Well I'd strongly disagree with you about the quality of the evidence, the genetics were a good example. They came up with piles of excuses for why the evidence of these huge kingdoms was missing, and not one piece of evidence outside of Joseph Smith's testimony that they did exist. Unless you were predisposed to believe Joseph Smith there's no reason to believe the story is true.

Similarly with the Book of Abraham, the source you provided is a Mormon apologist. If the evidence stands on its own it should also be endorsed by atheists, mainstream Christians, Muslims, etc. I don't find your claim that your faith isn't a causal motive in your belief in the evidence to be credible. If the evidence could stand on its own there would be many people who believed the evidence without the faith, or the faith without the evidence. As it is there are many people that believe the faith without believing the evidence, but almost none who believe the evidence but not the faith. That tells me that faith is necessary to believe in the evidence, and the evidence does not stand on its own.

I think the bigger factor is social. We spent most of our evolution in small communities with a lot of group activities, I don't think it's unreasonable to consider the possibility that those uncontacted tribe members are actually happier than we are. Hell, I'd rather be chatting with friends than posting on /. but our world isn't really designed for that.

I obviously can't say anything about your personal experience with a god, but my point is that outside of that experience the other evidence doesn't stand up, the evidence supporting Mormon story is nowhere near strong enough to convince a non-believer. You don't believe the Books of Mormon and Abraham are factual because they stand on their own, you believe because they're endorsed by your faith which you believe for other reasons.

To circle back to the point of the article I think some people think the evidence around the stories is solid, and that's a big part of the reason they believe. The Internet exposes them to strong counterarguments, when they realize the stories don't stand on their own that damages their faith as a whole.

So the explanation for the translating being completely wrong is the author wasn't actually writing Egyptian?

Except for some reason we can't actually see the trees (I'm not sure what you mean by seeing them).

So instead we ask what would we expect if there were trees? Well there would be leaves on the ground. Why aren't there leaves? The wind must have blown them away.

Ok, there would be wooden furniture and houses. But then we look and all the houses are brick and the furniture metal and plastic. So you say they must not like to build with wood.

Ok, then there would be fruit in the markets, but there isn't any. You say they must not like fruit.

The problem is that every time there's a test that could endorse the Mormon narrative you end up finding an excuse to explain away the difference.

Joseph Smith claimed there was a sword with the golden plates. Assume we had some fancy sonar that could identify the type any material underground, and, starting at Cumorah Hill, we scanned the earth 100m deep for a 20 km radius.

Would you expect them to find any swords or other metalwork from the 4th century?

Others are biting on the other topics so I'll just mention the genetics bit.

Weren't the people described be Semitic? In that case there would be signs of Semitic DNA in the Native American population, if the genes have spread through the genepool then genetic drift won't eliminate all traces. And the things they describe aren't population bottlenecks, for a bottleneck you really have to reduce the population to a small portion of their overall numbers. If a Semitic population had been there for several centuries the DNA would have spread throughout North America. To wipe out that DNA you'd have to drive the Native American to the brink of actual extinction.

It's not about knowledge it's about evaluating evidence and arguments. Mormonism isn't just claiming a couple Semites showed up in North America, it is claiming four major kingdoms surviving for almost 1000 years. The problem isn't that there aren't ways you can explain away the evidence, it's that every time there's a way to test the claims of Mormonism you end up having to explain something away.

Why couldn't the plates be investigated by an impartial authority, or the original text transcribed? Well the angel didn't want that.

Why does the little we've seen of the scrolls from book of Abraham have nothing to do with the described text of the book of Abraham? Well it was written by a Jew who wasn't writing proper Egyptian.

Why is there no evidence, genetic or archaeological, of these four huge middle eastern kingdoms that lasted a millenia or more? Apparently Moroni wasn't talking about the Native Americans after all.

Imagine that tomorrow someone discovered the book of Abraham scrolls hadn't been destroyed in fire, and were found intact in some forgotten collection, or some expedition on Cumorah found a bag containing some golden plates and the bag was carbon dated to the 1830s.

