Racism and riots

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2020/06/exposing-enchantment.html

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2020/06/mailvox-waking-up-to-churchianity.html

Vox is both right and wrong, because he uses too much of his own (admittedly extremely keen) intellect, and rejects the modern prophets, the Book of Mormon and other scriptural references that clarify and add to what the Bible says. He's not familiar with, for example, the examples of Ammon and his brethren who testified to the Lamanites and brought many of them to repentence. Racism is a sin. We should be filled with love towards all mankind. But I also suspect that he's not entirely explaining himself here, because he is entirely correct in pointing out that what our society calls "racism" usually isn't actually racism at all. It is not sinful to take care of your family first, your own people and nation second, and the rest of the world as opportunity and need arise. That perspective can swing too far by saying that "racism" as falsely defined by society isn't a sin into territory that is, in fact, sinful racism, so I think it worth pointing out that when Vox talks, he often "skips steps" and doesn't point out things that he expects you to fill in on your own. But I'll cover here and link to his posts while filling in some of the details for those prone to binary thinking. Pointing out that most of what society calls racism isn't racism at all does not excuse actual racism. Nor does pointing out that most of the anti-racism nonsense is nothing more than public self-flagellation and Pharisee-like piety displays to increase the perceived social status of those who do it. 

UPDATE: Y'know what? While that may be technically true, scratch that whole paragraph. I'm more and more convinced that the entire existence of racism as anything other than a bogeyman used to bully white people is nothing more than a hoax. It simply doesn't exist. Every. Single. Time. I look into a supposed racist undertaking; cop violence being the one that comes up the most often, the reality is that statistically not only does it not exist, but that the so-called perpetrators are bending over backwards to be anti-racist. And yet they're accused of it anyway.

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=20690

But the problem is that the word racism itself has become so indelibly tainted by these false associations that it's nearly impossible to talk about it.  Many of the things people do to not be called racist are in fact evil because 1) they imposes a heavy cost--a fatal one, actually, if paid in full--to the society that does it, and 2) the cost is disbursed so that the person who advocates for these actions doesn't actually pay it himself. This allows him to virtue-signal and feel superior because of his "tolerance" or whatever without actually having to pay the cost of the decisions he's made; either his descendants or his neighbors pay it instead. Virtue-signaling like a Pharisee while throwing your own people and your own society under the bus is certainly not a righteous endeavor, and much of our discussion about "racism" in America comes down to this. You also get "Racist!" screamed at you for trying to have a rational discussion about what is best for everyone involving facts and statistics that are certainly salient and pertinent to the discussion. The cultists who run our society based on their delusional wishful thinking don't want you to know and don't want to face these facts, but... they are true regardless of whatever you feel about them. I'm not a huge fan of Ben Shapiro, but his motto is a good one: facts don't care about your feelings. True enough.

For example, is it racist to say "All lives matter"? Apparently so, given recent events. Public figures have literally been fired for tweeting that expression. Is it racist to say, "It's OK to be white"? It certainly shouldn't be, but that is also condemned as racist. What this highlights is that the cult believes that whiteness is the source of all evil, and it is, in fact, not OK to be white, nor do white lives actually matter to them. This is a profound evil, and of course, to make it worse, us and our posterity are the direct targets of this treacherous malice. This concept should be fought with the same vigor that our forebears fought for their freedoms against King George. 

Is it racist to know and point out, for example, that because we have been taking IQ tests (and proxy IQ tests transparently disguised as standardized tests for every public school student in America) for more than fifty years that it's been well known to everyone involved in analyzing the data returns of those tests that black people in America have an average IQ an entire standard deviation below that of white Americans? And that black Africans in fact that have an average IQ an entire additional standard deviation below that? (Equatorial Guinea has the lowest average IQ of any country on earth at 59. The scale only does to "69 and lower" as very low. The entire country is--quite literally--functionally retarded from the point of view of a Westerner.) 

Now, I know that a person's IQ isn't an indication of the value of their soul to God, of course. And I also know that the average IQ of an entire population group doesn't necessarily say anything about the IQ of a specific person. But don't you think that that fact has some relevance when it comes to our domestic policies about race like Affirmative Action? About our immigration policy? Absolutely it does, and if you make judgments about those policies while in denial about the facts of the IQ difference, you are making--at best--very foolish decisions that will impose a heavy cost down the line. At worst, you are actually setting everyone involved up for failure and societal breakdown of the type we are seeing right now with the race riots.

Speaking of which, is it salient and relevant to point out that white men are killed in higher numbers than black men by the police? On average in America, a white man is killed by the police every 15 hours. Why don't you know that? Why doesn't everyone know that? That's not racist to know, it's hugely important. And of course, the elephant in the room that actually everyone knows at some level and law enforcement data going back literally for centuries to the Colonial period all the way until now backs it up, although it is verboten to talk about it except in hushed whispers; that black criminality--especially violent criminality--is an order of magnitude greater than white criminality. Even rendering the numbers in per capita format, black men are actually killed less than you would statistically expect them to be by police relative to white men once you factor in that criminality (see references here and here.) In any case, yes--according to the prevailing cult of white hatred that rules America, it is racist to know that. But that doesn't make it any less true. Does that have profound implications for discussions about domestic policy? You bet it does. In fact, it suggests very strongly that the entire premise of the ongoing (as I write this) race riots in America are based on a hoax, deliberately trumped up by evil people to inflame envy, covetousness, and spite in the black population against the white population in America. What's even more shocking, given that this is a complete con job, is that there are widespread protests in Europe where--obviously--American policemen do not operate, and black Africans there are running amok destroying the civilization and neighborhoods of the native white people. Because they can, and because they've been told all their lives that white people are evil and they deserve it.

Does this have an implication on the insane proposals that are gaining currency right now to abolish police departments? Of course it does. That's an r-selected delusion about reality. If you have a population that underachieves in terms of material success compared to another due to a variety of mostly genetic and inherent deterministic factors, who is already prone to violent redress of whatever issues bother them, who have been inflamed for half a century to see themselves as aggrieved and oppressed, in spite of no material statistical evidence that supports that claim (and a great many that refute it), and then we remove the one thin deterrent that keeps them from running amok among the rest of the population taking what they please from them--how does anyone expect that to turn out?

And yet many people, even in the Church, are blind to the truth, and don't want to hear it, and shut down when you try to point out these highly salient and unassailable true facts, because it makes them feel bad, and damages their self-image as a nice person who is full of all kinds of virtues that other people around them must not possess. It doesn't matter that they don't actually ever see any instance of racism; it must exist invisibly and somehow behind the scenes, because after all, everyone talks about it all the time! I'll quote some of the Z-man here. First some introductory context:

One of the truths about politics that many would prefer to ignore is that politics is not about facts and reason. The game is about persuasion. [...] In order to persuade someone, you need to understand his needs and motivations in order to frame your appeal to him in a way that he can understand. [...] The so-called normie has become the universal white guy everyone says they want to bring to this side of the great [political] divide [to unconventional right-wing politics]. As President Barak Obama once said, he is the typical white person. This is the guy who votes Republican and listens to Rush Limbaugh when he is driving around during the day. His dream is to be left to live his life as he sees fit with whom he sees fit.

Normie would naturally come this way [to dissident right wing politics], but he has been convinced of a number of things that operate like a leash keeping him in lefty’s yard. For example, normie is sure that markets matter a great deal. When he sees all of the corporate oligarchs promoting black violence, he mutters to himself, "Get woke, go broke." He truly thinks the marketplace will punish these companies. He thinks the sportsball leagues will suffer for kneeling to their black players. The fans will punish them for it.

The mistake made by dissidents when discussing the magic market issue is in thinking they need to be anti-market. The thing is, normie needs to believe the market will magically solve these problems because he is not motivated to act on his anger and frustration over what he is seeing. The choice he sees is to abandon the convenience of buying from Amazon or forgoing the joy of watching sports. If he is going to walk away from consumerism, there has to be something in it for him.

I have a hard time with this concept that most people are completely immune to reason when it comes to their beliefs about political and social issues. I know it to be true, but I tend to have little patience for those who are unable or unwilling to accept facts and conclusions that are plainly obvious but which require them to relinquish mistaken beliefs that they hold and consider part of their identity. That said, it is true for most people, which makes developing policy based on reality very difficult. Anyway, let's get back to the Z-man where he applies this concept specifically to race and immigration, which are, of course, intertwined concepts in America.

There is something similar at work with race. Normie has been told his whole life that if he just tries hard enough, black people will stop thinking he is a racist. It’s not that explicit, but that is the point of race messaging from the ruling class. They want white people in a constant struggle session over race, where they examine everything they do with an eye on reaching the magic state of being not racist. Since no such place exists, the struggle can never end, hence the endless riots.

It is why explicitly racist language is a dead end for normie. He sees that and is confirmed in his desire to not be a racist. Those taboo-breakers with their salty language and snarky comments are mostly singing to the choir. There’s a place for it and a need for it, but when it comes time to pitch normie on race realism, such language and symbolism is a deal killer. You become the salesman who walks into a Christian business using four-letter language and reeking of alcohol.

