was unknown and people scoffed at it. Now, we know that they were wrong and Joseph Smith was right. Just one more piece of solid evidence in favor of the Book of Mormon.

Have you heard this one before? I used to hear it quite frequently from defenders of the faith. But it never sat well with me. Intuitively, I just felt like this must be an exaggeration or a totally bogus argument because it did not seem likely that the idea of engraving words on metal plates would have been rejected out of hand by people in Joseph Smith's day. Maybe they would reject the idea of glowing angels and gold plates that only Joseph Smith was allowed to see... or only Joseph Smith and his family, and the Whitmers could see.

But writing/engraving words on thin metallic plates? I imagined that this was just another straw-man argument being used by apologists. Maybe one or two people tried that line against the BOM, but it didn't seem likely that most critics would have relied on that argument.

I decided to research it...and was amazed at how easy it was to refute that "evidence for the Book of Mormon."

Do a word search on "plate" for the KJV Old Testament (the very same that Joseph Smith's family had) and voila! Here you go:

+++++

Exodus 39:3,30
3 And they did beat the GOLD INTO THIN PLATES, and cut it into wires, to work it in the blue, and in the purple, and in the scarlet, and in the fine linen, with cunning work.

...


Exodus 28:36
36 ¶ And thou shalt make a PLATE OF PURE GOLD, and GRAVE upon it, like the ENGRAVINGS of a signet, HOLINESS TO THE LORD.


Leviticus 8:9
9 And he put the mitre upon his head; also upon the mitre, even upon his forefront, did he put the GOLDEN PLATE, the holy crown; as the Lord commanded Moses.


1 Kings 7:30,36
30 And every base had four brasen wheels, and PLATES OF BRASS: and the four corners thereof had undersetters: under the laver were undersetters molten, at the side of every addition.

++++++

Seems pretty obvious that if you were JS, a guy familiar with the KJV Old Testament, and you wanted to spin a tale about discovering an ancient record that was more precious than anything else in the world, it would have to be a set of records made in a durable format. Paper would not be a good choice. Payprus would not be a good choice (and Joe probably did not know much about papryus in general and definitely did not know about the discovery of the dead sea scrolls). Parchment. Not precious enough or durable enough. Stone? Too big, too heavy to contain hundreds of pages of text. Hey, how about gold beaten into extremely thin plates? Gold is fittingly precious for a record of such importance and the concept of thin plates of gold is biblically correct....

So Joseph Smith, the avid hunter of buried treasure, finally hit pay dirt by discovering an entire collection of ancient records graven upon thin golden plates.

Were the plates bound somehow, or were they sliding all over the place?

the PR / missionary Open House images showed 3 large rings keeping them together;


Imagination or 'supported' by stories?

(you know, like a three-ring binder, but instead of notebook paper, you have thin sheets of gold, which I suspect would be more expensive, but just the thing if you want only the best.)

Descriptions of the Book of Mormon also say that a portion was "sealed" but never explain what that means. Was there like a waxy goop spread around it? Doesn't seem like any kind of seal would have prevented Joe from opening it up.... I guess that's where the SuperZapppo Smite-o! powers of the golden plates came in handy.)

yet engraved, and they're on binder rings. Doesn't sound sturdy at all.

Maybe the sealed part was a type of reinforcer - the self-adhesive type, not those disgusting ones you have to lick.

Hah! A Kinkos woman!

As you can see from the paintings, carrying them around was a great upper body workout.

He was just born too early.

If he had been born in the middle of the twentieth century, he would have been the greatest running back in the history of the NFL.

Just imagine. A guy who can carry 200 lbs tucked under one arm, running quickly through the woods and successfully outrunning and eluding a dozen or so other men?

Of course, I guess the "other men" could actually have been little girls picking blueberries...and they weren't really chasing Joe Junior...and the golden plates could really have been an apple pie that Joe Junior was stealing from a neighboring farm...and he was not so much running frantically through the woods as he was walking at a brisk pace, hoping to get away from the scene before farmer Goopenheim's wife discovered that one of her freshly baked apple pies had gone missing...and, I suppose, this may have served as the foundation for the "schlepping golden plates at great speed through the woods" story that he told at a subsequent date.

So, probably wouldn't have been a great running back after all, now that I have pondered upon the matter.

