Traditional marriage

It's nice to see the LDS Church recognized that the tradition of marriage is an ever-changing one:

For much of Western history, family “interest”—economic, political, and social considerations—dominated the choice of spouse. Parents had the power to arrange marriages or forestall unions of which they disapproved. By the late 1700s, romance and personal choice began to rival these traditional motives and practices. By Joseph Smith’s time, many couples insisted on marrying for love, as he and Emma did when they eloped against her parents’ wishes. (See here.)

It's a small admission, but it's a hell of a lot better than their usual homophobic bullshit about "traditional marriage" going back to Adam and Eve. Here the Church admits that women have long been considered property of a man (like in D&C 132:62) and an important trade commodity (think of the tradition of asking for a father's permission and his agreement to "give away the bride"). Kudos.

Let's do what we can to avoid reinstating that tradition where it has fallen out of use.

Abraham and Sir Isaac

If Abraham really wrote the Egyptian papyri that Joseph Smith translated into The Book of Abraham, how the hell did Newtonian ideas end up in there? Were Abraham and Sir Isaac on the same wavelength? Did Joseph maybe sneak a little something into his translation that wasn't exactly in the words of Abraham but more in his thoughts? Or was it all made up post-Newton and have absolutely nothing to do with Abraham at all?

Whatever the case, whoever let Isaac into The Book of Abraham should have passed him up for a German fellow named Albert.

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.

It's all Greek to us

Joseph Smith had a very difficult time distinguishing Hebrew names from Greek and Latin ones. One of his biggest blunders shows up in Doctrine and Covenants 110, which reccounts the supposed visitations to Joseph and Oliver Cowdery in the Kirtland temple. In verse 12 Joseph says "Elias appeared, and committed the dispensation of the gospel of Abraham, saying that in us and our seed all generations after us should be blessed," which sounds totally cool and only slightly confusing (why's Elias officiating for the gospel of Abraham, and what the hell is Abraham's gospel anyway?). The problem occurs in the next verse when "Elijah the prophet, who was taken to heaven without tasting death, stood before us." The problem is that Elias is the Romanized Greek version of the Hebrew name Anglicized as Elijah. In other words Elias and Elijah are the same person, the former spelling of his name appears in the New Testament and the later form is found in the Old Testament.

LDS Church leaders have since decided that (1) there must have been some other prophet out there during Abraham's time named Elias (a Greek dude was hanging around with Abraham?) and that (2) Elias is probably a title for a forerunner prophet. I'm not making this shit up.

The more likely possibility seems to be that Joseph just didn't know the difference between Hebrew and Greek versions of the name in question.

Corroborating evidence to this latter theory is found in The Book of Mormon when Nephi uses the terms "Messiah," a Hebrew term, and "Christ," a Greek term - both literally meaning the anointed - in the same verse. Twice. Isn't that amazing? Nephi, a Hebrew is using messiah correctly (as a title) but using the Greek word Χριστός as Jesus' proper name. Nephi and Joseph need some serious help with their Greek.

Not that their Hebrew was any better. In 3 Nephi Jesus gives the Nephites chapter four of Malachi and the Nephites write down that "the Son of Righteousness" shall arise whereas Malachi wrote about "the Sun of righteousness." Now unless Jesus was speaking to the Nephites in English, it would have been very difficult for them to hear shamesh (Hebrew for sun) and then write down ben (Hebrew for son). What are the chances that Joseph's scribe screwed things up and the mistake going uncorrected all these years? What are the chances that Joseph thought he was being clever and screwed up?

The Book of Mormon also inserts the use of synagogues "after the manner of the Jews" in Nephite America even though synagogue worship did not exist at the time Lehi left Jerusalem. So where did the Jewish synagogue practice come from? Might Joseph have imposed New Testament era Jewish worship on people who would have been entirely ignorant of those practices?

"Just because we'll be living in the New World without any kind of telecommunicative technology doesn't mean we won't know exactly what our fellow Jews are up to in several hundred years."

Well how about Jews going to church? Laban and Zoram, two Jews living ca. 600 B.C.E., apparently were church goers, if that makes sense at all. It seems as though Joseph really liked Hellenizing his Hebrews.

Pulled from a hat

Supposedly God, in his infinite power, made the translation of the gold plates appear before Joseph's eyes as his face was hidden in a hat. (Originally we had been led to believe that the correct translation magically appeared through the lenses of the Urim and Thummim as Joseph scanned Moroni's text line by line.) In other words, the words Joseph dictated were not deciphered from a text - they were read aloud by Joseph as they magically illuminated in his hat.

