Quick Guide to Continued Belief

This comes from the Internet.

"[T]hose who have been led by the Letter to a CES Director to abandon their faith, should, in my view, reconsider those Mormon claims and the abundant historical support that’s available for them. They simply haven’t studied enough." -Daniel C. Peterson, fairmormon.org. 

Mormonism: a gospel "so simple even a child could understand" but so nuanced only a person with the equivalent of a PhD of study of church history could actually convince themselves was true. But what do I know? I'm just another apostate.

P.S. If you're not following Just Another Apostate on Facebook, you probably should.

Way ahead of the times

Cowboys only wish they'd invented the sport.

The Book of Mormon is full of hipster, I-was-doing-that-before-it-was-cool types. Today you might run into folks who flaunt their early adoption of quinoa and kale, but the characters of The Book of Mormon predated certain trends by hundreds, if not thousands of years. Take the Jaredites for example. They were keeping honey bees in the New World thousands of years before the European honey bee ever existed there! That's very impressive. They also kept cattle and sheep thousands of years before domesticated livestock like that had even set hoof on the American continents.

The point is, when considering evidence for The Book of Mormon, we can talk about what's not been found, but we also need to recognize what shouldn't logically be included in the text. There are a number of physical anachronisms in The Book of Mormon that should definitely cause every believing Mormon more than a few minutes of doubt.

Why do we have Nephites working all manner of precious ore of every kind, including steel? Why are they riding chariots and horses into battle? Why are they working silk and all manner of fine cloth? Mormon apologists have their answers, which always involve pipe dreams and defiance of known research coupled with an active imagination.

And somehow those apologetic tactics are supposed to fit the text and squelch our doubts even though things end up looking rather ridiculous. Could this be the true interpretation of Mormon scripture?

Or maybe this?

What's that? They didn't have missiles back then, you say? No, no they didn't...

I wonder why God couldn't give Joseph a more believable translation.