ryleyrandall22

Yeah, I believe the theory that other people were present.

But I will add a few comments for anyone not familiar with the Book of Mormon who is reading this.

- The goal of the Book is to persuade the reader that Jesus is the Christ, the savior of the world. To that end, the authors make a point to say that they are going to leave out a lot of things they could have added so as to focus only on those things that would be of the greatest spiritual worth to us today. Given that, the only real way to know if it is true is to read it, ponder in your heart the message it contains, and then to ask God if it is true. There is a promise in the introduction that if you will do that sincerely, you will know it’s true by the power of the Holy Ghost. I believe in Jesus Christ and in the Book of Mormon because I have followed that exact process.

- Any discussion here about archeological/literary evidence is at best interesting. Even if the Book of Mormon provided incredibly detailed maps of exactly where each city was located, that would not be reason to believe.

- In looking for evidence, you can find lots of things on both sides that seem to either prove it or disprove it. I fundamentally believe this was by design so that the only way we could know would be to read it and sincerely pray. This is different from saying you should believe it because “trust me bro”. You can know 100% independent of anyone else. I just believe God in his wisdom designed the Book so that the reader would want and need an experience with God before they could fully move on from it.

- Once you believe, I have found the incredible amount of supporting evidence for the book to be encouraging, even if it’s not what the foundation of my belief is built on

- One of the reasons pinpointing exactly where the Book Of Mormon took place is so difficult is because the last writer in the book, Moroni, wandered around for newly 40 years. So it’s hard to know exactly how much ground he covered.

- I find it really interesting that it seems the best archeological evidence comes from Lehi’s journey out of Jerusalem (Nahom, valley near the Red Sea, land bountiful) rather than in the Americas

Yeah, you’re definitely right that the book makes no geographical claims.

My original comment was mostly in jest considering most members believe it took place in South America.

And yeah, I apologize I didn’t mean literally nobody. I’ll have to see if I can find anything related online, but in high school I was given an anti-Mormon book that had a section talking about how there was no evidence of major cities and there was never as large a population anywhere in Central or South America as large as is claimed in the Book of Mormon.

No. Believing in a religious text because of some archeological evidence would be like doing math through prayer.

But I do find it at least a bit ironic that one of the critiques of the book I have seen most commonly has been "If there were so many people, where were all the cities?"

Correct. But for a long time people claimed no body even lived there.

But I agree believing in a book like the Book of Mormon because of some random article would be a bad idea

The Book of Mormon has made this claim for years

If you want to be even more cynical you could say they are all limited versions of Safari. There are valid security concerns for why Apple does this but I would love more choices as a developer.

I’ve been on a few teams that used to use slack and loom to achieve a similar effect. One benefit of loom though was the ability to have our internal communication and demos to customers in the same space. Any plans to offer sending a video to someone not in your workspace?