differently than they really are. Science really hasn't found any smoking gun yet. But your misinterpretation of lack of evidence is the fact that in your mind, you interpret lack of evidence of something as proof positive of the contrary. Those two things are not equivalent. Now, in a secular argument you can try to make your case, and you may indeed be able to persuade some people to your point of view, that lack of evidence is indicative of what you say. But lack of something will never be proof to the contrary of something, no matter how well you argue it. There will be always those that will not be persuaded entirely by your argumentation using lack of evidence as positive evidence for your philosophy.

This is similar to the problem where atheists use lack of proof of God as proof positive of the non-existence of God. If you want to make a declaration of your non-belief of some issue, that is fine, and your marshalling of lack of evidence can be supportive of that. Some people will be persuaded by that. Don't ask me to buy that you have proved something beyond doubt by your use of lack of evidence in that way. That is simply not the case.

ed123
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by ed123 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 12:16 pm

jfro18 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 12:00 pm
ed123 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 11:19 am
there is a NHM/Nahom, and reformed Egyptian that Joseph Smith presented for the word "Book of Mormon" which matches the hieratic and demotic.
I have yet to see a single non-LDS scholar that would claim Joseph's reformed Egyptian is legit in any way whatsoever.

That's a pretty bold claim without some sourcing, and why you're hitting resistance with some of these arguments I think.
My paper on that hasn't materialized yet, but it will be based on the research of Jerry Grover on Reformed Egyptian.
I already have in mind the part where I will focus the paper.
(1) I am not claiming that Jerry Grover's interpretations are all correct.
(2) I am focusing in where I have the equivalent of a "translation key" as a rosetta-stone-type of phenomenon.
(3) the Rosetta Stone had 2 different written languages, one known and one unknown. the Unknown language was in 2 different scripts.
(4) The fact that the Rosetta stone had a known language (Greek), allowed the Greek to be a translation key of the Egyptian.
(5) Joseph Smith has only left us the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone for Reformed Egyptian in two places. One where Oliver Cowdery and others recorded the specific glyphs for "Book of Mormon" and the other where he gave the specific glyphs for "interpretation of languages." Therefore, we have representation of these glyphs as their reformed Egyptian, and also as their identified English equivalents.
(6) All attempts to break the code of the Anthon Transcript are all guesswork without an English version of the content given in the Anthon transcript, and therefore, logically we must concentrate only on where we have the equivalent of a translation key like the Rosetta stone.
(7) This is only found in what I have described above, not in the Anthon Transcript.
(8) Jerry Grover has indeed identified the glyphs for "Book of Mormon" and "interpretation of Languages" as demotic and hieratic of those very phrases.
(9) I will show this in my paper based on his research, but I will also state that I think the rest of his translations based on the Anthon transcript are a flight of fancy.
(10) Therefore, if we want to break reformed Egyptian, we must start out with this, where we are grounded in a translation key.

Please read this carefully, multiple times if necessary, until you understand precisely what I am doing with this. Thanks.

ed123
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by ed123 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 12:43 pm

Ok. Anyway, I think this time we have all come away understanding each other, and I have come to recognize, in a friendlier manner this time, that this is not a fit for me.
Thanks for your time, and I hope the fact that we have understood each other is at least something this time, and if we aren't friends yet, maybe at least we aren't bitter enemies for no reason.
But yes, this place is not a good fit for me still, it seems. But thanks again.

Good luck with your endeavors.

Ed

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Evil_Bert
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by Evil_Bert » Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:30 pm

Are you speaking of Jerry Grover, civil engineer? The gentleman with no real training in ancient languages?
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Red Ryder
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by Red Ryder » Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:38 pm

Evil_Bert wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:30 pm
Are you speaking of Jerry Grover, civil engineer? The gentleman with no real training in ancient languages?
That must be the guy.
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jfro18
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by jfro18 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:39 pm

ed123 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 12:16 pm

Please read this carefully, multiple times if necessary, until you understand precisely what I am doing with this. Thanks.
I don't really need to read carefully multiple times to see that you are looking to piggyback off what Jerry Grover has done to try and crack Reformed Egyptian.

