Ironhold

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There's no way to prove that Jesus didn't open up a soft-serve ice cream shop in Galilee, either, but that doesn't mean anyone should take that idea seriously. Reformed Egyptian is not an idea that any serious, non-LDS linguist takes seriously. At all.

It would be a hamburger stand, as "cooked ground meat served on sliced bread" was known to have been a type of early take-out fare in Rome itself at around the time Jesus existed.

Yes, I said that.

It's a bit of trivia I picked up from some History Channel - type show I watched some decades ago, noting that a number of allegedly "recent" inventions have predecessors that go back to ancient days.

Likewise, it's within the realm of possibility that Captain Moroni was fond of peanut butter sandwiches, as nut-based spreads were known to be in use in parts of what we now known as Latin-America even before Colombus showed up, let alone the adoption of modern peanut butter and hazelnut spreads in the 1900s.

So let's not forget that just because something seems bizarre or absurd doesn't mean that it isn't.
 
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He is the way

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This is a mixture of claims that don't seem all that related to the existence of 'Reformed Egyptian'. Yes, Jamaican Patois is an English-based creole, but what is your point? Is the Mormon claim that 'Reformed Egyptian' is an Egyptian-based creole? If so, why doesn't anything we find in the Egyptian 'Grammar and Alphabet'' produced by the Mormons in 1835 bear any relation to any form of Egyptian actually known to linguists or Egyptologists? Being a creole, it should still retain a clear relationship to its parent languages. So where are your samples of it that show this relationship? Where can we pick out specific Egyptian lexical items in said samples, or see the underlying structures? You don't have anything to present in any case, so how can you say that it's akin to Jamaican Patois, or anything else that actually exists in the world?.


If you see any modern day Egyptian book it will be written in reformed Egyptian.

Hahaha. That's not St. Paul's teaching; that's Mormonism's teaching. The two are not the same. St. Paul traveled to the Antioch, to Arabia, and to several other places according to the scriptures and the fathers, as preserved in the various commemorations of the churches around the world (particularly those which claim descent from Antioch, for obvious reasons), but places we know he never went include upstate New York or anywhere in Utah or Idaho. Nice try..

I know you would like to see 1 Corinthians 15:29 erased from the Bible, but it is still there and it isn't going away.

Mormonism is neither the narrow road nor a particularly unpopular choice when viewed outside the lens of the oppression fantasies that some Mormons themselves choose to live in. It is in reality just one strain of 19th century restorationist religion which has been particularly successful due to its aggressive missionary campaign and the sense that joining it provides access to a level of wealth and prestige that the people of Oceanic nations (where it has been most successful) or Africa (where most of its growth is currently coming from) can thereby model themselves after in hopes that it becomes a reality for them..

Is the priesthood still on the earth today? Was it conferred the proper way by the laying on of hands by those with the same or higher priesthood as it has been in The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints? Do you have proof that it was?

Again, I don't disagree. I just don't think that means that it is directly relevant to every possible conversation we could have. Questions like "How many wives did Joseph Smith have?" or "Why do Mormons not divulge their true beliefs and practices to everyone without first forcing those who want to know them to become temple recommend-carrying members?" cannot be answered by capitalizing the word love over and over like you're getting paid per mention. It's just evasive and irritating, by a certain point..

I feel like I need to mention God's LOVE or I would be doing God a big disservice. I believe that LOVE is the main subject of the Bible. As it has been put: Know LOVE know God, no LOVE no God.

It's definitely just you and the other Mormons. Of course you don't see anything as a refutation of Mormonism because you think Mormonism has it all right in the first place. That makes sense, though being unable to critically engage with non-Mormons doesn't exactly say much for the general level of knowledge or zeal (in the positive sense of that word) among the Mormons..

There was one boast by Joseph Smith that I do not agree with, but I know that Joseph Smith was not perfect. Neither was Peter who denied Christ three times.

This is weird phrasing. The 'accusations', as you call them, are criticisms concerning the missteps in Mormon theology, ecclesiology, prophetology, and especially (here) Biblical hermeneutics. These are not exactly the kinds of discussions that you would normally expect to bear fruit, unless you're willing to count as fruit the ex-Mormons who are here like Phoebe Ann and the few others we have, none of whom were probably converted by such conversations anyway. But what are the chances that currently believing Mormons such as yourself would count ex-members who are now Christians as good fruit! :rolleyes:
.

I believe that most if not all of the accusations against The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints are unjustified. All who serve God as He wants to be served (doing His will) are bearing good fruit.

No, you believe that your Mormon Christ is one in purpose with the Mormon Heavenly Father and Mormon Holy Spirit, but they are three separate Gods each made of matter, and united in purpose but most definitely not sharing one and the same divinity (hence, Mormons have consistently told us here, your religion rejects the Nicene Creed for saying that the Persons of the Holy Trinity are homoousious, of one and the same nature). This is so far from anything resembling even the most basic grasp of Christian theology that even a five minute review of any of the many, many times we have already discussed exactly this should be enough to put to rest any claim to Christianity on the part of Mormons or the Mormon religion.

