You know, only anti-Mormons refer to them as “tablets”. Joseph Smith and his contemporaries always used the term plates. Careful, your bias is showing.
Well, you got me. I’ll just renounce my religion right now.
:rolleyes:
Trust me, I’ve likely read more anti-Mormon literature than you have. I’ve yet to find any of it compelling or even honest. Every single attack like this I’ve found turns out to be willfully fraudulent, and tends to simply fall back on assertions like yours.
But, you see, that’s the funny thing. That’s the bit that doesn’t fit. If Smith was really making it all up, it would have made plenty of sense for him to use the whole Lost Ten Tribes thing. But he didn’t. The Lost Tribes are nowhere in the BoM; in fact the action in Israel takes place before they got lost. The people who take off for parts unknown (in a classic Israelite theme of the righteous minority fleeing into the wilderness to escape wickedness) are not part of the Ten Tribes at all. Why not, when that would have made such obvious sense?
(Thus you see that we don’t in fact believe any such thing as that American Indians are descended from the Lost Tribes. No Mormon would say such a thing, knowing that they “went north,” as the scriptures say.)
Look. I, personally, care very little about your religion. I am merely trying, a little, to find the truth behind it and if I haven’t yet read every last pro-Mormon apologetic and anti-Mormon screed that is out there it is because I haven’t been trying all that hard. On my own I find the Book of Mormon a preposterous fiction that is poorly written and demonstrably false, purely from a historical and archaeological standpoint.
I would not try to turn you from your religion any more than I’d try to turn a Muslim, Christian, or Scientologist from his. If it provides value to you that is wonderful. Just don’t be surprised to hear me chuckling in the background.
In a Mormon leaflet I got at the Salt lake City visitor center, Smith described the gold plates as being written in something called “reformed egyptian”. I have never read of any achaeologist/egyptologist who has ever mentioned such script. Mr.Charles Anthon (an egyptologist on NYC) apparently pronounced “reformed egyptian” as fake.
And thisegolden plates…they got taken up to heaven, so we cn’t inspect them today…have I missed anything?
I’ll believe in the BOM when I can see those golden plates!
But what is your basis for this? The link you provided was worthless. I can understand your rejecting the Book of Mormon based on spurious evidence, but I can’t respect that opinion. My point in threads like this is not to prove the Book of Mormon, but to disprove faulty criticisms of it.
It’s not petty. I challenge you to find any references to the plates as “tablets” that isn’t in an anti-Mormon screed. Your usage of the term suggests you spend far more time reading the “anti” stuff than the rebuttals of same.
Because it was coined in the Book of Mormon itself. If it were discovered by modern archaeologists, there’s no reason to believe they’d name it the same.
There are two accounts of that story. Martin Harris’ (who visited) and Anthon’s after the fact. Their accounts disagree.
Martin Harris mortgaged his farm to pay for the printing of the first edition.
That is nonsensical of course. If you saw the plates you wouldn’t believe, you’d know.
When you find evidence of the Jewish exodus or the resurrection, let me know.
The common theory in Smiths time was that American Indians were descended from the Hebrews not just the lost tribes. See above post on the book “A View of the Hebrews” Consider these questions as well.
1. Linguistics. Why, if the American Indians were descended from Lehi, was there such diversity in their languages, and why were there no vestiges of Hebrew in any of them?
Why does the Book of Mormon say that Lehi found horses when he arrived in America? The horse did not exist in the Americas until the Spaniards brought them over in the sixteenth century.
Why was Nephi stated to have a bow of steel? Jews did not have steel at that time, and no iron was smelted in the Americas until the Spanish colonization.
Why does the Book of Mormon mention “swords and cimeters” when scimitars (the current spelling) did not come about until the rise of Islam after 500 A.D.?
Why does the Book of Mormon mention silk, when silk did not exist in the Americas at that time?
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but this statement is false. As far as I know, horses did exist in the Americas before the 16th century. The indigenous horses were extinct when the Spaniards arrived, so they were reintroduced then.
Note that I am not an expert on horses. I am basing this statement on this article from Slate, which says:
Now, I don’t know how the time of extinction of the indigenous horses lines up with when Lehi was supposed to have come to the Americas, but you might want to consider at least refining your argument.
Ok, so “reformed egyptian” was the lingua fraca of the ancient Hebrews. How come we don’t see any of this stuff written on monuments in Palestine, Egypt, etc.?
Second, I don’t know much about this Professor Anthon, but in 1827, I’d wager there would be damn few egyptologists in the USA, who were able to read ancient egyptian. As far as I know, ancent Egyptian (hieroglyphic/hieratic) writings were unreadable until Champollion was able to translate them into greek (using the famous Rosetta Stone).
So now I get it: an upstate NY farmer (named Joseph Smith) found a box with buried golden plates…he puts on a set of eyeglasses (the “urim and thummin”-which nobody can see today), and translates the golden plates. Whereupon he has Pof . Anthon pronounce them genuine…although nobody has ever heard of this “reformed egyptian” script. Next, Smith has everybody around him swear that what he said was true…only all of these people later recanted their testimony.
Finally, an angel takes the golden plates to heaven (which is why you can’t see them).