The problem is that if you take ANY set of random characters you can try to assign a pattern to them... especially since Joseph Smith never let anyone look at the plates to verify the characters.

And more to the point, the characters are effectively a crudely modified form of the English (Roman) letters/numbers:

Image

The Pure Adamic language isn't really related although it does show that Joseph was no stranger to using modified English to claim ancient languages.

And last, I leave you with this use of the Reformed Egyptian characters:

Image

I'm not trying to be mocking here, but to show that the more obvious, simple, and logical conclusion to Reformed Egyptian is that Joseph took familiar letters/numbers and modified them to look ancient and foreign.

ed123
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by ed123 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:52 pm

Evil_Bert wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:30 pm
Are you speaking of Jerry Grover, civil engineer? The gentleman with no real training in ancient languages?
Yeah, that guy. Kind of like that Alan Wyatt guy that is over Interpreter with no formal training (yet somehow ex-Mormons keep asking me why interpreter doesn't back my papers, as if it should matter), or that medical doctor, Greg Prince, with no formal training as a historian, respected so highly by his peers and by John Dehlin. Or that one medical guy, Sam Brown, who acts like a historian and a theologian, that has no expertise in that area either. Or that guy named Brent Metcalfe or Dan Vogel neither of whom has formal training in Egyptology.

Or the protege of John Gee, a Software Engineer named William Schryver, with no formal training in Egyptology, for whom FAIRMormon rolled out the red carpet in 2010, who was all the rage on all the message boards, whom many apologists worshipped for so long.

Or those guys, Hauglid and Jensen, a scholar in Arabic and Islamic studies, and the other, a historian, neither with formal training in Egyptology, who are all the rage among the Ex-Mormons for recognizing that Metcalfe and Vogel and the Tanners were right all along about Joseph Smith's responsibility for the KEP.

Or that one guy, Ed Goble, the Senior Software Engineer that works for a subsidiary of the University of Utah in Genomics, who decoded the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, who has no formal training in Egyptology.

http://egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogspot.com

Thanks.
Last edited by ed123 on Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:06 pm, edited 5 times in total.

ed123
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by ed123 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:55 pm

jfro18 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:39 pm
ed123 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 12:16 pm

Please read this carefully, multiple times if necessary, until you understand precisely what I am doing with this. Thanks.
I don't really need to read carefully multiple times to see that you are looking to piggyback off what Jerry Grover has done to try and crack Reformed Egyptian.

The problem is that if you take ANY set of random characters you can try to assign a pattern to them... especially since Joseph Smith never let anyone look at the plates to verify the characters.

And more to the point, the characters are effectively a crudely modified form of the English (Roman) letters/numbers:

Image

The Pure Adamic language isn't really related although it does show that Joseph was no stranger to using modified English to claim ancient languages.

And last, I leave you with this use of the Reformed Egyptian characters:

Image

I'm not trying to be mocking here, but to show that the more obvious, simple, and logical conclusion to Reformed Egyptian is that Joseph took familiar letters/numbers and modified them to look ancient and foreign.
That's not very convincing, by the way.

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Evil_Bert
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by Evil_Bert » Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:04 pm

ed123 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:52 pm
Yeah, that guy. Kind of like that Alan Wyatt guy that is over Interpreter with no formal training (yet somehow ex-Mormons keep asking me why interpreter doesn't back my papers, as if it should matter), or that medical doctor, Greg Prince, with no formal training as a historian, respected so highly by his peers and by John Dehlin. Or that one medical guy, Sam Brown, who acts like a historian and a theologian, that has no expertise in that area either. Or that guy named Brent Metcalfe or Dan Vogel neither of whom has formal training in Egyptology.

