This is an archived copy of a post written by Conflict Of Justice (conflictofjustice.com). Used with permission: Conflict Of Justice may not agree with any alterations made.
- “Sweeney: Mr. Smith got this papyri and he translated them and subsequently as the Egyptologists cracked the code something completely different…
- Holland: (Interrupts) All I’m saying…all I’m saying is that what got translated got translated into the word of God. The vehicle for that, I do not understand and don’t claim to know and know no Egyptian.” (CES Letter)
BBC has the 2012 interview video blocked, so we cannot tell the context. The entire video and interview was a hitpiece by BBC on Mit Romney who was a presidential candidate at the time. They wanted to show why we should worry about having a Mormon as president. BBC snipped Elder Holland’s comment so we don’t know what they talked about before or after. It sounds like Holland went on to give more explanation and the BBC journalists snipped it all out. They wanted to make Mormons look bad in order to attack Mitt Romney because of his religious beliefs.
| Holland Does Not Know Egyptian – Elder Holland said he doesn’t know Egyptian, the “vehicle” for the translation. So what? Well, why would Elder Holland know how Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham from Egyptian? Is he a professor of linguistics?CES Letter sets up this expectation where prophets and apostles are like Dumbledore the wizard and they know everything about everything. |  |
Holland did not go to school in Egyptology. BBC should interview an Egyptologist instead. Holland was not around when Joseph Smith translated the book, so how would he know how he did it? How could anyone know?
The scriptures give us a clue about translating, “you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right.” Joseph Smith did not just have words just appear to him through a stone in a hat. This is a lie that anti-Mormons push and, unfortunately, some Mormons accept. The rock in the hat narrative is false. Joseph Smith had to study it out just like anyone else who is translating, though the Urim and Thummim gave him a lot of help. The Book of Abraham took many years to complete and was by all accounts a very laborious process. Why would Elder Holland just one day out of the blue be able to speak Egyptian and describe the entire process?
Don’t Feed The Narrative – Furthermore, why should Elder Holland jump through hoops and answer to a BBC gutter-rat reporter? John Sweeney only wanted to attack Mormons and tear down the Republican presidential candidate. Sweeney wasn’t interested in how Egyptian is translated. Jesus told us not to open our mouths to deceitful wolves like John Sweeney. Honestly, I wish Holland had told Sweeney to pound sand, stood up and walked away.
The more we try to explain ourselves the more we feed this anti-Mormon narrative that we must either know everything or we don’t know anything. We do not need to be professors of Egyptian to know the truths in the Book of Abraham. We do not need a play-by-play explanation for how Joseph Smith translated it. The first time you bought a car, did you study car mechanics, pull apart the engine of your car, and examine every single piece to make it is a true engine? No, you knew that the engine runs and that by all appearances it was an engine. Likewise, we have sufficient evidence that this book is true scripture. And if that is not enough for you, by all means look at the physical evidence and look into the Egyptian origins.
Do mainstream Christians need to know ancient Hebrew? Do believers in evolution need to know every detail of evolution that has been discovered? CES Letter incorrectly claimed quantum mechanics taught scientists that the sun’s energy is internal, so I guess that tells us how much they know about what they believe in!
CES Letter spins the narrative around this BBC interview:
“Elder Jeffrey R. Holland was directly asked about the papyri not matching the Book of Abraham in a March 2012 BBC interview… Is ‘I don’t know and I don’t understand but it’s the word of God’ really the best answer that a ‘prophet, seer, and revelator’ can come up with to such a profound problem that is driving many members out of the Church?”
I didn’t see anything in BBC’s question about papyri not matching, but the answer to that is very simple: The recovered papyrus fragment is not the source for the Book of Abraham. My guess is Elder Holland said this and BBC clipped it out of the interview, or BBC never addressed the recovered fragment.
