(September 22, 2012 at 10:52 pm)AtheistAmes Wrote: Good find. I began to browse the site, and immediately found one of my very favorite kinds of arguments:
"...Joseph Smith could not possibly have written the Book of Mormon. How could a young, farm boy with limited education like Joseph have written a fairly long, complex, flawless religious text like the Book of Mormon? If Joseph could not have written the book on his own, then therefore his story of the golden plates and the angel must be true."
If this specific alternative did not happen, then it MUST be true.
There are so many believers out there who spend all of their time & energy attempting finding ways to disprove what we do know about the creation of the earth in order to say "well if it's not this, it must be god!"
The disproof of one alternative is just that. It says absolutely nothing about what actually happened.
Who says it is "flawless?" Mormons? Now there is an unbiased source.
Smith's idea was hardly original.
http://www.utlm.org/onlineresources/bomi...rigins.htm
Quote:One of the claims often made by LDS people is that there was no information on the Indian ruins in Mexico and Guatemala available prior to 1830. Actually, numerous books recounting similar ideas as those in Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon had already been published.
Many of the books published on the American Indians claimed a possible tie to the lost tribes of Israel. The Book of Mormon follows this idea and claims that the main group in the story is Israelites from Jerusalem. Other ideas found in the Book of Mormon that are also found in books of Smith’s time include: two groups warring against each other, a white group destroyed by war, horses, use of the wheel, mammoth bones, Hebrew writings, Egyptian influence, the use of stone boxes, written records, temples, grand ruins, highways, fortifications, etc. These commonly held theories prepared the way for people to more readily believe the Book of Mormon.
However, current findings and non-LDS scholars now reject these ideas and see no relationship between the American Indians and Hebrews or the civilization depicted in the Book of Mormon.
Below is a partial list of books published prior to 1830 dealing with the Indians (condensed from Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon, Dan Vogel, Signature Books, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1986, pp. 105-132).
