Mormons complain a lot about being “ridiculed”. Thomas Jefferson shared some words on that subject: “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.”
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Adrian Van there Kemp July 30, 1816. Mormons are often ridiculed because they embrace ignorance while typically having the capacity to rise above their mythology and false tradition. It is clearly mean to tease a mentally retarded person for doing something dumb. It is not mean to expect otherwise intelligent people to let go of ignorance, bigotry, and superstition. Joseph Smith didn’t “translate” anything. He simply made it up. The evidence is easy to see, once you step outside the Mormon bubble of Church-serving fear and taboo. And that is one of the deeper problems with a Mitt Romney presidency. A man who so readily embraces proven fiction as the “Gospel” is not the kind of person that can be trusted to hold the most powerful office in the world. We need someone more grounded in reality and who does not so readily embrace fantasy. For those Mormons that scoff at my statement that Joseph’s translations are proven fabrications, you can simply open up your own Pearl of Great Price to Facsimile 3, and compare Joseph’s “translation” (a projection of a rural Colonial American Bible-based world-view, including sexism and racism) to actual translations of the the Egyptian characters (e.g., the black “slave” is actually the god Anubis, and the “prince” is actually the goddess Maat. Joseph couldn’t even get the gender of the figures correct). Yes, I know it sucks to find out that the story you hear each week at Church is false, but then that’s the purpose of Church, to prop up false stories with constant repetition and dire warnings to stay away from anything that may contradict the stories. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_abraham#Facsimile_No._3