Facu

Esse quam videri | Offsec @ NVIDIA | BYU

[Facu @fdzdev]

@bradenpace @BasedMikeLee Callate pelaca

[Rep. Mike Kennedy, M.D. @RepMikeKennedy]

The Pentagon’s decision to list The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints apart from other Christian faiths is wrong and needs to be corrected.

No one needs to wonder where members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stand. We stand with Christ. We are Christians.

On that ground, and on the much larger ground of shared faith, values, and purpose, Latter-day Saints stand alongside many Christians of every tradition in following the teachings of Christ.

We only ask to be accurately portrayed.

I strongly urge the Department to correct the record.

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

Children in my church—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—know this song, “I Will Walk With Jesus”

Pay attention to the words

If this isn’t emblematic of Christian faith, I don’t know what is

[Facu @fdzdev]

@BasedMikeLee Same

[Rep. Mike Kennedy, M.D. @RepMikeKennedy]

I’m a Latter-day Saint, and I am a Christian.

Christ’s name is on our Church for a reason.

This must be corrected.

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

My church membership is inextricably intertwined with my Christianity, as it is for 17 million other Latter-day Saints

Regardless of what the Pentagon thinks

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

“And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins.”

The Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 25: 26

[Senator John Curtis @SenJohnCurtis]

Latter-day Saints are among the most patriotic, service-oriented individuals in our country. They are also unequivocally Christian—just look at who is in the name of the Church.

It is unacceptable for a government entity to characterize a faith in a manner that contradicts the religion’s own foundational tenets. I am working now to ensure a correction is made.

[Facu @fdzdev]

@cstanley @realGeorgeHotz He’s delusional

[Clint Teeples @TeeplesCY]

If Joseph Smith forged the Book of Mormon, the title page is the one place he should have kept simple. He did the opposite.

He drew attention to the one thing that should have stayed buried.

In his 1841 history, he explained that the title page was not something he composed. It was a literal translation, taken from the very last leaf of the plates, on the left-hand side.

That is a strange thing to admit. In 1829, everyone knew a title page goes at the front. It names the author, the title, the purpose, before you read a word. Joseph moved his to the front for publication because that is what readers expected. But he went out of his way to record that it did not start there. If you were inventing an ancient record, that is exactly the kind of detail a forger keeps to himself.

Here is how scholars think about it.

When you cannot inspect the physical object, you do not authenticate a document by handling it. You authenticate it by reading it. You ask whether the text carries the internal marks of the time and place it claims to come from. Historians call this internal evidence. A document is more likely genuine when it does things people in the forger's world did not know how to fake.

So apply that test to the title page.

First, what ancient records actually looked like. The Western title page descends from Gutenberg, six hundred years ago. Paper pages, a cover, names up front. But for more than a thousand years before that, the ancient Near East organized records very differently. Mesopotamian and surrounding cultures built libraries of tens of thousands of texts, engraved, named, cataloged, and stored for centuries. Their identifying information was placed at the end of a text, in what scholars call a colophon. A finishing statement. The reader confirmed who wrote it, where it came from, and why, after finishing the record, not before starting it.

Little of the detailed scholarship on ancient Near Eastern colophons was available in Joseph Smith’s environment in 1829.

Second, the scribal signature. Ancient colophons identified the scribe with a set formula scholars transcribe as "by the hand of [name]." The Book of Mormon title page uses it twice. "Written by the hand of Mormon." "Sealed by the hand of Moroni." One signature for the man who compiled and abridged the record, one for the son who finished and hid it.

Third, the father-son pairing. Ancient scribes worked in father-son pairs. The father taught the son to write and to archive, and the son named his father in the colophon. They often linked themselves to prestigious ancestors to establish authority. The title page introduces Mormon as the architect and Moroni as the son who completed the work. Elsewhere in the text both men trace their line back to founding figures. Moroni: "I am the son of Mormon." Mormon: "I am Mormon, and a pure descendant of Lehi." The lineage move is straight out of the ancient archives.

Fourth, source and purpose. Colophons named the larger archive a text was drawn from and explained why it was made. The title page says the record was written "upon plates taken from the plates of Nephi." That is technical archival language. It identifies the source collection and the chain of custody. It then states the book is an abridgment, names the principal writers, gives the purpose, and warns that it may contain the errors of men. Line by line, that is classic colophon behavior.

Then the placement detail. Joseph said he found it on the left-hand side of the final leaf. That detail raises the possibility that each leaf was formatted in double columns, like a known ancient bronze plate. He had no reason to include it and no framework to invent it.

And the medium. Critics mocked the "Gold Bible" for decades. But ancient cultures did engrave treaties, laws, and royal records on metal precisely because metal endures when paper, papyrus, and clay do not. Archaeology has since recovered metal plates from the ancient Near East, bound and engraved, reserved for texts meant to last. What once sounded absurd now looks ordinary.

Here is what this leaves you with.

You may not believe the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be. That is a reasonable position. But the title page does the work of an ancient colophon, assembled the way ancient archives were and unknown in the time and place where he lived. The placement is wrong for 1829 and right for antiquity. The signatures, the lineage, the source language, the medium, all converge.

Take any one detail and it proves little. Take them together and a pattern emerges, pointing away from a farm boy in New York and toward something far older.

The easiest forgery would have been a normal title page at the front. Instead we got an ancient colophon hiding in plain sight.

The evidence deserves a fair hearing. But for millions of readers in nearly every country on earth, the Book of Mormon is not a debate they are trying to win. It is the thing that brought them to Christ and opened a deeper life with God.

Source: Authentic: The Book of Mormon, Evidence of a Miracle by Lundwall and Lundwall, chapter 6

[Jon Root @JonnyRoot_]

Every single child with Down syndrome is a gift from God, who deserves life.

These children have just as much value, and deserve life just as much as a child without DS.

Down syndrome children aren’t a curse to parents.

Pass it on.

[Facu @fdzdev]

@davidzmorris Hahaha what an L of a post

[hasanabi @hasanthehun]

sga is a basketball terrorist and must be stopped

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

The new White House policy requiring green card applicants to apply from outside the US is a capricious attack on legal immigration. It will hurt families, leave us with fewer doctors, teachers and scientists, and hurt American competitiveness in AI.

[Facu @fdzdev]

269,320 words. It has 207 characters. It has 147 geographical locations with hundreds of movements between them. It has 77 storylines with 170 new proper English nouns, over 100 different titles for God. It has over 100,000 words and 68 religious discourses discussing over 70 highly nuance topics and themes. Deal with it, wish you well

[Thoughtful-Faith @ThoughtfulSaint]

Well the difference is we actually talk positively about other religions too.

The difference is that we actually love y’all while the rest of you hate us.

Guess that is our cross to bear.

[Facu @fdzdev]

@DanielProudfoot @DrFrankTurek S/o to brother Wilcox