« Happy Birthday - Abnormal Interests
Main
Roughing It »
February 16, 2006
By the Evidence You Shall be Known
The Los Angeles Times has a lengthy front-page article on how DNA evidence that Native Americans are of Asian origin is having on the Mormon Church in places like Peru.
From the time he was a child in Peru, the Mormon Church instilled in Jose A. Loayza the conviction that he and millions of other Native Americans were descended from a lost tribe of Israel that reached the New World more than 2,000 years ago."We were taught all the blessings of that Hebrew lineage belonged to us and that we were special people," said Loayza, now a Salt Lake City attorney. "It not only made me feel special, but it gave me a sense of transcendental identity, an identity with God."
A few years ago, Loayza said, his faith was shaken and his identity stripped away by DNA evidence showing that the ancestors of American natives came from Asia, not the Middle East.
"I've gone through stages," he said. "Absolutely denial. Utter amazement and surprise. Anger and bitterness."
For Mormons, the lack of discernible Hebrew blood in Native Americans is no minor collision between faith and science. It burrows into the historical foundations of the Book of Mormon, a 175-year-old transcription that the church regards as literal and without error.
The complete article is worth a read. But there is one point I want to make. If you have a faith that is in anyway based on events that happen or happened in this world, then you are at risk of having it undermined by the empirical realities of this world. And, by the way, if you have a faith that is based on supposed events in some other world, your faith is baseless in this world.
Posted by Duane Smith at February 16, 2006 10:12 AM | Read more on Religion |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1578
Comments
One doesn't really need DNA evidence to disprove the Mormon nonsense. The languages spoken by the Native Americans are not related to the Middle Eastern languages. Besides, so many different Native American languages couldn't have evolved from one ancestral language in such a short time.
Posted by: Aydin at February 17, 2006 4:44 PM
In general, if there is anything contains a lot of nonsense, there are several ways it will expose itself. The fact that someone who knew not a single word of what they says was Coptic was able to translate a work of a few hundred pages would be enough to discredit the whole project. I am told that he did it at some distance with the help of ciphering stones in his hat. While this last point may be apocryphal, DNA and language families details are, in any case, just frosting on the cake.
By the way, Cyrus Gordon who was two years out of every three was a very reputable Semanticist, thought he could see all kinds of Semitic glosses in native South America words, and particularly place names. He also thought that the Paraíba inscription was authentic. This inscription written in Phoenician tells, if I remember correctly, of Phoenician captain who sailed his fleet around Africa and ended up in Brazil! Even with all of that, Gordon didn't think that any of it was support for the claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. While he thought the Paraíba inscription was authentic, he thought the Book of Mormon was a fake. In fact, he thought that it was "discoveries" like the book Paraíba inscription in the early 19th century that provided the intellectual impetuous for Mormonism.
Like many who have looked closely at the Paraíba inscription, I think it is a forgery. However, I'm not sure that all of Gordon's arguments can be as easily dismissed as some have thought. My own view is that both "forgeries," the book of Mormon and the Paraíba inscription, plus a few other strange inscriptions, came out of a zeitgeist of the early 19th century in America. As to the Semitic glosses, if you look hard enough you will see things that aren't even there.
Posted by: Duane at February 17, 2006 7:05 PM
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
Send me an email if it is important.