The Trickster God

[dogbite]

finding a paralel and calling it a hit is not evidence. The lazy s is a common shape across many cultures. To call the egyptian the source for the Olmec and Maya similar shape is bad scholarship. It could just as easily have come from any of the other cultures by the reasoning displayed.

Or much more likely, it had been independently invented.

[ed123]

finding a paralel and calling it a hit is not evidence. The lazy s is a common shape across many cultures. To call the egyptian the source for the Olmec and Maya similar shape is bad scholarship. It could just as easily have come from any of the other cultures by the reasoning displayed.

Or much more likely, it had been independently invented.

Alright. Let's have you independently read all of my material on my site, and see just how many "parallels" I have found consecutively, with bullseye hits over and over and over again. Read my paper on the Book of Abraham that is linked. And then if you still find it unconvincing, it again is not because the evidence is not there. It is because it is underwhelming to you for whatever reason. I am not here to convince you anyway, but it doesn't mean that i can't answer you. And doesn't mean that I have not done my homework extensively on these subjects, far more than FAIRMormon or anybody else has on the Kirtland Egyptian Papers to figure out what the heck is going on. So, regardless of you think of my material, you cannot say that I have not done the work. But until you read the work, I can say that you have not read it. If it is just more "apologetics" to you, fair enough. But it is convincing to those who reasonably see in it that it is reasonable. Because it is indeed reasonable to reasonable people, even if it isn't convincing to you in particular.

Let's have you explain how Joseph Smith said that Ka Tu Min's name was spelled out on the Book of the Dead Papyrus, and it actually is. Let's see how you explain away that one.

http://egyptianalphabetandgrammar.blogs ... neage.html

No doubt you will explain it away. It doesn't mean it isn't reasonable to reasonable people.

[dogbite]

I'll wait for the peer reviewed publication, thank you.

[ed123]

I'll wait for the peer reviewed publication, thank you.

Nice try. Not an out. Not acceptable.

[dogbite]

Oh but it is. It's the standard of quality work for serious consideration.

Its all about confidence intervals. No one can be an expert in all things to test things firsthand. So you have to have a system of independent expert review to generate a level of workable confidence. A review of your data; a review of your method; and review your conclusions.

And it also matters about the journal that it's published in. Apologetics only talk to themselves because the professionals find the data, methods, and conclusions laughable.

[ed123]

Oh but it is. It's the standard of quality work for serious consideration.

Its all about confidence intervals. No one can be an expert in all things to test things firsthand. So you have to have a system of independent expert review to generate a level of workable confidence. A review of your data; a review of your method; and review your conclusions.

And it also matters about the journal that it's published in. Apologetics only talk to themselves because the professionals find the data, methods, and conclusions laughable.

Oh ok. Whatever you need to invoke to get out of it. Both you and Stephen Smoot, both in your overconfidence, the apologist and the critic alike.
The evidence will be here for your analysis when your ready.

[Random]

A bait and switch, when he told you that you only have a promise when you do what he says? What kind of bait and switch is that?
I have no idea what pseudonym you post on as LDSFF, so I don't know who I am talking to. I posted there, before I left, under my real name.

I said at the beginning that I didn't know in what context you were referring to a trickster God. I used my own understanding of a trickster God in my comment. Now that I've read your explanation, I see that I was not looking at it as you were wanting to discuss it.

I do not consider God to be a trickster God if, by that, you mean it is having a promise from God that he will bless me if I do what he says - unless he promises, but does not deliver.

I was A Random Phrase, then I left for a while. I returned as Silver PIe, as I had asked Brian to remove my other username (but keep the posts for continuity of conversation) so I wouldn't be tempted to return (I returned because FFA and I were good friends, he asked about me, but I could not talk to him because I could only talk to him through the forum). I remember that using your real name was important to you. I admire you for that. However, I am a female and there are stalkers and crazies on the internet. I am safer using a pseudonym.

[Random]

Under what condition did you people present yourselves to me to make me want to be your friends or want to stay here? Under what condition did you make me feel welcome here?

I don't recall saying anything to you before today. I should have welcomed you to the forum on your introductory post. I apologize for that. I did think I was sticking up for you, though, when I made the comment on that thread that you were not into either Denver Snuffer nor Warren Jeffs.

I did not participate in your threads because I did not understand what you were asking in your introduction. When I came on again, I saw a lot of deleted posts, and my curiosity was aroused, so I looked at them to see what was going on.

