Contribute an Article

Article Philosophy

This website's philosophy for articles follows the principles and ideas expressed in the talk, The Greatness of the Evidence, delivered by Elder Jeffery R. Holland at the 50th Anniversary Chiasmus Conference at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, USA on 16 August 2017.

The Greatness of the Evidence

As explained in his talk, The Greatness of the Evidence, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said that God provides evidences as infallible proofs for His truths He reveals to His prophets. Below are five quotes from his talk.

… it should be noted that truly rock-ribbed faith and uncompromised conviction comes with its most complete power when it engages our head as well as our heart.

I have always loved that definition of revelation (D&C 8:2-3). For one thing, it makes clear that all revelation that can be called revelation comes through the influence of the Holy Ghost—that is to say that the receipt of any truth is ultimately a spiritual experience, an enlightenment facilitated and confirmed by the Holy Ghost. Secondly, that definition makes it clear that truth borne by the Holy Spirit comes with, in effect, two manifestations, two witnesses if you will—the force of fact as well as the force of feeling. [Emphasis added]

In making our case for the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, I believe God intends us to find and use the evidence He has given—reasons, if you will—which affirm the truthfulness of His work.

…but not to seek for and not to acknowledge intellectual, documentable support for our belief when it is available is to needlessly limit an otherwise incomparably strong theological position and deny us a unique, persuasive vocabulary in the latter-day arena of religious investigation and sectarian debate. Thus armed with so much evidence …, we ought to be more assertive than we sometimes are in defending our testimony of truth.

… if members of the Godhead go to the trouble of providing “many infallible proofs” of truth, then surely we are honor bound to affirm and declare that truth, and may be upbraided if we do not. My testimony to you tonight is that the gospel is infallibly true and that a variety of infallible proofs supporting that assertion will continue to come until Jesus descends as the ultimate infallible truth of all.

Article Contributions

This website welcomes the contribution of articles that provide evidences for God's truths as described in the talk, The Greatness of the Evidence. If you have not seen this talk or read its transcript, please do so now before continuing. Watch Talk Video Read Talk Transcript

The evidences for God's truths can be for truths taught by ancient or modern prophets. Especially useful for people to know are evidences that demonstrate ancient and modern prophets spoke and/or recorded truths that together are consistent with, and support, each other. One example of such truths and their evidence discovery is the first article published on this website, A River Watered the Garden: Prophetic and Geographic Perspectives.

It is becoming apparent God is revealing evidences as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ draws near. Those seeking truth can learn these evidences through the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, even if they are not scholars or "learned". God wants us to seek His truths, learn and live them, and in doing so He may grant us a view of their evidences.

If you have such an experience and others can learn from your experience and the evidences you discover, and you are not prohibited by Him from doing so, you are invited to "uncover" those evidences to the rest of us by sharing them on this website in the form of an article.

Article Common Characteristics

The characteristics of articles that describe the evidences discovered for God's truths are such that they likely will have two main components; a spiritual component and a secular component.

Spiritual Component

The spiritual component will usually reference scriptures and/or the teachings of prophets along with descriptions of one or more spiritual experiences involving the Holy Ghost that directed the author in one or several directions that led to the discovery of evidences for God's truths. This component is nearly required since discovering God's truths usually involves His revealing them to us through personal revelation; i.e., He reveals His mysteries to us far more often than we could possibly discover them on our own, if ever.

Secular Component

The secular component identifies the discovered evidences and supports those evidences with as much secular knowledge as known or learned by the author or others. This support usually gives descriptions of various secular items supporting God's truths. Be aware that God often gives evidences commensurate to the knowledge of our society, not necessarily commensurate with your knowledge. This means you may have to learn things in order to clearly support the secular items you will present as evidence.

Solar Eclipse Analogy

To illustrate using an imperfect analogy, most ancient peoples did not correctly understand astronomy. When a solar eclipse occurred, it scared them and they attributed it to various superstitions, all of which were false. Today, a solar eclipse is mostly a non-event since we, as a society, understand what causes such an event and can even predict them to the second. However, if you had to predict a solar eclipse, which would be easy for the astronomers in our society who have the advanced knowledge, you would have to learn some astronomical concepts and maybe even some advanced mathematics to do so.

