DNA tests contradict Mormon scripture. (Duh)

[Ernesto]

Bedrock of a Faith Is Jolted
From the time he was a child in Peru, the Mormon Church instilled in Jose A. Loayza the conviction that he and millions of other Native Americans were descended from a lost tribe of Israel that reached the New World more than 2,000 years ago.
"We were taught all the blessings of that Hebrew lineage belonged to us and that we were special people," said Loayza, now a Salt Lake City attorney. "It not only made me feel special, but it gave me a sense of transcendental identity, an identity with God."
A few years ago, Loayza said, his faith was shaken and his identity stripped away by DNA evidence showing that the ancestors of American natives came from Asia, not the Middle East.


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-mormon16feb16,0,5561316.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[Goblinmonger]

1. Seriously

did the guy ever look in a fucking mirror? He thought he looked more Jewish than Oriental? Yikes, the extent that some people will go to in order to keep their beliefs in tact (kind of like the quotation at the bottom of my posts).

And I am shock to think that the Mormons were actually wrong about something. My worldview is crumbling around me.

[rexcat]

2. Since DNA is implied to have an evolutionary...

function they should just deny the scientific facts and go on their merry way since evolution does not really exist! God made it look that way, kind of like the instant age thing with dinosaurs and man living side by side. We all take science way to seriously! We should never let fact and reason overshadow superstition and stupidity.


:sarcasm:

Sorry for the rant but when science overwhelms these superstitious a..holes I can't help myself.

[funflower]

3. Remind me never to hire an attorney from Salt Lake!

How can you have that many years of college under your belt (in a field that celebrates reason, no less) and be that STUPID?

[Ladyhawk]

9. Hey, a fundy othopedist scheduled a surgery for me without consulting me

first...eek! This was after his psychiatrist wife told me that my "bitterness" toward religion was what was causing my depression. :D Sometime afterward, the fundy ear, nose and throat specialist couldn't take a joke and admitted he didn't believe in evolution.

Can I move to someplace less weird, please?

[progressoid]

10. Jeepers Ladyhawk.

Every time you post about your neck of the woods, I get a little chill.

[Warpy]

13. I remember why I left North Carolina

although the OB-Gyn group in my town on Cape Cod would have given all the nutty fundies a run for their money.

[progressoid]

4. Fascinating.

We get to see how a relatively young religion struggles against reality and science. Sadly, even in the face of facts clearly in opposition to their beliefs, they remain faithful to the bullshit. Fascinating.

"This may look like the crushing blow to Mormonism from the outside," said Jan Shipps, a professor emeritus of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, who has studied the church for 40 years. "But religion ultimately does not rest on scientific evidence, but on mystical experiences. There are different ways of looking at truth."


Makes you wonder if someone like Smith could get away with it on such a broad scale today. I suppose so. Rev Moon has been pretty successful in fooling people.

[NMMNG]

5. That quote, in other words

"This is a crushing blow to Mormonism, but like all other fundies we are going to ignore scientific proof in favor of our fairy tales."


And they wonder why some people think they are fools. :eyes:

[ozone_man]

11. Surprising there haven't been crushing blows to more religions.

To see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.

"It is too late in the day for men of sincerity to pretend they believe in the Platonic mysticism that three are one and one is three, and yet, that the one is not three, and the three not one.... But this constitutes the craft, the power, and profits of the priests. Sweep away their gossamer fabrics of fictitious religion, and they would catch no more flies."
-- Thomas Jefferson

[arewenotdemo]

18. What an extraordinary quote!

That makes my day.

[onager]

6. Also L. Ron Hubbard...

:hi:

It amazes me that so many different groups continue to fall for the "Lost Tribes Of Israel" nonsense. It's not only a core belief of Mormonism, but a belief closely held by many different cults...including some that are blatantly anti-Semitic.

That's not too surprising, I guess. Claiming descent from the Temporarily Misplaced Tribes doesn't mean you are Jewish, it means you are the Certified Chosen People Of Gawd. And if you don't like Jews anyway, it gives you a double benefit of claiming they are "in error" and your cult/tribe/Klavern is the REAL Chosen People.

Anyway, I've lost track of how many nutters trace their ancestry back to the Lost Tribes. If you have absolutely nothing else to do sometime, a Google search on "British Israelites" will get you started on a lot of hilarious reading.

But as anybody with a lick of sense could figure out, the "lost" tribes didn't get lost at all. They simply assimilated into the local cultures that conquered them. And for that, there IS archeological (and probably DNA) evidence.

IMO, this put the Jewish priesthood in something of a pickle and threatened their well-paid, undeserved positions in society: they had to face the uncomfortable fact that 5/6 of their population preferred to remain among pagan, neighbor's-wife-coveting societies, instead of returning to Palestine and the One True Gawd.