CES Letter Logical Fallacies
| Strawman Fallacy | The LDS church has never said anything to lead us to believe that apostles should know the process of translating Egyptian. BBC News and CES Letter’s transcription take Elder Holland’s comments totally out of context, clip out much of his explanation, and falsely implies that he provided no further explanation. |
| Emotional Language | “Profound problem”… What profound problem? |
| Argument From Ignorance | How many people leave the church because of the Book of Abraham? My guess is few or none. Some might say that is the reason but it is just justification for the real reason, such as social issues like gay marriage or someone that offended them. |
| Circular Argument | We know Elder Holland can’t explain it because he is a fraud, and we know he is a fraud because he can’t explain it. |
Use Opponent As Authority Tactic – This is a popular Marxist tactic that anti-Mormons use. They use Mormonism’s own authorities to discredit the faith, such as an alleged Mormon scholar. There is a lot of solid LDS literature about the Book of Abraham, and CES Letter has a hard time twisting them. So they instead take a snippet of quote totally out of context (I don’t think CES Letter ever quotes a Mormon not out of context) to make it sound like we don’t know anything, and ignore the vast explanations we do give. They pretend like the church hasn’t explained anything about how the Book of Abraham was produced, and that is totally false.
What makes this argument powerful is that it quotes an apostle. It:
- Deceptively discredits the vast libraries of study on Book of Abraham by LDS professionals.
- Gives more focus to a phony frame that attacks the Mormon church.
- Divides the ranks of the church.
- Establishes a frame that demands a clear, modern explanation in the Book of Abraham for every religious issue in existence, and that it be exactly corroborated by every other Mormon source.
The church has been upfront since the beginning. Back when the papyrus fragment was first discovered, Dr. Hugh Nibley, wrote a monumental explanation, ‘Joseph Smith Papyri,’ at the behest of the church, and it pretty well explains everything. But CES Letter doesn’t bother looking at it.
Satan tempts followers of Christ by telling them that God hasn’t answered their questions. This places the burden on “church authorities” to answer every little question in life instead of you finding out answers for yourself. CES Letter‘s logic reflect the simplistic idealism that we see in the Plan of Satan. This idealistic standard for “correctness” makes people bitter that God allows tragedies to happen in their lives. It makes them skeptical of any opinion that doesn’t fit their narrow preconceived view of perfection. It thus sets a narrative that destroys Mormons’ testimonies and promotes Satan’s agenda.
God As A Dictator – Followers of Satan want everything spelled out for them. Do this. Say this. Don’t even bother thinking critically or making judgement calls for yourself. This is the heart of CES Letter‘s strawman argument that scripture should be a perfect, crystallized model of truth for every word we say and movement we make. They are authoritarian personalities who want a dictator.
Then again, Satanists don’t actually have a rigid model for truth. They only have their ideology, and they follow an ever-changing narrative to suit whatever helps the Satanic ideology in that moment. So, if you can’t trust ancient scripture to be infallible truth, who can you trust? Science! Science will tell you all you need to know. Science is great for Satanist because conclusions are always changing, always updating, and are easily manipulated. The frequent shifts in science can be exploited to push Satan’s ideology, which is an ideology of universal salvation and no personal responsibility.
So if Social Justice Warriors can convince you that the Book of Abraham is not trustworthy as ancient, unchanging truth, then they can also convince you that a good alternative to scripture should be constantly edited to fit modern circumstances and push this oppressive gospel of Satan. They make the case that modern “scripture” should direct every explicit part of your life, from the way you tie your shoes in the morning to which words you are allowed to speak.
Do You Want Evidence Or Relics? – Why does there need to be smoking-gun evidence? We are not a church that deals with relics, like pieces of Noah’s ark or the cup of Jesus Christ. CES Letter sets the narrative that we need to have some kind of physical objects, like the Catholic crusaders who scoured the Holy Land for objects from the bible. Well, the Mormon church does not do this, because any archaeological finding could be called a fraud, or dismissed as a coincidence, and real faith is not built on this kind of physical pursuit.
Superstition is spiritual belief built on a physical premise. Why is there lightning in the sky? Must be a manifestation of the gods! I think a better path toward truth is physical conclusions based on physical evidence and spiritual conclusions based on spiritual evidence.
| Does CES Letter believe in human evolution? Well, plenty of bones have been found to support this scientific model but there is no smoking gun; there are missing pieces of the puzzle, and it has not been reproduced in a laboratory or demonstrated in real life. It is still just a scientific model for what could have happened. The same goes for Book of Mormon archaeology. So many physical pieces of the puzzle have been found, but there are always going to be missing pieces, because we are talking about an ancient civilization that got wiped out. Anti-Mormons can always fall back on the missing puzzle pieces and claim “no archaeological evidence exists.” |  |