Why are there Mormons after 1967?

Question

In 1967 some of the original papyrus pieces used by Joseph Smith to translate the "Book of Abraham" contained in the "Pearl of Great Price", a key Mormon doctrine, surfaced in a New York City museum.

Modern Egyptologists made a translation and showed the documents had nothing to do with Abraham but were ordinary funeral documents that would be found with any mummy.

This was in fact the proof that Joseph Smith was not given the wisdom to translate the Golden Plates, wasn't it?

Answer 1

Yes, this is evidence of fraud.

In 1843 six brass plates were found in a mound in Kinderhook, Illinois. Mormons who saw the plates were impressed by their ancient appearance and felt that they would prove Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon. Joseph accepted these plates as authentic and claimed that he had translated a portion of them. Joseph Smith: "I have translated a portion of them and find they contain the history of the person with whom they were found . He was a descendant of Ham, through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the Ruler of heaven and earth." ( History of the Church vol. 5, p. 372). Unfortunately for the Mormons, it was later revealed that the plates were forgeries.

In July of 1835, an Irishman named Michael Chandler brought an exhibit of four Egyptian mummies and papyri to Kirtland Ohio, then the home of the Mormons. The papyri contained Egyptian hieroglyphics. In 1835 hieroglyphics were unreadable. As Prophet and Seer of the Church, Joseph Smith was given permission to look at the papyri scrolls in the exhibit and he revealed that "one of the rolls contained the writings of Abraham, another the writings of Joseph of Egypt" (History of the Church, Vol. 2: 236). But with the resurfacing of the same papyri he used to do his Book of Abraham translation, and the fact that he did not in any way do it correctly, we have proof that Joseph Smith lied about his abilities from God.

Current Mormon Apologists have retreated to the position that either (A) there are missing portions of the papyri that Joseph Smith translated the Book Of Abraham from or (B) that the existing papyri were just "catalysts" for a kind of "translation" that wasn't literally from the papyri. Both explanations conveniently ignore the fact that we have the facsimiles and Joseph Smith's faux translation, and his repeated insistence that these were really written by Abraham and that he really translated them literally.

Joseph Smith's false "translation" of the Kinderhook plates + Joseph's false "translation" of the Egyptian papyri = a false prophet.

What if we still had the gold plates and experts proved them to be incorrectly translated and/or not even of ancient origin? That exact scenario has happened twice now. First with the Kinderhook plates and then with the Egyptian papyri. How much evidence does a person need?!?

It is obvious that present scholarship has revealed that Joseph Smith did not translate the Book of Abraham by the power of God as he had claimed. We know for a certainty that the partial translation of the Kinderhook plates was obviously not a divinely inspired translation as well. It follows that if he did not translate the Book of Abraham by the power of God, and he did not translate the Kinderhook plates by the power of God, then it would be very easy to conclude that he did not translate the Book of Mormon by the power of God either.

Embarrassment has come to the LDS church, which prides itself in adhering to the honorable claims of its Thirteenth Article of Faith:
"We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul--We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things."

Answer 2

There weren't any golden plates except in vision. Joseph Smith used a seer stone. His parents were practicing seers. Joseph Smith searched for treasures often.

He used the seer stone and called it the thumbin. With the hood over his head, he gazed into the seer stone with a bible or other writings behind it. There appeared words that made up the Mormon book.

Joseph Smith was given worldly wisdom to translate from books of the time to the book of Mormon. God has made MoronI the wisdom of this world.

Answer 3

"We have learn those passages and their related passages for a long time. We have visible what the phrases say and feature mentioned to ourselves, "Yes, it says that, however we have got to learn out of it the taking of the gospel and the advantages of the temple to the ***** folks, in view that they're denied distinctive matters." There are statements in our literature by way of the early Brethren that we've got interpreted to intend that the Negroes might now not acquire the priesthood in mortality. I have mentioned the equal matters, and folks write me letters and say, "You mentioned such and such, and the way is it now that we do such and such?" All I can say is that it's time disbelieving folks repented and acquired in line and believed in a residing, cutting-edge prophet. Forget the whole thing that I have mentioned, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whoever has mentioned in days beyond that's opposite to the reward revelation. We spoke with a restricted knowledge and with out the sunshine and expertise that now has come into the arena. We get our reality and light-weight line upon line and principle upon principle (two Ne. 28:30; Isa. 28:nine-10; D&C ninety eight:eleven-12; 128:21). We have now further a brand new flood of intelligence and light-weight in this specified discipline, and it erases all of the darkness and all of the perspectives and all of the ideas of the beyond. They do not topic anymore. It does not make a particle of change what someone ever mentioned approximately the ***** topic earlier than the primary day of June 1978. It is a brand new day and a brand new association, and the Lord has now given the revelation that sheds gentle out into the arena in this discipline. As to any slivers of sunshine or any debris of darkness of the beyond, we fail to remember approximately them. We now do what meridian Israel did whilst the Lord mentioned the gospel will have to cross to the Gentiles. We fail to remember all of the statements that restricted the gospel to the condo of Israel, and we begin going to the Gentiles." Elder Bruce R. McConkie

Answer 4

I belong to the Church of Jesus of Latter-Day saints
The proof that you speak about can be found by reading the scriptures and pondering the truths that they contain
daisykriss has given a good explanation of this
also see www.mormon.org

Answer 5

if you look at the beginnings of Mormonism, and the modern Latter Day Saint, you will see that their doctrine has evolved, yep there is modern day evolution, the teachings of the Later Day saint, is becoming more in line with modern day Christianity, who know some day you might not even be able to tell us apart.