As holy men have often needed to do throughout recorded history, they desperately needed a mystical cover story to explain this. Hence the "Lost Tribes" bullshit.

[PinkUnicorn]

7. What exactly...

..are the 'Lost Tribes'. I know you have the mythical twelves tribes of Israel, name after Jacobs sons and chosen of Yaweh..blah blah blah, so where do tribes 13+ come from and what are/were their names. Every time I try to find out they're simply the "lost tribes". No mention how they managed to sail round the world and end up in various countries, no names or dates, nothing.

But the magic missing tribes have been around for centuries. One of the first documented ones is the British ones you mention, and ties back to the pyramids, the "pyramid inch" (the inch being a divine measurement of course), and various nut balls.

As for the mormons, the papyri that were supposedly translated for the "Book of Abraham" are a scream for anyone who even knows rudimentary egyptian mythology. Take this one for example....

Of course it's not original but a extremely crude sketch, so bad as to be almost worthless. But good old Joe Smith claims it as thus - Abraham on the throne, Pharaoh behind Abraham, a prince standing in the middle with a royal waiter and a slave nearby (guess which one is the slave - nah, he wasn't racist at all). Of course this has people with a clue rolling on the floor especially as it appears the 'pharaoh' and the 'prince' are engaging on a little cross dressing (from left to right - Isis (with possibly Nepthys behind her giving the odd 'double leg/arm' effect), Osiris, Ma'at, Dead person being judged, Anubis)

To show more of the "creative license" he took with papyri compare...
The original


The "reconstructed sketch"....


For more hilarity check the articles http://atheists.org/christianity/mormon.html">here.

[onager]

8. Bob Marley belonged to the Lost Tribes!

:rofl:

Rastaman Salvation!

Here's a sort-of explanation from a Jewish site. And apparently a damned credulous one:

http://www.wzo.org.il/en/resources/view.asp?id=174

Thanks for the info on the Mormon-Egyptian papyrus. I've never seen that! It is hilarious.

Here in Alexandria there are some fascinating tombs from the Second and Third Centuries CE, when various religions were sort of melting together. One tomb has the typical Book-of-the-Dead scene like yours, from ancient Egyptian religion. But right underneath it is a scene showing Persephone being dragged off to the underworld--pure Greek. At El Shoqafa, a tomb is flanked by figures of Anubis and Sobek the crocodile god...but they are dressed as Roman soldiers! The Graeco-Roman Museum here has a mummy of a guy who wasn't taking any chances. He was mummified acccording to the Egyptian religious rituals, but has a big Xian cross painted on his wrappings.

Bonus, Unasked-For Rant triggered by a comment on that Jewish site:

...Elijah against the decadent Jezebel.

"Decadent?" As Isaac Asimov explained in his "Guide To The Old Testament," Queen Jezebel was actually a quite elderly lady. When she heard a howling mob coming to kill her, she calmly sat in her bedroom and made herself presentable. That included putting on makeup, which led to the standard religious depiction of her as a "painted jezebel."

I guess it's typical of religious thinking that we're supposed to consider her fanatical killers as the heroes. As I remember the story from Sunday School, she was thrown out a window and "dogs licked her blood."

Reading the story from a sane, non-religious POV, though, Jezebel comes off as someone facing a horrible death with incredible courage and dignity.

[arewenotdemo]

17. Shipps is correct on this point:

"Religion ultimately does not rest on scientific evidence, but on mystical experiences".

But I'm still betting on Science to expand our understanding of those experiences.

[Hamlette]

12. ahem. . .

1. Mormons are not fundamentalists. They do not believe in the literal word of the bible and do not take a stand against evolution. Many thinking Mormons believe in evolution.

2. Why is the lost tribes thing any more strange than believing in god? If you can believe there is a man/woman/entity walking/existing out in space someplace who created all this and you'll go to heaven/hell after you die, (like Jesus who rose from the dead) what is so strange about Jesus visiting America and bringing some of the lost tribespersons with him?

3. Not all lawyers from Utah are stupid. Some of us are atheists.

Having lived here all my life and, when I was young, thinking Mormons were major wack jobs, I have come to realize there are wackier religious nut jobs in the US and the world. Note: I do not go so far as to say Mormons are not wack jobs, just they are not the wackiest nut jobs. Of course, I think all believers are wack jobs.

[Taxloss]

14. Bunch of Moronis. n/t

[JNelson6563]

15. Good one!

Clever.

[arewenotdemo]

16. I like this quote:

"It's not that Mormons are not curious," Mauss said. "They just don't see the need to reconsider what has already been decided."

He must have forgotten to add "for them".