It sounded like you might be saying something like (for an example): Pretend you believe in the book of Abraham as a real book, and argue/debate for its reality, but I wasn't sure. As for me, I believe the book of Abraham, even though I'm aware of the issues with it. It seems obvious that it didn't come from the piece(s) we have access to today, though. I believe the Book of Mormon came from God. I believe Joseph Smith was a translator for God. (Not sure he was supposed to actually start a church, though.) I believe Joseph did not have sex with anyone but Emma (I'm still trying to figure out why the men he was supposedly sealed to were called sons instead of husbands, if the women he was supposedly sealed to were called wives - or the reverse, why the women were not called daughters if the men were called sons - unless it was to uphold BY's debauchery).

On the old NOM, I was very plain about what I believe, and I have (I hope) been plain here. But I have said that I don't have a problem with people believing the exact opposite of what I do. We've had very civil conversations about it (and I did learn a lot more about the book of Abraham than I did before; I appreciated that).

Heck, they even know I think Denver Snuffer has talked to God, and they endure it well <3 -even if they probably roll their eyes at that and at the other things I believe.

These are awesome people if you come in gently, and give it a year so they know what to expect from you.

[Random]

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.

So this is the premise put forth that we were supposed to discuss? I can see how that would be a turn-off to believing in God. As for me, I'm still trying to figure out who and what God is. I posted my idea of what God ought to be earlier and if God is not that, then I'm not sure I want one. It is imperative to me that God understand that he/she/they is/are the parent here. They are the ones with all the knowledge and power, not me.

[Random]

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).

I do believe there is a spirit in each of us that speaks truth to us. I believe that is what connects us to God, and probably to each other. I believe when we connect to the holy part of the spirit that resides in us, that is the Holy Ghost. I believe it is the mind of God, though I don't pretend how to know or understand how we can all be tapped into one thing (God).

I also believe there is a spirit of pride, of selfishness, of revenge, of vengeance, of greed, of lust (real lust, guys, not just wanting another person's body), of fear, and so forth. I believe it is the antithesis of God. I believe this spirit(s) also resides in us. I believe we can tap into one or the other, but we have to learn how to differentiate the two.

I think we are here on earth to learn and to improve. I think our passage and pathway here is between us and God. I think religions interpose themselves between us and God for power, for adoration, for women, and for wealth. I think following any organized religion is a dangerous path.

I have been really struggling to find out what I believe and what I think is truth, independent of what any other person has taught me or is trying to teach me. It's difficult because I am swimming in so much of my own culture that I can't see outside of it until someone says something or shows me something (like the info against the book of Abraham or what Velikovsky learned and shared, for example).

[Random]

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).

I can see this, where God lets conditions evolve naturally, and where people are free to make choices (even choices of changing history, or of thinking they are speaking for God when maybe they're just saying something they really believe, but isn't true or translating something with words that may not match the actual characters they are looking at).

One problem I have with Christians who believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God is that they feel threatened by the reality that - all of those people who wrote the original words thousands of years ago, and the hands the Bible went through, may have had their own agendas and God did not stop them.

I think we do the same thing, really, when we blindly accept any book or any teaching.

If our research leads us to believe something is false, I really don't think God will punish that person for their new understanding. Now, if they're an ass, like Alas' dad, I believe they will be punished, but that punishment will be having eyes wide open to what they really were. I think the atonement is there so that, if we are willing, our eyes can be opened now, and we can reach out to God (not some clergy member) instead of suffering later when it is too late.

[Random]

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.

This is interesting. Thank you.

[Random]

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.

I think that is the biggest problem. No one could look at them. They were engraved but, as far as I know, no one was allowed to do a rubbing or a wax model of them. Why? Is it because of fear that they'd be stolen (pure gold) or was it something else?

Maybe that is what is meant by the trickster God? A God who doesn't give enough concrete evidence for something, so all you can do is either believe the supernatural happenings or delve into the concrete, which casts a jaundiced eye at the supernatural happenings. Surely, the two forms ought to be compatible if they are both true.

[Random]

Yeah, that guy. Kind of like that Alan Wyatt guy that is over Interpreter with no formal training . . . [etc.]

I have definitely noticed that experts are often blind to things that go against their training. Astronomy is a good example of amateurs finding things the experts cannot see. I don't think it necessarily follows that having training or letters after one's name means that that person has a corner on the market of knowledge of the thing(s) they have and do study. For that reason, I prefer to look at arguments and knowledge individually, and not based on who approved what they said or if they do or don't have the right letters after their names.

[Random]

Interesting.

This is what I like. Civil back and forth. Each side presenting their evidence, then I can look at the sources/links and decide for myself what I think the reality or truth of it is.

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.

[jfro18]

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.

