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In preparation for the currently ongoing papal conclave, I decided to read the official rules currently in force, UNIVERSI DOMINICI GREGIS, issued by John Paul II in 1996. The document contains this provision (emphasis added):
Seems simple enough right?
Whoops.
Here I was, a schmuck, reading the canonically promulgated apostolic constitution as if it mattered, as if the supposed men of God involved in this 2000-year-old institution might care about established procedures.
Sure, Francis could have changed the rules, as many popes have done throughout the centuries, but he didn’t. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and neither did anyone else with influence within the Vatican either. How am I supposed to take this seriously if the cardinals and popes don’t even take it seriously?
I wish Christianity were true. I really do. It would certainly make my dating life easier. I’d have a sense of purpose in life, defined rules of virtue to follow, but it just doesn’t make any actual sense. The inconsistency I cited above is relatively minor, but it is illustrative of what one finds everywhere when one digs into the claims of Christianity and treats them with the truth-preserving tools of logic. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus and Vatican II, Matthew 24:34, these are fundamental truth claims that can’t be handwaved away like the finer points of ecclesiastical law.
Obviously, as a Mormon (member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, whew) I think you're actually on the right track. It's so blindingly obvious that the Catholic church is bumbling along, with zero internal consistency, for centuries and centuries. It shows up all over. Even today, Catholics are very loud about a number of major issues, but very small numbers of actual Catholics actually agree with their own church's doctrine, much less practice it, and that's even before you look at any history at all. Don't get me wrong, I respect Catholics, I get along with many, I still view the religion as an overall net good, etc. but their doctrine is a mess. I genuinely extra respect the Catholics who attempt to pull the doctrine together into a coherent whole, but I just don't see the hand of God guiding them.
Now, doctrinally, to me, this all goes away quite neatly when you give up on the idea of the Catholic line of authority being unbroken. Clearly they strayed, it's self-evident, so my own faith has the nice idea of needing someone to restore and clarify things and have a modern guide/prophet. I'm not saying that people don't find any inconsistencies in Mormon doctrine, there's a people component to be sure, but it's several orders of magnitude less. I strongly reject this idea that doctrine is developed by groups of people hashing it out. Council of Nicea? Convened by Constantine, he basically says I don't care what you produce as long as it's something unifying, and once you do, we'll burn the writings of dissenters and exile anyone not with the program. All this to say you should meet with the missionaries :)
As much as the meaning of Matthew 16:18 has been stretched to assert papal primacy, let me be the first to dunk on the central conceit of faith of Mormonism: Joseph Smith and his golden plates. As a recent convert to Catholicism, I spent quite a bit of comparison-shopping between the Christian denominations. Mormonism, even in comparison to the other sects of Christianity, is too much to ask to believe in without being born into it.
Joseph Smith does not claim to be a prophet, but merely the reciever of revelation of historical apocrypha: translated to him from the original 'Reformed Egyptian' created from a Native American script. This is an article of faith of the Mormon Church: you cannot be a Mormon without accepting this. You can probably guess that I'm not a Mormon because I don't believe this for a second.
Now, you might say from a secular perspective: isn't this the narcissism of small differences? You believe in the resurrection of Christ, don't you? You believe in miracles? Surely, you can't give the benefit of the doubt - or even faith - to an American finding golden plates with the word of angels on it? Yes. Yes, actually. I'm not a midwestern subsistance farmer with less than a grade-school education. Egyptians never crossed the Atlantic, and even if they did, they certainly wouldn't have passed their script in such a way that there is no sign of the language anywhere else than the Book of Mormons attests.
Catholicism, on the other hand, has thousands of years of writings of church fathers in Greek and Latin. Is the New Testament an 'add-on' to the Old in the same way the Book of Mormon is? Perhaps. But the New Testament is the description of the life and ministry of Christ (with added prophecy.) The Book of Mormon describes events that no human being could plausibly witness the entirety of (the post-Resurrection ministry of Christ in the Americas.) The Gospels, at least, are written to be the accounts of different church fathers all witnessing the same thing. We only have Smith's word that it is relevation of God at all.
As a Christian, and as a Catholic, even if the papacy is so astray as to have broken the church of Christ, it was certainly not amended or renewed by Smith. His claims to being a prophet hinge on the legitimacy of a dubious forgery. By Nicene standards, his followers are not even Christians - being non-Trinitarian in belief and dogma. No doubt you've heard of these arguments before. You might even have been taught how to rebut them. But you can't get away from the golden plates.
If he had merely asserted that he was a prophet from the beginning, no such artifice would be necessary.
So why didn't he?