Normie also likes feeling a bit self-righteous and sanctimonious. This is true of all people to some degree. All of us want to be good people in the universal sense, but we also want the people around us to acknowledge it. As John Derbyshire explained back in the Neolithic, social thought is a foundation of man. When it comes to politics, the easiest way for normie to feel good is to triangulate. He rejects the far-left, but also rejects those bad people and haters to his right.

You see this in business. Often a buyer will justify his decision as being the value proposition, which means not the best, but not the cheapest. It is a form of self-flattery that the good salesman can exploit. He recognizes that the buyer needs to feel like he is a reasonable guy not taken by fads and thoughtful in his analysis. Normie takes a similar approach when it comes to thorny cultural issues in politics. He naturally seeks some middle ground that he can then pretend is the high ground.

This is, in part, why normie remains smitten with immigration. It has always been framed for him as a choice between open borders and xenophobia. Normie really needs to believe that those immigrants want to be like him. To reject them out of hand is to reject himself. Again, it is a form of self-flattery. Think about how so-called conservatives sell normie on immigration. They talk about immigrants starting businesses and being natural conservatives who love Jesus and family

On the other hand, normie makes noises about the need for immigration being legal and measured, because it makes him seem reasonable. He rejects the chaos of open borders, because he is an orderly sort of guy. He wants a tough border, but as long as there is a legal process, he is fine with immigration. The current immigration levels have become his value position. He’s not taking the cheap route of open borders, but he is not going for the expensive option of a moratorium.

Then there is the weird fatalism of normie. He looks around at the madness of the day and thinks, "They have gone too far. The snap-back is coming." This is similar to his belief in the magic of the marketplace. Normie just assumes the excesses he sees around him will cause the silent majority, of which he is a member in good standing, to move like a school of fish in a different direction. Millions of private decisions motivated by left-wing excess will put things back in order.

This is why talk of whites becoming a minority is so effective on normie. It’s not so much that he fears being at the mercy of non-whites. He fears he will lose the validation of being in that silent majority and that the silent majority will no longer be that magical force that rights all wrongs. In other words, so much of the normie mindset that keeps him tethered to conventional politics, depends on him believing he is part of a perpetual majority of good white people like himself.

This isn't a very flattering picture, but I suspect that it's largely true. Sadly, I think his conclusions are optimistic rather than realistic. The hope for some kind of snapback is a particular failing of mine, too. 

It’s why the scenes of whites washing the feet of blacks and kneeling before them is so powerful, when combined with demographic reality. When normie understand he will be a minority and it means washing the feet, he suddenly becomes a highly motivated buyer for a new political ideology. The good salesman is always prepared for the motivated buyer. He does not bore him with a long sales pitch. He just presses on those pain points until he gets the sale.

Every salesman will tell you that there are good times and bad times. The good salesman weathers the bad times and maximizes the good times. Right now, it has never been a better time to sell dissident ideas to the normie in the market for something better. Not all are motivated buyers, for sure. Some people never let go of the past. You can’t save everyone, but there are a lot of white people looking around right now thinking, “There has to be something better than this.” 

The evidence from history, especially pointed in the Book of Mormon with regards to the Nephite and Jaredite nations, but not exactly unknown from other sources, like the fall of the Roman Empire, is that people will ride gleefully off a cliff, still in denial about the fatality of such an action even while they're literally falling to their deaths. Only when the more wicked part of the people are destroyed can those that remain effectively bring about a societal paradigm shift back to reality.

While I strive to love all mankind and be filled with charity towards all, as Moroni counsels, I admit that as of yet--and probably forever--I do tend to like my own people the most, because they are, after all, mine. And given that, the depressing reality is that we are certainly due for a major event where the more wicked part of my people are destroyed and the naive--heck, even the righteous--will have a steep cost to pay as well. Our Church leaders today tell us to be optimistic and even cheerful about the future, and while I can do that in a longer-term kind of perspective, I can also relate to the deep melancholy that is not hard to read between the lines when reading what Moroni wrote about what happened to his people. Knowing that it's just is one thing, but having to see it happen is not fun.

UPDATE II: The more things change, the more they stay the same. This all could have been avoided, and it wasn't. For the same reasons that our country, culture, legal traditions and religious traditions are being destroyed by out of control invasion: cheap labor for the soulless Chamber of Commerce types. 

Feminism is Satanic

Actually, that's not really an over-the-top clickbait title, although the series that I'm linking to here doesn't make that case specifically. I'll quote a bit of a sample from each, but follow the link to read the entire article series.

I was a bit frustrated during General Conference at Sister Bingham's talk. While the answers she gives were entirely correct, it's clear that she gave them under a background assumption of women being oppressed by men. That is absurd. It's a lie. It's likely not her lie, but it's one that she believes.

Martin van Creveld's essay on Feminism, in five parts. After reading this, go check out the books Men On Strike and The War on Boys.

And... if you are male, or have sons, be very careful (and advise your sons to be very careful) in getting married. It is a much more perilous venture than it ever has been in the past. That doesn't mean that we should shrink in fear and embrace bachelorhood, only that one must be much more careful than in the past, because it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid stumbling upon unrepentant, narcissistic, entitled bratty little princesses who are unpleasant and miserable and will destroy you out of spite and envy. There is no fair play. There is no justice for those so targeted. The only recourse is to avoid being targeted in the first place, and that means strict adherence to the law of chastity for boys, extreme care during dating and courtship to not end up in even innocent situations that can be interpreted as compromising in the future, and especially, extreme care when picking someone to seriously date and marry so as not to end up with a shrieking harpy who will make you miserable. Sadly, many elements in our culture encourage girls to become exactly that, although luckily, many elements in our Church culture mitigate the damage.

And also, luckily for boys, the numbers are on their side. They can afford to be picky and absolutely cannot afford not to in our current climate.

I. Introduction

"Want to know what the strangest thing about modern feminism is? Not the derogatory things many feminists say about other women. Not the foolishness of many of the claims its proponents keep on making, e.g that men designed the famous qwerty keyboard specifically to make the lives of female secretaries hard. Nor the fact that it often comes at the cost of women’s health and welfare, as when they try to compete with men in fields where the latter’s greater physical force and resistance to dirt gives them a clear advantage; thereby inviting injury and shortening their own lives. Nor the truly nauseating combination of aggression and self-pity which has become its trademark. But the fact that so many men tolerate it, abet it, and even help push it forward."

II. The Road to Herland

"Feminist bloodhounds and their weak-kneed, self-hating male supporters have constructed a monstrous propaganda machine, trained it straight at men, and made them pay heavily for the gratuitous concessions their great-grandfathers made. Day by day, tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of them are being penalized for offenses they did not commit and which, even a few years ago, not even the victims themselves would have considered offenses at all. They are prosecuted, put on trial, convicted, and incarcerated and/or fined. So much so that, as used to be the case and sometimes remains the case in Muslim societies, even looking at a woman in the 'wrong' way can be considered sexual harassment. And so much so that defending the accused in court has almost become a crime in itself; which is one reason why so many lawyers who specialize in doing so are themselves female. As to the alleged victims, so mentally retarded are some of them that they take years, decades even, to understand that whatever was done to them; or which they thought was done to them; or which (in at least one famous case) they dreamt had been done to them; or which others told them had been done to them; did indeed constitute rape, or abuse, or harassment, or whatever."

III. Into the Breach

 

"In some armies, these problems and others like them have long brought about a situation where male personnel are more afraid of their female colleagues than of the enemy. And no wonder: the U.S military e.g has more sexual assault response coordinators (SARCs) than it does recruiters. In my experience this fear has even spread to retired male officers; they are worried that walls may have ears. Responses to the problem vary. With Vice President Mike Pence providing the example, in- and out of the military a growing number of men refuse to be alone with any woman other than their wives, thus opening the door to complaints about discrimination. Many others will not meet with female co-workers unless a third person is present, thereby opening the door to even more complaints, this time about the violation of privacy.

"Through all this, one thing remains clear. Should those in charge gird their loins and decide that enough is enough, then both in the military and in the civilian world a great many working women could be dispensed with fairly quickly and sent home. The place they occupied until 1965 or so; and which, to the mind of many men and such women as consider their children too precious to be raised by strangers, they should never have left to begin with."

IV. Brave New World

This one was weird. I'm not quoting any section of it, it seems like a tangent that I'm not quite sure what to make of.

V. Conclusion

Another good read on the same subject:  https://theamericancitadel.com/2020/03/09/women-then-and-now/

"Before the advent of Marxist-inspired feminism, women were treated like queens and womanhood was highly cherished. It is one of the great feminist myths that before feminism women were chattel; mere property of oppressive men. Feminists deride their ancestors by calling them 'domestic servants' or 'doormats.' What Marxist-minded women see as 'oppression,' however, was authentic Liberty. The stark reality is that women in the past were freer, happier, and more powerful than their modern counterparts."