Does any of this make any sense? I’d just as soon believe that little green men come here in flying saucers from Alpha Centauri, and haunt rural farmers, and insert probes into people, and mutilate cattle.
Sorry, but I’ve heard some silly stories, and this one is pretty silly.
Now that most emphatically is not true. 11 people said they saw the plates (3 were shown by an angel and 8 just the plates themselves) and their testimonies are in the introduction to every Book of Mormon published. About 5 would later leave the church over some disagreement with Joseph Smith; every single one would maintain his testimony, even after there was no possible gain to be had if they hadn’t really seen the plates.
And anyway, every LDS doper here has heard every argument used against the Book of Mormon and refuted it (I guess SDMB is too sophisticated for Revelations 22:18-19?) and we view it on spiritual grounds. As someone has said, the physical evidence is no more than an intellectual exercize.
Just for the sake of argument, there was ceratinly a danger of loss of credibility and public ridicule if they were to recant their testimony, so I would submit that that could be construed as a “gain”.
Actually, we haven’t started with the arguments, in part because these people are our friends and it is unseemly to do a full-scale SDMB anti-apologetic on your friends. But if anybody cares to tick off Dex, tomndebb, or Diogenes the Cynic enough that they go at it point by point I’m not cleaning up afterwards…
Two things: What does that have to do with the discussion? and the nitpick that the book’s name is “Revelation,” singular and, to paraphrase emarkp, your usage of the term suggests you spend far more time reading analyses of the Bible than the Bible itself.
Oh? So the BoM need not be factually accurate because its spiritual message is what is important? Sounds like somebody has started down that slippery slope to apostasy, secular humanism, and, eventually, Catholicism! (great big )
That is the problem, isn’t it? I think I Love Me. Vol I and gobear got pitted recently for just such an issue. It’s so easy to tear something you can plainly see as thin as tissue paper apart.
It may not be as thin as tissue paper, but if it looks that way to you, it’s hard to resist.
The Book of Mormon has certain issues with it that, to an outside observer, throw up little highlights of, “Oh, man, that’s such utter BS.” Of course, so do many other religions. And truthfully, many to most Mormons are good and honest people, possibly more so on average than most other religions. I have minor personal issues with certain things they do. (Yes, I understand it’s an invitation to be baptised, not actual baptism, but it still pisses me off when they do it to people who died in the Holocaust. Pisses me off a lot. That, and certain monoculture issues that resulted in the Boy Scout takeover and then the homosexual issue, and the minor gutting of the CIA in the 90s…)
But, generally, they’re good people. So poking at what I see as tissue paper, I’m aware, will hurt them. I try not to do it. If someone asks, I’ll wave gently in a direction that might give a hint, but it just feels rude and insulting to go further.
Exactly. And it takes some of the fun out of it. Thanks to this thread I am itching to do a point by point rip of the entire Mormon belief system but I catch myself and stop. We are a community here. One formed to fight ignorance, yes, but still a community and there are some things I don’t do to neighbors and friends.
I leave my dirty work to Diogenes because he lacks such restraint.
Perhaps in the denial sense of the word but not in the proven wrong sense.
Coming up with some vague justification that allows the possibility to remain open is far, far from proof.
Karl Popper
7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be
false, are still upheld by their admirers ? for example
by introducing /ad hoc/ some auxiliary assumption, or by
reinterpreting the theory /ad hoc/ in such a way that it
escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible,
but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the
price of destroying, or at least lowering, its
scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing
operation as a “/conventionalist/ /twist/” or a
“/conventionalist/ /stratagem/.”)
John 4:24
God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
I agree there is some spiritual value in the BOM. That does not lend proof to Smiths story about the source. I can be edified by listening to a preacher who is a complete charlatan if my heart and soul are in the right place. In order to grow spiritually we must diligently seek the truth and be willing to let go of myth and tradition that can’t hold up to reason and logic. Then again, Spiritual growth is not the subject of this thread.
No it wasn’t. I guess you didn’t read the link I gave you.
Actually one of the strengths of the Book of Mormon is that none of the witnesses of the plates ever recanted, even though several became estranged to Joseph Smith.
Not surprising since you can’t even seem to get the basic facts of the story straight. Strawmen can be torn apart so easily.
emarkp, please, tone down, restrain yourself, allow us to return to civil conversation? This is a thread on literary deconstructionism. Let’s see if we can get some real chewing on that, okay?
Because, as I said, we’re restraining ourselves in the sense of good community.
First of all, I only mentioned Revelation because it is the single most common argument against the Book of Mormon, I’ve heard it dozens of times, and I’m surprised it didn’t come up here. My point on the spiritual aspect is only that we tend not to get carried away regarding the literal truth of the book not because we doubt it but because it’s pointless. I’ve heard all the objections raised here before many times, and heard them refuted. I have spiritual reasons for believing the Book of Mormon is factually true.
cosmosdan, thank you for quoting Popper rather than Inigo Montoya from “The Princess Bride.” It was refreshing.
By the way, I neglected to welcome our guests in this thread! I hope you all find enough potential for intelligent discussion, or at least potential opportunities to slap me around, that you join the SDMB permanently.
