Detailed Response
Response to FairMormon's Debunking FairMormon Claims
FairMormon Agree With Large Percentage of CES Letter?
FairMormon says...
Does FairMormon agree with a large percentage of
the claims made in the Letter to the CES Director?
Jeremy's Response to FairMormon
"If one assumes that FairMormon's undisputed silence is acceptance of the facts, FairMormon agrees with X% of the CES Letter's X section."
When and if FairMormon decides to respond to the neutral statements, I will update the lists and donuts. Until then? FairMormon's undisputed silence on the specific individual "neutrals" can only be interpreted as acceptance of the facts. Especially considering that FairMormon has had over a year to respond to those neutrals and they have never done so. FairMormon, as a team effort, had time to delete, revise, and change their original responses and claims after the release of Debunking FAIR's Debunking but apparently they don't have time to respond to the neutrals. A blanketed vague "we don't agree with Jeremy's conclusions" is not sufficient. It's especially not sufficient in light of the organized and outlined list of specific statement and claims classified as neutrals. FairMormon: "With regard to historical facts, Mr. Runnells's citations are sometimes incorrect and his interpretations, even of correctly cited historical facts, are unwarranted." This is actually pretty rich coming from FairMormon. I see no need to respond to this as Debunking FAIR's Debunking sufficiently illustrates just how hilariously ridiculous and absurd FairMormon's above claim really is. FairMormon: "In short, FairMormon disagrees entirely with the conclusions..." What conclusions exactly? FairMormon cannot say all conclusions because there are obvious agreements (Joseph used a rock in a hat to translate the Book of Mormon, the papyri and facsimiles do not match the Book of Abraham, Joseph married at least 34 women, Joseph married at least 11 other men's wives, Joseph married teenage girls as young as 14-years-old, Joseph did a translation of the fake Kinderhook Plates, etc.) Does FairMormon's disagreement include the conclusions of the original CES Letter that consisted of the 5% mistakes/errors that I corrected and fixed? Obviously, the updated CES Letter no longer contains those 5% mistakes and errors. FairMormon, as usual, provides obfuscating and vague statements.Response to FairMormon's "Overview" section
FairMormon says...
Approximately eight or nine months after we produced our original response to the Letter to a CES Director, the author produced an apologetic called Debunking FAIR's Debunking, later changed to Debunking FairMormon. [1] Much of the material is simply an incorporation of our original summary responses to the individual issues, and the author's reassertion of his original claims. Our original summary responses to most of these issues have now been incorporated into the text of the full wiki articles that are now transcluded into the CES Letter response. There are, however, some new claims that originated in direct response to FairMormon. In this page we will highlight only new individual items which were not covered in the original CES Letter response. For convenience, these responses to Debunking FairMormon are also included in the list of responses to the original CES Letter.
Jeremy's Response to FairMormon
Response to FairMormon's "Polygamy/Polyandry" Debunking Answer
FairMormon says...
Coming Soon.
Jeremy's Response to FairMormon
Coming Soon.
Response to FairMormon's "Kinderhook Plates" Debunking Answer
FairMormon says...
"We can play this game too using the Anthon transcript"
The critic assumes that the document referred to as the "Egyptian Alphabet" by "A Gentile" was, in reality, the Anthon transcript, noting that "We can play this game too using the Anthon transcript".[3] He offers his own "reconstruction" of a deconstructed "boat" character on the Anthon transcript similar to that demonstrated by Don Bradley which matches the "boat" character on the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language, thereby removing the "boat" character from the Kinderhook plates themselves from the process. Once you link to the character on the GAEL, the entire "translation" produced by Joseph comes with it:
So, let's assume that Joseph did use the "boat" character from the Anthon transcript. The critic demonstrates a match between a "boat" character on the Anthon transcript and the corresponding character on the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language'. All he has done is remove the actual Kinderhook plates from Don Bradley's explanation and replace them with the Anthon transcript.
