Keep this in mind the next time you stop at your favorite hardware establishment. When you enter the store, pick up a bag of cement, tuck it under your arm, and continue with your shopping … carrying this weight for a distance of three miles (according to Smith’s mother), at times running ‘at the top of your speed’ … As you attempt to replicate the story, you will soon realize that Smith’s tale was nothing but a fabrication. Mormon Research Ministry online, ‘How Heavy Were the Gold Plates?’
This prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi, in his book of Mormon, every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last ten years. He decides all the great controversies – infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the rights of man. All these topics are repeatedly alluded to. How much more benevolent and intelligent this American Apostle, than were the holy twelve, and Paul to assist them!!! He prophesied of all these topics, and of the apostasy, and infallibly decided, by his authority, every question. How easy to prophecy of the past or of the present time!! Alexander Campbell
Joseph Smith made it up in the nineteenth century. He made it up in seventeenth-century English although writing in the nineteenth century. I mean it’s got charlatan written absolutely all over it. Professor Richard Dawkins, interview Bill Mayer 2nd October 2009
Christianity, even fundamentalist Christianity, is substantially less ridiculous than Mormonism ... Christian scriptures are genuinely ancient. The translations from Hebrew and Greek that Christians use are in a language contemporary with the translators. The Book of Mormon is not ancient and the language of its alleged translation is ludicrously anachronistic. It was dictated by Joseph Smith, a man with a track record of charlatanry, purporting to translate it from ‘Reformed Egyptian’ with the aid of a magic stone in a magic hat ... The English in which Smith dictated it is not the English of his own time (1830) but the English of more than two centuries earlier. As Mark Twain cuttingly observed, if you remove all occurrences of ‘It came to pass’ the book would be reduced to a pamphlet. The language in which it is written proclaims it to be a palpable fake – as if Smith’s cock-and-bull story of golden plates hadn’t already given the game away. Smith obviously was steeped in the King James Bible, and he made up a whole new set of ‘scriptures’ in the same style of English ... Setting aside the mountebankery of Smith’s English style, many of the core beliefs of Mormonism run counter to everything we now know for certain about the colonisation of America. DNA evidence, for example, utterly refutes the claim that Native Americans are ‘a remnant of the House of Israel’. The idea that Jesus visited America is preposterous, and the idea that Adam and Eve did too is even worse (it is at least arguable that Jesus existed). The traditional Mormon belief in the inferiority of black people (only lately renounced for reasons of political expediency) is as scientifically inaccurate as it is obnoxious. The great ‘prophet’ Brigham Young even prescribed the death penalty for inter-racial marriage. Richard Dawkins
The Mormons will tell you the same: you may think it’s a bit cracked to think that Joseph Smith found another bible buried in upstate New York but you should see our missionaries in action. I’m not impressed. I’d rather have no Mormons and their missionaries, quite honestly, and no Joseph Smith. Christopher Hitchens v Tony Blair: Is Religion a Force for Good in the World? debate 2010
During our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined. He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, mode of traveling, and the animals upon which they rode, their cities, their buildings, with every particular; their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life with them. Lucy Smith, mother of Joseph
The plates were secreted about three miles from home ... Joseph, on coming to them, took them from their secret place, and, wrapping them in his linen frock, placed them under his arm and started for home.
After proceeding a short distance, he thought it would be more safe to leave the road and go through the woods. Traveling some distance after he left the road, he came to a large windfall, and as he was jumping over a log, a man sprang up from behind it, and gave him a heavy blow with a gun. Joseph turned around and knocked him down, then ran at the top of his speed. About half a mile further he was attacked again in the same manner as before; he knocked this man down in like manner as the former, and ran on again; and before he reached home he was assaulted the third time. In striking the last one he dislocated his thumb, which, however, he did not notice until he came within sight of the house, when he threw himself down in the corner of the fence in order to recover his breath. As soon as he was able, he arose and came to the house. Lucy Smith, History of Joseph Smith by His Mother pp.107-108
One shouldn’t be surprised by Smith’s abandonment of the so-called keystone of the Mormon religion; nor should one be surprised by Smith’s utter disdain for what he regarded as the simple-minded stupidity of those who actually bought into his lies.
