Miguel’s Weblog

Check here this very interesting article.

On this Sabath Day I would like to share with you the 178th Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that took place last weekend in Salt Lake City, USA.

Since yesterday we have been following the 178th Conference of the Church. I love the Church and I know that it is the only true Church on Earth. It’s wonderful to be led by inspired leaders who love God and serve Him with all their heart, might, mind and strength!

By David Haldane, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

The Mormon Church has to be among the most outgoing on earth; in recent years its leaders have reached out to, among others, Latinos, Koreans, Catholics and Jews.

One of the most enthusiastic responses, however, has come from what some might consider a surprising source: U.S. Muslims.

“We are very aware of the history of Mormons as a group that was chastised in America,” says Maher Hathout, a senior advisor to the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles. “They can be a good model for any group that feels alienated.”

Which perhaps explains an open-mosque day held last fall at the Islamic Center of Irvine. More than half the guests were Mormons.

“A Mormon living in an Islamic society would be very comfortable,” said Steve Young, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints attending the event.

The sentiment is echoed by Muslims. “When I go to a Mormon church I feel at ease,” said Haitham Bundakji, former chairman of the Islamic Society of Orange County. “When I heard the president [of LDS] speak a few years ago, if I’d closed my eyes I’d have thought he was an imam.”

Though the relationship has raised eyebrows and provided ammunition for critics of both religions, Mormons and Muslims have deepening ties in the United States.

What binds them has little to do with theology: Mormons venerate Jesus as interpreted by founder Joseph Smith, while Muslims view Muhammad as god’s prophet. Based on shared values and a sense of isolation from mainstream America, the connection was intensified by 9/11 and cemented by the Southeast Asia tsunami. It is especially evident in Southern California, with large Mormons and Muslim populations.

The Mormon Church has become the biggest contributor to Buena Park-based Islamic Relief, touted by its administrators as the West’s largest Muslim-based charity. Relief officials say the church has donated $20 million in goods and services since the 2004 tsunami, equal to about 20% of the charity’s annual budget.

Brigham Young University in Utah, the church’s major institution of higher learning, features what is thought to be one of the world’s best programs for translating classic Islamic works from Arabic to English. Though created primarily for academic purposes, the results have impressed Muslims flattered by the close attention.

“It shows they have a keen interest in the Muslim world,” said Levent Akbarut, a member of the Islamic Congregation of La Cañada-Flintridge.

And Mormons and Muslims say they often are co-hosts of educational and social programs at which, though some may be angling for long-term doctrinal influence, very little open proselytizing of each other seems to take place. “We have a very close and friendly relationship,” said Keith Atkinson, West Coast LDS spokesman.Mormons “explain our faith to anyone who will listen” and “treat Muslims like anybody else,” said Elder Dallin H. Oaks, a member of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles, one of the church’s top governing bodies in Salt Lake City. But Oaks added that “we don’t preach to people who would be disenfranchised” or likely offended by the effort.

Arnold H. Green, a history professor at BYU, has traced how early Mormons in the 19th century were hounded by accusations that church founder Smith was the American Muhammad. The first Mormons angrily denied any connection to the Muslim prophet but gradually accepted some comparisons, particularly that both religions were founded by post-Christian prophets with strong sectarian views. “As the church grew into a global faith,” Green wrote in a 2001 essay, “its posture toward Islam became . . . more positive” until, today, “the two faiths have become associated in several ways, including Mormonism’s being called the Islam of America.”

Both religions strongly emphasize family. They tend toward patriarchy, believing in feminine modesty, chastity and virtue. And although Islam discourages dancing involving both sexes, Mormons report that church-sponsored “modesty proms” commonly draw Islamic youths.

Both faiths adhere to religion-based health codes, including prohibitions against alcohol, but Mormons and Muslims share something more: membership in quickly growing minority religions that many other Americans have sometimes viewed with suspicion and scorn.

“We both come from traditions where there has been persecution in the past and continues to be prejudice,” said Steve Gilliland, LDS director of Muslim relations for Southern California. “That helps us Mormons identify with Muslims.”

A recent national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that although a thin majority of those polled expressed positive opinions of Muslims and Mormons, the number was significantly less than those favoring Roman Catholics or Jews.

More than half the respondents said they had little or no awareness of the precepts and practices of either faith. But 45% saw Islam as more likely than other religions to encourage violence, and 31% said that Mormons weren’t Christian.

