I haven't read through it all yet, just the first posts, but my response to this topic is the very obvious point that if God wanted to communicate with his creation, he did so very poorly. It's one of the big reasons I rejected Christianity and the Bible after I left Mormonism. It's simply not logical for His word to be so misinterpreted. It should be impervious to that, after all, this is God, right? He can't write a perfect book? Then again, he made man imperfect, so, I suppose it's a consistent problem for him to half-ass everything he creates.
Then again I'm biased. I grew up believing that the Book of Mormon was translated using ancient glasses, where as Joseph Smith read each word on the golden plates, it would appear in English and they couldn't move on to the next word until the scribe, Oliver Cowdery, wrote it down exactly right. THAT was how you did translation with God, in my mind. No room for error, just every single word fed into the magic glasses, translated to the exact English word God wanted to be used for his holy book. Notwithstanding the disillusionment of finding out that the BoM has been edited since the first copy about 3,000+ times, and about half of those changes were made to the second and third editions during JS's life(what? God made THAT big of an oopsie, Joseph? What about the glasses?), I still think my expectations of how a god might bring his word to us meek earthlings are pretty high.
Then again I'm biased. I grew up believing that the Book of Mormon was translated using ancient glasses, where as Joseph Smith read each word on the golden plates, it would appear in English and they couldn't move on to the next word until the scribe, Oliver Cowdery, wrote it down exactly right. THAT was how you did translation with God, in my mind. No room for error, just every single word fed into the magic glasses, translated to the exact English word God wanted to be used for his holy book. Notwithstanding the disillusionment of finding out that the BoM has been edited since the first copy about 3,000+ times, and about half of those changes were made to the second and third editions during JS's life(what? God made THAT big of an oopsie, Joseph? What about the glasses?), I still think my expectations of how a god might bring his word to us meek earthlings are pretty high.