This can be similar to the case with God's evidences; they may not be understood by most people but a few people in society may have enough knowledge to understand the evidences, if they were aware of them . If God leads you, who may be "unlearned" (meaning you are not a specialized scholar, scientist, or other expert but are openly curious and continue to seek knowledge and truth), to His evidences for His truths, you may have to stretch yourself by learning enough from others to sufficiently understand them so you can describe the evidences in such a manner that many other people can understand them.

Secular Support

To this end, secular items must be supported with footnoted sources identifying where the descriptions or additional knowledge came from so website visitors can see the source information for themselves by clicking on links in the footnotes. These sources must be authoritative and not just someone's opinion on a blog or social media on the Internet.

Spiritual and Secular Journey

One way to make an article interesting is to describe the author's spiritual journey of evidence discovery, describing spiritual questions asked and their answers revealed by God, and describing the answers supported by secular knowledge discovered along the way, as well as additional questions that arose during the journey that prayer, personal revelation, and/or further research answered.

One example of such an approach is the first article published on this website, A River Watered the Garden: Prophetic and Geographic Perspectives.

Note that spiritual experiences of evidence discovery do not usually happen just because one sets out to do so. Instead, this website owner's experiences happened while simply studying scriptures, reading talks by general authorities, pondering different topics, etc., and wondering what they meant, then asking God in prayer for understanding, and receiving enlightenment through personal revelation that revealed something never before considered or would never have been thought. In every instance the experiences were unexpected but, notwithstanding, they were wonderfully enlightening in such a manner as to have no doubt as to the source of the enlightenment.

Contributor Submissions

Prospective articles must be written by the original author (you cannot submit someone else's work) in an "article" format suitable for printing as pages on a computer printer. There is no specific "article" format required by this website.

Copyright

Authors must copyright their articles but do not need to purchase a copyright. The author must submit a prospective article as a PDF file that anyone can download and print for their own personal use. This implies authors will grant download and print permissions so anyone can use an article and pass it on to others. The point of these articles is to disseminate their information as widely and quickly as possible.

Disclaimer

An article must have a disclaimer immediately below its title on the first page indicating the content is the author's opinions and does not imply, in any way, that it offers or specifies official positions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or is endorsed by the Church.

Why is there a the need for a disclaimer? Because Jesus Christ restored His true church organization for the purpose of providing His true gospel, His priesthood authority and its ordinances, and His true doctrine for the eternal salvation and exaltation of all of us, through His duly constituted prophets and apostles. That is their responsibility straight from Jesus Christ and our Father in Heaven. They do not have the responsibility or time to vet every evidence claimed by every person.

The following is a suitable disclaimer.

The opinions expressed in this article are entirely those of the author, <author name>, with no intent to represent official positions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or imply the Church endorses this article.

Supporting Evidence

External information presented by an article must notify the reader of the source for the information via footnotes. Assumptions, assertions, and claims must be supported by footnoted source information or declared as personal opinion. Opinions must be explicitly noted or couched in terms that unambiguously indicate they are the author's opinion.

Footnotes are preferred since readers have indicated they vastly prefer footnotes they can immediately see at the bottom of the page they are reading compared to endnotes. They really dislike having to go to the end of an article to see an endnote and then having to return to the page where they must locate the place where they left off reading.

Copyrighted Materials

Copyrighted works such as photographs, paintings, or any other literary works must have written permission to appear in a submitted article. Before the website publishes an article, the author must supply all written permissions as proof of permission. The website will archive a copy of the written permissions with the article's final PDF file version.

URL Links

All URL links must work at the time of submission and must be shown in the footnotes as an absolute, or full, URL path; i.e., one cannot hide a URL link behind a word or phrase, such as "here". The reason the URL path must appear in such a manner is for the situation when someone prints an article, the reader of the printed article can manually enter the URL in a web browser to see source information.