Wally Prince Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> He was just born too early.
>
> If he had been born in the middle of the twentieth
> century, he would have been the greatest running
> back in the history of the NFL.
>
> Just imagine. A guy who can carry 200 lbs tucked
> under one arm, running quickly through the woods
> and successfully outrunning and eluding a dozen or
> so other men?

Not bad for a guy with a limp left over from a bone-removal
operation on his leg when he was a kid.

How come the "writings" are always on something soft like gold and never chiseled into something hard like iron ?
Lead is soft. How come I never hear about lead plates ?

All that trouble with the Golden Plates just so you could hide them in the woods while translating them with the rock in the hat method?

most idiotic non-sequiturs in history. Four years of begging and haggling with the angel. Four years of proving his worthiness. Finally he retrieves the sacred plates. Then spends every waking moment trying to protect them from thieves, because he knows how important their contents are. They must be translated. They must! For the salvation of the world depends on it. The it came time. Time to begin the translation of the sacred plates....

"Tell us more, Joseph! Tell us more! So finally you have the plates and you are ready to translate them. It must have been so thrilling to set them on the table and start translating the plates, plate-by-plate, carefully examining the sacred engravings! How exciting!"

"Oh...that...well, I didn't actually need to look at them at all. They didn't even need to be nearby. I got everything through this here rock I found when we wuz digging an outhouse hole for a neighbor. This rock is what done it. I didn't even know where those heavy old plates were most of the time. For a while, I had them hidden under a burlap bag somewhere...and then mom used them to prop open the barn door cuz on account of it flapping shut with the wind. Last I heard, some kids over in the next town had found them and were using the plates under their butts to slide down a hill like they wuz sleds. Then the angel came and took them away."

Kind of like:

"So, when our hero, Bart, learned that his nemesis was a master swordsman, a master of 5 different martial arts and an expert dagger thrower, Bart determined that it would be essential for him to master each of these disciplines in order to one day meet and defeat his nemesis in combat.

"With unusual grit and determination Bart practiced tirelessly suffered and sacrificed to hone his skills in these combat disciplines over a period of 5 years, after which he felt it was time to leave the security of his isolated training facility and go out into the world where he was certain to encounter his nemesis.

"Sure enough, it did not take much time, for the nemesis had been tracking Bart's moves. One night, in a dark alley, Bart heard his nemesis calling out from the shadows. "Guess it's time for you to die, Bart," the nemesis spoke menacingly. As the nemesis moved slowly out from behind a dumpster, Bart shot him with his pistol and called the police to report the incident. The nemesis was dead."

Exodus 28:36
36 ¶ And thou shalt make a PLATE OF PURE GOLD, and GRAVE upon it, like the ENGRAVINGS of a signet, HOLINESS TO THE LORD.


Bingo -

sig·net
ˈsiɡnit/Submit
noun HISTORICAL
a small seal, especially one set in a ring, used instead of or with a signature to give authentication to an official document.

The only ancient gold "tablets" that I know of are from ancient Italy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrgi_Tablets


People just don't normally write on gold.

It's too soft and too valuable to be used as a writing medium.

Bronze or stone engravings are much more common.


So much of debunking the Mormon delusion is about trying to disprove already improbable things.

Taking that into account and combining it with the references in the Old Testament, it's easy to see where Joseph Smith could have gotten ideas about thin plates of gold and words engraved upon them.

And, of course, as you pointed out it would have been ridiculous for anyone in the real world to basically create a journal or log book made of hundreds of thin sheets of gold.

But when Joe Junior was making up his story about the golden plates, he was looking for superlatives. Everything about it had to be ultra-super-special and posh. Even brass would not do. Sure, brass was okay for the plates of Laban, but not for the super, special, ultra-precious book that an angel led him to. It had to be made of gold. If he had thought of it, he probably would have said platinum. But in Joe's world, gold was the best, the most precious medium that he could imagine. That was the best way to impress his friends and relatives, yea, verily, even the same friends and relatives who excitedly joined him in previous treasure hunting escapades.

Thanks for the Biblical references.

I've had Mormons try to use that type of argument with me, basically that Joseph couldn't have known that ancient people recorded things on metal.

Someone said this to me once "We now know that ancient people did record on metal plates." It was in reference to Middle Eastern discoveries.

I replied "there is zero evidence of ancient Americans recording their histories on metal plates."

