Here's the gripe I have with this thread: even the most trenchant criticism levied so far doesn't do justice to the rampant idiocy that is the notion---it's not a theory, it's not even an idea---propounded by Mopologists in the OP. Like
mighty Nephi, we should delight in plainness. As in, talking plainly about the degree of utter lunacy it takes for an otherwise functional adult to spout such an exquisite degree of nonsense that you're willing to posit with a straight face that a handful of Hebrew refugees staged a silent coup and took over the Mayan civilization.
It's like Mopologists and their patrons have some kind of intellectual autoimmune disease, where the mind's defenses against even the most pernicious ____ have been weakened so much by constant autophagy that it's too weak to fight off the infection when it comes. The constant stream of non-theories and ad hoc speculation and
ass-pulls just wear down whatever the psyche's version of T-cells are, and then, one day, you can't resist anything anymore and you're publicly appearing in a video saying without irony that you think Nephi was the king of the ____ Mayans.
Maybe we're part of the problem. Maybe we're like hospice workers who have watched so many people die from pneumonia or the common cold that we don't even understand anymore how remarkable it is that there are healthy people around who can resist this ____ with no conscious effort. We sit on this board, or some other board, or go out and have drinks, or whatever, and think nothing of the fact that THERE ARE GROWN MEN WITH A SIDE HUSTLE OF TELLING PEOPLE THERE WERE CHRISTIAN HEBREW TAPIR RANCHERS IN PRE-COLUMBIAN MEXICO. It's just like, "Yeah, some people like Led Zeppelin, some people like to go fishing, AND SOME PEOPLE THINK AN UNDEAD NATIVE AMERICAN TELEPORTED INTO THE VILLAGE MAGICIAN'S LOG CABIN TO TELL HIM ABOUT THE BURIED TREASURE THAT TELLS ABOUT PRE-COLUMBIAN HEBREWS WHO SILENTLY TOOK OVER THE MAYAN EMPIRE FROM WITHIN. Different strokes for different folks, right?"
This isn't normal human behavior. This isn't like how all of us have some quirky or stupid ideas, or how it's common that people believe in the supernatural, or funny little superstitions, or what have you. This is a willingness to believe unspeakably stupid things about the tangible, physical world. And all of us are too comfortable with it. It's a kind of provincialism in itself to think this kind of insanity is within the normal range of what religious people might believe.
Imagine this kind of stupidity in any other context. Imagine that a grown man who has no other apparent signs of being completely ____ insane came up to you and said, in the most maudlin sincerity, that his scholarship and faith have led him to conclude that
the Norman invasion of England in C.E. 1066 is evidence that
The Return of the King is a true story, the Normans were the
Numenor, and William the Conqueror was Aragorn.
How much time would you spend working on a rebuttal to this? Because this hypothetical is not different in any way at all from the indescribable gibberish set forth in the OP. And sometimes we actually take a moment to entertain this nonsense.
On second thought, let me walk that back a little bit. It really is an apples and oranges comparison to talk about The Book of Mormon and The Lord of the Rings in the same breath. One of them is a serious work about fundamental questions about faith, cosmology, salvation, and good and evil, set against a backdrop of compelling military conquests, difficult journeys, and divine intervention, in an internally consistent and rich narrative that no uneducated person could have produced.
The other is the Book of Mormon.
I worry that at best, we're getting numb to watching this slow and unrelenting death from things a healthy person would shrug off. And at worst, maybe we're not baffled enough because you can only be around contagion so much before it gets on you, too. Not that you even momentarily consider this idiocy. But that you get used to it.