Armand L. Mauss, a Mormon and professor emeritus of sociology at Washington State University specializing in religious movements, said that unlike mainstream Christians and Jews, Muslims and Mormons “tend to make fairly stringent demands for religious conformity on their members.” These practices, he said, include discouraging marriage outside the religion and observing dietary laws, such as the Mormon prohibition against tobacco, alcohol and caffeine.

But the clincher, according to Mauss, is that both communities “have been stung in recent years by the recurrence of scandals over which they have no control.” For Muslims, the obvious example is 9/11.

Introduction

David Stewart, Jr.

Archaeologists and historians generally agree that recorded history began between 3000 BC and 3500 BC.  This is remarkably consistent with the scriptural account.  It is significant that there are no written records, for instance, from 10,000 or 20,000 years B.C. that would provide a clear chain of recorded history that would falsify the scriptural timetable.

Any dates before this time cannot be documented by direct historical evidence.  Rather, dating of presumably earlier artifacts relies on indirect methods of calculation.  Such methods rely upon assumptions which are accepted dogmatically by the archaeology community, but are unproven.  For instance, carbon dating methods of very old objects depend on the assumption that the radiation level in the atmosphere has remained virtually unchanged throughout the entire existence of the earth.  Because the date calculation is logarithmic, even a small difference in carbon-14 levels can drastically alter the calculated date.  I have previously addressed some of the problems with DNA dating in the debate here.  The site requires free registration to view the discussion. Suffice it to say that we have good reason to believe geologic, DNA, and nuclear dating methods within the course of recorded history are relatively accurate.  However, calculations of dates in the remote prehistoric past bear a high margin of error and rely on numerous unproven assumptions that are typically not disclosed in public pronouncements by experts claiming their calculated dates to represent definitive fact.

Anthropologists and archaeologists claim that “As a species, Homo sapiens has not changed significantly either mentally or physically, for well over 100,000 years.  We may have moved from the Stone Age to the Internet Age but each human being is no different today to their forebear 500 generations in the past.”^[1]  They claim that only “after 100,000 years of what is assumed to be virtual stagnation, humans began a completely new way of life in what is known as the Neolithic Revolution.  It began approximately 12,000 years ago when people across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia quite suddenly abandoned their nomadic hunter-gatherer existence and began to opt for permanent settlements.  They began to cultivate rice, wheat, rye, peas, lentils, and other plants, and to domesticate animals such as cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats.  Technology also began around this time with the manufacture of pottery vessels for cooking and storing food, stone sickles, and grinding stones to turn grain to flower.”^[2]

Thoughtful persons should immediately recognize several serious problems with the claims of contemporary scholars.  We are told that the human brain has not changed significantly in over 100,000 years, yet that there was no cultivation of land and that humans lived exclusively a hunter-gatherer existence after 100,000 years of stagnation.  Humans are resourceful.  We have seen dramatic technological innovation in just the past ten years, and the course of recorded history demonstrates remarkable innovation even in the earliest antiquity.  Yet we are to believe that ancient humans – who shared the same brains and cognitive capacity that we do today – lived exclusively as hunter-gatherers for over 100,000 years, for over 20 times the length of entire recorded history, until the ideas of permanent settlements, crop cultivation, and the domestication of animals ever occurred to anyone?  Such a claim is patently ludicrous. It is made more ridiculous by the belief that permanent settlements – which allegedly had never been made over the prior 100,000 years – suddenly, independently, and near-simultaneously came into being all around the world.  Such implausible claims transcend the level of mere coincidence and invoke faith in consensus dogma far beyond reason.

The archaeological record is too sparse to credibly document the existence of prehistoric humans over the time frame claimed. The oldest sites of human habitation in North America, for instance, are dated at 12,000 years old – and even such dates depend on a string of assumptions that render the resulting calculations tenuous.  Worldwide, relatively few human finds that have been dated before 4,000 BC, and very few before 10,000 BC.  If Homo sapiens really inhabited the earth for more than 100,000 years before the beginning of recorded history, we would expect vastly greater quantities of findings of prehistoric humans.  Such findings have not been forthcoming. Anthropologists would have us believe that early humans existed for more than a hundred millennia, but for some reason, very few specimens been found.  Even the dating of these few often depends on circular reasoning rather than adequate scientific proof: settlements are claimed to be old because they are primitive, and recent if they are more advanced, enforcing the orthodoxy of the assumptions of Darwinian evolution by decree rather than the scientific method.