To be sure, Smith had a habit (about which he privately boasted to his friends) of making up stories about imaginary ‘golden bibles’, then playing it out even further for his incredulous associates when Smith discovered that they actually swallowed his tall tales hook, line and sinker. Steve Benson, board post 22 August 2011, ‘October 2 1841: We Were There When a Faithless Joseph Smith Got Rid of the Book of Mormon by Putting it Back Into the Ground’
In our meeting with Oaks and Maxwell, Mary Ann began by explaining to them that she was sincerely trying to do what the Mormon Church had admonished its members to do: namely, study the scriptures.
She informed them that the more she examined Mormonism’s scriptural texts, the more she found contradictions between the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants.
Mary Ann informed the two apostles that she was having a difficult time reconciling those contradictions. Therefore, she said, she decided to undertake her own personal study of the Book of Mormon – but from another point of view.
She took out a well-used, paperback copy of the Book of Mormon and showed Oaks and Maxwell what she had done with it.
Opening the book and thumbing through its pages, she demonstrated to them how she, in Seminary scripture study cross-referencing style, had color-coded the text for the Spaulding Manuscript, B H Roberts’ study of parallels between Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon, the King James text of the Book of Isaiah and the King James text of the New Testament – with particular emphasis on the Book of Mormon timeline from 600BC to 1BC, when the words of the New Testament had not yet been written.
She then pointed out to Oaks and Maxwell seventeen parallels she had discovered between the lives of the Book of Mormon prophet Alma and the New Testament apostle Paul.
She also directed their attention to wording in Alma’s letters that was found in exactly the same language as that in Paul’s. Mary Ann asked Oaks and Maxwell to explain to her how these things could find their way into the Book of Mormon ...
Oaks told Mary Ann, ‘Well, you know, as you've thumbed through your book, it only appears to me that 5% of your book has been marked, so I would say don’t throw out the 95% because of the 5%. Don’t take the 5% that you have serious questions about and cast out the 95% that is unexplained or, as Steve said, divinely inspired.’ Steve Benson, board post 1st March 2006, ‘More from Deceptive Dallin: What Oaks Has Said in Private vs Public About the Book of Mormon’
Where’s a working Liahona when you need one?
Anyone got a map to Joseph Smith’s Sacred Grove? Didn’t think so. From the clueless Mormon Church’s own website:
‘The Joseph Smith Sr family moved to this 100-acre property in western New York [Manchester, New York, near Palmyra] around 1818. Joseph Smith, Jr labored with his father and brothers to remove trees and prepare this heavily forested land for farming.
‘‘On the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of 1820,’ young Joseph went into these woods to pray, to a place where he ‘had previously designed to go’. Here, God the Father and His resurrected Son, Jesus Christ, appeared to Joseph Smith to commence the Restoration of the gospel in the latter days.
‘Joseph Smith’s family moved away from this farm in 1830. The Church acquired the land in the early 1900s. The exact location of Joseph Smith’s First Vision is unknown, but it occurred somewhere within a 10-acre forest on the western boundaries of the farm. This forest has been referred to as the Sacred Grove since 1906 …’
That the Sacred Grove is unfindable hasn’t kept the Mormon Church from peddling its now-heralded ‘location’ as the actual spot where God and Jesus stopped in to talk to Joseph Smith …
Author John J. Hammond – in his The Creation of Mormonism: Joseph Smith, Jr …
‘Even the physical setting where the First Vision supposedly took place has been highly idealized. True-believing Mormon historian Richard Bushman, tells us that ‘Joseph Smith came to a determination to pray for help in the early spring of 1820. With no hope of privacy in the little cabin filled with children and household activity, he went to a place in the woods where his father had a clearing and where Joseph had left his axe in a stump.’ To say the least, this ‘picture’ does not fit with the beautiful pristine grove of trees called to mind in official descriptions and re-creations of the Sacred Grove, not to mention the leafy arbor which tourists are directed to on the historic Smith Farm in Palmyra, New York. It apparently was not so much a ‘grove’ (sacred or not), as it was a man-made clearing with tree stumps! …’
Finally, let’s open the following big can of worms for Mormon true-believers:
There is inconvenient evidence that Joseph Smith junior wasn’t even in his Palymyra, New York, household in 1820 – this according to the Manchester 1820 census itself. Moreover, there exists further evidence that Smith’s family didn’t move to their Palmyra farm until 1822.