Drive By #1

I found this on a message board.  I wanted to keep it for reference.
MDD thread

sock puppet wrote:For me, they have mattered and dispelled my LDS belief (and participation). For me, history matters, particularly in regards to an organization making such audacious claims of sole authority from god.

I am interested in hearing from believers why these facts don't matter.

I'm not a believer, but I'd like to chime in here. To me, the historical criticisms themselves don't mean the church isn't true. The church isn't not true because Joseph Smith had sex with all those women, or because the Book of Abraham isn't what you get when you translate the papyrus Abraham supposedly wrote on by his own hand.

To me, the church isn't true because God never appeared to Joseph, never charged Joseph with "restoring" his church on Earth, never inspired him with the power to translate words written in Hebrew but represented on leaves of beaten gold using reformed Egyptian characters, which words represented the history of ancient Jews who migrated to the Americas, etc.

The church isn't true because its founding was entirely human-directed and human-performed, and was done with no more "authority" than that of human beings exercising their 1st Amendment rights to make up their own religion and believe in it.

All the historical things are not, themselves, the disqualifiers. They are evidence which backs up the assertions I made previously.

So the question in my mind is: is God acting through Joseph Smith as Prophet consistent with Joseph's sexual shenanigans? I believe it is not.

Is the Book of Abraham reality more consistent with A) Joseph Smith inventing tales of Godly authorization and power, or B) God preserving the words penned by Abraham so we could benefit from them in our day? I believe the evidence leans strongly (as in, way past the point of falling over) toward A).

If a man claims that an angel appeared to him and delivered up records inscribed on beaten-gold leaves in an ancient tongue, but then produces a "translation" of those records which appears to be of strictly modern origin, or which claims to represent ancient people but it looks like these people never existed, may I reasonably take this as evidence that the man was making things up?

It is my personal judgment that the historical record overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that Joseph Smith never received any divine commission from the Creator of the Universe to lead the rest of us. He almost certainly made that up. His claimed powers of translation of ancient languages were all a sham, at least if the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham are taken seriously as evidence of Joseph using these powers.

The LDS church is not true because it never was true. It wasn't true the very minute it was founded in 1830, and has never been true for even a single second since then. It didn't start out true and then "fall" from being true because Joseph Smith f****d a few dozen other women and girls. It didn't start out true but become false because Joseph Smith invented the Book of Abraham, falsely claiming it came from the papyrus of Michael Chandler. It was never true to begin with. All this other stuff merely serves to support that assessment.