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Criticism of Mormonism/Online documents/Letter to a CES Director/Citation abuse
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Citation abuse in the original Letter to a CES Director
| A FAIR Analysis of: Letter to a CES Director, a work by author: Jeremy Runnells
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Overview
The following articles demonstrate citation abuse in the Letter to a CES Director. In some cases, the author has taken a single citation, extracted different portions of it, and then assigned different references in order to make it appear that the data comes from multiple sources, thus producing two different "citations" instead of a single one. In other cases, only the portions of the citation that support the author's position are extracted and displayed (this is known as "quote mining"), while other data in the same citation which does not support the author's position is ignored. These articles provide detail on how the citations were manipulated.
Detailed responses by section are found in linked subarticles below
Response to section "Book of Abraham Concerns & Questions"
Summary: The author notes that, "Egyptologists have found the source material for the Book of Abraham to be nothing more than a common pagan Egyptian funerary text for a deceased man named “Hor” in 1st century AD. In other words, it was a common Breathing Permit that the Egyptians buried with their dead. It has absolutely nothing to do with Abraham or anything Joseph claimed in his translation for the Book of Abraham."Jump to Subtopic:
Response to section "Witnesses Concerns & Questions"
Summary: The author claims that, "If David Whitmer is a credible witness, why are we only using his testimony of the Book of Mormon while ignoring his other testimony claiming that God Himself spoke to Whitmer “by his own voice from the heavens” in June 1838 commanding Whitmer to apostatize from the Lord’s one and only true Church? FAIR must admit that Whitmer was less than credible on this occasion. Why couldn’t he have been less than credible when he testified of the Book of Mormon?"Jump to Subtopic:
- Citation abuse in the original Letter to a CES Director: Anthony Metcalf's Ten Years Before the Mast
- Citation abuse in the original Letter to a CES Director: Stephen Burnett to Br. Johnson
- Citation abuse in the original Letter to a CES Director: John Whitmer states that he saw the plates by a supernatural power