In addition, a PDF file must not underline URLs displayed in its article, which is often the default formatting applied to "links" by many word-processing software applications. The reason for this restriction is that some URLs contain the underscore character (_) and underline formatting can obscure the underscore character. This can lead the reader to falsely believe the underscore is a space character, which when manually entered by the reader leads to a search error indicating no such web page exists.

In the case of a dynamically created URL (e.g., Google or Bing search), the source information must be accessible using a static URL. It is often the case that a dynamic link can be shortened to just enough to always access the information. You will have to experiment by removing characters from the end of the dynamic URL until what is left always shows the source information web page.

Visuals

Visuals such as charts, graphs, maps, graphics, photographs, illustrations, etc. are strongly encouraged in an article. They can condense prose, since the reader can see what the author is talking about, and can speed the reader's understanding of the subject matter if the author's descriptions are less exact or phrased ambiguously (e.g., just what does "it" refer to?).

Abstract

Each submission must have a short abstract or introduction to the article's topic that will appear in the article's web page, which may also have an image or two. This does not have to exactly match anything within the PDF file but should be related to the article and not just be a "hook" or "eye candy" to attract a person's attention or click.

Last Page - Author Biography, Contact Email, Acknowledgements, Article URL, and Permissions

The article must contain the author's biography, picture, and contact email address in the upper part of the last page.

Optional acknowledgements may follow if they are few enough to appear on the last page without forcing any of the other items on the last page to appear elsewhere; otherwise, they should be on a separate page immediately before the last page.

Next is the article's web page URL. This permits readers of a printed copy to access the online article. It is highly suggested to format the URL using the Times New Roman font since it clearly distinguishes between the uppercase letter I, the lowercase letter l, and the digit 1, and the uppercase letter O and the digit 0.

The standard permissions shown in the example below must appear on the last page of all articles.

Below is the author contact, article URL and Copyright Permissions for the article A River Watered the Garden: Prophetic and Geographic Perspectives used as an example.

==========

Contact the Author: uvugdbrown@gmail.com

Article URL: https://www.evidenceuncovered.org/articles/A-River-Watered-the-Garden

Individuals may copy, print or electronically display this article for their own personal or family use, or use in an educational situation.
In addition, they can share the article in electronic, printed, or electronically displayed form with any other individuals. Electronic form means this article’s PDF file.
Websites, electronic publications, and printed publications may quote excerpts from this article but to do so must include the article’s title, author’s name, and the Article URL reference above.
In all situations, no one may alter the article and must use, copy, share, or print the article in its entirety, including this page, except as expressly permitted above for excerpts.
The author expressly forbids the use of the article in compilations or anthologies without written permission. If granted, such compilations or anthologies must include the entire article and give the article’s title, author’s name, and the Article URL reference above. Use the Author Contact above to request written permission from the author.

==========

Lastly, if the author has secured an ISBN number for the article, it appears as a 1.25"x2.0" ISBN barcode in the lower-right corner 1" from the page's edges. Below is an example barcode.

Article Submission

To submit an article, send an email with the article attached as a PDF file to Submissions@EvidenceUncovered.org. Enter the article's title in the email's Subject line. All correspondence between the author and the website will use the Subject line to keep emails about the author's article grouped as "conversations" in their respective email systems.

An article web page permits a graphic at the top over which it will display the article's title. If you have a graphic/image you want at the top of the webpage, please attach it as a .jpg file to your emailed submission with the file name "WebpageGraphic.jpg".

If you have written permissions for use of copyrighted works (e.g., emails, text messages, scanned letters, etc), list the works, their owner's name, and the written-permissions file name in a text file named "CopyrightPermissions.txt". Zip it and the individual written-permission evidence files into a zip file named "WrittenPermissions.zip". The zip file's contents must be extractable by opening it in a Microsoft Windows operating system.

Video Links

If an article has a corresponding video, the article's PDF version must contain a clickable URL link to the video hosted on another service such as YouTube or Vimeo. The URL link in the article must display the entire URL address so users reading a printed version of the article can manually enter the URL to see the video. For ease-of-use by website visitors, this website will publish the video link alongside the article.

