Perhaps God doesn’t make such a mistake, but man certainly can.
How many translations into English of the Bible are there? How many doctrinal disagreements could be derived thereby? How many of said translations should be considered “valid” scripture?
In my opinion, God is worried much more about the essence of the doctrine being presented in the text, than He is about the precise wording, spelling, or grammatical errors in the text.
I find that a genuine seeker of truth will normally disregard errors of man and search after the truths outlined in the text. It is the fault-finder who reads a holy text with an eye toward disproving it.
One must be very careful in trying to disprove the Book of Mormon with this category of criticism. The Bible would have to be discarded on the basis of many of these same questions.
Personally, I don’t wish to see either discarded. But, if this discussion continues, I will make it a practice to ask the same questions of the Bible; if the Bible fails by the given standard, then consistency demands that the question be disregarded.
Here is an example of what I’m talking about:
http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=1197
In the above article, the author is defending the Bible against the charge that it has suffered more than 100,000 changes. I agree with the author. I accept his explanations.
Interestingly, the same breed of explanations are being used to justify the changes in the Book of Mormon. If you do not accept the explanations in the case of the Book of Mormon, and reject as a result the Book of Mormon’s divine origination, than it is therefore impossible to accept the Bible as divine.
Many of the changes of the type you cite in your previous post, MHG, are quite possibly resulting from the fact that the Book of Mormon had to go through a layer of interpretation that, to the best of our knowledge, the Bible never faced - that being a hostile printer. The 1837 edition was the first time that there was an opportunity to correct the inconsistencies of this category. I’m looking for better evidence of this, but I think it is plausible.
Given this information, this argument against the Book of Mormon would be much more convincing were there to be serious changes between the 1837 and later editions. I have not found evidence of such.
Well, you’re certainly making me dizzy.
tantiboh, I always enjoy your posts, thanks for keeping your cool with those who attack us and think nothing of it, nor of their blapshemy in our eyes, it is wonderful to see that you can look at things from both their and our perspectives, thanks for some great reads.
Enjoy your Sunday
Very funny. I wonder why it was never the noun that was in error, but it was always the verb tense that was the problem? If God can’t get the tense of a verb right, that’s sort of surprising. Now if a man, who had a problem with verb tenses wrote the book of Mormon without guidance from God, that would make things easier to understand with 1000’s of mistakes in singular and plural verbs.
Also funny that the Mormon church line is that they are “punctuation errors,” so much so that it was a kneejerk reaction on your part before you saw that I’d posted proof that this was not the case. Yet that line by the church is a lie, that the changes were only punctuation. What sort of Church lies like that?