Examining the claims of Jonathan Neville and the Heartland movement

Tuesday, September 14, 2021

Please show us the receipts, Brother Neville

Jonathan Neville keeps telling us about anonymous “people” who ask him or tell him this or that. He never bothers to tell us who these people are or how they contact him.

Here’s the latest example:
I frequently hear from M2C and SITH scholars and their followers who say that we should accept the theories of the credentialed class because they are experts who have studied these things. They’ve reached a “consensus” about M2C and SITH and they expect all Latter-day Saints to agree with them.
I would like very much to know who these supposed “scholars and their followers” are. I’d also be interested to know how often “frequently” is (weekly? monthly? annually?). In other words, show us the receipts, Brother Neville.

I’ll wager real money that he can’t and won’t give us any examples of this because virtually no one who believes Cumorah was in Mesoamerica and that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon using a seer stone would claim that anyone must believe them just because they said so. What we actually see from those people are arguments based on evidence from history, archaeology, anthropology, and the scriptures.

For example, John L. Sorenson, emeritus professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University, wrote Mormon’s Codex, an 826-page book setting forth his evidence-based arguments for a Mesoamerican setting for the Book of Mormon. Not once in his entire book did he state or even imply that anyone has to believe him simply because he’s an expert on archaeology and anthropology.

(Back in 2019, Jonathan Neville promised to review Mormon’s Codex and tell us where and why Sorenson’s arguments were incorrect. He wrote five blog posts about this, and not one of them actually engaged with any of Sorenson’s evidence. And I didn’t fail to point this out at the time.)

Until he feels inclined to tell us who these “people” are, Jonathan Neville’s claims about “scholars and their followers” who tell him things have just as much evidence for their existence as the rest of the claims made by advocates for the Heartland hoax.

—Peter Pan
 

1 comment:

  1. Once again, Neville has is completely backwards. It is the Heartlanders who insist we should accept their theories, not the other way around. They have reached a "consensus" about the "teachings of the prophets" and "expect all Latter-day Saints to agree with them".

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