Speculations About Mormonism

Saturday, August 24, 2013

Welcome to Speculation(s) About Mormonism!

Information about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon church) can be put into two categories: doctrine and folklore or myths. Elder John Taylor, before he became president of the LDS church, said the church can not be held accountable for statements made by Elders of the church. The church can only be held accountable for the Standard Works of the church. Four books comprise the Standard Works: the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price.

Since scriptural statements are open to interpretation, the President of the Church is accepted by LDS as the prophet of the church, and as such he is the only person who can give official interpretations of scripture and the issuance of new doctrine. Statements made by other persons, including General and local authorities, must be considered their personal viewpoints, and the church is not responsible for their statements.

The Mormon church has several websites that give positions adopted by the church. The two basic websites are http://mormon.org and http://lds.org In addition, several websites exist under the domain of lds.org. However, there are many websites created by members of the church. I have created several sites about the church. My Mormon blog gives my understanding of the basic doctrine of the church. My Gateway blog gives links to Mormon and other websites and can be used as ones home page. This blog gives some of my speculations about topics not clearly explained in the scriptures. A knowledge of these topics is not essential to ones salvation, and visitors to this blog must realize that this blog deals with speculations and not with church doctrine.

All visitors to this blog are invited to leave comments on appropriate pages giving their views of the topics being discussed. I reserve the right, however, to delete comments that are contentious.

Many of the posts in this blog were copied from my science and Mormonism blog. That blog now contains links to scientific articles, and this blog contains topics that are open to speculation.

A few of the posts contain introductory information from Wikipedia. Links given in the Wikipedia information have been deleted to simplify the reading of this blog. Links to the Wikipedia articles, however, are given so visitors can access the Wikipedia articles and links.

This blog gives my personal views on the topics discussed, and it is not approved by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and does not represent the church.

Welcome to this blog. I hope you will find information here that will broaden your views of the "mysteries" of Mormonism

Mormon,Mormonism Position of the LDS Church

A few years ago, the LDS church changed the Introduction to the Book of Mormon to state that the Nephites and Lamonites are among the ancestors of the American Indians. Before that change, the Introduction stated the Nephites were the principal ancestors. It's important to note that the Introduction is not part of the Book of Mormon, per se, but is an overview written by church leaders to help people not familiar with the book have a brief overview before they read the book.

The church recently published a page called Book of Mormon and DNA Studies that discusses DNA and the Book of Mormon in quite a lot of depth. It's important to note that this information was written by humans and may contain mistakes. As as been discussed in other posts in this blog, the church leaders (and employees of the church) are not infallible and may make mistakes.

Mormon,Mormonism Steel

The Book of Mormon has been criticized because of its claims that Nephi, who lived in 600 BC, used a bow made of steel.

And it came to pass that as I, Nephi, went forth to slay food, behold, I did break my bow, which was made of fine steel; and after I did break my bow, behold, my brethren were angry with me because of the loss of my bow, for we did obtain no food. (1 Nephi 16:18)

Critics claim that smelting of iron into steel didn't happen until later. However, according to Wikipedia, the smelting of iron occurred prior to 600 BC, and the making of steel was common by 650 BC.

Steel was known in antiquity, and may have been produced by managing bloomeries, or iron-smelting facilities, in which the bloom contained carbon.
The earliest known production of steel is a piece of ironware excavated from an archaeological site in Anatolia (Kaman-Kalehoyuk) and is about 4,000 years old. Other ancient steel comes from East Africa, dating back to 1400 BC. In the 4th century BC steel weapons like the Falcata were produced in the Iberian Peninsula, while Noric steel was used by the Roman military.
Steel was produced in large quantities in Sparta around 650BC.
The Chinese of the Warring States (403–221 BC) had quench-hardened steel, while Chinese of the Han Dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) created steel by melting together wrought iron with cast iron, gaining an ultimate product of a carbon-intermediate steel by the 1st century AD. The Haya people of East Africa invented a type of furnace they used to make carbon steel at 1,802 °C (3,276 °F) nearly 2,000 years ago.

A recent science article about the use of meteorite iron in the making of jewelery mentioned that iron smelting was introduced around 2000 BC. Thus, we see that the information given above shows that the addition of carbon to iron was used by ancient peoples prior to the time Lehi left Jerusalem and immigrated to the Americas.

As a result metalworkers had already nearly two millennia of experience of working with meteoritic iron when iron smelting was introduced in the mid-second millennium BC. This knowledge was essential for the development of iron smelting and the production of iron from iron ore, enabling iron to replace copper and bronze as the main metals used.

When Joseph Smith used the word "steel" in his translation that led to the Book of Mormon, he wasn't necessarily referring to the word "steel" as used today. The 1828 Webster's Dictionary gives the following definition of the word "steel".

1. Iron combined with a small portion of carbon; iron refined and hardened, used in making instruments, and particularly useful as the material of edged tools. It is called in chemistry, carburet of iron; but this is more usually the denomination of plumbago.

This definition of the word "steel" is important, because it is likely that it describes the word "steel" as used by Joseph Smith, since the Book of Mormon was published in 1830. The definition indicates, in a general way, that the word "steel" refers to iron containing a small amount of carbon, with nothing implied about the process used to impregnate the iron with carbon. Today, the word "steel" refers to iron containing carbon and other elements impregnated by a particular process. Wikipedia gives the following about steel made in recent times.

Though steel had been produced in a bloomery furnace for thousands of years, its use became more extensive after more efficient production methods were devised in the 17th century. With the invention of the Bessemer process in the mid-19th century, steel became an inexpensive mass-produced material. Further refinements in the process, such as basic oxygen steelmaking (BOS), lowered the cost of production while increasing the quality of the metal. Today, steel is one of the most common materials in the world, with more than 1.3 billion tons produced annually. It is a major component in buildings, infrastructure, tools, ships, automobiles, machines, appliances, and weapons. Modern steel is generally identified by various grades defined by assorted standards organizations.

Articles About the Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon is accepted by Latter-day Saints as scripture, and there is a lot of speculation about the people and cultures in the Book of Mormon. This page gives links to some of this speculation.

Saturday, July 6, 2013

What's New in this Blog

Recent additions to this blog. Most recent additions are listed first.

Added a page on ancient steel and the Book of Mormon
Renamed the Migrations tab to the Book of Mormon tab

Mormon,Mormonism One World Follows Another

As described in the book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price, the Lord told Moses that he has created many worlds. And then the Lord said,

And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come; and there is no end to my works, neither to my words. (Moses 1:38)

That is, the Lord is creating world after world, and as one world passes away (leaves its mortal state and becomes a celestial, terrestial, or telestial world) another world is created.

Scientists are learning that the cosmos has billions upon billions of stars and that many of the stars apparently have planets orbiting them. Not all of these planets will have life, but many of them will. This means there are probably billions upon billions of planets having life. So far we've detected a few hundred exoplanets. The future will be very exciting!