Pre-Adamites revisited

I thought I'd rework my pre-Adamite article from a couple of years or so back, and use it as the transcript of a podcast or YouTube discussion. I also want to edit and add a bit to the original text, but rather than simply modify the existing post, which has sunk pretty far down the list over time, I thought I'd go ahead and rework it as a new post; even though most of the text is the same as before. Quite possibly, as happened to me, you see the very term and scratch your head.  Huh?  What in the world is a pre-Adamite person and where in the world did such an idea come from?  This is actually somewhat curious, however, as the question was once a big one that many members of the Church seemed to be concerned about, and it even prompted an official statement from the First Presidency to the General Authorities of the Church.  This question is also inextricably tied up with the question of evolution, so I'll have to address that somewhat too.  Pre-Adamites isn't a concept that originated with members of the Church; actually, Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions address them going pretty far back. The early Christians simply dismissed the concept out of hand, but even in doing so, they affirm that the concept existed and people had speculated on their existance. Later on, they seemed to own the possibility that they may have existed more explicitly. Before we really begin, let's establish some context.

First off, as James Talmage said, there is no conflict between science and religion when both are clearly understood; if there is apparent conflict, it is due to our own incomplete and imperfect understanding of one or the other (or even both.)  That said, there are limitations to both sets of knowledge with regards to this particular question.  It is not useful or helpful to be overly dogmatic on what we think we know, when in reality we have to be very careful that just because we think we know something, we may in fact not. For instance, everyone is taught the theory of evolution in school, and most people believe that because we are taught it with confidence and everyone else learns it too, that the theory is unassailable and unchallenged, other than by young Earth creationists, who are themselves often written off as crackpots. This is not true at all; there are, in fact, and always have been, serious scientific challenges to the theory of evolution. But few know of them. So, being dogmatic that the theory of evolution is well established and unassailable science may be easy for many people to be, but it is built on a foundation that is pure sand. I'll get to that more later. The same is often true for scriptural and doctrinal interpretations. For example, the Masoretic Text, which is the basis for all of our modern English Bibles (and I believe the rest of the Bibles of the European languages, for that matter) is the source of the Ussher chronology. However, the Masoretic Text features some alterations made to the chronology and the ages of the descendants of Noah down to Abraham; changes that the Greek Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and Flavius Josephus all do not show. They agree on a different, longer chronology for those generations. It is clear that it is the Masoretic Text which has been altered. Why? The most likely explanation is that it was something that the Jewish rabbis could use to "disprove" the authority of Jesus  (although their disproof was based on deliberately lying and altering their own records). I've seen smug, arrogant and angry-sounding rabbis on Youtube and elsewhere ranting on this very issue even still today, which lends credence to the motive. But what does this mean? It suggests that the chronology that Young Earth creationists use is probably too short by well over 600 years. But what about D&C 77 you may say? Doesn't that prove the Ussher chronology, or at least the portion of it that follows the Fall of Adam? Not really. In fact, D&C 77 demonstrates that there are all kinds of symbolic features of the revealed truth, and taking all of it literally and in the same context that we perceive it is probably a bad idea. In Church study manuals about the creation that say plainly that "day" as given in the scriptures according to the account of creation is not to be taken in context to refer to "24 hours"; are we to assume that the periods of 1,000 years referred to in Revelations and alluded to in D&C 77 are literal? I don't know. D&C 77 is a brief explanation of what Revelations says; it doesn't necessarily add literalness to everything that Revelations said if Revelations didn't mean it literally, except in the verses where it specifically says something to that effect. I'm not saying that I know anything at all about the age of the earth or the span from Adam to now with confidence, but I am saying that it pays to not be too dogmatic about things that you want to believe but that we don't in fact know. As Gordon B. Hinckley said, "None of us ... knows enough. The learning process is an endless process. We must read, we must observe, we must assimilate, and we must ponder that to which we expose our minds. I believe in evolution, not organic evolution, as it is called, but in the evolution of the mind, the heart, and the soul of man. I believe in improvement. I believe in growth."

Science does not give us an acceptable answer to the creation, and religion has not attempted to answer definitively with any level of detail what exactly encompassed the creation, and I think any attempts to wring a detailed history of the world by literally reading the Genesis account of the creation and the Ussher chronology are wrong-headed from the get-go.  The answer from God appears to be some form of "that is not important to your salvation, so details have not been revealed" and along those lines, the Church has declined to offer any doctrinal clarification or establish any doctrine with regards to the details of the creation beyond that which is in the scriptures and taught in the temple. Also, since those sources stand in (occasionally, apparent) contrast with science, it means that it becomes a means whereby to try the faith of Man. As long ago as Brigham Young, he referred to the possibility of an older earth, of course; "In these respects we differ from the Christian world, for our religion will not clash with or contradict the facts of science in any particular ... whether the Lord found the earth empty and void, whether he made it out of nothing or out of the rude elements; or whether he made it in six days or in as many millions of years, is and will remain a matter of speculation in the minds of men unless he give revelation on the subject. If we understood the process of creation there would be no mystery about it, it would be all reasonable and plain, for there is no mystery except to the ignorant."

So that's the answer from doctrine. Evolution, on the other hand, is a bit more tricky from a scientific perspective, as I alluded to earlier.  Sure, there is a strong, decades-long scientific tradition of the model of evolution being the explanation given for the peopling (and inhabiting by both plants and animals, for that matter) of the earth.  However... things are not as simple as they seem.

A few interesting examples: the credibility of the scientific industry overall has undergone a rather withering fire for anyone who's been paying attention to it.  Although I could discuss this at length, to do so, I'd need to dig out a lot of sources that I've read but not really kept track of; rather, let me point you merely to a summary here, and an even more scathing one in the book reviewed here.  And here's one specifically regarding evolution itself.

But maybe that's getting a little ahead of ourselves.  Despite its ascendancy, evolution as a model suffers from a number of crippling flaws, notably:

• The second law of thermodynamics states that natural systems become more chaotic over time, not more structured and organized.  Evolution posits the opposite. There is no system on Earth where anything is known to become more organized naturally rather than less without the hand of a higher intelligence to make it so, with the possible exception of rocks that form crystals. The collapsing of clouds of gas and dust into stars and planetary systems is another possible exception from astronomy; but again, that involves a creative hand as well.
• Few scientists understand the statistics involved with the model of evolution.  While they hand wave away the unlikeliness of evolution by saying that clearly it did happen, in reality, no rational mathematical model can possibly give us the complexity we see over the time frame that we see.  That mathematics would require an order of magnitude (or more) more time for evolution to have produced the result that we see today.
• This is even worse with the abiotic genesis of life from some "primordial soup."  There is no satisfactory scientific explanation for the genesis of life from not-life organic elements.  And again; the statistical odds of not-life becoming life is astronomically more difficult than most scientists realize or admit. It is, and honest evolutionary biologists will admit this, a just-so story. They have no understanding of how they propose that it happened, they just say that since it did, there must be an explanation that maybe someday they will disover.
• Hybrid species in the fossil record are rare and unconvincing, except in a very macro, big picture way.  As an example; Archaeopterix lithographica was often held out as a transition between dinosaurs and birds; however, it's also clearly too derived in a number of characteristics to be ancestral to later birds.  It is therefore a "close cousin" of a completely unknown and unconfirmed ancestor to birds.  This kind of ghost transition fossil story is commonplace; the actual transition fossil is almost uniformly unknown.  There's even a modification to the theory of evolution proposed by Stephen J. Gould a few decades ago that purports to explain why there is no clear fossil evidence for evolution: punctuated equilibrium.  All of this merely says that there is no significant "hard evidence" of evolution in the fossil record. The theory can exist without any evidence, because it's been modified to explain why there isn't any. QED.
• Experiments have been conducted with fruit flies, bombarded with mutagens to supposedly replicate the effect of millions of years of evolution.  None of these has ever produced anything like a new species.
• In fact, the very notion that mutation is beneficial and can result in speciation, especially prompted by vacant ecological niches, is a just-so story that has never been observed or explained satisfactorily.  And it trips over its own feet to some degree; mutation isn't caused by ecological vacancies, so what exactly prompts rabid speciation and diversification when ecological vacancies exist is not explained at all. Again, there's a hand wavy explanation that perhaps all of this mutation and potential speciation is happening all around us all of the time, but the speciation doesn't actually happen without vacant ecological niches for creatures with beneficial mutations to exploit. This is, again, a very convenient just-so story that is backed by no evidence or even a convincing proposal.
• The complexity of various organs, such as the vertebrate eye, or a bird's wing, which have hundreds of working parts that all interact together to fulfill a single function, has no explanation.  There are hand wavy attempts to suggest that "half a wing" or a "partial eye" confers some evolutionary benefit, thus prompting transitional features to exist, but these are just-so stories.  The reality is that these complex structures have to have been designed in coordinated fashion in order to even exist.  This is, again, a failure of most scientists to truly understand statistics and probability; c.f. the just-story which is actually statistically impossible of millions of monkey and millions of typewriters and Shakespeare.
• The same is true for intracellular enzyme interactions, or for that matter, other complex symbiotic interrelationships.
• Biological models, as referred to in the link above, are continually debunked by genetics, requiring tweaks to the theory of evolution until it is a hopelessly complex model that rests on an unproven foundation, and is therefore very unlikely to actually end up being true.

