The Morg's single greatest historical issue always has been and always will be......THE GOLDEN PLATES. WHERE THE HELL ARE THEY?!?!?!?!

If the BoM story were true the existence of reformed Egyptian gold tablets would be PROOF POSITIVE of the church's origins. People would travel the world over to examine these tablets and read their ancient text. Denying the historicity of the BoM would be impossible. Denying Joseph's divine role would be hard to do when looking at the plates and seeing how the experts have verified Joseph's translation.

But where are the plates? Oh that's right......”the dog ate my homework”. Or in other words an angel took them to heaven....yea, that's the ticket.

Whether the angel was Moroni, or Nephi or Bro. FlamingSword, the one piece of evidence that would corroborate the whole story and silence all the critics just flew up to heaven and became instantly impossible to verify……well in a word that’s a PROBLEM. It’s a problem that thinking people just can’t ignore. It’s a problem because it suggests a deception.

And there is no need for the Morg to post another anonymous essay discussing the absence of the plates....talk is cheap. Instead our current ‘prophet, seer & rev-a-ma-tator’, should tell that angel to fly his ass back down here and show us the PROOF. Enough yammering about context and man-talking; its time to shut-up and slap those plates on the table for all to see. SHOW ME THE PLATES!!!!!!!

Until that happens I’m calling BULLSHIT!

well said!

why did the angel fly them back to heaven? why not have joseph just bury them again? After all, burying them was good enough the first time around to hide them from the world. I guess the plates are just too sacred to look at. Not secret, just soooo sacred.

they were never in heaven until the angel took them.

Well, if you want to be correct, you can only say "they never were."

God took them away to make sure you use faith. Yeah, that's the ticket!

Hahahahaha.

Talk about gullible!

^this. The ultimate TBM rationalization...

Ironically, if the plates had been real, they would have never built the value that the myth of their existence created. What better example of the caprice of humans? A fake gold volume is worth far more than a real one. Chicanery has more dollar value than any actual object. It's fucking embarrassing, to tell the you the truth. I belong to a species that values blatant lies over things that are real.

Don. Where I work in catering we have something called 'presidential disposables'. It's disposable plates which have a little substance and might survive one run in the dishwasher. But the cutlery is plastic and yet reflects like metal. At least one time per luncheon, some imbecile who makes $100,000/year will pass through the buffet line, hold up a fork and declare "honey, this is BETTER than a REAL fork!" This fascinates me.

True, why did Moroni even have to carry them around and the "bury them up" into the earth.

Did the lord not tell him that the whole "angel taking them into heaven" thing was on the table?

Why didn't moroni just have Mormon come down from heaven after he had the time he needed to get them completed? Something like "hey dad, I'm done, could you come grab these"? Then the angel Mormon comes to grab them and saves Moroni a lot of trouble.

Or, bag the plates idea all together and just reveal the whole thing to JS with him having to translate anything.

You know, like it ended up happening anyway.

Moroni got a bad deal. Maybe that's why he's on all the temples, God's compensation for making all his hard work a total waste of time.

dirt-poor as they were always portrayed (before young Joe had visions), if he had REALLY found ANYTHING made of gold, rather than fretting about a bunch of hen-scratching scribbled all over these plates, wouldn't somebody in the family have had the sense to just melt this stuff down into more useful form and lived high on the hog for the remainder of their days?

No, the REAL gold was always young Joe's incredible drive, creativity, and the desire to attain whatever he wanted - and he found a way to do just that. It should have bitten the dust when he did, in Carthage, but instead, has surged on to ruin way too many lives.

I've always thought that JS would have done well on a modern IQ test. He can't have been a stupid guy. But he was twisted.

Additionally, considering Ol' Joe never even used the plates to translate the BofM, what was the point of Mormon/Moroni painstakingly engraving each character on sheets of metal, hauling these plates thousands of miles to what would become New York, burying the plates in the ground to stay for 1,400 years, just to be magically transported to heaven without being used? I'd be pissed if I were Moroni!

