Well, I don’t wish to insult the esteemed LDS posters, yet I should give my unvarnished opinion.
IMO, Joseph Smith was a fraud, a semi-educated treasure hunter, who cobbled together bits of the Bible mixed with 19th century pop ethnology, and created a religion.
Now I can’t argue with the supernatural aspects fo the LDS faith–there’s no way to disprove the Preexistence, the spiritual progression of the soul through performing ordinaces, and so on.
But, unlike other religious leaders who kept their folderol strictly in the spiritual realm, where one cannot apply logic or falsifiability, Joseph Smith made claims that CAN be disproved.
For example, Joseph Smith bought an Egyptian papyrus that he claimed told the story of Abraham and Sarah’s sojourn in Egypt. At that time, Egyptian hieroglyphs ahd not yet been deciphered, so anyone could claim to have a key to understanding them without fear of being disputed. Nowadays, however, Egyptologists have shown that Smith’s papyrus is just a copy of Egyptian funeral spells and incantations, having nothing to do with events of the Bible.
Moreover, the Book of Mormon tells of the arrival of Jewish refugees to North America in the 7th century BC (I Nephi 18:23), as supposedly deciphered by Smith through the use of the seeing stones (which were set in frames for Smith to see through, so yes, they were “magic spectacles”.) The Jews divided into two groups, the Lamanites, who were wicked, and the Nephites, who were virtuous. Eventually the evil Lamanites wiped out the Nephites in a gigantic battle in the 5th century AD, near the Hill Cumorah in what is now Palmyra, New York. Moroni, the last Nephite, supposedly wrote out the Book of Mormon on gold plates and buried them to be “revealed” to Joe Smith 1,400 years later. The Lamanites were cursed by God and made darkskinned and loathsome (Mormon 5:15), and they were the people later known as the American Indians.
As a history of pre-Columbian life in North America, the Book of Mormon is a crock, contradicted by mountains of evidence to support settlement of North America by Siberian wanderers over the Bering land bridge some 12, 000 years ago, and not a pack of vagabond Hebrews.
For a skeptical approach to the many factual problems in the Book of Mormon, visit this site. Moroms are swell people and I like them a lot, but the book they believe is a scripture equal to the Bible is nothing more than 19th century fiction…