There is a point where apologia grades into codependency and you've passed that point. Don't you get tired of making excuses and trying to cobble together ways to quibble about things that are painfully obvious to the entire rest of the world?
I've heard that the Mexican stingless honeybee was already here when the Spanish explorers arrived. In any regard, extinctions are common when a species is introduced to a new environment, are they not?
At least three separate species of elephants once roamed the Americas.
In any regard New World pollination species are tied to specific host flowers. The relatively recent introduction of the European Honeybee has not only resulted in the extinction of native bees but that has threatened many native species of plants. This is an observed effect that can be directly tied to the introduction of the European Honeybee, so your comment: " In any regard, extinctions are common when a species is introduced to a new environment, are they not?" is absolutely true, but not in the direction that you thought and, in fact, is one line of evidence in my case.
Must we go on with elephants? Last ones died out more than 5,000 years ago.
Most people would recognize a Peccary as a pig. Bison are so close to bovine, that they can interbreed and produce offspring. None of this even touches on the possibility that the Nephites used these terms for entirely different species. They certainly had chariots, as defined by the Hebrew word, which borrows from the Egyptian "riding seat". Mayan kings and generals were carried aloft in riding seats. The Book of Mormon is very specific about these two classes using chariots, and I doubt that Joseph Smith or anyone else in 1830 knew this.
Do you have any idea of how ridiculous these apologetics make you look? It's like you have a different bizarre explanation for everything that doesn't hold up but rather that leads to yet another bizarre explanation that doesn't hold up but rather that leads to yet another bizarre explanation, and so on. It is apologia based on matryoshka dolls.
I already showed that Mormons aren't the only ones who believe that pre-Columbian horses once lived in Mesoamerica.
Actually you did not meet the specification that you were committed to meeting: "Was Joseph Smith lying his head off when he claimed that horses (
Equus ferus spp.) Were present in the New World between the Pleistocene Extinction and 1492." All you did was produce either unsupported claims or evidence that there were equines in the New World prior to the Pleistocene Extinction.
I admit that these are minority positions, and that we have more faith in God than we do in scientific theoris.
Translation: "We'd rather ignore modern science because it proves Joseph Smith's to be a liar, and we just can't deal with that.
It is natural for us to enjoy some corroboration of our beliefs, if only presented by a minority of scientists.
Translation: "We like the comfort provided by our tame apologists rather than face the real world."
There is nothing magical about having a majority; they can be just as wrong as a minority. Science has done many flip flops over the years. It is our personal experience, not a blind faith, which causes us to believe in Mormonism.
Since had not done "flip flops" it has progressed, there is a difference. Especially when we are talking about things as non-controversy as which animals went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene. Really now ...
When it come to hard facts, not things that are matters or interpretation, the BofM can be rather easily falsified. That leads one to the obvious conclusion that any synchronicity with truth is purely accidental. Why not flush the crap down the sewer and struggle to build the good parts in a helpful and supportive structure. Why not ditch the obvious lies, like Jesus of the New World and focus on the family centric, hard working, moral core that Mormon has built. Cleaving to the lies will, in the end, destroy it all. If I were you I'd save what I could right now before it all collapses and the baby is thrown out with the bathwater.
It was gratifying, when they discovered Nahom. In fact, every step of the journey from Jerusalem to the southern coast of Arabia is accurately described in the Book of Mormon. It really stretches the imagination that this could somehow be a coincidence, or that Joseph Smith somehow knew more about Arabia than all the learned scholars of his day.
I'm not even going to bother debunking Nahom and the "journey from Jerusalem." You've already been sufficiently embarrassed and have, at least de facto, if not de jure, resigned from rational debate, taking the the loss.