I would have to say that I believe the Bible where it states that the Father is our God and Jesus Christ is the Lord:

(New Testament | 1 Corinthians 8:5 - 6)

5 For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,)
6 But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.

We know that God the Father sent Jesus Christ to be our Savior and Redeemer. We also know how the Father and the Son are one in unity, glory, and perfection, because Jesus told us so.
 
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dzheremi

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So let's not forget that just because something seems bizarre or absurd doesn't mean that it isn't.

Doesn't mean that it isn't bizarre or absurd? :confused:

Yeah, man. Totally.

I'm going to assume you mean something like "doesn't mean that it isn't possible", which again requires reminding Mormons why it is that sciences like linguistics do not function based on the 'possible' (since if we're using the basically non-existent standard of "you can't prove it didn't happen", as HITW put forth, that would include literally anything anyone could dream up for which there is not [enough] countering evidence), but on the demonstrable and probable -- and at the level of actually defending and publishing research, what is reproducible and falsifiable.

What is demonstrable points us to what is probable. For instance, taking an overly charitable view of the point that HITW seemed to be trying to make, can we say that the existence of English-based creoles makes it probable that we may find other types of creoles in other parts of the world? Yes, as it is highly unlikely that this phenomenon should only be present when English comes into contact with other languages. And indeed that is what we do find: There are Portuguese-based creoles like Papiamentu (spoken on the islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao), Arabic-based creoles like Nubi (spoken in Uganda and Kenya), and even a Uyghur-based creole called Hezhou, spoken in certain areas of China.

But when the question is narrowed from "Do we find this in many languages?" to "Have there ever been any Egyptian-based creole(s)?", the answer is no, there have not been, and the existence of other types of creoles don't really matter, since there's nothing that says because they exist, this other thing that is in the same category that we have no evidence of the existence of must therefore exist or have existed.

To see why this is, first we must consider how it is that creoles are hypothesized to come into existence: long-term, sustained contact between two languages causing a sort of incomplete shift whereby one of the two absorbs much of the vocabulary of the other while retaining its own underlying grammatical structures. Hence, a language like Hezhou has mainly Mandarin Chinese vocabulary, but placed into a Turkic (Uyghur) grammatical system, with six noun cases (whereas Mandarin marks what we would call 'case' -- e.g., dative, accusative, etc. -- by means other than via noun form, like word order, free and bound 'relator nouns', etc.; see Starosta and colleague 1985), an SOV word order (whereas Mandarin is typically SVO), and agglutinative morphology (compared to Mandarin's very analytic, isolating morphology).

So we would have to see some time period in which the speakers of what would become 'Reformed Egyptian' came into contact with the speakers of another language and it resulted in a similarly mixed language form, with this other language and some form of Egyptian coming to 'rest' (i.e., being standardized and learned by subsequent generations as a native language, which is the difference between a creole and a pidgin) bearing this kind of relation. Since the 'Egyptian' part suggests contact with Egyptian/Egyptian language (duh), and the BOM talks about very small, discrete populations coming from Jerusalem or its environs, it would make more sense to assume that the speakers of the other language would relexify (provide the 'donor' vocabulary) Egyptian, rather than the other way around, as this is exactly what happened with the advent of Coptic: a form of Egyptian language with a huge amount of Greek vocabulary, rather than the other way around. (There was a form of Greek spoken in Egypt, but since the Greek-speakers were the political elite around Alexandria and the other major cities since at least the days of the Ptolemies, it was the Egyptians who learned the Greek language, not the other way around.)

Soooo...where is it? Where is this resulting language that is Egyptian at its base with all this 'foreign' vocabulary replacing the 'native' vocabulary? Really, I just gave you the answer, as far as what we have any evidence for: it is Coptic, and indeed some very respectable researchers in the field of Egyptian and Coptic linguistics like Dutch linguist Chris Reintges (author of a Sahidic learner's grammar in 2004 and many articles covering Coptic Egyptian's morphological peculiarities, as well as other forms of Egyptian) do essentially argue that Coptic represents a kind of 'mixed language' without necessarily using the word 'creole' to describe it (I'd have to go back over some of his work I cited in my own work, but I don't recall seeing it there), with one Egyptian and one Greek 'parent'.

Having written all this, I remind you here that this is Coptic:

hqdefault.jpg


We can read this. Heck, any Coptic person who is literate enough can read it (not just linguists or other nerds). It is the Lord's prayer in the Bohairic dialect. It's printed in literally all of our service books.

For contrast, this is supposedly a sample of the 'Reformed Egyptian' writing that Mormons think golden plates found by JS were written in (taken from Wikipedia's page on the Anthon Transcript):

Caractors_large.jpg


It's not readable by anyone, as far as anyone can tell it doesn't say anything, and it's not found anywhere outside of this paper. To quote Egyptologist John A. Wilson (ibid), "This is not Egyptian writing, as known to the Egyptologist. It obviously is not hieroglyphic, nor the 'cursive hieroglyphic' as used in the Book of the Dead. It is not Coptic, which took over Greek characters to write Egyptian. Nor does it belong to one of the cursive stages of ancient Egyptian writing: hieratic, abnormal hieratic, or demotic."

In short, it is nothing. It's not evidence of anything. And this is literally one of the only pieces of physical evidence we have that is actually analyzable by anyone, and whenever that happens (and they're a professional who is not in the pocket of the LDS in one way or another), they come to that same conclusion.
 
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