If I were not so amused at your short-sightedness and interesting assumptions regarding anachronisms and what was and what wasn’t on the American Continents during the time of the Book of Mormon peoples, I would be frustrated to tears.
I am not going to waste my time to burn all the dross out of your posts. I simply want to say that there are very reasonable explanations (not excuses, but explanations) to every point that has been brought up in this thread. I do not feel threatened in my faith in the Book of Mormon’s validity at all. And I don’t consider myself stupid, ignorant, or brain-washed, either. What a thought! That a college-educated person could actually believe this stuff even though there’s such obvious errors! The truth is, the “errors” you have so “exhaustively” proved, if true errors, would have brought nearly all the learned believers to doubt and leave the Church. And yet they remain, even after reading Catholic Answers Forums.
I recommend
fairlds.org and farms.byu.edu to do some research yourself on these matters. These are just starting places since there are many more scholarly books and journals that you can use to find the reasoning behind words,etc.
Here I will give you a clue to understand many of the things you ignorantly dismiss as anachronisms: remember the purpose of translation is to take some concept from a foreign language and say or write the same idea or concept in the common language. Thus, a collection of the writings of the prophets in Israel containing Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, etc., would be known in the common language today as the Bible! It’s not a word-by-word translation, but a concept-by-concept translation! Understand that Joseph Smith was “seeing” (as a Seer would do) the text in a vision-like experience where he would then speak the record’s teachings and events in terms that he would understand. If he saw an animal that resembled a horse but he didn’t know what it really was, he would say it was a horse! Don’t set up a straw-man argument saying this is what a translation is (“gratis”=“grace”) when Joseph Smith claimed his translation was (the idea of grace=the idea of grace). Remember, the text itself said to not dismiss it because of the errors of men or the errors of the change of language over time since the translation of the Book of Mormon (like if Joseph Smith said they had tools of steel, which was the common term for any metal during Smith’s day and the Bessemer process to create steel hadn’t been invented until after Joseph Smith had already published the Book of Mormon with the word “steel” in it). If it was a true anachronism, it would still be evidence that Joseph Smith was a prophet, since he prophesied the invention of steel before it came about!
I know the Book of Mormon is true. I’ve read it over a dozen times. I’ve studied it looking for errors, looking for answers, looking for reasons to doubt and reasons to believe. I know it’s true because unlike all of its critics I didn’t dismiss the evidences for it, historical, textual, contextual, and spiritual. We are still discovering great evidences for it, including the city of Nahom described in 1 Nephi and chiasmus all throughout the text as well as a more correct version of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in line with Jewish customs, traditions, and celebrations than the New Testament.
I do not just rely on whether I “feel” good about it. I know it’s true in my mind as well as my soul. I encourage you to stop looking for reasons to doubt it and start looking for reasons to believe it and I promise you will be surprised that the reasons you doubted it will be explained and the reasons to believe it will become clear to you. Now, if you’re too insecure in your own faith to try then by all means go ahead and prove your ignorance to the whole world by saying things like, “it’s so clear it’s false there’s no reason to discuss it” and “there’s no historical or archeological evidence for it.” Be my guest! If you really want to know, just try the promise in Moroni 10:3-5 to study it with faith in Christ and with “real intent”–not ‘doubtful intent’ or ‘Catholic-Apologist intent.’ Then, once you have thoroughly studied it, you can ask yourself, “What is left to outweigh the evidence I have for this book that would cause me to believe it is not true?” Then, if you struggle answering that question there is one final promise the Bible does not have: to ask God if it’s not true and He will manifest the truth of it unto you by the Holy Ghost’s power.
Or you can trick yourself into thinking that what others “dug up” in Anti-LDS websites is reliable enough to place your eternal soul on its altar.
I know the Book of Mormon is God’s word. The Great Apostasy happened. That’s what’s so threatening to you, isn’t it? If the Book of Mormon is true, it means Joseph Smith was a prophet. And that means the claim that Joseph Smith made to restore the Church of Jesus Christ means there was an apostasy from the early church. Well, it’s true. I’ve heard all the junk you could share in reply so don’t bother. I know God has chosen men again to be seers in our time.