While it isn't really my purpose in this post to debunk the theory of evolution by natural selection (TENS for short), it is important for this post that I point out and establish, at least at a very high level, that TENS is very poor science, and if it weren't for inertia and politics within the scientific community, it almost certainly would have been discarded decades ago, and we'd either be talking about a new standard model, or at least be in search of one. As noted in the points above, the "theory" is plagued by a multitude of stacked just-so stories and vague hand waves rather than a solid foundation of actual, observable facts. The reality is that we are desperately in need of a new model that better explains the data that we have, because evolution doesn't do so. To the best of my knowledge, nobody in mainstream science is working on this, although critics from within the scientific community, like David Berlinski and Michael Behe are popping up. Young earth creationism doesn't offer us a workable model either, which is the other obvious alternative in the public sphere, so we do not have a model that actually fits the data well currently, unless it lurks out there in the fringe realm of pseudo-science or para-doctrinal speculation.  Many of the prophets and apostles in this dispensation have alluded to this fact, and it does, in fact, seem likely that few of them who have made any statements on it have actually believed in young earth creationism or evolution as formulated specifically either one.

One day, the edifice protecting evolution from sufficient criticism to bring the model down will break through the political forces aligned to stop such criticism from gaining steam and some alternative, whatever it may be, will be presented.  Then again, maybe it won't happen until further light and knowledge is revealed to Man.  TENS has evolved into the counter-argument against religion; an atheistic, secular humanist dogma.  As I said, neither the "standard" religious model of young earth creationism nor the atheist natural selection model are realistic or believable, and both are contradicted by a wide variety of evidence, but the presence of the model of evolution has been a very effective tool for Satan in leading people astray from their faith because of the weaknesses in young earth creationism, and the suppression of details about the weaknesses of evolution.  As I said earlier, and as Bro. Talmage said decades ago, there is no conflict between science and religion when both are properly understood.  However, neither are properly understood today; science gives us a visibly unworkable model with no alternatives, and religion declines to answer the question in any detail at present (although curiously, there are ways in which using time dilation observed by theoretical physics can actually—believe it or not—salvage and reconcile the Bible narrative with observed scientific observations about age.  But that doesn't take away from the fact that the creation narrative that we have is incredibly light on details, and almost certainly deliberately so on the part of God, or Moses, or both.)  For now, what is required is faith that more details on the how will be forthcoming at some future date, possibly in the Millennium, or in our life to come as we learn and grow more following the Resurrection.  From D&C 101: 32 Yea, verily I say unto you, in that day when the Lord shall come, he shall reveal all things— 33 Things which have passed, and hidden things which no man knew, things of the earth, by which it was made, and the purpose and the end thereof— 34 Things most precious, things that are above, and things that are beneath, things that are in the earth, and upon the earth, and in heaven. From the Religion 301 manual (an Institute, or BYU class): How was the earth created? The Lord has not yet revealed how the earth was created. All we know is that it was created by God.  (That quote from D&C 101 will apply quite well to all kinds of mysteries in astronomy and astrophysics that also are clumsily patched up with a secular, areligious scientific dogma, but that's a discussion for another time...)

Nor is my purpose to present an alternative model.  I personally favor a model that has many of the "noble and great ones" involved in the creation, as described in Abraham 3 as a learning and training exercise, to prepare the world for the coming of Man, and that the various stages of life as seen in the fossil record are more like the model years of a car, advancing as we worked through different systems as part of that plan, than what is described in TENS.  But that's merely my own speculative pet theory and without a greater understanding of what the purpose of such an activity may be, it's hard to pin it down as only one of many potential models that could fit the available data.  But we shall indeed see.  As Bruce R. McConkie once wrote (and with the caveat that McConkie wrote a lot of stuff that was clearly merely his opinion, learned though it was); emphasis mine: When, during the Millennium, the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon is translated, it will give an account of life in the premortal existence; of the creation of all things; of the Fall and the Atonement and the Second Coming; of temple ordinances, in their fullness; of the ministry and mission of translated beings; of life in the spirit world, in both paradise and hell; of the kingdoms of glory to be inhabited by resurrected beings; and many such like things. As of now, the world is not ready to receive these truths. For one thing, these added doctrines will completely destroy the whole theory of organic evolution as it is now almost universally taught in the halls of academia. For another, they will set forth an entirely different concept and time frame of the creation, both of this earth and all forms of life and of the sidereal heavens themselves, than is postulated in all the theories of men. And sadly, there are those who, if forced to make a choice at this time, would select Darwin over Deity.

Some of the speculation of pre-Adamites came about a hundred or more years ago as Charles Darwin's TENS theory was really percolating into academic culture, culminating in 1925 with the Scopes trial, at which point the Church even issued a revised statement to complement an earlier statement that they had issued in 1909. In particular with regards to the age of human and hominid fossils, and the very existence of "early man" in general that seemed to contradict the Adam and Eve narrative, members of the Church were looking for a way to reconcile science and religion.  B.H. Roberts prepared a document, at the First Presidency's direction as a study manual for Melchizedek Priesthood holders, which referred to pre-Adamites in an off-hand way in one lesson. This prompted a discussion among the General Authorities about the text, and prompted a statement from the Church, as well as a letter to the Desert News on the topic by the President Smith himself. The statements assert that evolution is not a doctrine of the Gospel, but also assert that not evolution is also not a doctrine of the Gospel. Given the many weaknesses of TENS, it's possible that this whole controversy of the past is somewhat mitigated or even moot. However, to accept young earth creationism it would also require that one believe that the half-life of Carbon-14 and radiocarbon dating is flawed science; a more difficult premise to accept, as I know of no challenges of any significance to the rationale of radiocarbon dating.  So what exactly is the idea of pre-Adamites, and what happened to the idea that it's kind of dropped out of the consciousness of the membership of the Church?

Obviously, science still teaches us that the longevity of the human race is a good deal longer than as described in Scripture, and it is plausible that science is correct on this matter.  According to research, anatomically modern humans have existed since about 200,000 years ago, out of a diverse selection of anatomically non-modern, or archaic human groups such as Neanderthals, Heidelburgians, Denisovans, Ergasters and Antecesors, etc. which in turn go back a million or more years. Even more primitive models; guys like Homo erectus and Homo habilis go back almost 3 million years, before which their ancestors were supposed to have been the bipedal savanna-dwelling chimpanzee-like Australopithecus.  Now granted; you need to get into the details on a lot of this research.  What is presented to us as a done deal with complete drawings of skeletons of unambiguous interpretation is often quite far from that in reality. While nothing as grotesquely false as the Piltdown Man hoax is evident, I firmly believe that without the underlying context of TENS, the data that we have on these so-called early humans could and would be interpreted very differently than they are today.  A few fragments of bone does not a convincing primitive ape-like proto-men make unless your model requires primitive ape-like proto-men, after all, and very few of these specimens are known from more than a few fragments of bone.  Most of the skulls that you see pictures of are reconstructions based on a bit of braincase attached to some brow ridges, a separate find of some jaw bones from a similar locale that is referred to the same species, and the rest is filled in via comparative anatomy.  There's a joke physical anthropologists, archaeologists and paleontologists make that you could fit all of the pre-Modern human remains that we have today in a single shoe box, and still have room for the shoes.  That's an exaggeration, but it's funny because of the underlying truth behind it.  But even if you disregard the entire reconstruction of primitive, ape-like species like Homo habilis, you still have anatomically modern humans that extend an order of magnitude earlier than Adam could possibly have been extended.  It is very difficult to envision even an unliteral reading of the Scriptural account that has Adam and Eve running around 200,000 years ago.  And yet we have skeletons that date that old, and no compelling rationale to challenge the veracity of the dating. And as archaeogenetic genome sequencing has started to become a thing, we even have proposals that Europeans and Asians have a non-trivial (albeit small) percentage of their DNA which is inherited from Neanderthal and Denisovan archaic human groups. Again; I'm not here to tell you that these proposals are or are not true, merely that the data which led to the proposals are out there, and I'm not aware of any challenges to the data or its conclusions either one from the field of science.