Answer 6

Michael D. Rhodes wrote the following on the topic in 1988, I think it gives a good explanation of why we're still around:

"Actually, there are two possible explanations why the text of the recently discovered papyri does not match the text in the Pearl of Great Price.

One explanation is that it may have been taken from a different portion of the papyrus rolls in Joseph Smith’s possession. In other words, we don’t have all the papyri Joseph Smith had—and what we do have is obviously not the text of the book of Abraham. The Prophet described the papyrus he used in translation in these words: “The record … found with the mummies, is beautifully written on papyrus, with black, and a small part red, ink or paint, in perfect preservation.” (History of the Church, 2:348.) The Book of Breathings papyrus has no writing in red ink and is in an extremely poor state of preservation. It must have been in much the same condition in Joseph Smith’s day when fragments of it were glued haphazardly to other totally unrelated papyri. In fact, part of the outer border of facsimile two [Facsimile 2] in the book of Abraham has some of these unrelated fragments inserted in it.

Although the picture found as facsimile one in the book of Abraham stands at the beginning of the Book of Breathings, this does not necessarily mean that it belongs to the text. The Egyptians often placed vignettes next to texts that bore no relationship to them. J. C. Goyon, in his study of the Louvre papyrus number 3279 (a Book of Breathings text, incidentally), says that the vignettes of religious papyri often have only a very distant connection with the subject of the accompanying text. (Bibliotheque D‘Etude, Vol. XLII, “Le Papyrus du Louvre N. 3279,” Cairo, 1966, p. 2.) Edouard Naville, in his invaluable publication of the Theban version of the Book of the Dead, also notes that the vignettes of many Book of the Dead papyri have absolutely nothing to do with the text they accompany and are clearly not meant to illustrate that text. (Das Aegyptische Totenbuch der XVIII, bis XX, Dynastie, Einleitung, Berlin, 1886, p. 39.) Thus, the text that gave rise to the book of Abraham could have been located elsewhere on the same papyrus or even on another.

But if the text were on the same papyri, what is a text written by—or attributed to—Abraham doing with a bunch of pagan religious texts some two thousand years after his time? This is really not as unlikely as it may seem. The Egyptians had a mania for things of the past. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Abraham’s ancient record could have been copied many times through the generations and treasured for its antiquity centuries later. Perhaps it was just such a multigeneration copy that finally ended up with the mummies and documents that came into Michael Chandler’s possession, a text that we do not now have.

A second explanation takes into consideration what Joseph Smith meant by the word translation. While translating the Book of Mormon, he used the Urim and Thummim rather than dictionaries and grammars of the language. Translating with the Urim and Thummim is evidently a much different process than using the tools of scholarly research.

Section seven of the Doctrine and Covenants provides us with a good example of that process. It is a revelation given to the Prophet through the Urim and Thummim of a translation of a “record made on parchment by John [the Revelator] and hidden up by himself.” (See section heading to D&C 7.) In other words, the document being translated wasn’t even in the Prophet’s possession; yet by means of the Urim and Thummim he was able to translate it.

His translation of the Bible, parts of which are in the book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price, was also done without having the original text before him. Instead, while he was using the King James Version of the Bible, the correct meaning or content was revealed to him, including extensive revelations of both Enoch and Moses that are not found in the King James Version.

We can envision a possible similar process taking place in Joseph Smith’s translation of the papyri he got from Michael Chandler. Instead of making a literal translation, as scholars would use the term, he used the Urim and Thummim as a means of receiving revelation. Even though a copy of Abraham’s record possibly passed through the hands of many scribes and had become editorially corrupted to the point where it may have had little resemblance to the original, the Prophet—with the Urim and Thummim, or simply through revelation—could have obtained the translation—or, as Joseph Smith used the word, he could have received the meaning, or subject-matter content of the original text, as he did in his translation of the Bible. This explanation would mean that Joseph Smith received the text of our present book of Abraham the same way he received the translation of the parchment of John the Revelator—he did not even need the actual text in front of him.

In reality, the actual method Joseph Smith used is far less important than the resulting book of scripture he produced. But here the Prophet’s critics prefer to ignore the evidence of the text itself. The book of Abraham should be evaluated on the basis of what it claims to be: a record of Abraham. A wealth of material on Abraham has come to light since the Prophet’s text was published, and the book of Abraham compares astoundingly well with these documents. (Hugh Nibley has discussed in detail the correlations between the book of Abraham and the subsequently discovered texts on Abraham. See Abraham in Egypt, 1981, and The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, An Egyptian Endowment, 1975, both published by Deseret Book Company.)

In the final analysis, however, the proof of the truth of the book of Abraham does not come by human means. As with all aspects of the restored gospel, “by the power of the Holy Ghost [we] may know the truth of all things.” (Moro. 10:5.) I have studied the book of Abraham, and the truth of it has been made known to me in a way I can’t deny. I know that anyone who earnestly wants to know if the book of Abraham is true can also receive this same witness and knowledge from God."

Answer 7

Because they are completly brainwashed and brainwash their children at an early age and on and on through generations. They also choose to ignore things that are true and make sense and make up their own "truths" in order to control.

Answer 8

the same reason people still follow religion in general, the details just don't matter to them

Answer 9

What golden plates?

Answer 10

Satan is the great deceiver, and Joseph Smith served satan.