See URL Notes above for required URL format information.

Article Reviews

All contributor submissions are reviewed by the website moderator and/or others invited by the moderator for the purpose of review. Reviewers verify the soundness of evidence presented by articles as proofs of God's truths and that the truths the articles present as God's are truly His truths as taught by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

If the article contains a video link for a video accompanying the article, reviewers will also review the video.

Articles or videos containing unverifiable "facts" or unsupported speculation or opinion will not be accepted for publication on this website. Whether any facts, speculations and/or opinions are considered unverifiable, unsupported, or "just plain crazy" is at the sole discretion and judgement of the reviewers.

If an article is deemed unacceptable, the reviewers and/or moderator will indicate the unacceptable parts along with the reason they are considered unacceptable. The author can them perform further research, find more authoritative sources, remove speculation, etc. to make the article acceptable and resubmit it for reconsideration.

Author Copyright and Permissions

All articles submitted for publication on this website must be original work by the author(s) and copyrighted. The author retains ownership of the article. Notwithstanding, submitting an article for publication means the author expressly gives permission, a license, for use of the PDF file version of the article for the following purposes by all website users, subject to the restrictions and conditions below.

Permissions

The author gives all website visitors and any other secondary users the right to read the article on the website, in printed form, or in any other non-commercial electronic or physical form.
The author gives all website visitors the right to download the PDF file for the visitor's own personal or educational use, to share a copy of the electronic PDF file with other individuals, to print the PDF file for personal use and/or to share printed copies with other individuals, and to display electronically (e.g., TV or computer monitor) the PDF file for personal use and/or to share with other individuals (e.g., students in an educational setting, members in a church, etc).

Conditions

The author specifies the article is copyrighted by centering at the bottom of the article's first page a copyright notice using the format "© Year Author's_Name" (e.g., © 2023 John Doe). Yes, we understand that is not needed as per copyright law but the average website visitor will not know that and we want to remind the visitor and those with whom the visitor shares an article that your article is copyrighted.
The author provides a recent photograph and a short biographical sketch on its own page, which must be the last page of the article. The sketch must identify the author's name.
The author provides contact information in the form of an email address so reviewers and visitors can contact the author. The contact information must appear by itself as the last line in the biographical sketch using the format, "Contact the Author: email address".
If the author has accompanying video(s), the video URLs must appear below the biographical sketch on the same page. Note video URLs still can appear in the article, likely as footnotes, so the actual, possibly long, URLs do not unduly interrupt the article's text.

Restrictions

The article may appear in another publication, such as a compilation or anthology, or another website, without the permission of the website owner only if the other publication or website indicates this website published the article by referencing this website's article web page URL.
Under no conditions may an author publish an article for commercial or personal gain through this website or publishing via any other means the article published on this website. Notwithstanding, an author may publish via other means and recover the costs of such publication; i.e., the author does not financially profit therefrom but can recover publication costs.

Article Acceptance

After possible feedback, requested corrections and clarifications, etc., the website's moderator will accept or reject a reviewed article submission by notifying the author(s) of its acceptance or rejection. Note there is no guaranteed response time since all reviewers are volunteering their time and expertise. Notwithstanding, reviewers will make "good faith" efforts to keep an author up-to-date relative to review progress. Please note the definition of a good-faith effort is solely the discretion of a reviewer.

Author Compensation

This website does not compensate author's for their contributed articles. Since the website is free, contains no ads, and its intent is to disseminate discovered evidences for God's truths, its policy is author compensation might fall into the category of "priestcraft", which God specifically forbids and which the website explicitly avoids.

See also Restrictions in Author Copyright and Restrictions above.

Article Publication

If accepted, this website will publish the article's PDF file version on the website as an article web page.

Part of this process is assigning a URL for the article's web page, which URL the author must insert with the format "Article URL: absolute url address" above the Copyright Permissions on the article's last page for the published final PDF file version. This permits those reading a printed version of the PDF file to manually access the article's web page if they want to access the electronic PDF file.

Page updated

Report abuse