"If we forego traditions and folk-assumptions about the Book of Mormon and apply the methods of modern science and scholarship to what the Book of Mormon actually says and does not say, we find that the book paints a picture which is amazingly similar in many ways to the same picture painted by New World experts about the ancient cultures during Book of Mormon times."

“Direct evidence … is evidence of a fact based on a witness’s personal knowledge or observation of that fact."

"If we forego traditions and folk-assumptions about the Book of Mormon and apply the methods of modern science and scholarship..."

I’m not one to publish frequently on blogs or message boards. Quite frankly, life is too short, I have too many irons in the fire, and I have precious little time to work on projects that I feel are more worthwhile than arguing with others.

Having said this, however, I feel the need to comment on a few things discussed herein.

Steve, I honestly hope that you find happiness in your own personal spiritual quest. In the end, each of us has to decide for ourselves what brings us true happiness.

I can imagine (with a touch of anecdotal recollection of my own) the emotional turmoil you must have gone through. The phrase “cognitive dissonance” [CD] is thrown about loosely in discussions about LDS issues, but true CD is very hard on the emotions and mind, and can make you physically ill. You cannot endure CD for long and your mind/body seeks a quick resolution. Some people find resolution by brushing difficult issues aside, others by embracing the new difficulties and changing their paradigm. Either way, the psychological tension is relieved. This doesn’t automatically make one direction right and the other wrong, however.

Common among those who leave the church are feelings of anger and betrayal, and those feelings can be so powerful that they can cloud any or all thoughts of accepting the claims made by the Church. This comes from feelings of mistrust and are hard to overcome– and certainly influence a bias against arguments that support the Church.

Feelings of mistrust, as you note in your post, come most often from feeling that things have been “hidden.” The simple truth, however, is that things are not nearly as “hidden” as some– who stumble upon such information [often painted in the worst possible light by critics]– would think. There isn’t enough space in this blog to do this topic justice but I can refer you to information that demonstrates a) that most of the difficult issues have been discussed in Church-related publications for years, b) most people in general are blissfully unaware of significant historical/political etc., events. In other words, it’s sad but true, that most people are simply ignorant of things they should know more about.

When a believing member “discovers” such things, the Church is immediately held up as the culprit for “hiding” the information in a “cover-up” to control the minds of members. This is simply not true.

Your post speaks of “solid, reliable, testable scientific data,” that supports your current religious views of Mormonism. At the risk of sounding rude, I seriously doubt that you could produce such data. Before you begin writing a list please keep in mind, that a large number of educated Latter-day Saints are fully aware of every single LDS-critical argument. I, myself, have studied them for many decades. There is absolutely no intellectual data that automatically compels an intelligent person to reject the Book of Mormon. Of course there is no intellectual data that automatically compels an intelligent person to accept the Book of Mormon either. In short, all the “scientific data” that is used to discredit the Church has an equally “solid, reliable,” and “testable” refutation (and, generally, vice-versa for pro-LDS claims).

The journey is yours, and yours alone. No one can ride on the shirt tail of anyone else when it comes to matters of faith, so I have no dog in the race as to the outcome of your own decision on religious issues. I merely wish to emphasize that you are not the only one to “discover” difficult issues. Lots of intelligent people have examined them. A number of these intelligent people are not only still believing members but recognize that there are rational and logical explanations that account for every criticism out there.

From what I have seen through years of reading exit stories is that the main factor which causes a person to leave is indeed “hurt feelings” and feeling “offended”– not offended by someone in the Church, but offended at the thought that they’ve been conned. And the primary reason that such people feel they were conned is because they never really engaged “study and faith” in their gospel lives.

Like most people who fail to put their minds to full use as God intends, they often take a black-and-white approach to religious issues. It’s either true or false. There either were horses in the New World, or the Book of Mormon is fictional. The Book of Abraham was either written by Abraham himself, or Joseph Smith created the text. Such a fundamentalist attitude is anathema to a healthy paradigm of how God works through fallible humans.

Good luck, and if you are ever open again to searching for answers, let me know.

“In fact, non-LDS molecular anthropologist Michael H. Crawford wrote that the Spanish Conquest "squeezed the entire Amerindian population through a genetic bottleneck. ... This population reduction has forever altered the genetics of the surviving groups, thus complicating any attempts at reconstructing the pre-Columbian genetic structure of most New World groups," - (The Origins of Native Americans, 1998).”

“Drs. Beth Shook and David Smith, two non-LDS scientists, claim genetic drift among Native Americans has "altered haplogroup frequencies and caused the loss of many haplotypes" - (American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2008).”

“This sentence has been misused! I had intended to state that there may be some genes that have been lost due to depopulation. However, there is no question that the genetic evidence does not in any way support the presence of lost tribes from Israel. The Mormon apologists are misusing and misinterpreting one sentence in a volume that disputes any suggestion of lost tribes of Israel." - Dr. MH Crawford Professor of Anthropology and Genetics at the University of Kansas

'I explained that even if evidence for an early Christian community in Mesoamerica could be found, that still wouldn’t satisfy most critics or prove that the Book of Mormon is true. The task of finding the evidence of a real ancient community of New World Christians becomes difficult once we understand the complexity and nature of what might be found.'

'First, it’s important to remember that the Nephites were “Christian” for, at the most, 400 years. Second, the Nephite-Christians were a small group of persecuted believers among a sea of non-Christian believers in the ancient Americas.'

• We know who they were
• We know where they were
• We know how many of them there were
• We know what 'stuff' they had
• And - We know exactly when they were there

"Even in areas of the world where animals lived in abundance, we sometimes have problems finding archaeological remains. The textual evidence for lions in Israel, for example, suggests that lions were present in Israel from ancient times until at least the sixteenth century AD, yet no lion remains from ancient Israel have ever been found."

"John Tvedtnes, “The Nature of Prophets and Prophecy” (unpublished, 1994), 29-30 (copy in author’s possession); Benjamin Urrutia, “Lack of Animal Remains at Bible and Book-of-Mormon Sites,” Newsletter and Proceedings of the Society for Early Historic Archaeology, 150 (August 1982), 3-4."

"The largest faunal collections and most intensive archaeo-zoological research for [the Chalcolithic] period have been carried out in the northern Negev. This biological data provides us with a detailed picture of human/animal relations during this formative period. … If Shiqmim is taken as a representative sample for the valley, sheep … and goat … make up over 90 percent of the faunal assemblage with the remaining 10 percent consisting of cattle, … dog, equid and ca. 3.8 percent of wild animals (gazelle, hartebeest, hippopotamus, lion, small cat, fox, hare, ostrich, bird and fish). (The Archeology of Society in the Holy Land, ed. Thomas Levy, New York, Continuum, 1998, pp. 231-32)"

"The biblical narrative mentions lions, yet it was not until very recently that the only other evidence for lions in Palestine was pictographic or literary. Before the announcement in a 1988 publication [L. Martin. "The Faunal Remains from Tell es Saidiyeh," Levant 20 (1988): 83—84] of two bone samples, there was no archaeological evidence to confirm the existence of lions in that region. (Robert R. Bennett, “Horses in the Book of Mormon,” Maxwell Institute, 2000)"