Or the protege of John Gee, a Software Engineer named William Schryver, with no formal training in Egyptology, for whom FAIRMormon rolled out the red carpet in 2010, who was all the rage on all the message boards, whom many apologists worshipped for so long.

Or that one guy, Ed Goble, the Senior Software Engineer that works for a subsidiary of the University of Utah in Genomics, who decoded the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, who has no formal training in Egyptology.

http://egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogspot.com

Thanks.
None of which are actually highly respected outside of Mormondom. Find an actual peer reviewed paper on Reformed Egyptian. There are many on Egyptian, but none on Reformed Egypt.

I get it you believe this stuff, I used to, but the simple fact is that the evidence against outweighs the evidence for and I will go with the science and evidence. At least science admits when it is wrong.
Illegitimi non carborundum.

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jfro18
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by jfro18 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:05 pm

ed123 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:55 pm
That's not very convincing, by the way.
But why is it not convincing? The reason I ask is because it is very convincing to those who have left the church as well as those who have no skin in the game.

Why is it that you do not feel it is convincing that so much of Joseph's translated languages (both Reformed Egyptian and Pure Adamic) closely resembled a modified English language?

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Re: The Trickster God

Post by ed123 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:10 pm

jfro18 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:05 pm
ed123 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:55 pm
That's not very convincing, by the way.
But why is it not convincing? The reason I ask is because it is very convincing to those who have left the church as well as those who have no skin in the game.

Why is it that you do not feel it is convincing that so much of Joseph's translated languages (both Reformed Egyptian and Pure Adamic) closely resembled a modified English language?
Because it is a forced-to-fit scheme according to a preconcieved notion of modernity, forced to fit into the scheme of the Latin Alphabet, with no concern for the likelihood of an ancient context.

ed123
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by ed123 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:14 pm

Evil_Bert wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:04 pm
ed123 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:52 pm
Yeah, that guy. Kind of like that Alan Wyatt guy that is over Interpreter with no formal training (yet somehow ex-Mormons keep asking me why interpreter doesn't back my papers, as if it should matter), or that medical doctor, Greg Prince, with no formal training as a historian, respected so highly by his peers and by John Dehlin. Or that one medical guy, Sam Brown, who acts like a historian and a theologian, that has no expertise in that area either. Or that guy named Brent Metcalfe or Dan Vogel neither of whom has formal training in Egyptology.

Or the protege of John Gee, a Software Engineer named William Schryver, with no formal training in Egyptology, for whom FAIRMormon rolled out the red carpet in 2010, who was all the rage on all the message boards, whom many apologists worshipped for so long.

Or that one guy, Ed Goble, the Senior Software Engineer that works for a subsidiary of the University of Utah in Genomics, who decoded the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, who has no formal training in Egyptology.

http://egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogspot.com

Thanks.
None of which are actually highly respected outside of Mormondom. Find an actual peer reviewed paper on Reformed Egyptian. There are many on Egyptian, but none on Reformed Egypt.

I get it you believe this stuff, I used to, but the simple fact is that the evidence against outweighs the evidence for and I will go with the science and evidence. At least science admits when it is wrong.
Oh boy. Don't get me started on admitting when someone is wrong. I refer you to the discussions I've had with Maksutov over on MormonDiscussions and with others of how I retracted a book I wrote with Wayne May entitled This Land: Zarahemla and the Nephite Nation in 2002. Don't get me started about how difficult it is to retract something you were wrong about. Don't get me started about how I retracted the Heartland theory, since I am one of the pioneers/inventors of it. Don't get me started on how hard it was to admit publicly that the Michigan Tablets and Burrows Cave stones aren't what the were claimed to be, and I should have never had anything to do with Wayne May.

Think of how hard it was for Philo Sofee (Kerry Shirts) to retract his apologetics.

I see no reason to assume I am wrong about things until I am convinced by someone that I am wrong about them, but boy have I done it. Sorry. This is not a trait only found in secular science.

