Difference between revisions of "Criticism of Mormonism/Websites/MormonThink/Mockery, hyperbole and nonsense"

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Mockery, hyperbole and nonsense statements from MormonThink.com


A FAIR Analysis of:
MormonThink
A work by author: Anonymous

MormonThink states...

"There's an episode of the cartoon South Park called "All About the Mormons". In the episode, a faithful LDS family tells the story of the Lost 116 pages to a neighbor boy they are trying to convert. They tell this story as proof that Joseph Smith was telling the truth and Mormonism is true. Perhaps the most telling comment we've ever heard about the Lost 116 pages debacle comes from the neighborhood boy, who, after hearing the story of the Lost 116 pages, exclaims ""Wait, Mormons actually know this story and they still believe Joseph Smith was a Prophet?"

Editor's Comments, "The Lost 116 Page of the Book of Mormon," MormonThink.com"

FairMormon Response


Why yes, of course we should give credence to a satirical cartoon as providing valuable insight when determining what our most life-altering and sacred religious beliefs entail.

MormonThink states...

"The Nephites and Lamanites were primitive peoples. Joseph Smith would have been considered a scholar compared to any Indians that lived 2,000 years ago. Yet we don't question that the ancient Indians wrote the original Book of Mormon, but we totally reject the idea that a 19th century man couldn't have done the same thing. That makes reason stare."

FairMormon Response


The authors seem to naively equate "ancient" with "primitive," and they actually insult both present day Native Americans and "ancient Indians" with their statements. There was nothing "primitive" about the Nephites and the Lamanites: they had sophisticated societies and the ability to keep records. It is one thing to write a history of one's own time and place that one experiences with such matters as angelic visitations, theophanies, revelations, and the appearance of the resurrected Christ. It is quite another to concoct a fictional account of such things, complete with the complex and internally consistent geography, theology, cultural behaviors, and other matters that are counter-intuitive for the modern author/translator.

Furthermore, Joseph Smith was the first to admit that he was no scholar. In his 1832 history, he started by explaining, "we were deprived of the bennifit of an education suffice it to say I was mearly instructid in reading and writing and the ground rules of Arithmatic which constuted my whole literary acquirements." Joseph Smith, at the age at which we dictated the Book of Mormon, was no scholar.