In addition to that, here's a small roundup of some quotations from The Brethren:

• In a Memorandum from the First Presidency to the General Authorities (mentioned above) issued in April 1931, it says: Both parties [i.e., Elders Joseph Fielding Smith and B. H. Roberts] make the scripture and the statements of men who have been prominent in the affairs of the Church the basis of their contention; neither has produced definite proof in support of his views... Upon the fundamental doctrines of the Church we are all agreed. Our mission is to bear the message of the restored Gospel to the people of the world. Leave geology, biology, archaeology and anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research, while we magnify our calling in the realm of the Church. We can see no advantage to be gained by a continuation of the discussion to which reference is here made, but on the contrary are certain that it would lead to confusion, division and misunderstanding if carried further. Upon one thing we should all be able to agree namely, that presidents Joseph F. Smith, John Winder and Anthon Lund were right when they said: "Adam is the primal parent of our race." 
• Elder James Talmage wrote, of the same discussion: Involved in this question is that of the beginning of life upon the earth, and as to whether there was death either of animal or plant before the fall of Adam, on which proposition Elder Smith was very pronounced in denial and Elder Roberts equally forceful in the affirmative. As to whether Pre-Adamite races existed upon the earth there has been much discussion among some of our people of late. The decision reached by the First Presidency, and announced to this morning's assembly, was in answer to a specific question that obviously the doctrine of the existence of races of human beings upon the earth prior to the fall of Adam was not a doctrine of the Church; and, further, that the conception embodied in the belief of many to the effect that there were no such Pre-Adamite races, and that there was no death upon the earth prior to Adam's fall is likewise declared to be no doctrine of the Church. I think the decision of the First Presidency is a wise one in the premises. This is one of the many things upon which we cannot preach with assurance and dogmatic assertions on either side are likely to do harm rather than good. 
• Hugh Nibley, in an article titled "Before Adam" wrote, among other things: Do not begrudge existence to creatures that looked like men long, long ago, nor deny them a place in God's affection or even a right to exaltation—for our scriptures allow them such. Nor am I overly concerned as to just when they might have lived, for their world is not our world. They have all gone away long before our people ever appeared. God assigned them their proper times and functions, as he has given me mine—a full-time job that admonishes me to remember his words to the overly eager Moses: "For mine own purpose have I made these things. Here is wisdom and it remaineth in me." (Moses 1:31.) It is Adam as my own parent who concerns me. When he walks onto the stage, then and only then the play begins. 

This opens the door to the possibility of pre-Adamite men, given those quotes and the archaeological record.  But that of course answers nothing of what in the world they are doing spiritually and where they fit into the Plan of Salvation.  Here's a few other Scriptures and quotes that some have used to build up (admittedly very speculative) concepts about pre-Adamites and where they may fit:

• D&C 45:54: And then shall the heathen nations be redeemed, and they that knew no law shall have part in the first resurrection; and it shall be tolerable for them.
• There are also many who believe that the term "replenish" in the phrase "multiply and replenish the earth" is to be taken literally; i.e., the earth needs to be refilled as it was emptied from a former full state.  Elder Orson Hyde said in the Journal of Discourses: The world was peopled before the days of Adam, as much so as it was before the days of Noah. It was said that Noah became the father of a new world, but it was the same old world still, and will continue to be (in the future), though it may pass through many changes.

If any such pre-Adamites existed, then there are a few potential outcomes that I'm aware of, with little to recommend any of them other than speculation. 

1. (The most conciliatory to the modern scientific paradigm) Adam and Eve were the father and mother of the lineage of people who received the first dispensation of the gospel; starting the Gospel history of the world, and as such are the father and mother (in a spiritual and figurative sense) of all men, but not necessarily in a genetic or literal sense. In this scenario,Adam as the Father of our race does not mean that he's the father genetically, but spiritually, i.e., there was no dispensation of the Gospel on the Earth until the Gospel was revealed to Adam after his Fall and expulsion from isolation in Eden.  This could, conceivably mean that there were other people on the Earth at the time of Adam and before, but that lacking the Gospel, History, as they say, starts with Adam and the revelation of the Gospel to him.  In this scenario, being the posterity of Adam could just as well mean that our ancestors received the Gospel from him as that they were born of him. The presence of Adam and Eve alone at the head of the family tree of all humanity is not to be taken too literally in this interpretation.  Although I do not favor or agree with this interpretation, there are at least some traditions that support it; Adam and Eve are mentioned in the Pearl of Great Price (and in other sources) as interacting with other people who remain unnamed.  I presume that they are meant to be their own offspring  There are also persistent (apocryphal if not actually outright mythological) references to a first wife of Adam's: Lilith, although that seems to be a kind of Mesopotamian ghost story that got adopted into Jewish and some early Christian philosophies during the Middle Ages, mostly.  Even the statement above from the Presidency to the Brethren leaves open this possibility; it states that Adam is the primal parent of our race, not the sole parent of our race.  In general, I don't support or agree with this position myself, but I can, by squinting really hard, see how it could maybe fit in with what we know.  Certainly it seems that most the Brethren have never really believed it, but many Christian scholars outside of our faith believe in something like this.  (Many others see the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall as symbolic rather than literal, and many even in the Church believe this, although I believe that this is not in harmony with what we know of Gospel doctrine.)
   
   As an aside, a similar argument can be made about the Flood and its effects on the human family. I've long had some cognitive dissonance about both the time frame of the peopling of the Earth following the Flood as well as the fact that clearly the genealogies following Noah seem to only give ancestors for nations of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East that the Israelites would have been familiar with. Any proposal linking peoples of Northern Europe, the Orient or sub-Saharan Africa to any of Noah's sons is hand wavy at best. Does that mean that some of them were there all along and weathered the Flood? I dunno. I make no attempt to answer that, merely point out that I have cognitive dissonance about what we think we know, and note that possibly we don't actually know details that maybe some of us think we know.
2. There was a theory that I haven't heard much about, but which apparently was earlier somewhat popular, that a large number of people in the War in Heaven were reluctant, or afraid of the mortal trials, and entered into some kind of "plea bargain" or negotiated state where they would inherit only a Terrestrial (at best) glory but would live outside of the dispensations of the Gospel and not be subject to Celestial law.  Although prior to hearing about this notion, I had assumed statements like Joseph Smith's reference to "the heathen of ages that never had hope," in Times and Seasons to refer to merely conventional heathens who died without ever hearing of the Gospel, some have seen statements like this as evidence for this plan, as is the verse from D&C section 54 noted earlier.  If a terrestrial eternity was "tolerable" to these heathen nations, could they have bargained for just such a plan rather than being tried according to a fuller, celestial law?  If so, it certainly makes sense for them to have lived before Adam's time, because Adam was given the celestial law, as were his descendants and the whole earth from his time until the end was subject to that mandate; even those who lived during the Apostasy or in cultures where they never heard of Christ will be taught the gospel in the spirit world and have the chance to accept it and thus gain the benefits of a celestial exaltation.
   
   Although I don't see any reason to say that this notion can't be true, neither do I see any reason to suspect that it is.  Every statement used to support it can equally be made to support another interpretation that does not involve pre-Adamic peoples that merely were apostate, not in some putative negotiated, plea-bargain spiritual status.  The only things that recommend it are the fact that it does, at least, offer an explanation for human skeletons found by archaeologists that are almost certainly way too old to post-date Adam and Eve, and hey, at least it's a really interesting just-so story.
3. Orson Hyde and some other Brethren in earlier days of the Church seemed to believe in entire Dispensations of the Gospel that were born, came to fruition, and were finished prior to the Dispensation of Adam; i.e., Adam and Eve are the parents of our cycle, but that earlier cycles of humanity may well have existed on the Earth, lived their lives, had the Gospel, come to fruition, etc. and been then cleared to make way for our cycle once they were done.  The quote given above from Hugh Nibley seems to be concurrent with this belief as well.
   
   The reasons for this idea to be attractive are, again, it explains the existence of archaeological finds and radiocarbon dates associated with them, and at least a few of the early Brethren seemed to believe it.  And as Bro. Nibley said, our Scriptures allow for the possibility; by which I presume he means that they don't say anything that would contradict it, although they also say nothing that would support it either.
4. Before leaving off theories entirely, here's another idea that some in the Church believe.  They apply this more to dinosaurs and other extinct life-forms and whatnot than to old people skeletons, but the concept is the same: i.e., that the matter used to create the Earth may have been leftover from some other earth and that fossils and other finds that seem to predate the Biblical record seem to do so because they existed earlier on another earth, not on ours.  There are several reasons, I believe, to reject this idea:
1. The creation of the earth, as best understood by science, is not a cold creation.  The accretion of material would have generated a great deal of heat and pressure and any such relics from whatever former earth that they are the detritus of would have been destroyed as part of the process of the formation of our earth. Fossils can't exist surrounded by magma.
2. We are given to understand from multiple sources that the spiritual fate of the world is to be perfected and "resurrected" to a degree of glory itself, not merely the people who lived on it (see D&C 88:17–20; 130:8–11; 77:1; 29:23–25; 43:32).  If this is true, it doesn't make sense that the "bones" of one earth would be used to make another, since those other earths presumably have the same fate as ours; i.e, to receive their own celestial glory and be perfected; not to be torn apart and recycled.
3. This would be true of the actual fossils and skeletons as well; if the world on which they lived had its Dispensation and came to its fullness of times, thus freeing its matter up to be used to make our earth, why haven't those creatures or men who lived on it been resurrected themselves? And if they have been resurrected, why are their remains still hanging around?
   
   You can possibly twist this into a salvageable theory by positing that the Judgement Day of our world and our Dispensation is actually the Judgement day of all worlds and all Dispensations, and therefore all of those resurrections and celestial glories are yet to have happened.  All in all, I think this theory requires too much special pleading... although honestly, I suppose all of these theories require special pleading.

That's really kind of the takeaway, though—as interesting as all of this is, there really isn't any reason to believe any of it.  The only reason I can think of to even entertain these ideas are 1) they're curious and interesting at least, if nothing else, and 2) if you need some kind of rationalization or justification in your mind to accept the apparent contradiction of what we think we know about archaeology and what we think we know about Gospel doctrine. Finally, you can add 3) it was obviously a preoccupation of some degree to some of the earlier Brethren of the Church, which means that it's not just some wild, crackpot idea, but something that our elders took seriously, which at least implies that we might, if we're so curious, do so as well.

