Where’s the love?And Steve Sandvoss is so cute in the movie Latter Days.  Too bad his character’s family is so unbending.

Historical Comment…As I understand it, the Book of Mormon details events which supposedly occurred in the Americas during the two millennia before European colonisation. The image on the right is presumably of one or other of these events that took place in the Americas. So could someone please explain to me why, when horses were unknown in the Americas before their introduction by the Spanish (having been wiped out some several thousand years previously) there is a horse in the painting?

Just a guess…Home schooling?

Whoreses?

Cool, an excuse to drop off some images …… that would never be understood by non-LDS otherwise …

And one more (last one, promise) …… This one was a big hit on the Mormon email forwarding circuit back during the Cali campaign:

WowAmazingly good point. I would say they would respond that Jesus brought them. And then they disappeared, similar to how the unicorns and dinosaurs vanished after Noah’s flood.

UmYou were probably being snide, but that’s closer to the truth than you might think.
My parents and I were going through the La Brea Tar Pits museum. My parents (my mother in particular) is a fundamentalist mormon – whatever the BofM says is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. When we came to the protohorse fossils, she read the plaque that said this was the last surviving type of horse in the Americas, until Europeans brought them. She smiled indulgently and said “Well, that’s what the scientists believe.”
The BofM says there were horses, so there were horses. Why aren’t there any remains, or any other indications? It doesn’t matter, because the BofM says there were horses, so obviously, there were horses. Everything else is just confusing, so let’s not talk about it.

HomoerotisismTroy Williams, a radio show host and gay rights activist in Utah even made a short fill about the subject: http://www.queergnosis.com/mor…

That’s not homoerotic, no, not at all!That is from the banned Mormon missionary calendar, I take it?  

Specifically, from 500-400 BCE to about 1,000 CEThe BOM states the original inhabitants of the American continents were Jews who came over the Atlantic in football-shaped sealskin submarines in roughly 400 BCE. And then the bad ones among them were cursed with dark skins (hmm, haven’t we heard that racist line of shit before?) and later became Native Americans. All this despite the fact that genetic tests on indigenous peoples in North America show them having Mongoloid mitochondrial DNA placing their ancestors in Asia, and show no relation to Semitic people whatsoever.

Oh, I know the feelingDude, I feel your pain. My mother is convinced that dinosaurs never actually walked the earth, that their skeletons were sucked intact into the earth’s crust when Gawd created the planet, specifically because His Almighty Beefiness needed to test her faith 6,000 years down the road. Yet another example of how religion reinforces idiocy. I don’t understand it; as a Catholic, she didn’t believe blatantly stupid shit like that. Yet when she converted to mormonism, all the reason flew out the window in favor of complete cognitive dissonance.
And you all wonder why Louise adopted me? It’s because, among other reasons, I need comparatively sane family members!

What…?????How come none of them are wearing Jesus Jammies???  (their required underwear)

as others have notedWhen did they invent shirts?

i had wondered as well …… as Jesus’ General. I had seen that art as well in my youth.
Give me some men who are stout hearted men
Who will fight for the men they adore –

“In memory of our God”That seems to imply that their God is dead or no long around. Same for religion, freedom, peace, wives and children.

Yup!

The apologists say “horse” was a word for “tapir” seriouslyThis is from an apologetic think tank at BYU:
http://www.fairlds.org/Book_of…

In my opinion, a more likely candidate for the Nephite loan-shift “horse” would have been the Central American tapir. Tapirs are one of only a few odd-toed ungulates–a family that includes the horse, zebra, donkey, onager, and the rhinoceros. These large grazing animals have common traits, including an odd number of toes on each hoof, a large middle toe, and a relatively simple stomach (as compared to other grazing animals like cows who regurgitate their cud for digestion).
Israelites often distinguished animals based on the type of foot and what the animal ate. This generally played a role in determining if an animal was “clean” or “unclean.” If we use the Law of Moses as a guide, tapirs and horses are very closely related–and in a significant way. While there is no clear consensus as to what dietary rules were known and/or applied in the land of Israel just prior to Lehi’s departure, it is possible that the Nephites were obligated to live–or were at least familiar–with some of the dietary restrictions and may therefore have included tapirs in the horse family. And while they may have categorized the tapir in the same family as the horse, it is possible that they might not have had dietary restrictions on eating animals is this family.
While some species of tapir are rather small and look like pigs, the Mesoamerican variety–Baird’s Tapir–can grow to be nearly six and a half feet in length and can weigh more than six hundred pounds. A modern government report indicates that
The tapir is docile toward man and hence management of the animal is relatively easy. An indigenous person describes the tapir as follows: “The animal is very sociable. Taken as a pup, one can easily tame it; it knows how to behave near the house; it goes to eat in the mountain and then returns to sleep near the house.”27
Tapirs were frequently eaten and, because of their strength, they may have been used as beasts of burden on a small scale. Charles Darwin wrote that tapirs were kept tame in the Americas, though they did not tend to breed in captivity. This fact might explain the relatively infrequent mention of “horses” in the Book of Mormon.28
“Many zoologists and anthropologists,” explains one researcher, “have compared the tapir’s features to those of a horse or a donkey.”
“Whenever I saw a tapir,” notes zoologist Hans Krieg, “it reminded me of an animal similar to a horse or a donkey. The movements as well as the shape of the animal, especially the high neck with the small brush mane, even the expression on the face, are much more like a horse’s than a pig’s…. When watching a tapir on the alert . . . as he picks himself up when recognizing danger, taking off in a gallop, almost nothing remains of the similarity to a pig.”29

a tapir! a tapir! my kingdom for a tapir!Doesn’t sound as heroic. Especially not when wearing your holy underwear.
Even when exercising your right to bare forearms.

Saddle up!

We need a scholar……of 1930s propaganda to tell us which of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party’s posters this was copied from.  

Your mother sounds like my mother-in-law.Fortunately I’ve managed to dissuade her from ever trying to “bear her testimony” to me, because if she did, I’d have to take apart her belief system in blunt, incisive, and factual ways that she would not be able to stand up against.
The woman has a master’s degree, but it hasn’t stopped her from believing the most ridiculous garbage I’ve ever read. It’s depressing.