It amazes me how many Mormons are miomnfsried and ignorant of the true facts surrounding the origins of their religion and the supposed golden plates. It does not matter if J Smith was or wasn't convicted. What is clear is that even before he supposedly met Moroni, he was a person who was inclined towards fanciful & magical notions. He was a early new-ager . He was into treasure hunting and claimed to be able to divine the location of buried treasure by peering at a magical stone in the bottom of his hat. Other persons did not view and certainly touch the golden plates at all. Smith expressly said that this was not possible because anyone without the Urrim & Thumin stones would be destroyed by the plates. Smith was a clever con man who always came up with an answer for everything. Conveniently, Moroni wanted the plates back when he was finished. The Mormons at my door love pointing out to me how reminiscent of the Bible the book of Mormon sounds. By this they mean that it sounds like the King James translation of the Bible. Plenty of and it came unto pass that etc. That is in fact a strong pointer to the fact that it is a fraud. The KJV sounds like it does because of the time and place in which it was translated. There was no good reason why Smith, a 19th Century East Coast American, should translate to that sound unless he was deliberately trying to create a holy book that would appear to the gullible to be a sequel to the Bible. Additionally, to accept the book of Mormon as scripture, one has to have complete and utter faith in its miraculous origins. One has to believe that in a singular time and place Smith came upon a volume, containing books by various authors, for which he was by the use of magical stones of which he was conveniently possessed the sole interpreter. By contrast whilst Christians and Jews believe that the content of the Bible is inspired by God, they do not believe that it came to us by miraculous or magical means. They accept that the Bible is in fact not a book but a collection of 66 books scribed at various times and places by various human writers in the same way as books in general are normally written. Biblical scholars can point to manuscripts and to a history of scholarship and translation that delivered these books to us. Inspiration aside, the story of the bible is a mundane a non miraculous story. The translation was a collaborative work of many, not explainable by the claimed supernatural experience of one. Indian Vedic scriptures have a corresponding scholarly history, but the Islamic Koran suffers from the same disability as to origins as the book of Mormon. It was all said to have been supernaturally conveyed to the prophet Mahommed. There is a good adage. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence . The explanations for the advent of the Koran and the book of Mormon are extraordinary claim completely devoid of extraordinary evidence . -3Was this answer helpful?