This process of translation gets me wondering what kind of translator God is. How the hell did he get confused over the whole "white and delightsome" vs. "pure and delightsome" thing? One would think he would have had the foresight to avoid the whole racist debacle, right? Why's he translating tapirs as 'horses,' deer as 'cows,' and turkeys as 'sheep'? Why did he need the King James translation of the Bible so badly? And why the hell couldn't he come up with a better translation for curelom and cumom? Here's an inspired rendering, or maybe this one's more accurate:

Read from a hat? It's more like this stuff was just pulled from somebody's ass.

Scriptural errors

"And now, if there are faults they are the mistakes of men; wherefore, condemn not the things of God, that ye may be found spotless at the judgment-seat of Christ." (Title page of The Book of Mormon)

This would be a great "Get out of jail free card" for the ancient writers of The Book of Mormon if the faults and mistakes in their writings were not the same faults and mistakes of the translators of the King James Bible.

The Book of Mormon repeats verbatim the mistranslated words, it often keeps the non-textual words and phrases added by KJT translators, it promotes  misunderstandings of the Bible popular in Joseph Smith's time, and it doesn't even align with the "inspired" corrections of the JST.

To suggest that the Lehite prophets possessed the KJT is absurd. To suggest that God filled Joseph's illuminated translating mind with the texts he was already familiar with instead of giving him the actual translation of the gold plates defeats the purpose of bringing out new and improved scripture.

We need to think about this a little bit. If a student turns in homework with the same mistakes as another student, what is the teacher to think? If Thomas Monson came out tomorrow with a new book of freshly translated ancient scripture from Australia and a large part of it quoted verbatim sections from the Doctrine & Covenants and, say, the Book of Enoch, how would we feel about that?

Isaiah and the Book of Mormon

Deutero-Isaiah (or is this one Trito?) writing about Jesus. 

If the fact that Isaiah was written by more than one person isn't enough to bring on at least a little doubt, consider this fact: anything from Isaiah chapters 40-66 that made it into The Book of Mormon either verbatim, slightly altered, or paraphrased (1 Nephi 10:8, 13:37, 17:36, 20-21, 22:8 & 10-11; 2 Nephi 6:6-7 & 16-18, 7-8, 9:50-51, 10:9, 26:25; Mosiah 12:21-24, 14, 15:10-11 & 14-18 & 29-31; 3 Nephi 16:18-20, 21:8-10 & 29, 22; Moroni 10:31) was written after Lehi & Co. left Jerusalem. So how the hell did they make it onto the brass plates and over to the New World?

You could doubt the authorship of The Book of Mormon at this point if you wanted to. Or you could simply doubt the scholarly understanding that Isaiah was written by multiple authors on into the years following Lehi's departure. After all, we know that The Book of Mormon is true and that "the wisdom of this world is foolishness" (1 Corinthians 3:19).

Problem solved! Except there's still the whole plagiarism thing you have to consider too...

Book of Mormon - King James Bible

The more I read The Book of Mormon and the more I read the Bible the more I saw how much of the King James Bible was in The Book of Mormon. It was already weird enough that Nephi didn't have the foresight to spare us all the Isaiah that we would have anyway (he should have simply left things with "hey, Isaiah's awesome so read up!"). Jesus could have left a simple endorsement as well.

As a believer I was taught that some of the Bible made it into The Book of Mormon because it wasn't really the Bible per se, just God's pure inspiration and profound insights given in the same words to his prophets. And I bought that explanation. For a while anyway. Did God really inspire them to write the exact same words? I can understand him imparting the same concepts, but the EXACT SAME WORDS? Usually you can't even get two people sitting in the same lecture to write the same notes down.

I think it would have been a little more convincing had there been something in the Bible that felt a little more like The Book of Mormon, if that makes sense. Maybe an epistle from Peter about some Roman village that converted after falling to the ground and then being baptized en masse after burying all of their weapons and making oaths to never fight Gauls again or something along those lines. Why was it that The Book of Mormon felt so desperate to be the Bible, but the Bible doesn't feel much like The Book of Mormon?

Unfortunately for Mormons who want to believe The Book of Mormon is the actual historic record of another so-called flock, there are some real problems to consider. It starts to look more and more like somebody just sat down and plagiarized the living shit out of the Bible all willy nilly.