Becoming Gods

From FAIRMormon

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Note: This page is not an exhaustive treatment of this author or his/her work. It serves as an index for reviews of specific works and/or reponses to attacks on LDS Church made by this author. The inclusion of an author here does not imply that he/she is necesarily "anti-Mormon" (though he/she may be), or that none of his/her work(s) have value.

1 About this work
2 Claims made in this work
3 Quote mining, selective quotation and distortion
- 3.1 Comparing population sizes at the beginning and end of a 1000-year period?
4 Endnotes
5 Reviews of this work

About this work

Author: Richard Abanes

Claims made in this work

A list of claims indexed by page number made in Becoming Gods with links to the corresponding responses in the FAIRwiki may be found here: Index to claims made in Becoming Gods: A Closer Look at 21st-Century Mormonism.

Quote mining, selective quotation and distortion

Many critics who write about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are not content to portray the Church and its doctrines fairly. Some critics mine their sources by extracting quotes from their context in order to make the statement imply something other that what it was originally intended to mean. Other critics make statements that are self-contradictions—instances in which a critic says or writes one thing, and then makes another statement elsewhere that flatly contradicts their first statement.

These examples do not prove that these critics' arguments are without merit; they do suggest caution is warranted before accepting these authors or their works as reliable witnesses when they speak of their own experiences connected with "Mormonism." In particular, one should also be cautious about accepting their interpretation of primary sources without double-checking the original sources themselves.

Comparing population sizes at the beginning and end of a 1000-year period?

Reference	First the author says...	The author then concludes...	Use of sources
p. 69-70	"LDS apologists and BYU professors are advocating a new unofficial opinion that Lehi and his people represented only a 'small band' of Israelites, compared to a larger population of indigenous people in the New world."	"But according to Mormon 1:7 in the Book of Mormon, the Nephite and Lamanite populations were hardly small: "The whole face of the land had become covered with buildings, and the people were as numerous almost, as it were the sand of the sea [about A.D. 322]."	Jeffrey Meldrum, "The Children of Lehi: DNA and the Book of Mormon*, lecture at the 2003 FAIR Conference, aug. 8, 2003.

Commentary

The author seems to believe that the proposition that Lehi's small group intermingled with a larger population of Native Americans in approximately 600 B.C. is somehow contradicted and invalidated by the fact that the population was as numerous as "the sand of the sea" in A.D. 322, almost 1000 years later. The logic behind this comparison is elusive. If anything, the idea that Lehi's group mingled with an existing population supports the idea that they would become quite numerous over a long period of time.

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