They items in question were then scanned and put online. My prediction is that the plates would turn out to be gibberish and the book of Abraham would have nothing to do with Joseph Smith's translation. What do you think the result would be?

It's a little pithy but he did follow with some actual arguments.

How do you rationalize Smith's behaviour with the gold plates that nobody but him ever saw, and when the transcriber "lost" the translations (to see if Smith actually did have a source document from which he could reproduce the same translation) Smith then provided a different translation. How he translated some Egyptian scrolls into the Book of Abraham, but the scrolls in question have nothing in common with what Joseph Smith translated. What about the claim that Native Americans are a lost tribe of Israelites, something proven false.

I'm just curious, I'm sure you're aware of these counterarguments, how do you deal with them?

The US is supposedly selling Democracy, free speech, and freedom of the press.

Government propaganda, particularly covert government propaganda, has no place in Democracy. By using these methods to influence foreign populations not only is the US is undercutting its own message, they're doing through the agency (USAID) that is supposed to be spreading that message.

This is why sunlight is essential, because without it governments fall victim to group think and short sighted objectives and lose the ability to plan for the long term by standing on principal.

I don't think that's the issue precisely, but I think the idea of debunking actual pseudoscience is really dicey.

When you teach evolution you're teaching something the parents think is wrong. They fight it but you can do it.

But if you debunk creationism you're teaching that the parents are wrong. They're going to fight that a lot harder.

Similarly with "Roughly one in three American adults believes in telepathy, ghosts, and extrasensory perception,"

So if you use those as examples of pseudoscience you're saying that 1/3 of parents are wrong.

Even if you could manage it politically I don't like it from an ethical perspective.

It's better to concentrate on teaching good critical thinking skills. The Texas GOP notwithstanding the idea of making kids better critical thinkers is something everyone can get behind, I doubt you can find a single creationist, astrologer, or antivaxxer who doesn't attribute their belief to superior critical thinking skills. Everyone can agree with making the kids better critical thinkers because everyone thinks that they're right and smarter kids will agree with them.

If you want to attack the pseudoscience directly you might be able to get away with inventing some ridiculous fictional pseudoscience and debunk that just so they understand the existence of cargo cult science. But even you'd probably get in trouble as it would be pretty obvious you were "shilling for big science" or something similar.

I'm not convinced this was the case, the fire could run out of oxygen, run out of things to burn (depending where it started), or they could have put it out before succumbing.

If it turned later on couldn't that be the result of the autopilot? I'm envisioning a scenario where the pilot tried to program in a return course but was very confused due to oxygen deprivation and wrote in some bizarre flight instructions instead. Soon after the fire everyone was dead and the fire was out but the plane continued flying with weird instructions entered.

Assuming the first thing the pilots did wasn't turn off the communications system to try and prevent the fire from spreading.

So you're implying that detectors failing is implausible, and any detected fire is trivial to put out. If that were the case then airplane fires wouldn't be a problem.

That being said I would be curious to know why more experts aren't talking about a fire.

We don't know that.

And I'm not sure it's accurate to say it's not worth $53M for closure, a good portion of the planet would like to know what happened. There's also the question of what went wrong, plane crashes are rare, which means they're invaluable from a data perspective. Say discovering the cause of this crash allows us to avert on average 1/4 of a future crash, 50 people is about $1,000,000/person, that's well below the standard $2,000,000/person you see thrown around.

Why would the fire have to evade the detectors?

As for the fire going out without damaging the aircraft that seems plausible. A fire breaks out in the cabin area, kills all the people with smoke inhalation then kills itself by using up all the oxygen. It's even consistent with some of the weird flight behaviour as a pilot dying of smoke inhalation may not have adjusted the auto-pilot properly.

What is the evidence that it didn't really crash?

It looks like there may have been some odd circumstances around the crash, a hijacking or equipment malfunction of some kind, but I don't imagine there's a lot of places you can land and hide a 777 without someone noticing. The fact they haven't found the wreckage doesn't mean a crash still isn't the overwhelming possibility.