Personally, I don't require any such justification, and I'm comfortable suggesting that there are a number of things that I don't know or understand, but will in the fullness of times.  So for me, I don't really take any of these theories seriously, or believe in any of them... although I will point out that I also can't see any reason to suggest that they can't be true; just that I don't see any reason to suggest that they should be true either. All in all, I find them merely an interesting historical footnote; a folk belief, if you will, that briefly had a heyday before the Brethren decided specifically to no longer address it and it faded away as an important question to the membership of the Church. Not to say that the question of evolution vs creationism and how that all works out isn't still a question that occupies the thoughts of many members of the Church, which is related, but specifics of pre-Adamites has faded, and few are even familiar with the term today. This has evolved, no pun intended, into more a question of how literally to take the account of the creation, the Fall, Adam and Eve, the Flood, etc. in terms of its time frame and its scale; i.e., localized vs. global. The more literal minded become a specifically LDS flavored version of young earth creationists, and the less literal minded become science apologists who dismiss much of what the doctrine says and focus their attention on other doctrines instead where there aren't any contradictions. Most in the Church simply don't know enough to have an informed opinion; either because as I've noted, actually none of us knows enough to have a truly informed opinion, or because they aren't even informed as to the state of the science and the doctrine, and so just don't worry about it.

For people like me who are curious by nature and who do try and stay as informed as is reasonably possible on topics that interest me, it's actually gratifying and interesting to know that actually nobody, claims that they may make notwithstanding, really can say any more authoritatively than I can myself, what the real answers are barring a revelation from God Himself. It's also gratifying to know that the foundations of those who make very strident claims with a lot of confidence aren't really as secure as they think they are in their opinions. It becomes an issue where I'm comfortable saying that I have my doubts and issues about any proposed just-so story meant to explain the creation of the earth and its peopling, but that because of my curiosity, it'll be one of the first questions I ask when I get the opportunity after this life to talk to someone who knows more about it than me, and in the meantime, I'll carry forward with faith that although there is no answer that I can see clearly now, one will be forthcoming someday. And in the meantime, I don't need it anyway.

Book of Mormon geography; cureloms and cumoms; Black Jaredites

I was originally thinking of making a post from my old, original list of topics, which was a discussion of cureloms and cumoms. (Actually, I looked at my first post, and I don't see that topic. I don't know why I forgot to write that one down; I always intended to ramble about it someday.) In order to have a discussion about what the cureloms and cumoms might be, it's important to discuss what the geography of the Book of Mormon is, and while I'm at it, touch on one of my other topics; whether or not the notion that the Jaredites were black has any merit. If you accept a Heartlands model, for instance, it might suggest very different animals than a Meso-American model would suggest. I'll come right out and say it; I think the Heartland model is the one that best fits the data. By "data" I mean basically two things; claims made by Joseph Smith and other early prophets of the Church that the Indians that they were familiar with were the descendants of the Lamanites, including a few very specific location claims; (the location of the ancient city of Manti, the location of the Hill Cumorah, Zelph, etc.) Also, I think on recently re-reading Nephi's vision in Second Nephi of the coming of the Gentile Nations and what they will do on the face of the Promised Land that it clearly refers to the American nation; the promises and actual reality that is described in those chapters doesn't apply to southern Mexico; it clearly refers to Gentile Nations that are the American Colonists and the Revolutionary War, the Restoration, etc. Getting drawn repeatedly to stone ruins in Mexico and Central America seems a distraction to me.

That said, I don't really care all that much where the Book of Mormon takes place. While I certainly have an opinion on it, and the more I study it, the more my opinion is reinforced, if it turns out that I'm completely wrong, well... I won't really care all that much, and it's not like my testimony of the Book of Mormon will be affected. In any case, I don't want to talk too much about it, but here's a youtube video that adds more to the discussion than I have done.



I am a little bit concerned--although it's not my problem to solve, and I don't want to impinge on the agency of proponents of either theory by telling them what they should say or think--by the heat with which some Heartlanders approach their model, though, which state that because Joseph Smith clearly advocated the Heartland model and that lack of acceptance of it is tantamount to apostasy. And the Meso-Americans have started responding with similar vitriol; claiming that the Heartlanders are claiming that the Church itself is out of touch with Joseph Smith and therefore, they are the semi-apostates. That's not really true, of course; neither of those, actually, but it doesn't have any impact on my belief that the Heartland model is a better model than the Meso-American model. The behavior of proponents of either is not evidence of anything.

Unfortunately, and maybe this was something that God allowed to happen by design, the nature of the early expansion of the Americans across the continent, and their farming techniques, coming as they did before the real advent of archaeology and paleontology, means that there is little scientific consensus about many of the things that farmers reported finding as they plowed their fields and tore up mounds, etc. There's actually a great deal of evidence, reports, and witnesses for a lot of stuff that science does not support, including archaeological finds related to the Hopewell complex in particular. As the video above suggests, there was a concerted effort, related to Manifest Destiny and other ideas that make acceptance of evidence that is actually widespread difficult to accept. We've found tons of metal swords in the Midwest? Iconography that resembles Middle Eastern and even specifically Israelite stuff? Well, that contradicts our ideas, so it's dismissed. After all, if the Indians were the post-apocalyptic descendants of a higher culture, that could very well interfere with the beliefs in the Manifest Destiny of the Americans to spread across the largely empty lands that the remnant of these other peoples still lived on.

The same thing goes with the notion of the Pleistocene extinction event. There is all kinds of evidence that suggests that many of our ideas are wrong. Mammoths and mastodons still being found and described to Americans by the Indians in the 1700s. The Sioux insisting that their horses are not the descendants of Spanish horses, but a lineage that they'd had for generations. (They were all killed by the US government, so no genetic research can be done anymore. Plus, the whole thing doesn't really add up; the Plains Indians were supposed to have become among the best light cavalry with a horse-centric culture only a couple of generations after stumbling across a few feral Spanish horses, and figuring out what to do with them on their own? That doesn't make any sense.) I strongly suspect that most of the extinct animals were not extinct as early as our paleontologists tell us and many of these animals; maybe even most of them, lingered beyond the 8,000 BC mark, well into the modern era and as Americans we literally just barely missed seeing them alive. There may well have been early frontiersman, trappers and whatnot who did see them alive, but of course, they didn't bring evidence back to Yale or Harvard or other places who published scientific data, so now our so-called elite scientific minds don't accept them as accurate or even possible.

In fact, curiously, if you start digging into it, there has been a very concerted effort among academia to discredit all kinds of evidence that would corroborate the Book of Mormon narrative in the American Midwest. Even when the individuals in academia wouldn't necessarily have known that that's what they were doing. The Great Deceiver has been very active making sure that there is doubt, so that the righteous have to exercise some faith to accept the Narrative given to us by our Father. If anything, to me, this is a kind of confirmation that I wasn't even expecting to find, but is compelling nonetheless--the fact that Satan is trying very hard to hide and cover up this evidence is itself evidence that we're on to something interesting here.

--~~*~~--

So anyway, if that's true, the Jaredite scripture that references horses and elephants and cureloms and cumoms is entirely plausible. There were American lineages of horses in America, and they probably did survive into Book of Mormon times and even beyond, possibly even all the way into the late 1800s. The "Columbian Mammoth" should really be more accurately called the "American Elephant" as it is more closely related to the Asian Elephant than even the African Elephants are. But the question remains; what is a curelom and what is a cumom? They were either animals not known to the Nephites, or at least Moroni who wrote the Book of Ether from Jaredite records, or they weren't known to Joseph Smith, so he didn't have an English word to translate that he knew.

Ether 9:16 And the Lord began again to take the curse from off the land, and the house of Emer did prosper exceedingly under the reign of Emer; and in the space of sixty and two years they had become exceedingly strong, insomuch that they became exceedingly rich—
17 Having all manner of fruit, and of grain, and of silks, and of fine linen, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious things;
18 And also all manner of cattle, of oxen, and cows, and of sheep, and of swine, and of goats, and also many other kinds of animals which were useful for the food of man.
19 And they also had horses, and asses, and there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man, and more especially the elephants and cureloms and cumoms.

It's not clear if the cureloms and cumoms were "useful unto man" or "useful for the food of man;" i.e., did they use them as domesticated work animals, or did they just eat them? There's no way to know what animals they were, or even if they were animals that were used more for hunting or as livestock as opposed to working animals. There are a number of proposals put out there by a number of members, but they all are based on making unverified and unverifiable assumptions, and then treating these assumptions as if they were fact; i.e., that the animals have to have been the most useful for work, etc., therefore, proboscideans are to be favored because they are more useful than other animals as beasts of burden and construction (see the use of elephants in India and southeast Asia even today, for example.) In any case, if they already had "elephants" than additional proboscideans shouldn't necessarily be useful rather than redundant; although I think that the other proboscidians are still very valid and likely candidates, but they aren't necessarily to be preferred to other animals that could have been referenced.

