darth_ender said:
RicOlie_2 said:
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);
Have you read the accounts?
No, I have not read the accounts themselves. Certain details seemed to be mutually exclusive when I read the letter's summary of them (I don't feel like opening up the PDF again just to check for sure), but I can easily believe that critics exaggerate the differences (and they tend to exaggerate similarities when it suits their purpose).
- 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);
It's one of several possibilities posed by apologists. What I believe the texts to be are ancient Egyptian texts, exactly as most interpret[...].
I think that makes sense and that's the first time I've heard a reasonable rationalization of those data.
- 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);
While being unreliable does cast a person's character in doubt, it does not invalidate all that a person says[...]
As for his witnesses, different events, the extent of their witness, who the witnesses are (i.e. one being a poor witness for something does not invalidate another's witness for something else), once again the social conventions and circumstnces, etc. It would be a fallacy to discredit Book of Mormon witnesses because of the affidavit of the witnesses of Joseph's marriages.
I agree with that. My point was just that if he could find such a large number of people to testify to his monogamy when he was practicing polygamy, it seems he could have had people testify to the truth of the golden plates without them being true. My focus on the witnesses is in part due to a vague recollection from reading through this thread that the witnesses to the plates was a significant factor in your acceptance of Mormonism as the truth.
[...]
http://en.fairmormon.org/Template:PolygamyPortal
Fair enough, though I don't find all fairmormon.org's arguments more convincing than the author of the PDF's. I can put that down to lack of in-depth reading from the Mormon side of things.
- 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);
There is no such thing as an unbiased witness. However, if he did not see what he says he saw, don't you think he'd be more likely to actually take a stand against it? "You mean I wasted my money on this phony book?!" And most of his faith was indeed devoted to schisms of Mormonism. Only his interest in the Shakers followed.
Note that this is incomplete but i won't be able to post till tomorrow probably.
Indeed, there is no such thing as an unbiased witness, but a person can be an unbiased (or almost so) witness for a certain thing. I don't agree he'd be more likely to take a stance against it, but I won't argue my thoughts on it, since that isn't the purpose of the thread. The letter/PDF states that Martin Harris was a member of five previous religious organizations, some of which he testified for. Is that inaccurate? Even so, if he testified for one, that seems to effectively nullify the validity of his later testimony. Again, as you say, the unreliability of one witness doesn't mean they were all unreliable, but I think it's safe to say that this one wasn't.