My gut says the reason it's so hard to deal with the current form of ligin is parasites would have evolved to eat anything simpler. Do they have any strategy for preventing parasites from finding the trick to breaking down the ligin in these modified trees?

Either way it does sounds pretty cool.

But at the end of the day the failure of Iraq was fundamentally one of incompetence, there were certainly lies and criminal acts, but I believe the core motive of the people in charge was to help the Iraqi people.

That's kind of a very dubious claim - and one that rests more on personal bias than anything proveable... I see the US in much less of a rosy light, given how they, you know, installed Saddam there in the first place. And then supplied him with WMDs so he could kill the very rebels the US proclaimed to now side with.

I'm not sure many people would accuse me of seeing the US in a rosy light. The US actions in Iraq are basically driven by Pax Americana, the belief that the US is extraordinarily powerful and has a responsibility to exert that power to spread democracy and freedom. Also that any truly free populace would be pro-West, ie an unfriendly democratic leader must not be truly democratic otherwise they'd be friendly, and thus they're liable for overthrow.

Now the problem is this isn't completely wrong, anti-west democratic leaders do have a tendency to become totalitarian (Chavez is a good example), and it's not clear that a genuine democratic government is possible, or that open elections wouldn't result in even greater oppression. This leads to them playing a game where the try to micro-manage foreign politics winning short term gains but arguably increasing oppression in the long term by pissing people off.

Unfortunately expecting them to perform a useful intervention in Iraq was a bit like asking an elephant to run a daycare, an act of dubious value that was fated to end in tragedy.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I'm sure that trying to help is going to be a real comfort to all those who died - or have to live in constant fear thanks to their country descending into civil war.
In short: given the absolute mess that Iraq became, I wouldn't care about the intentions of the US - even if I really believed they were doubtlessly altruistic to begin with...

What if solid evidence came out that revealed that Bush-Cheney didn't care at all about Iraqis or Democracy, but only wanted to enrich some defence contractor and oil exec buddies? I'm guessing you'd care a lot about those intentions.

The reason why I found Crimea to be MORE objectionable was because Putin has no noble motive. It's land theft pure and simple, made on a pretext so flimsy it makes Iraqs WDMs to be as common as sand. And while the body count has been low it runs the risk of war in an otherwise stable part of the world and significantly escalates the tension between the West and Russia, the long term consequences of the Crimean invasion could be far worse than those of Iraq.

Land theft is kind of a misnomer. There are very important navy bases in Crimea - ones which the Russian navy kept using after the USSR dissolved... and which they must've felt in danger after their puppet government got kicked out of Ukraine. Not that I approve of this move - had enough of Russia sitting around here for fifty years - just saying it's a whee bit more nuanced than you make it seem like.

As for reactions and fears... the world is only up in arms because we are reminded of the Cold War. If China decided to annex parts of Mongolia, I could tell you what would happen: a big, fat nothing. Ukraine is too close, and the bad memories with Russia are too recent. But this was really to be expected; after the NATO continously expanding east and losing Serbia, Iraq and now Ukraine... of course Russia would react in some way.

They had a 25 year lease on the bases I'm not sure losing them was really a risk, and even if they did Russia already had territory on the Black sea. The importance of those bases was as a symbol of their relationship with Ukraine. While the most extreme wing of the nationalists definitely wanted to Ukrainianize the country a lot more I don't think even they wanted to sever the relationship with Russia.

I do agree that NATO and the EU were undercutting Russia's influence, but those reactions were the results of the valid Democratic desires of the populations involved. Moreover Crimeans weren't oppressed by Ukrainians in any sense, you can justify Iraq in the sense that Saddam was a very bad man and you think you can do better. Under Russia Crimeans are already experiencing more oppression, I just don't see seizing Crimean as any sort of defensible reaction to the NATO and EU expansions or being based on any sort of noble but misguided ideology.