NOM

https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/39150212-2 ... -love.html

I just went straight to the comments.

Looks like most people have "an unfavorable impression" of the church judging from the comments.

Interesting article, I think.

Regarding the comments....I read some of them, and when I got to the Dan Peterson comment, I thought, "This bozo thinks that he has the last say on all sorts of things". I don't know when I've had less respect for LDS apologists, as we have discussed before, than I do now. (sigh)

White American Mormons have an affinity for Native American culture and Pacific Islander culture, Mueller says. “They revere it to the point where they have been accused of culturally appropriating, collapsing the identity between Mormon and Pacific Islander.”

Pretty much stolen it, I'd say

Lena Guyot: (a bunch of stuff I've never heard about Solomon Spaulding).

Daniel Peterson: I don't believe that there's a single serious historian -- Mormon or non-Mormon -- who believes that the Book of Mormon was derivied from Solomon Spaulding's manuscript. Just about everything in Lena Guyot's comment above is historically false.

Hagoth: "Just about everything in Lena Guyot's comment above is historically false." Equally false are the claims of modern apostles and prophets who have told Pacific Islanders that they are the descendants of Father Lehi and their islands were settled by the Book of Mormon's Hagoth, particularly when they were addressing people on Islands that had not been settled until after Book of Mormon times, whose genetic lineage is completely unique from both Native Americans and Middle Easterners.

Daniel Peterson: Hagoth, you plainly have a rigorous mastery of population genetics and Polynesian prehistory that I (and the geneticists that I know) can only envy.

Hagoth: Daniel Peterson : I would never make such a claim, but thanks for the compliment!

Daniel Peterson: Hagoth, you plainly have a rigorous mastery of population genetics and Polynesian prehistory that I (and the geneticists that I know) can only envy.

Dr. Peterson should really get to know some non-Mormon geneticists and historians for the purposes of a good liberal education.

I suspect he already knows that Hagoth was speaking the truth since he has a sharp mind and is well read, but couldn't resist practicing apologetics.

Also, he could point to some evidence that overrides the current accepted less-than-faith-promoting genetic evidence, rather than lining up the geneticists he apparently knows in front of the bus wheels.

Why do Pacific Islanders love the BOM? Why is a high percentage of them LDS?
I think the answer lies with Hagoth and Matthew Cowley. Back in the early 1900s, Matthew Cowley was a missionary in New Zealand. He later became an apostle. One of the teachings he repeated many times was the story of Hagoth. Not our Hagoth, but the one from BOM lore who lived back in 55BC. He was a nephite who built ships and sailed off to find the lost nephites who has gone back to find the city of nephi (iirc). They were never heard of again. So, logically, these sea bearing folk were lost at sea, and the Pacific Islanders were appointed the descendants of Hagoth. They were not black. They were not from the line of lamanite savages. These were descendants from the great Nephi, so they were readily accepted by white Mormons. And then they prospered.
And they have been repeatedly told of their great blood line...and so they love the BOM because it speaks of them as being a righteous people.