As always, you can get the Straight Dope from Jack Chick. 
What does the price he paid have to do with him being a fraud or not? Paying a high price makes you buy into that talk about the golden plates, seer stones, etc?
Hey, some fraudsters don’t know when to quit. They get cocky and arrogant and think they’ll be able to smooth-talk themselves out of trouble…all the way to the gallows. That’s why they are despised so much.
He needn’t have been killed over it (though someone needs to be held accountable for Mormon hair). But if he was fraud, he was a fraud. It ain’t an insult if it is true.
Keyword “just,” the answer is no.
A fraud, yes. “Just” a fraud, no.
Let’s get back to Scientologists. Are there any that interpret the doctrines metaphorically, etc.?
I’d be surprised. Mormonism might be a “cult,” but Scientology is a CULT. Very tightly disciplined even by Mormon standards.
With regards to being a fraud, how would you compare Smith with Moses?
We know almost nothing about Moses, and in fact, a considerable number of scholars think there was no such person.
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He “paid such a disproportionately high price” for conning hundreds of people, bilking people out of their time and money, moving them across the country, sending men on missions and marrying their wives behind their back, seducing teenage girls, and creating a 2 century legacy of bullshit?
I kind of think the fraud got off easy.
Well their’s that (I guess we only know what we read, much like Jesus) but say he did exist and said the things in the Torah. Do you think he is more or less of a fraud than Joseph Smith?
Why is Joseph Smith apparently a clone on Napolean?