Nevertheless, yes, apologetics will never be science. That much I have said from the beginning. So, there you go.

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jfro18
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by jfro18 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:18 pm

ed123 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:10 pm
Because it is a forced-to-fit scheme according to a preconcieved notion of modernity, forced to fit into the scheme of the Latin Alphabet, with no concern for the likelihood of an ancient context.
The thing is that it's *not* forced to fit - the image is matching up characters to the Latin alphabet without needing to alter anything.

The apologetics to the Book of Abraham would be a forced-to-fit scheme because as Muehlstein has said he beings with the conclusion and makes the evidence fit.

There is no single person that has ever written a peer reviewed paper to show there is anything ancient about the characters Joseph Smith wrote down, and if you speak to any experts on Egyptian languages that would tell you unequivocally that there is nothing about the characters that resemble anything they've ever seen.

So whoever is trying to 'crack' the characters is doing so because they need to... force the characters to fit the idea they are authentically ancient.

You're looking at the most obvious answer and saying it's a "forced-to-fit scheme" while taking Jerry Grover's research that is forcing the charactrs into his predetermined conclusion and inferring that is the logical conclusion.

You're not looking at this objectively in any way here.

ed123
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by ed123 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:20 pm

jfro18 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:18 pm
You're not looking at this objectively in any way here.
You sure got that right. Give that man a cigar!

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Re: The Trickster God

Post by ed123 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:27 pm

jfro18 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:18 pm
You're looking at the most obvious answer and saying it's a "forced-to-fit scheme" while taking Jerry Grover's research that is forcing the charactrs into his predetermined conclusion and inferring that is the logical conclusion.
Well, I will give this much to you. To me, it is an article of faith that it is a foregone conclusion that the characters are authentically ancient, and that there is no chance they are not.

If you read my post above about Glover above carefully, you will see that I am focused ONLY on those parts where I have a translation key. This is the same methodology I use in my reverse Engineering of the KEP. I already stated that I have no confidence in Grover's other translations based on his speculations on the Anthon Transcript, which is not in any way equivalent in principle to the rosetta stone. I already told you that I am focused on only those parts for which an English translation was given for characters, where there is an English and Reformed Egyptian equivalent. Therefore, it doesn't bother me if you don't like the fact that I am not open to the prospect that it is all a modern fantasy.

What should be of interest to you, is that I am careful enough to be extremely rigorous in what I do, in spite of what is not negotiable to me.

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jfro18
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by jfro18 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:35 pm

ed123 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:27 pm
To me, it is an article of faith that it is a foregone conclusion that the characters are authentically ancient, and that there is no chance they are not.

If you read my post above about Glover above carefully, you will see that I am focused ONLY on those parts where I have a translation key. This is the same methodology I use in my reverse Engineering of the KEP. I already stated that I have no confidence in Grover's other translations based on his speculations on the Anthon Transcript, which is not in any way equivalent in principle to the rosetta stone. I already told you that I am focused on only those parts for which an English translation was given for characters, where there is an English and Reformed Egyptian equivalent. Therefore, it doesn't bother me if you don't like the fact that I am not open to the prospect that it is all a modern fantasy.

What should be of interest to you, is that I am careful enough to be extremely rigorous in what I do, in spite of what is not negotiable to me.
The problem is that if you give someone a few pages of characters with nothing else, you can make them say or mean whatever you want.

Having the characters would only matter if we had the "gold plates" to see the order they were in and then reverse engineer based on what the BoM says vs the characters in that part of the plates.

The reason no peer reviewed paper has ever been written on reformed egyptian is because all of the evidence suggests that Joseph made the characters up to look ancient so that Harris would finance the publishing. So you're forcing something that isn't there, but you're forcing it against characters that have no meaning but also can be made to mean anything we want since they're not tied to any actual text.

I do appreciate that you're being upfront that you're forcing it, but I hope you can understand why almost no one is going to be willing to give you any kind of confirmation or encouragement on a project that goes against all available evidence.