By the same token, I think it's important to mention that the cureloms and cumoms were almost certainly animals that were unique to North America, because Old World animals were well known in American culture already, and would almost certainly not have been left untranslated. By this same token, it probably wasn't a North American animal that Joseph Smith himself would probably have known quite well. We know that Joseph Smith's translation was a revelatory process, not a worldly one. He didn't sit down with a dictionary of Nephite to English; he had the meaning of the text revealed to him directly. In this regard, some animals that otherwise might be candidates can probably be eliminated from consideration. For example, if the Jaredites did live in the upper Midwest and the Great Lakes region and southern Canada, as the Heartland model proposes, then the beaver would probably have been greatly useful to them, because warm clothing could have been made from its pelts, as trappers and Indians alike did during the Colonial period. Even if, as the Heartland folks opine, the climate was warmer during the Book of Mormon years than now, coinciding with the Roman Warm Period for the Nephite flowering and the Bronze Age Optimum that would have been in place during the time of the Jaredites. I doubt that this was uniformly true, however. The Book of Mormon spans many centuries; although the timing of the beginning of the Jaredite era is a bit uncertain, it likely spans at least two thousand years, if not another half millennium more even. No warm period in history has lasted this long without oscillations between warm and cool. I don't think the Jaredites, if they lived in the area around the Great Lakes, would have had uniformly warmer weather than we do now, since we also live in another relatively warm period comparable to the Roman Warm Period right now.

In any case, I digress. I believe the best candidate are among the megafauna, or large-bodied animals that were native to North America, and which are assumed incorrectly by science to have all gone extinct around 8,000 BC. Some, at least, of them had to have lingered to have been listed by Moroni's summary of the Jaredites as horses, asses, elephants, cureloms and cumoms. What are the candidates?

• Giant sloths; various species from about black bear sized to nearly elephant sized in North America. I doubt these were domesticable, but you never know, and maybe they were a great source of meat, at least, if nothing else. I also think they are unlikely because their remains are almost exclusively found in the southern reaches of North America, and the Jaredites didn't utilize the land southward for most of the span of their history. Of course, if you don't accept the Heartland geographical model (certainly grist for another post) then that objection is removed, and they remain in play as a possibility.
• Several species of tapir, including one that lived at least as far north as Missouri. I think this is also probably too far south for the Heartland model to be in play, but otherwise it's a good candidate, and there are, in fact, some ancient stone carvings that seem to indicate possibly domesticated tapirs at some point by South American indians.
• Several species of peccaries, including species larger than today's peccaries. I don't know that these were ever domesticated, and if they were, it's certainly possible that that's what were described as swine in the list of animals, although technically peccaries aren't really exactly swine.
• Saiga are a possibility, as they lived in North America. Although they are an Old World animal as well, it's not likely that Joseph Smith was familiar with them, and therefore wouldn't have been able to translate it into an English word, as there was no widespread English word in use in his era. While the saiga have been important to populations in the past; the Andronovo culture and the Scythians used them intensively, although they probably hunted them rather than domesticated them as livestock. In addition, it probably lived even further North in North America relative to the Jaredites to have been very common among them. This is a very distant possibility.
• There were two species of North American llamas, the "big headed llama" and the "stilt-legged llama." They aren't really well known from the Great Lakes region, but a bit further south and especially west, but they may have been more broadly distributed than the finds now indicate. Given how useful the extant llamas are in South America, this would be a decent candidate.
• There is also a North American species of camel, called Camelops, but unless it looked significantly different than Old World camels, it probably would have been translated as camel rather than untranslated.
• A number of native bovine species; two types of buffalo, the shrub-ox, and Harlan's musk-ox. I suspect that Joseph Smith would have translated bison rather than left it untranslated, and I also suspect that the other animals, if they were domesticated, can probably be wrapped up in the list above as the various cattle, cows and oxen. There isn't any indication that Old World cattle were still in North America, so I prefer to suspect that that listing is referring to native animals among this list, in particular the shrub-ox and the very widspread Harlan's musk-ox.
• I doubt that the stag-moose was domesticated, or that it would have been listed in this list if the actual moose and other deer were not listed. Likewise, the numerous species of antelope related to the pronghorn antelope today are not likely to have been listed. In fact, none of the animals listed seem to have been animals that were hunted, and it's possible that the Jaredites weren't big hunters period. Or maybe they simply didn't list animals that were hunted in this scripture because it was meant to list specifically animals that were kept by the Jaredites rather than hunted by them. However, in the same chapter that lists these animals, it refers to the herds being driven by poisonous serpents into the land southward, without any herders, so it's possible that the Jaredites kept a number of semi-domesticated livestock that they hunted. But I think all of these are unlikely.
• A number of large armadillos, including the glyptodont, all probably lived too far south to be known to the Jaredites.
• The Columbian mammoth, as mentioned above, is probably the "elephant." That said, good candidates include the American mastodon, which would have looked like an elephant, but also sufficiently different that anyone at a glance would not confuse it with one, and Cuvieronius, a gomphothere, or elephant relative, that had very different proportions than the mammoth and mastodon both. Stegomastodon was another gomphothere
• The giant beaver. I earlier ruled out that regular beaver, but the giant beaver was much larger; weighing several hundred pounds, and was especially concentrated in the Great Lakes area, and if one accepts the Heartland model, was almost certainly known to the Jaredites. The giant beaver probably did not build dams or create beaver ponds like the extant beaver. But again; I doubt they were domesticated.

I suppose after going through the list, I'm leaning heavily towards assuming that the American mastodon and Cuvieronius are by far the most likely candidates to be cureloms and cumoms. In fact, I think almost every other potential candidate is ruled out as unlikely for various reasons. As an aside, again utilizing the Heartland model, the mastodon was a forest-dwelling animal normally, and is well known from the Great Lakes region in particular, while Cuvieronius is normally known from locations just a little further south.

--~~*~~--

Finally, since we're talking about the Jaredites, what about the notion that they may have been black? I first though that idea was kind of crazy when I first heard it (from a black instructor in my high priests group a number of years ago), but some of the Heartland guys, or at least Wayne May, believes it, and there's a book published out there that promotes this idea as well (I have not read it, I admit, nor am I interested in doing so. I have read a brief summary by the author of some of the lines of evidence used to support his thesis, though.) I do not, although I don't rule it out as impossible, just very highly unlikely. Let's examine the evidence used to bolster this claim, and I suspect you'll agree with me that it is mostly specious.

The first time this notion was proposed was, I believe, in relation to the Kinderhook plates. These were some plates allegedly found by a farmer a bit south of Nauvoo in a place called Kinderhook, which were associated with a giant skeleton burial. The story is that they were found and brought to Nauvoo, where Joseph Smith looked at them briefly, said he'd attempt a translation, said that a small portion of them were translated as saying that the guy was a descendant of Ham. But no further translation ever appeared, and the episode ending up fading out of the public consciousness of the members of the Church. When they first showed up, naturally they excited a great deal of interest, and wild speculation and rumors were flying around Nauvoo about what they may be.

In any case, this idea that this alleged Jaredite skeleton was a descendant of Ham is where the notion that the Jaredites were black got started; Ham being allegedly the ancestor of black people, according to interpretations of the book of Genesis. However, the Kinderhook plates are almost certainly forgeries. The person who brought them to Nauvoo admitted it later in life. One of the plates still survives and its location is known, and it's been analysed forensically; the findings are consistent with the forgers story that they etched it with acid themselves as a hoax or "frontier joke"; or more maliciously, an iteration of the same trap that Martin Harris' people tried to foist on Joseph Smith with the stolen 116 pages. In addition, it's also unlikely that Joseph Smith ever tried to translate anything, or made any comment about anybody being a descendant of Ham. Reports that he did so are almost certainly reports of gossip, rumors and speculation that was flying all around Nauvoo at the time that the plates made their dramatic entrance into town. The Church has issued a short statement about the affair, which seems to discount them.

But let's assume for the sake of argument that they are actually genuine and valid, and that the translation that the Jaredite was a descendant of Ham through his son Pharaoh of Egypt. The descendants of Ham mentioned in the Bible are not black. Nations reported to be descended from Ham include the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Phoenicians, etc. none of whom are black. The Jaredites come from Babylon (Babel) which is far from sub-Saharan Africa, and no black people are reported ever having been native to the area. In fact, the area is a stronghold and even historical seats of Semitic people, i.e. descendants of Shem, not Ham. This is strong evidence that even if the Kinderhook material is valid, it still doesn't say, or even support, the idea that the Jaredites were black.

Another line of evidence, which is really just very poor and specious speculation and wishful thinking tied and connected to additional poor and specious speculation and presented as if it were fact is in regards to the Olmecs. There really isn't any reason to associate the Olmecs with the Jaredites unless you also accept the equally specious idea that the Pre-classical Mayas can be associated specifically with the Nephites.  If this specious (and unlikely, in my opinion) correspondence were true, then the Olmecs would indeed be an attractive candidate to propose as a possible Jaredite archaeological culture. 

