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Originally Posted by ChinoCoug
I've already replied to that post.
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You didn't speak to the point of it being a bad analogy.
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Originally Posted by Archaea
Do you believe we have sufficient detail as to the revelation process to exclude it as a possibility?
IMHO, we certainly lack significant details and it is ambiguous enough to include this logical possibility.
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Given that there are no independent means of confirming the Book of Mormon's supernatural origins, I think we require something more than bald guessing, yes.
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Originally Posted by Archaea
You are presuming quite a bit. It is equally logical God could have handed it to JS fully translated without erros. Why didn't he do that?
It is not illogical to make JS work as a translator, struggling through recognition so that he would grow and learn the principles more deeply than if it were just magically revealed to him in perfect form.
Can't you see the pedagogical value of God forcing a prophet to compare biblical passages, to ponder them and to verify their important in providing a midrashic work of revelation and translation? Those principles would be so well taught as to become ingrained within him.
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I don't disagree with you, which is why Occam's razor doesn't really apply here. (read: you're making my point to Chino for me) The most logical solution is not necessarily the correct one.
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Originally Posted by Archaea
Is that the only suggestion that this scenario provides?
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Not necessarily. But the cognitive leap from "inspired copying" to plagiarism is tiny.
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Originally Posted by Sleeping in EQ
I'm aware of what the BoM narrative says. Parsing what the plates "said" (or even knowing if they "said" anything at all) from what Joseph Smith "said" is nigh to impossible. What liberties Joseph Smith took in constructing the work we know as the BoM are not known.
Put simply, you can't demonstrate what the plates did or did not contain.
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Don't you think this is a specious argument? Was there ever any doubt on the minds of anyone associated with the prophet, to say nothing of the modern church today, that the plates contained the same Book we read today?
And does it not strike anyone as odd that we are continually seeing strange hypotheses about the original of the Book without the slightest support in the historical record?