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Re: The Trickster God

Post by moksha » Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:43 pm

ed123 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 1:52 pm
Or that one guy, Ed Goble, the Senior Software Engineer that works for a subsidiary of the University of Utah in Genomics, who decoded the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, who has no formal training in Egyptology.
Don't forget that guy Jean-François Champollion, who had no formal training in Egyptology but managed to decipher the Rosetta Stone. :D
Good faith does not require evidence, but it also does not turn a blind eye to that evidence. Otherwise, it becomes misplaced faith.
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Re: The Trickster God

Post by ed123 » Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:46 pm

jfro18 wrote:
Tue Jul 16, 2019 2:35 pm
The problem is that if you give someone a few pages of characters with nothing else, you can make them say or mean whatever you want.

Having the characters would only matter if we had the "gold plates" to see the order they were in and then reverse engineer based on what the BoM says vs the characters in that part of the plates.

The reason no peer reviewed paper has ever been written on reformed egyptian is because all of the evidence suggests that Joseph made the characters up to look ancient so that Harris would finance the publishing. So you're forcing something that isn't there, but you're forcing it against characters that have no meaning but also can be made to mean anything we want since they're not tied to any actual text.

I do appreciate that you're being upfront that you're forcing it, but I hope you can understand why almost no one is going to be willing to give you any kind of confirmation or encouragement on a project that goes against all available evidence.
But see, this is what I'm trying to tell you. We have a little bit of that. We have the next best thing already. We don't have the plates. We don't have the order they were in in the Book of Mormon. We DO have a few characters with specific English interpretations. So, when you say, we have no available evidence, that is not the case.

We have:
(1) English text with a few of the purported characters, where we are specifically told which characters go with which English text.
(2) Egyptian characters that are of the cursive type that have been decoded by modern Egyptologists called Demotic and Hieratic.

These happen to match. And Joseph Smith had no access to #2, but we do. I don't understand where you think there is a problem with my thinking in this particular case.

Therefore, I don't know what you mean by "forcing something that is not there."

Furthermore, the same exact approach yeilds fruit when it comes to the Kirtland Egyptian Papers.

http://egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogs ... -reed.html

Here, I show how the reed symbol is a visual pun for the "Land of Reeds", Chalsidonhiash (Karduniash), the Land of the Chaldees, exactly as is said in the Kirtland Egyptian Papers, thereby refuting the claims of Ed Ashment, the Egyptologist that took Joseph Smith to task for his use of the Reed symbol, the Egyptian letter I in the Egyptian Alphabet. Therefore, I have indeed "reverse engineered" what is going on here, by focusing in on where English examples were paired up with Egyptian. Therefore, I don't understand why there is something "forced to fit" here in your mind. I am following the same exact principles used in that led to success with the decipherment of Egyptian in the first place. This is the first character in the Hor Papyrus. And it actually lines up with "Land of the Chaldees."

In other words, the Hor Papyrus doesn't contain the text of the Book of Abraham. What it does contain is a bunch of characters that form deliberate, ancient puns with that text. And so the source of the text is some other ancient non-extant source. But that doesn't mean that the Hor Papyrus and its characters did not have a role here. And it furthermore demonstrates that Joseph Smith didn't know all the answers, but he knew there was an ancient relationship between the Hor Papyrus characters and the Book of Abraham text. It's just not the relationship he supposed. Modern scholarship WILL elucidate the other nuances here in time.

It's exactly this type of stuff of where the Trickster argument comes in that I have been making, not that the Trickster itself was a good thing to use to explain it in the first place. I mean what I say, precisely that appearances are only that, and when you dig further, and are patient enough, stuff actually does start to come to the surface that starts to make you go, huh, I guess appearances were deceiving after all, and while Joseph Smith didn't have an exact understanding, the core of what he was getting at was actually correct, with further refinement necessary to his points of view.

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