And this is another possible source of the idea that the Jaredites were black, because there is also an idea that the Olmecs were black. This is based on the idea that the large stone heads associated with the Olmec people look to some as if they represent the facial features of sub-Saharan, black Africans. This is not, however, taken seriously by anyone who doesn't have some kind of ax to grind about trying to attribute some kind of high culture or magnificent discovery or colonialism to black people. As many have pointed out, there are still native peoples (not black) in the Yucatan who look almost exactly like these Olmec heads. Plus, the Olmecs heads have some kind of head plates on them that look like old-fashioned leather football helmets, the Olmecs are sometimes believed to have invented the infamous ball game that was famously used by the Maya in later years, and black people today are really good at football, or something?

Really, the evidence that the Jaredites were black is completely non-existent. It amounts to the combination of a hoax, some rumors, an unfounded bit of racial chauvinistic wild speculation and wishful thinking. That doesn't mean that it's impossible that the Jaredites were black, just that it seems unlikely in the extreme and there is literally no credible reason at all to believe that they were. And in fact it is perpetuated for bad reasons, in my opinion. I don't know how many times that I see people in the Church who believe that who latch on to it as evidence for their non-racism; see, look, the members of the Church were proposing that black people had the most advanced civilization in the world at one point in the past; nobody else believed that, especially in the 1800s! This is Phariseeism and virtue-signaling, and if anything, is evidence that suggests you should not take seriously anything else anyone who does that says on the subject, as they are clearly neither objective nor serious.

Personally, I don't believe that the Jaredites were black at all. I believe that they were basically a Mesopotamian people who left in the pre-Akkadian age, crossed central and eastern Asia through some route (although perhaps they went south from Mesopotamia instead of east northeast, and that a much better putative archaeological horizon to the Olmecs is to be found in the Adena Mound-builder horizon; although that doesn't seem sufficient to completely encapsulate the Jaredites either. I also believe that the Jaredites may well have not arrived in a completely empty land (the Nephites and Lamanites either, for that matter.) Just because the narrative thread of the Book of Mormon can be interpreted that way doesn't mean that it's true. Absence of reference to other peoples is not evidence of absence of other peoples, and the Church itself has recently (well, relatively speaking) the Introduction of the Book of Mormon to suggesting that rather than the Lamanites being the primary ancestors of the American Indians, being merely among the ancestors of the American Indians.

Archiving...

For posterity. My wife believes that this was an impractical and ineffective technique that I employed here to "fight back." I stand by what I said, but I agree that maybe it wasn't very empathetic or necessary to defend my comments with quite as much vigor as I usually do. So, I'll archive here a post I made on Facebook recently, and then some of the commentary with one particular person—a woman of my parents' generation from my home ward where I grew up who's notorious for meddling with people and causing unnecessary drama; something I could see even as long ago as when I was a young teenager in middle-school.  First, here's the original post:

Ezra Taft Benson: "God inspired 'a man among the Gentiles' who, by the Spirit of God was led to rediscover the land of America and bring this rich new land to the attention of the people in Europe. That man, of course, was Christopher Columbus, who testified that he was inspired in what he did. The temple work for the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence and other founding fathers has been done. All these appeared to Wilford Woodruff when he was President of the St, George Temple. President George Washington was ordained a High Priest at that time. You will also be interested to know that according to Wilford Woodruff's journal, John Wesley, Benjamin Franklin, and Christopher Columbus were also ordained High Priests at the time. When one casts doubt about the character of these noble sons of God, I believe he or she will have to answer to God for it." 

Remember that next Columbus Day when the revisionists are attempting to paint Columbus as a tremendous villain and undo the celebration and remembrance of his accomplishments.

Next, the drive by comment from this lady, who, keep in mind, I literally haven't seen in about thirty years and who has never commented on anything I've written before (nor I on anything she has done.)

David was also chosen of God and was revered in the scriptures even many generations later. He accomplished God's mission for him, but he also engaged in some reprehensible behavior once he accomplished that mission. Christopher Columbus did accomplish his mission, but his men, and possibly he, exposed the natives to STDs. You don't get those by shaking hands. He died of Reiter's Syndrome. And he did kill LOTS of natives. If it was war, it was a very lopsided war. I just went to visit President Washington's Mt. Vernon. He engaged in many courageous and heroic acts for our country. He also had 317 living slaves when he died, and there is a fairly large slave cemetery on his property. I saw the cemetery. So, over his lifetime he enslaved hundred of people. The slaves lived retched lives. I saw their living conditions. They even know some of their names and stories. I went thru the museum. Washington, himself, knew what he was doing was wrong, and it caused him Many sleepless nights. So, what is your point?? These men lived in a different time, and they were not flat Stanley's. They are men, not Gods. Thankfully, God is merciful, but we shouldn't just erase the stories of those who suffered. Maybe we need to make sure those Slaves and Natives also receive the blessings of the temple.

My reply to that was initially rather simple:

Yeah, well there's that. On the other hand, I'm quoting Presidents' Benson and Woodruff. You want to argue with something that the prophets, plural, said, then you're on your own with that.

OK, so she was obviously triggered in the first place, but the level of triggering increased with her next volley. Where she, in turn, kinda ticked me off, because I react very poorly to guilt trips, shaming attempts, and any other form of emotional manipulation. But first, her response:

What are you saying? That these things didn't happen? That doesn't make any sense at all. I don't believe for one mini-second that Wilford Woodruff or President Benson endorsed slavery or STDS. David was a king and a prophet. He wrote the Book of Psalms - which we still consider to be the word of God. However he did commit murder and adultery. This King and Prophet will have to make compensation for that. And there are millions of people who have died who have been ordained to be high priests if they qualify themselves. And many will. Yes, George Washington did some very commendable and courageous things for our country, but I'm sure that George Washington himself sorely regrets enslaving God's children. If you read what he wrote, you have to conclude that the spirit did testify to him that slavery was wrong, and though he was uncomfortable, he did not yield to the spirit. I am, sure he has repented, and likely pled forgiveness from those who he mistreated so badly. Certainly, he should be given credit for the good things he did, but he was a man - not a God. And I don't believe that he would - for a mini-second - ever desire that anyone use him to justify slavery. I think that would make him angry indeed. Joseph Smith certainly opposed slavery and took a very unpopular political position. ,Surely, you aren't implying that President Benson or Wilford Woodruff supported the institution of slavery in any way. It DEEPLY offends me if you are implying these noble men have in any way excused slavery or the rape of Native Americans.

And mine.

It DEEPLY offends me that 1) you're wandering around picking random arguments with me because of some comment that I made. That's borderline cyber-bulling. If you don't like something I've said, then just ignore it or unfollow me, don't try and swoop in here and argue with me about it. 2) You are using sophistry to try and run circles around the prophets to interpret their words to mean the opposite of what they clearly say so that you can hold on to your own pet peeve issue. That is flirting with apostasy, and even being generous, is looking WAY past the mark, as Quentin L. Cook says it. 3) You imply that the SPECULATIVE SUGGESTION made recently that Columbus did not die of gout and influenza as was long believed, but from reactive arthritis is a historical fact, and not a speculative bit of gossip. In addition, the fact that you report as a fact that reactive arthritis is caused by STDs when in fact the most common cause of it is intestinal bacteria as would be caused by poor sanitation related to food as would be common on a Renaissance era sailing ship or primitive island, where Columbus spent many years, means that you don't even understand the very claims that you are making and how specious and gossipy they are. 4) I have completely lost patience for the ankle-biters on the pillars of Western Civilization who use this kind of gossip and nonsense to libel great men, for whatever reason; virtue-signaling Phariseeism, self-righteous endorphin rushes, or just as a patch for their own misery due to their envy and covetousness. In the last days, we are supposed have the hearts of the children turned towards the fathers; this trend among the so-called elite to constantly belittle our culture, our civilization, our past heroes, and to tear them down; turning our hearts AWAY from our fathers is truly one of the greater widespread evils of the last days. I'm offended that you're participating in it. 

I don't know what made you think any of this was a good idea, but I assure you, it was not. If you're going to go around attempting to bully people and shame them by shouting SLAVERY at them randomly, you better at least have the tactical sense to find a softer target for your bullying. If you're going to engage in gossip about great men, you better have more than a superficial understanding of what you are claiming about them, because otherwise eventually someone, like I just did, will call you out for being nothing more than gossip by proving that there is nothing to your assertions than mean-spirited implications and hints. 

And as I said before, if you're going to flirt with subverting the words of the prophets to make them mean the opposite of what they say so that you can pursue your own agenda in spite of what they have clearly warned you against, then you're on your own.

Then later, I edited that to this:

On second thought, although everything I said was true and correct, that doesn't mean that it was a great idea to say it. I'll leave you to your... whatever it is that obviously triggered you to make this ill-considered drive-by commentary here, and you can deal with it on your own without any "help" from me.

I do admit that I get somewhat triggered myself by this nannying, manipulative, bullying approach, and probably hit back much harder than is warranted or called for. On the other hand, I feel, as I told my wife, that I've got plenty of scriptural precedent for calling out that kind of behavior. Which, of course, I'd ignore completely if it wasn't directed squarely at me, because it wouldn't be any of my business.

In any case, my purpose in archiving this isn't to justify or excuse my own reaction, nor to open that up for discussion in any way whatsoever, but rather the content of my longer reply.