That web page is just a reprinting
obviously.
but the point is that... that's all you need to be satisfied?
11 people who you've never met? they just SWEAR they've seen it, huh?
and that's good enough?
Seeing something, no matter how convincing, isn't going to make people "believers" or give them any conviction. Most of the people that signed that they saw the plates left the LDS church later on but none of them ever refuted their signed testimony. Wouldn't that have been an ideal time to do so?
this is a scapegoat type of response though.
I don't know those people or the circumstances under which they signed their original statements and how much power the church has over those statements (legally speaking).
but if the LDS is actually in possession of the plates and science could easily verify their authenticity that would be huge. everything I think that I "know" in life is based on expert analysis by people who have committed their lives to their specific area of research. I don't have the time or energy to personally study physics and biology and astronomy and chemistry all at once.
but if the people who already do those things were to publish peer reviewed research findings in a reputable journal and the headline was "Veracity of Joseph Smith's Golden Tablets Confirmed" then I would have to seriously reconsider my outlook on life. the same goes for any other relic or purported "miracle" from any other religion.
but so far, religious leaders have refused to allow their relics or miracles to be tested under controlled and scientific guidelines.
Also, the testimonies aren't meant to quell suspicion. If you want to find out whether to believe it or not, read the book. Think about it. Question it. If you still don't believe it, that's fine, too. As members of the LDS church, we are frequently encouraged to question it, people with conviction rarely rely on what other people tell them is true.
It's easy for me to justify how I "live with myself" because I am convicted and that is part of what defines me.
but why would I go out and read the Book of Mormon to begin with?
it has no place in my understanding of the natural world.
my education (in history, in science, in sociology) has never left me with such gaping holes in logic as to think "well there must be a higher power at work here" whose dogma I must then subject myself to. when Isaac Newton first attempted to calculate and predict the orbit of the major celestial bodies (the planets), he was unsure how they maintained their curved ellipses without eventually falling off the track, so to speak.
everyone around him assured him that it was the invisible force of God who held the orbits together and kept the balance in space. there was no need for further inquisition.
Newton wouldn't have it. he threw away his previous notes and started his research again from scratch. he disappeared from the public eye for a time and buried himself in his work. when he returned, not only had he resolved the problem of self-adjusting elliptical orbits, he had single-handedly
invented the discipline of calculus.
calculus did not exist in mathematics before he defined it and showed that it worked within all preexisting models.
these breakthroughs - these incredibly awe-inspiring accomplishments of the human mind - they wouldn't have occurred if people had continually chalked their problems up to the feeble reasoning of scripture. we know by default that no form of scripture anywhere on Earth was written by men of science. we know by default that no holy book contains rigorous or peer-reviewed standardized research.
what insight can it provide?
the most good it ever did was to console a person who is grieving the loss of a loved one, comfort a prisoner on death row, or make a child molester and serial killer believe that he too can enjoy eternal bliss in heaven as long as he says the magic words with a priest nearby.
I do not see the value it provides to modern mankind.
On a side note, the Shroud of Turin
has been dated.
oh.
well clearly I don't follow religious news.
but now that you've pointed it out, it only reinforces how absurd this is.
according to that article the Shroud dates from about 1260 to 1390CE.
and all the conventional accounts of Jesus of Nazareth show his birth to have occurred sometime before 10 BCE. his death is shown to have occurred sometime around 35-40 BCE.
this means that the shroud didn't exist until over 1000 years after Jesus lived and died. so clearly, even with carbon dating, the Shroud proves absolutely nothing about anything. even if we had Jesus' DNA and could match it to the shroud, it wouldn't prove that he rose from the dead or was the son of god either.