It didn't phase that Mormon at all. I guess things on the other side of the world, that were always known about and even mentioned in the Bible are all the evidence some need to claim that it happened in America too and that Joseph Smith couldn't have known that anyone ever wrote things on metal plates.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/15/2018 09:16AM by mikemitchell.

is expected at all times...and those who refuse to go along with the suspension are shunned. Mormonism has it particularly bad.

You need about 10 times the usual suspension-of-disbelief effort to give any credibility to this story:

(1) There's a young treasure hunter who claims to see treasure locations by gazing at an ordinary-looking rock referred to as a "peepstone". (Yeah, you really are going to need to crank up the suspension-of-disbelief levels because we're just getting started.)

(2) He never successfully retrieves any treasure because the treasures are always cursed to be "slippery" and they slide away into the earth before they can be retrieved. Got that? He sees the treasures in the peepstone. He knows where they are. But they're slippery, so he can never actually get his hands on the treasure. But you should pay him for his services anyway because he did his part, which was to find the location. It's not his fault that the treasure was cursed with a curse of slipperiness.

(3) Then a glowing angel visits the boy. The angel's name is Nephi...or Moroni. Doesn't matter. Angels all look the same anyway.

(4) The glowing angel tells the boy where he can find a stack of golden plates. What a treasure! Peepstone. Glowing angel. The important thing is finding out where the treasure is located. This one is located on a hill real close by.

(5) The boy tries to get the plates, but he gets zapped. Drats! Foiled again by a curse on the treasure. This time instead of being "slippery" the treasure is hot wired to deliver electric shocks. It's there. The angel led him to it. But he can't get it because of all the zapping that happens when he tries.

(6) Eventually he gets to retrieve the treasure, but he has to keep it concealed from view because if anyone else looks at it without proper permission, they will be killed by god. (Sure, you're thinking that this would be an awfully convenient cover story if in fact the young man did not actually have any golden plates. But then you would be failing at your principal task, namely suspending disbelief.)

(7) Now the young man is supposed to translate the golden plates using special spectacles wired to a breastplate. Nobody actually sees the special spectacles or the breastplate, however, because the young treasure hunter finds that it's much easier to do the translation using his treasure-hunting stone. There is much hope that people will want to buy the book/translation when it is finished because, well, who wouldn't want to know about how Jesus visited America before it was America and all that stuff?

(8) Amazingly, he never even has to look at the golden plates when translating them. The stone is completely sufficient by itself for the task. You might be tempted to think that the golden plates were totally unnecessary and only served as a dramatic story-telling device. But you would somehow be wrong, even though it is difficult to explain how you would be wrong.

(9) After all is translated, except for the "sealed" part, the angel takes the golden plates/treasure up into heaven. Still nobody but Joseph Smith has seen them. Now their in a vault up in heaven or being used as a doorstop at St. Peter's gate. Nobody really knows and nobody's keeping track. As long as the young treasure hunter still has his peepstone it really doesn't matter where the plates are.

(10) Some people who are skeptical give the young treasure hunter a hard time, so he gets some witnesses to testify that they saw the golden plates with their spiritual eyes (also known as their imagination). None of them are ever questioned in any detail. One of them has a hard time conjuring up a picture of them in his mind, so the young treasure hunter has to spend a long time coaching him until he finally thinks that he can picture the golden plates in his mind. "Just picture it in your mind, Martin. Glowing angel. Golden plates. Glowing Angel all in white. Has a beard. Seeing it yet? See the stack of golden plates?"

And this is the story that Mormons build their lives around as though it was really a true story. Mind boggling. You would be better off building your life around the Harry Potter story.

I looked our the window
And what did I see
Joey running
From tree to tree.

He was a huffin'
And a puffin'
And when I looked again
Joey just began
To do it all again.

Moroni was close behind
Traveling full speed
Yelling, "Joey, stop Joey!
There is somethin' you'll need.

"I'm the prophet, not you,"
Joseph screeched in reply,
And speeded home to Mommy...
And a slice of pumpkin pie.

What had that angel for Joey?
We'll just never know
Because Joey plum decided
That's how it would go.

Joey, oh Joey
What secrets you embrace
Leaving so quickly
Without much trace.

I'd like to meet you
Indeed, yes I would
With REAL TRUTH required
To see where you stood.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/17/2018 02:09PM by presleynfactsrock.