[supportlocal4h]

My family is amused when I criticize the physics in a movie when a bridge collapses in an unrealistic way. Apparently I don't have any issue with the talking dog that flies across the river and uses mental telepathy to form a giant wave that catches all the pieces of the fallen bridge and pushes them back into place to restore the bridge. No, my beef is with the poor grasp of physics because of how the bridge fell down.

Joseph Smith didn't discover gold plates. He was led to them by an angel sent by God. The question of whether a decendant of inhabitants of Jerusalem could have buried some modified Egyption writings in North America 1000+ years before Joseph was born... that question is kind of small when considering if there is a God and if any such God takes a direct interest in individual people.

FWIW, I happen to believe that there is a God and that God cares very much about you.

Now, about that bridge...

[matt_s]

You speak about physics and how unrealistic a bridge collapse in a movie is yet want to hand wave about the physics of golden plates showing up from a civilization 5000 miles and 1500+ years away with zero evidence that the plates ever existed other than "trust me, bro".

As you go back through history, its understandable that earlier civilizations attribute things happening around them, or things they observe, to some higher power or having completely false notions of the world, like the earth is flat for example. And then humans come to a more accurate understanding via science. How many hundreds or thousands of deities/gods have humans attributed things to during our thousands of years of existence?

God or a higher being isn't the discussion point, the discussion point is how silly it is to think that something like being led to/discovering golden plates happened at that period of time.

[supportlocal4h]

Please read the book. One guy follows a funky compass provided by...God(?) from Jerusalem to some coast. On the coast God shows him where to mine ore to make tools. God shows him how to build a ship that can weather a long sea voyage all the way to the Americas.

The whole book has all sorts of interventions from God. Like every page is about God. If you're hung up on Egyptian writing you missed the whole point. That's the least incredulous part.

And some 18-year-old kid in the 1820s says an angel led him to these gold plates with all this modified Egyptian writing and God showed him how to translate it into English.

So this book is going to be a bunch of crazy nonsense, right? Read it. Seriously, read it. It is a better read than anything you did in your high school or college lit class. We can't have a decent critical discussion about the physics of it until you've read it.