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Post #733521

Author
RicOlie_2
Parent topic
Ask the member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints AKA Interrogate the Mormon
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/733521/action/topic#733521
Date created
28-Oct-2014, 7:37 PM

AntcuFaalb said:

What's your opinion on this, d_e? http://cesletter.com/Letter-to-a-CES-Director.pdf

I came across it on Reddit recently.

 Ender, could you elaborate on your thoughts about the following specific points outlined in the letter (or whatever it is) that AntcuFaalb linked to?:

  • Why were there multiple, contradictory accounts of Joseph's first vision? That doesn't seem like the kind of thing one would forget enough to contradict oneself on (p. 23 in the PDF);
  • There is, of course, the issue of Joseph translating Egyptian artifacts which were later translated yielding a completely different result. I believe you've explained this before in this thread, but if I recall correctly, you simply (I don't mean to imply that you're a simpleton here, just that you don't have complicated beliefs on the subject :)) believe that the Egyptian texts have a dual meaning, and I'm curious why you believe that (pp. 25-30);
  • Joseph Smith was shown to be unreliable with his denial of his polygamy, so it seems quite possible, if not likely, that he was unreliable in general. If he got thirty-one witnesses to sign in testimony against Joseph's polygamical practices, should one consider the testimony of the witnesses to the golden plates any more reliable? If Joseph Smith was known to lie, and used his leadership to pressure numerous women and girls to marry him, while forbidding polygamy to all other Mormons, how can anything else he said and claimed be trusted ? (p. 34);
  • Some of the witnesses were apparently unreliable (I forget what you wrote previously about the witnesses, so perhaps the others make up for the following): 

 

Martin Harris had mortgaged his farm to finance the Book of Mormon, and thus would not be an unbiased witness (and not to the golden plates themselves, but a cloth-covered object supposed to be the plates), not to mention that he had belonged to five other denominations previously, testifying to the truth of all of them at various times, and Mormonism wasn't the last (pp. 52-53);

David Whitmer later testified that he had been instructed by God to split off from the main LDS Church, so one must either pick and choose among his testimonies or join his sect (p. 54);

Oliver Cowdery has a stronger case, but he was still a scribe and co-founder of Mormonism, so he could have easily been in cahoots with Joseph Smith in fabricating the Book of Mormon (p. 55);

  • James Strang split from the LDS Church, and though I don't know much about the history of that, it seems that most of the witnesses followed him. If they were duped by James, why not by Joseph (pp. 57-60)?;
  • There exists no extant copy of the testimony of witnesses of the golden plates (in the oldest copy of it, the "signatures" are all written by the same hand), so there seems to be no conclusive evidence that the testimony was actually signed and agreed upon (p. 60);
  • The Testimony of Three Witnesses, which included Martin Harris, stated that they had beheld the plates and the engravings thereon, yet Martin Harris stated multiple other times that he had only seen them when covered with a cloth, and also that he had seen them with a spiritual eye. All three of those are very different things, and he seems not to have remembered what he saw. It appears he was making things up, and though he never retracted his statements, as far as I am aware (and from what I understand, left Joseph's church for James'), so it seems quite plausible that all the eyewitnesses were making it up (pp. 60-61);
  • On the witnesses never retracting their eyewitness statements, see page 60 (although I take issue with the fact that he says none of the Marian apparitions were true ;));
  • The summary in the conclusion about the eyewitnesses is also something I'd like you to address, if you don't cover it in your answer to the above.

 

Take your time answering me, and don't feel like you have to answer me all at once. I expect that some things you have a ready answer or set of links for, but I can wait for anything you want to spend a bit more time explaining. If you already explained something earlier in the thread, and I've forgotten about it, then link me to your post to save you some time.

I look forward to your responses.