Dates claimed by archaeologists and anthropologists are also continually being revised.  Only a decade ago, it was claimed that the Americas were settled more than 30,000 years ago; now it is claimed that settlement occurred 10,000-15,000 years ago.  The pyramid of “Zoser” was previously claimed to have been built approximately 4000 BC.  Now, archaeologists claim that the pyramid was built in approximately 2600 B.C. Literally hundreds of similar examples could be cited. Dates characterized as impossible or absurd a few years ago are now taught as mainstream science.  In almost every case, the error has been in dating artifacts as being far older than they actually are. While these dates are still not correct, it is important to keep in mind that the direction of revision has consistently been in favor of a shorter scriptural timeframe rather than the “millions and millions of years” claimed by archaeologists.  It is likely – in fact, nearly certain — that in another hundred years, scientists will scoff at how primitive and erroneous the prehistoric timeline currently taught in textbooks turned out to be, and at the ignorance of present scholars for failing to adequately recognize or account for the unproven assumptions in their current paradigms.

Yet it is interesting that, no matter how frequently or how substantially the accepted dates of events and relics may change, there is rarely if ever any public admission of error on the part of the scholarly community.  Those who grew up hearing one set of dates proclaimed as irrefutable fact in school are often surprised to learn how drastically scholars have changed those dates in the course of few intervening years.  One would think that the frequent errors in dating requiring dramatic revision would lead so-called dating experts to be more cautious in qualifying their own claims and more respectful to those who hold different views, but such an approach is the rare exception rather than the rule.

Recent research has also demonstrated that the units of measurement used in so-called “Late Stone Age” and Neolithic communities around the world, from Egypt to Europe to the Middle East to India to Asia, were closely related^[3] and demonstrated precision to less than the width of a human hair.^[4] What is more, these measurements are closely related to natural constants including the speed of light,^[5] the circumference of the earth, and more.  Anthropologists and historians have no explanation for such astounding findings, which undermine core assumptions of steady Darwinian evolution from primitive to complex.

There is increasing support among linguists for the existence of a unifying “proto-language” from which all human languages arose, with a date of convergence estimated by qualified linguists at 15,000 BC.^[6]  We know that this date is still too early, but even this date wreaks havoc with the claims of anthropologists and archaeologists.  For a universal language to have existed around the world requires, at a minimum, contact among early peoples that academic consensus views on prehistory currently do not allow. In this point as well, scientific data supports scriptural history while disputing evolutionary views: human languages were not invented independently, but originated from a common source.

The purpose of this introduction is not to disparage those who accept the present dating consensus, but only to object to the all too common characterization that anyone who accepts scriptural chronologies at face value is ignorant or uninformed.  To the contrary, examination of prehistoric dates accepted by the scientific establishment demonstrates irreconcilable conflicts among different types of data, and ultimately invokes faith in evolutionary theory far beyond reason.  Whatever challenges or minor discrepancies scripture-based dates may face, such dates have generally corresponded closely to historical evidence in both the Old World and the New, and there are good reasons to believe that they are fairly accurate – especially when we compare them to the wildly fluctuating chronologies promulgated by the academic community over even the past fifty years.

The chronologies below deal exclusively with the history of the earth from the time of Adam and Eve down to the present, but do not address earlier issues of time.  The earth’s creation involved the organization of existing matter, and not creatio ex nihilo.  The elements – subatomic particles, not chemical elements – are eternal (D&C 93:33). Joseph Smith taught: “Anything created cannot be eternal; and earth, water, etc., had their existence in an elementary state, from eternity.”[7]  The state of organization the earth’s matter was in before the creation is not declared in scripture.  While there are scholarly reasons noted here that demonstrate that consensus prehistoric geologic dates are dubious and cannot be supported by rigid scientific standards, there is also nothing in claims that matter is “millions and millions” of years old that would fundamentally undermine scriptural chronology.  To the contrary, the recognition that matter is eternal leads us to believe that the building-blocks of the earth are very old indeed.

Book of Ancient Scripture

David Grant Stewart, Sr.

In this list I have listed the books which are listed in the Old Testament, but not present there, plus books which are not mentioned, but which I know exist and I have cited them accordingly. All of the earlier dates are entirely my own. For some of the later dates, about 1000 B.C. onward, I am indebted to the Bible Dictionary as published by the LDS church, which should be taken as approximately accurate until better information proves otherwise. I have made corrections to the extent possible with the time available to me.