+++

Here's my favorite "Golden Plates" story.


When I was a teenager, my mom taught the Beehive class for a while so I went to school with most of them.
I don't remember how this came about, but my mom asked my dad if he could build her a Beehive to use in her classes and I don't remember what she used it for.
He was pretty creative and made it out of heavy rope and kind of rolled it around and up until it looked like a beehive, duh. He put it on a square wood base and it was about 18 inches high, and remarkably heave due the rope he used.

He painted it light brown and for some reason it looked kind of gold.

Sometime later, the mother of one of the Beehives asked my mom how dad knew what the golden plates looked like and thought his model of them was not appropriate since they were very sacred. (I think she was the wife of the soon-to-bishop but don't remember now).

That was the same ward where I got my mission call and that beehive sat in the ward library for a long time. My mom told me later, I'm sure after I came home, that it had disappeared. I don't think she ever found out what happened to it. Wow, I wish I had a picture of it.

The angel took the plates and urim and thumim, but left the real translation tools, the rock and hat. The church has been embarrassed by the angel's sloppy retrieval, and has been hiding the rock and hat ever since.

If people could see the rock, there'd be no need to have faith that Joseph had a rock. Thanks, LDS Inc, for protecting our faith by hiding the rock.

:-/

The next big issue would be that before Joseph said that they were a sacred record, the plates were going to be a key to unlocking the secret to achieving the slippery treasures.

http://signaturebookslibrary.org/?p=13145

It's not a problem for the believing Mormons. They believe that, not just Jesus, but God the Father, the big creator of everything, came to visit Joseph Smith. So it's not a problem for them to believe that an angel took the plates to Heaven.

Joseph couldn't bury them again, because too many people were following him around, trying to get those plates to get rich off of their gold. They'd dig up the county looking for them.

"Dave the Atheist" made a very good point.

God was able to keep the plates hidden on earth for 1600 years but when the greedy white men showed up it was now beyond his powers.

The whole premise is so incredibly childish.

It doesn't matter for mormons. Mormons believe that the first principle of the gospel is faith. If the plates existed there wouldn't be any need for faith, since the church would be proven. Therefore, the plates will never be found, and mormons don't expect them to be found.

I think there are other bigger historical issues with the church. Mormons don't ever expect the plates to be found, so the fact that they're not being found isn't a problem for them. However, there are many other historical issues that mormons wouldn't expect (especially the ones who think prophets are infallible), and those will be more troublesome for them.

Yeah, and how come the gold plates are too sacred for us to keep and look at, but the Abraham papyrus, the ones that Old Abraham actually wrote his scriptures on, are here still on the earth?

How come the papyrus aren't too sacred to look at?

Why didn't the Artifact Angel take the papyrus with him too?

Answer: Joseph lied.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/28/2014 09:34AM by PapaKen.

And if papyrus can survive from before the supposed time of Abraham, why did't the Nephites use that instead of gold plates? It would have been so much easier to make and carry around. Papyrus and Reformed Egyptian -- a perfect match. But, no, the stupid Nephites had to go with gold so that everyone would want to steal them.

I wish they would actually find those damn elusive gold plates that we have been told were taken back to heaven. And that they contained all the original wording of the first printed version.
I believe that it would show not only is the BOM supposed god actually a somewhat illiterate hillbilly that had his followers write in an altered language that translated into an uneducated form of communication. But that their god knew nothing of the very world he created.
In other words, the plates themselves would prove that a couple thousand years ago, writing fiction was just as popular as it is today, and that the people at that time were just, if not more so, a superstitious, gullible, credulous people.

The golden plates were in a box of made of flat stones. Where is that box? Why couldn't Joseph show that hole in the ground to people, even if he couldn't show them the plates? Where did that disappear to?

One simple rubbing could have made a huge difference.

One must wonder why this was not done, while it is obvious that effort was taken in the facsimiles in the BOA to include for dramatic attempt to claim authenticity.

This was not even a well thought out con job.