Christ, was, at some point: a living person. The Church fathers were real people who attested to him: the writings of early Christians that formed into the Catholic Church exist. Secular analysis into the Bible has even analyzed the different authorial voices and styles within it. Doctrinal discord within the Catholic Church is nothing new. But the basis of Mormonism is in an article of faith that is transparently a fraud. If the plates aren't real, then everything he teaches and every commandment he pronounced is a falsehood.
Did you attempt to read the Book of Mormon, or merely dismiss its provenance and not bother? I think that's usually more valuable than extra-textual criticism. I'm not in the habit of being a Book of Mormon apologist or promoter on its non-spiritual merits, like some members might, as I still believe reading it is the best way of assessing it as scripture rather than dealing in endless speculation or attempting to make some scholastic proof (and honestly, the same could be said of the Bible)... but I will mention a few points in response. I agree that if the Book of Mormon is fraudulent so is the religion. Thankfully, I do not think this is the case. Even if you do, the case you have presented above has at least some major misunderstandings. I it was going to be brief but I guess it ballooned. Oh well. Hopefully the thoughts are in a roughly coherent order. Not that this is really the proper forum for this anyways, and we're way off topic, but maybe this can provide some further unfamiliar information at the minimum.
Internally, there are some passages that allude to the script being somewhat of a rare skill in the first place, and likely not even corresponding to the typical spoken language of the people there. In-text there is further described a tendency of the victors to burn the loser's records and texts, a classic and historically accurate thing to do, so we wouldn't really expect much writing to survive. We hardly had any Mayan codices to begin with, even before the Catholics started burning it all, plus there were an estimated 200 or so languages spoken in the region before 1500, we hardly knew all of them to start with. Finally, contrary to popular belief, historians seem to have found that although writing itself is excellent and obviously useful, not all cultures adopt writing systems even when there are examples nearby, or can die out for other reasons, especially in more ancient contexts. Even in mesoamerica itself, while the Mayans had a system, their neighbors for centuries generally did not, and when they did it was pretty limited. (On top of all that, it was largely assumed by most in Smith's region at the time that all Native Americans were basically illiterate, even knowledge of the complexity of Mayan script wasn't yet popularly known, a point to be revisited below)
I also think that you are mistaken about a core point about the people involved -- these are not, in fact, Egyptian people. This is a set of Jews, primarily a family of merchants (perhaps metal traders), who left Jerusalem at a known point in time, and we have seen (limited but existing) evidence of a denser Egyptian script mingling with Hebrew in exactly that time period. The text does describe with remarkable precision a route out of Jerusalem that matches known geographical features, as well, again something Smith had no knowledge of (e.g. their coastal boat-building site was described as lush, something you wouldn't expect out of the Arabian desert coast)
The text does describe several attributes of mesoamerican people not yet popularly known, but since confirmed, and moreover avoids a ton of Indian stereotypes common at the time and in Smith's region, which is notably odd (no teepees, no scalping, they aren't savages, all the stereotypes don't fit at all). As one example, you can map major battles to months recorded in-text, and viola: we see a clear pattern of historically accurate seasonal warfare. Not really what fan-fic usually does, seems like a weird choice that would actually undermine contemporaries' opinions about it. It also doesn't do the sci-fi fiction thing where descriptions of certain things are subtly hinted at to the reader. Nope, we get at times some random words or items dropped in and described, with the assumption we'd know what they are.
There is Hebrew-style poetry in it that was also unknown to scholars at the time, as well as other Hebrew literary elements, and at least a few genuinely Hebrew-inspired names, in addition to some strange turns of phrase one assumes are linguistic artifacts of the original language ("and it came to pass" as the classic example, is repeated a lot). We even get a random olive tree parable, that actually gets a lot right about the growing process, that's not a New England thing. There are over a thousand intra-textual references, quotes, and callbacks as well, a lot to keep track of. On top of that, Smith makes the seemingly strange decision to relate slightly different versions of Isaiah and the Sermon on the Mount, and some of these departures show up in the Dead Sea Scrolls or early Septuagint versions even, since discovered. The records are mostly of the nobility among the people, often following lineages and select spiritual stories and developments, not intended as primarily historical, as is the case for many ancient records in terms of focus. Compare for example the Mayan Dresden Codex - a record mostly of the nobility, following select lineages and with select stories bolstering the nobles' lineage. Yep, sounds familiar in format.
I would add that the internal setup is that of two specific people assembling and in some long stretches summarizing and paraphrasing this largely spiritual set of events, hundreds of years worth (there was never the allegation that "one person" witnessed it all, I'm not sure where you got that from?), this is a little over half the book, so that is a bit different in format than the Bible, but it's far from all. In fact, the story internally references a variety of source texts, splices them in at a number of points, and engages at times in periodic flashbacks offering different perspectives of the same event. There is some clear internal evidence of different author tones and styles, reinforced by modern textual analysis techniques.