The problem is that what "matches" is one of the very basic shapes. If I drew out 50 characters that I was trying to resemble language with, almost surely a few would match any language. I believe Dan Vogel did a video about that although it could've been someone else showing how parallels can be found anywhere if you're trying to force it.

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.

The papyrus absolutely contains the Book of Abraham - that's why the characters are written in the margins the way they are and why they correspond to the papyrus in order.



It would be quite a coincidence to write down the characters on the two simultaneous manuscripts in order from the papyrus and have that not be the source Joseph was translating from.

[Red Ryder]

Ed, i would like to understand your thoughts on polygamy. Can you start a new thread?

By the way, we won’t ban you here. You bring livelihood to the forum and I think your thought experiments are healthy for everyone.

[slavereeno]

Just before my shelf broke I used the argument that because God requires faith he can't allow any of his religious truth to be explicitly provable.

But then there is the inconsistency, if God doesn't find some way to tip his hand, then how is one supposed to know what to believe in? Islam? Judaism? Buddhism? Seventh Day Adventists? Mormonism? etc. etc. There are lots and lots of people in all of those and a thousand other religions that believe God tipped his hand in the direction of their faith. I specifically had hope, faith, devotion and service in Mormonism for 30+ years and never got an answer from God that Mormonism was true (even though I asked over and over). There isn't enough time to devote that kind of effort into each and every religion out there, to ask if each of them is true. So God is not really being very effective is he? Its sort of like God saying "I'm thinking of a number between one and a hundred thousand.." then asking us to to guess what number he is thinking of and if you get it wrong then an eternity of suffering or servitude or whatever. How is this not cruel and sociopathic of God?

If God had to hide the evidence of the BoM so people would exercise faith, why didn't he hide the Romans, Jews, cities, artifacts etc from the New Testament for the same reason?

What virtue is gained by having faith when the results are inconsistent? What kind of individuals does God want to reward if the virtue is obtained by acting in contradiction to ones moral, logical, or intellectual reasoning?

[moksha]

Figure 1-4

1. Bishop overseeing the Saturday cleanup at the Luxor South Ward.
2. Aaronic Priesthood teacher
3. Aaronic Priesthood deacon
4. Young Men's President taking orders for a run to the McDonalds on West Nile Blvd.

Explanation - It is a typical cleanup, but the young Aaronic cleaners are careful not to erase any of the
Reformed Egyptian writings proving that everything that will be later written in the Book of Abraham is
100% legit as a channeled translation.

[Not Buying It]

For me, if it isn’t 100% plain to scholars who have had literally years of training in deciphering ancient Egyptian that Joseph Smith’s translations in the facsimiles in the Book of Abraham are legit, I have exactly zero interest in what anyone else has to say. I’m not interested when an amateur claims they found a small number of things they think Joseph Smith got right - even a broken clock is right twice a day. A similarity here and there is hardly evidence that Joseph was making correct translations. The translations should all be correct in a way that can be verified by experts - that would be impressive.

But that’s not what we have. We have a similarity here and a tantalizing possible connection there and still the large majority of the “translations” declared bogus by all trained experts. If The Book of Abraham was what the church claims it is, and if Joseph Smith was what the Church claims he was, it would be clear and we wouldn’t need convoluted, brain-twisting arguments to try and prove those things true. But instead, I am supposed to simply believe in one of literally hundreds of charismatic religious leaders who attained a following by convincing a group of people that he knew something about God no one else did. I am just supposed to take it on faith that even though all of the evidence points in the exact opposite direction, even though all the experts proclaim Joseph’s translations are bogus and when even most apologists have resorted to a “catalyst” explanation for his “translations” of the facsimiles in the Book of Abraham, even when all of it screams “FRAUD!” I am supposed to have faith in it anyway because I happened to be born to a family that was descendants of followers of a particular charismatic religious figure. Just like I would be expected to just have faith had I been born a Branch Davidian, or a Scientologist, or a member of the People’s Temple.

Simply having faith in the religious tradition you were born into is a lousy way of determining actual truth. Simply having faith in a religion you converted to isn’t much better - how can you know if you were deceived when you joined? I must have evidence - otherwise I have no objective way of knowing whether I am as deceived and deluded as the Branch Davidians, Scientologist, or followers of Jim Jones. Simply having faith is a dangerous, dangerous approach to determining what is true.

I need evidence. And not convoluted, twisted, mental gymnastics evidence. Straightforward, explicit, easily discerned evidence, that even the simplest and least intellectually capable among us could see and understand, otherwise God is not just. And the available evidence overwhelming points to Joseph Smith being a huckster and the Church being a fraud. I see no compelling reason for having faith in one of many, many religious figures when the available evidence tells me not to.

See my signature line below. For me, that says it all.