Moroni took the plates back to protect US! How dare you question him?! Joseph told Martin and others that they would surely die if they looked at the plates OR his seerstone. If the church put the plates on display, all onlookers would die! IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?!!

The church has the seerstone, but they keep it in the vault to make sure the stone of death doesn't take the lives of faithful would-be observers. Now, Grant Palmer saw Joe's stone. He held it, cupped in his hands, close to his face, and what did he see? DARKNESS. He's now apostate!...spiritually DEAD!!...and so we see that the prophet's words have been fulfilled.

The church could prove the authenticity by digging up 1,600 year old swords and chariots near the hill Cumorah. They don't dare do any digs, because they're worried that they won't find anything. They're probably even more worried that they WOULD find something...like Joe's tin prop plates that he probably buried somewhere in the area.

They wouldn't even have to dig. Just stand by while normal everyday basement digging and ditchdigging reveal all those artifacts because 2 million dead couldn't possibly be confined to the actual hill. Seriously, unexpected artifacts are dug up all over the world by farmers, roadcrews, and anyone else with a shovel. And with the extablishment of Palmyra and Rochester and the amount of digging to create the Erie Canal, oops.

Oh wait- maybe THAT's why we have the Limited Geography Theory making it take place in Central America, with poor old Moroni dragging them all the way to New York from a different Cumorah...

Yes, if the plates were available for examination, they'd be as valuable as the papyrus for the Book of Abraham. Oh...yeah...uh...right. Or not!

Great point, CA Girl. What? The hole and the box are sacred too?

The church has the wood box that the plates were supposedly stored in for a time. It doesn't look like it's large enough to even hold the plates as they were described, not to mention the breastplate, etc... Every little detail of Joe's story, if pondered for two seconds, is beyond absurd.

Here I thought you were going to say that their greatest historical issue is history.

For the believing Mormons the fact that there are no Gold Plates isn't that big of a deal. For the non believing or exMormons it is a huge deal and for everyone else it is a non issue. At least in my estimation, there are only about 5-7 million people who really care that there are no plates and about 7 billion who don't give it a real thought.

For me the biggest historical issue that Mormonism has is the fact that it doesn't conform with history. I recall reading a series of rebuttals to Rod Meldrum's heartland model by a handful of professors. They had a disclaimer at the end of the first essay explaining that they understood that there was a faith element to the discussion. They stated clearly that they would ignore the faith element and address the historicity, since that is clearly the only source of proof both positive and in this case negative.

How do they know it was an angel that took them??? Did someone try to shake his hand??? Well?

Or JS just told everyone that an angel took them. That way he could hide them where ever and no one would look for them. Not that I believe any of it anyways - just sayin' that's an answer that most would accept back in the "magical and mystical" days.

The Book of Mormon's story contains a massive body count, many of these bodies landing on some truly horrific battlefields. If even a miniscule percentage of these millions of bodies from battle or burials (not that we'll really find them) had a little remaining DNA to extract we could form a decent (albeit, as always, imperfect) picture of their ancestry as a whole closer in time to the supposed source. The way the text reads these people would have lived in sometimes monumental cities that would reflect a remarkably consistent culture in most regards over many centuries. It shouldn't be that hard to find more examples of whatever written language and writing methodology they used (especially if they engrave it on metal that doesn't tarnish and bury that metal in protected boxes under large boulders). Archaeologists can easily travel and study almost anywhere in the world now, especially in the new world. This is the equivalent of saying an entire old world empire disappeared completely except for the "revelation" of one person whose results cannot be replicated or reinforced by any credible researcher (or even an apologist for that matter) anywhere in the world for most of 200 years thereafter. This improbable is just too big for their increasingly desperate possible. This isn't one ancient city that is missing, as suggested by the BOM: It's dozens. Other ruins from much earlier in world history can be found all over the world in all sorts of climates. With hindsight I can't believe I ever really believed this nonsense! I just never allowed myself to ask questions before.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/28/2014 03:21PM by masonfree.