There are random digressions into migrations, descriptions of different internal cultures, notes about the calendar, weight and measure standardization listed on the reign of a new king with similar natural ratios as those we find in authentic ancient records. We have over 150 named people, 200 place names, 600 relational geographic passages, no map, but the info we have is internally consistent. Plenty of stuff perfectly fitting the internal editorial decisions as well as what ancient records tend to digress about.
With respect to the plates themselves and the manuscript resulting, first of all the idea that records would be written on metal plates at all was at the time ridiculous, but we have since found a few examples. In terms of timeframe, there is significant evidence that the whole book's 'translation' was produced at a pretty fast pace, a little over 2 months, with significant complexity and references and setup as described above in part, and obviously some spiritual teachings too that many have since found to be extremely faith-promoting (the actual point of the book), and this is the quite factually the case even if you think his scribes were all in on it too. I only briefly touched on the spiritual aspect, despite the bulk of this post, but there's some genuinely interesting and unique theological concepts there inside that need to work for any of it to work at all. This chapter has some interesting doctrines about sin and the fall. This one has some great teachings about insecurity and grace. This one contains a timeless analogy about the process of nurturing faith in God. This one and the next three chapters is a classic sermon encouraging faithfulness, but with fiery rhetoric about taking care of the poor and our purpose on earth. Faith, charity, and repentence are constantly emphasized. Aren't those the main takeaways from the gospel anyways? But the classic challenge is, can you write a similar amount in two months, and have it be spiritually enjoyable to read, let alone display the depth and complexity described in all the points above? Press X to doubt.
And lastly, when it comes to the physical gold-looking (probably a lighter alloy) plates themselves, we actually do explicitly have more than just Joseph Smith's word - although some of them are family or friends, there were 11 total people who signed testimony they saw them or handled them or saw an angel present them, with a half dozen more besides, none of whom recanted despite several leaving the church or thinking Joseph has become a fallen prophet.
Which, by the way, sounds more likely to me than just a straight con job. Has any other con artist in history ever produced something comparable? In word count it's like half the full Lord of the Rings trilogy, for comparison. There was the Hitler Diaries, I guess, but a lot of the heavy lifting was done by matching up existing newspaper accounts and plagiarizing, and they were pretty quickly shown to be fake, and excessively tropey with known Hitler flourishes. Scientology and Hubbard's writings? Maaaaaaybe? Eh, no, not really. Connection is a bit weird, because he was quite literally a science fiction writer. Then took a detour into self-help psychology. Then gave some lectures. Then and only then near bankruptcy he starts dropping in spiritual-ish stuff, and boy is it a gradual process over decades. So yeah, prolific writer, but bad comparison, and he took decades to accomplish not half what Smith did in two months. Ellen G White of Seventh Day Adventist fame also was a book-writer and vision-haver. But her visions are atomic, continuations and plays on her normal writings, occur throughout her life, and don't have the same demand for consistency of course due to their nature. (Atheists might also note she was, in fact, literally knocked out with a rock as a child as the start of her spiritual awakening. I don't know enough to opine). The only other thing I know or have heard of would be the Ossian Poems, according to AI, where some guy in the 1700s wrote his own poems of warfare and romance with some maybe some legit old Gaelic inspiration, blended them together, then claimed to only be the translator of them (but refused to show the allegedly too-delicate manuscript). Still a bit of a far cry from the potent Book of Mormon claims and its own textual complexity.
This brings to mind Brígido Lara who (going off of Wikipedia, here, which is itself going off of the word of a self-reported fraudster, so – grain of salt, here) supposedly created tens of thousands of pieces of fraudulent Mesoamerican art, to the degree that it's possible he created more fraudulent Totonac artifacts than there are authentic pieces in circulation, although it seems like it would be hard to tell since his creations were apparently indistinguishable from the originals.
As an aside, can I say that I find this entire conversation really funny given Motte lore? Obviously Christian Mottizens would love to convert you to orthodox Christianity but I'm sure there's also got to be an underlying concern about turning you into a furry by mistake.
The Scots Wikipedia chap was pretty impressive. From the non-Scots wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_Wikipedia
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Every random triviality in the book that manages to not blatantly contradict reality is apparently evidence for its validity, but I guess we're just supposed to ignore all the anachronistic horses, chariots, steel, etc. etc. etc.
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Even LDS church sponsored investigations into its provenance have not been kind to Joseph Smith’s story on the origin of the Book of Mormon.
Like, throw shade at the shroud of Turin if you want, at least investigators didn’t say ‘yeah it’s fake’ when they’re being paid by the Catholic Church.
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