Shaking My Head

I have recently employed the use of Google Alerts. This is a great tool to help track items that are of interest to you, and it's also a great way to find out who's talking about you, and to see if it's positive or negative. I've found a couple of reviews on my books that I didn't know existed -- thankfully, they were positive. All you do is go to Google and click on Alerts, and then put in the search terms you're interested in. Right now I have "LDS Historical Fiction" and "Tristi Pinkston." Once a day, I get a list of all the sites and blogs that have mentioned one or the other of these terms.

What's making me shake my head is how often lately I've seen bloggers state that the LDS Church is fiction. (It comes up on my list because of the words "LDS" and "fiction" in my stated search parameter.) I'm good with people having their own beliefs and stating them. I love freedom of speech. But what cracked me up the other day was a blogger's assertion that there's not one speck of archaeological evidence that the Book of Mormon is true.

Shall we take a little look-see . . .


Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited: The Evidence for Ancient Origins

Who are the Children of Lehi? DNA and the Book of Mormon

Visualizing the Lands of the Book of Mormon

Sacred Sites: Searching for Book of Mormon Lands

MesoAmerica and the Book of Mormon: Is This the Place?

Decoding Ancient America: A Guide to the Archaeology of the Book of Mormon

Echoes and Evidences of the Book of Mormon

The Little Book of Mormon Evidences

These are just some of the many, many books that have been written detailing items that have been found in Mesoamerica that tie directly to events mentioned in the Book of Mormon. In First Nephi of the Book of Mormon, the prophet Lehi has a dream of a tree filled with fruit. He goes into great detail in his account, and archaeologists have found a stone carving that depicts Lehi's dream in the smallest detail.

There are things in the Book of Mormon that an ignorant farm boy from New York in the 1800's could not possibly have known, or for that matter, for anyone at that time to have known. They didn't have the Internet back then. No one could have hopped online and said, "I wonder how they graft olive trees in Israel," and then written out the parable of the olive tree. If you read Keith Terry's novel "Out of Darkness," you'll discover that people in America didn't know anything about the grafting of olive trees until years after the Book of Mormon was printed. The information simply was not to be had in America at the time Joseph Smith brought forth the book. How could he have invented it in such great detail and then just happen to be right on the money?

Skeptical blogger, there is much evidence, archaeological, DNA, cultural and otherwise that all indicates the Book of Mormon is true. I think what you were trying to say is that you don't believe that the evidence that has been found really shows that it's true. I'm okay with that. But to say that nothing has been found is a little sheltered. Get out there. See what there is to see.