Okay, here's a logical look at the Book of Mormon. Brother Hugh Nibley, a Book of Mormon teacher at Brigham Young University in Utah issued a challenge to his students, and especially after Non-Mormon attendance at BYU rose. On the first day of classes he would present an opportunity to the students, they could do absolutely no assignments if they could create a fictional account of an ancient civilization to form a foundation for a religion. The Book had to be at least 600 pages long, the approximate length of the Book of Mormon. The work could not contradict itself in any of the 600 pages, it had to be written in 1 semester(giving the student more than double the amount of time many claim Joseph Smith took to do this) they had to convince a group of people that it was true given to them by revelation. The students had a distinct advantage over Joseph Smith, having exponentially more education than he did and having a very nice college library at their disposal compared to a relatively uneducated man who lived in the 1800's. Upon doing this the student would receive an A in that class and any other religion classes from Brother Nibley, and he would acknowledge the possibility of the Book of Mormon being Fabricated.
I would argue there should be another part of this challenge, the student and those who they convince should be willing to be driven out of their homes across the country, tarred and feathered multiple times, unlawfully imprisoned and beaten and still proclaim the truth of the work. Really it just doesn't make sense to me how people could say it's fabricated. It just doesn't make sense to me at all.
For more information you can look up Hugh Nibley on wikipedia or go to www.mormon.org to learn more about the LDS Church.
As Nibley writes in his challenge, to paraphrase,
ReplyDeleteIf the world honestly believes Joseph Smith to be a fraud and the Book of Mormon to have been written by him, they have the responsibility to do the world a grand service and show us that it can be done.
Yet no one has done it, nor even attempted it -- because it is impossible.