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say what you want about the hat, the stone, etc etc.

personally, i dont find that stuff any more or less believable than sacred things in other religions.

i read a biography about joseph smith recently and he was an amazing guy. read about the cities he built out of nothing and the society he created. he started with nothing in the middle of nowhere in upstate new york.

say what you want, the guy had it going on , no question.

personally, i dont find that stuff any more or less believable than sacred things in other religions

Ah, how prophetic of me. I didn't read this post of yours, yet anticipated it & posted it within the same minute(see post #13 as my "pre-response" to your comment here)

read about the cities he built out of nothing and the society he created. he started with nothing in the middle of nowhere in upstate new york.

Rev. Moon was persecuted & imprisoned by the communists in Korea, & before you knew it, he owned the Washington Times & a slew of other businesses! (And now we know his followers as "Moonies")
Jim Jones started with a small town in the Bay area, and before you knew it, he had expanded to large acreages in Guyana after becoming a key civic leader in the Bay Area. (You've heard all about the coolaid in Jonestown, haven't you?)
Shall I go on?

As for the societies he created, well, that's a myth. He moved first to Ohio, but he didn't create the community of Kirtland, OH. In fact, he fled that town in the middle of the night because the bank he started wasn't solvent. (He literally issued $3 bills, giving us the phrase, "As phony as a $3 bill.")

The Missouri experience? Smith sent others ahead to populate MO while he remained in OH. He wasn't responsible for setting up those small, temp communities -- others were. It was a non-Mormon who helped to carve out a new county for Lds in MO in 1838.

So now we're down only to Nauvoo. Oh, sure, Smith was directly involved in creating Nauvoo. But what kind of a "society" did he create? (All I can say is that if you want to go to a community where "Mayor Smith" orders his henchmen to go smash your opposition printing press because he didn't like your critiques of him, then quick, head off to those Phillippine compounds where they've surrounded these regional lords for killing off the opposition party's family -- & about 15 journalists in the process!).

EVERYthing is missing; except......

The "Caractors" are the only tangible evidence in existence related to Smith's story.

No gold plates, no brass plates, no peep stones, no Urim and Thummim... only these "Caractors," not a single one of which is in the purported languages.

Smith's translation of the Caractors. According to Martin Harris (Joseph Smith - History, 1:64), "I went to the city of New York, and presented the characters which had been translated, with the translation thereof, to Professor Charles Anthon, a gentleman celebrated for his literary attainments. Professor Anthon stated that the translation was correct, more so than any he had before seen translated from the Egyptian. I then showed him those which were not yet translated,* and he said they were Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, and Arabic; and he said they were true characters."

Speak right up now in all truthfulness. Isn't it revealing how Smith started out making a stab at creating believable "caractors" but quckly gave up and produced nothing but squiggles, ending up wih a series of nothing more than crude little scribbles? Yet Professor Anthon supposedly translated them!

*Harris must have had two or three pieces of paper with him—one with characters and a translation of them (on the same paper or a separate one) and one with untranslated characters—quite likely the "Caractors." Some Mormon "scholars" have gone out on a limb, sawed it off, and knocked themselves out trying to translate from these true Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, and Arabic characters a segment that would correspond with a verse from 1 Nephi.

Modern-day experts in Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, and Arabic. In 1829, any knowledge of these languages possessed by U.S. scholars would have been rudimentary at best. Expertise in them has vastly improved since then. So go ahead, do it. Get any modern expert in these languages to identify which of these "Caractors" are Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac and Arabic. Better still, accept the claim of Mormon apologists that Anthon did indeed so testify and that his appraisal of the Caractors was correct. (Op. cit, pp. 73-75)

Save your money! Samples of Assyriac/Aramaic and Arabic writing:

.

What say you? Which of Smith's "Caractors" resemble the Assyriac and Arabic ones? No need to pay experts for their analysis. A child could accurately check this out. These writing systems have remained constant for well over 3000 years.