To summarize:
Where are the Kinderhook plates in this process? The author's graphic simply "proves" that Joseph "translated" a portion of the Anthon transcript.
Moreover, it makes absolutely no sense that Joseph would have used the Anthon transcript in any attempt to "translate" the Kinderhook Plates - there is no extant translation of the Anthon transcript characters. The characters likely came from the portion of the Book of Mormon plates corresponding to the lost 116 pages, and no translation of these characters was ever recorded by Joseph Smith. Don Bradley's Kinderhook explanation, however, clearly links the "boat" character on the GAEL and its assigned meaning with the actual "translation" of a portion of the Kinderhook plates produced by Joseph. The text shows a correlation.
The critics are missing the point in that the GAEL=Kinderhook "boat" connection has quite a bit of explanatory power--it really accounts for all available evidence quite nicely. Just because you can play games with other "boat" shaped characters in other contexts (for which the imagined connection explains exactly nothing) does not invalidate that. It is the explanatory power of all of the available evidence, the character on the Kinderhook plates, the explanation of a similar character on the GAEL, and the similarity to the content of translation that Joseph produced, that makes Bradleys's thesis compelling.
- Bradley: Kinderhook "boat" character -> GAEL "boat" character -> GAEL explanation of the character -> Joseph's "translation" of a portion of the Kinderhook plates.
- Critic: Anthon transcript "boat" character -> GAEL "boat" character -> GAEL explanation of the character -> Joseph's "translation" of a portion of the Kinderhook plates.
Missing the point
The critic offers the following, which completely avoids the fact that Don Bradley's Kinderhook presentation has accounted for all of the existing historical evidence [4]:Anyone who seriously thinks that a single Egyptian hieroglyphic, let alone one which represents two consonants, translates into: "Ha e Oop Hah - honor by birth, kingly power by the line of Pharaoh, possession by birth; one who reigns upon his throne universally...possessor of heaven and earth and of the blessings of the earth"...either does not understand the Egyptian language or is deliberately making stuff up. [3]
and
"The GAEL is nonsense. The Kinderhook Plates are fake. There is no indication that Joseph believed anything other than that both were legitimate and real." [3]
After making a perfunctory and failed attempt to address Bradley's data, the critic even erroneously assumes that the deconstruction of the Kinderhook character was produced by FairMormon, when it is, in fact, part of Bradley's own data: "So, what does FAIR do? They 'deconstruct' it"[3]. The critic then shifts the focus away from Bradley's data by simply concluding that none of it matters, because the GAEL is "nonsense" and the "Kinderhook plates are fake" (a fact which Bradley himself clearly notes at the beginning of his presentation). Rather than even coherently describing Bradley's data, the critic simply reverts to the argument that it is all fake anyway and doesn't warrant the attention. The critic therefore avoids engaging the totality of Bradley's Kinderhook presentation directly. Nobody is asserting the the GAEL was an actual correlation between Egyptian and the explanations offered - the validity of the GAEL has nothing to do with the Kinderhook plates. What is important in this instance is that Joseph Smith believed that the GAEL explanations were valid, and was therefore willing to utilize them as a translation tool. It is therefore ironic that the critic's last statement: "There is no indication that Joseph believed anything other than that both were legitimate and real" actually validates Bradley's data: Joseph believed that the GAEL explanations had value sufficient to use them to translate "a portion" of the Kinderhook plates.Jeremy's Response to FairMormon
Coming Soon.
Response to FairMormon's "Notes" section
FairMormon says...
It should be noted that there has never existed a FairMormon document claiming to "debunk" the CES Letter: This is a particularly odd claim when contrasted with the fact that the author claims that FairMormon has a high percentage of agreement with his letter. FairMormon always uses the words "A FairMormon Analysis" to describe our reviews of critical works. Critics, on the other hand, prefer to use the more provocative term "debunking".
Jeremy's Response to FairMormon
Last Updated: August 7, 2014
