The other day I was going through the TV channels trying to find something suitable to watch that was not endorsing fornication, profanity, and so on, when I happened across a South Park cartoon in the process of mocking my God and my Prophet Joseph Smith.
It was about Martin Harris taking 116 pages he had transcribed as Joseph Smith translated them from the golden plates. Thereafter he supposedly lost them showing them to family friends. Then Joseph was challenged to do them all over again verbatim, so that the doubters could see if he really was a prophet.
However, God told Joseph to instead recount the material from another book in the collection of books that make up the Book of Mormon. Now this cartoon show says this is proof that Joseph was a false prophet, because if he were a true prophet, he would get inspiration from God and do it again verbatim.
But certain facts are ignored to prop up this false argument.
The thieves could alter some of the original material so that the second translated copy from Joseph Smith would be different. Or, they could make their own altered copy in their own handwriting after destroying the 116 pages, claiming their own copy was written verbatim from the pages Martin Harris brought home and afterwards lost. How to disprove that? Better to start over.
Non-believers say there were no golden plates, that Joseph just made the whole thing up. And that is why he could not do it all over again. The Book of Mormon is a quite complex book, consisting of over 500 pages of a history of an ancient people over a period of a thousand years. If Joseph just cited this history from his head making it up as he went along with Martin Harris writing it down, then how could any human make up such a complex story full of strange names, as Ammonihah, and so on, and keep them in his memory as the pages were filled, and not getting mixed up?
Later the narrated original book was put into chapter and verse style, and then the dates and periods given in the book were found to be so consistent that now at the bottom of each page the dates are given. Could you or anyone on earth recite such a 500 page story out of his mind, and then keep even his page by page time successions consistent with one another? And this from an uneducated young man in his twenties? And many Book of Mormon scriptures are quotations from the King James Bible. He recited hundreds of Bible scriptures and knew when, where and how to place them in the Book of Mormon.
I guess about here, a Mormon mocker would say: “Well, he probably had the whole thing written down behind the hat or blanket he used to hide the “golden plates;” so he just read it to Martin Harris.
Well, if that was the case, then he still had the original material he read from – Martin Harris lost the transcribed copy. Joseph could easily have just read it again to Martin Harris from the original copy.
Thus, none of these anti-LDS postulates can be defended. Why? Because the Book of Mormon did come from God after all.
One more thing I have thought about. The use in the Book of Mormon by the writers Mormon and Moroni, writing something down, and then changing their minds saying “… or rather.” This happens over a dozen times in the Book of Mormon (but only a few times in the Bible). Why is this? And then it occurred to me: “If I were translating something and pressing and indenting my words into golden metal plates, if, after I had done this, and then saw there was a better way to say it, I would be forced to either skip it and leave the less favorable text intact, or manually press out my writings on the plates, which might require redoing the entire plate – no erasers for this kind of work – or, just add the better rendition prefixed with, “or rather.” If I did not have golden plates, but only paper instead, an eraser would have worked, and I could have removed the less favorable translation, and skipped having to add “or rather.” This is another proof that the text was indeed written on metal plates.
This also indicates that there are sometimes several ways to write down that which God inspires. If Joseph had translated the whole original text again as Martin Harris wanted him to do, he might have indeed used other words – also inspired, but likely disappointing to Harris.
