I  It seems common place for the LDS "big wigs" to excommunicate the people who ask for their names to be removed from the rolls. 

Posted By itsadryheat on 05/22/2008 3:45 PM
You want a good resource, try the DVD the Bible vs the Book of Mormon, or the DVD Jesus Christ Joseph Smith. LDS say they are Christians and so this should be not a problem to do so. I've got them and would gladly burn you a copy. You can also go online to www.lvhm.org or http://www.goodnewsforlds.org/ to watch them yourselves. Why not see if there were any truth to what has been said? But, I know you won't. You would rather pin everyone as anti-Mormon and apostates, than just look to see if there is any truth to what has been said.

I agree. Holding a disciplinary council for someone who has requested that his/her name be removed is very rare. EEE was not speaking from personal knowledge or experience, but rather overgeneralized and unfounded opinion.

What's funnier is that Mormonism took off like it did among devoted Bible readers in a Bible-reading society. As a translation by and for a people whose Bible was the King James Version, why would anyone expect Bible quotations to be in any other version? Furthermore, the witnesses to the olates and the translation are unanimous and united in affirming that the text was dictated completely without the use of manuscripts, documents, or books (including the Bible). Many of these witnesses became disgruntled at various times, but remained true and consistent with their testimonies even while separated from the Church. It should be nothing short of amazing to critics who harp on what they see as "plagiarizing of the Bible" that none of these witnesses "exposed" the fraud when they were disgruntled and away from the Church.

The following from the packet I provided at my Book of Mormon manuscripts presentation in February is relevant to your above claim, EEE:

The best treatment of this question, in my view, is by the late Mormon scholar Hugh Nibley in an article for the Church News:

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"The next most devastating argument against the Book of Mormon was that it actually quoted the Bible. The early critics were simply staggered by the incredible stupidity of including large sections of the Bible in a book which they insisted was specifically designed to fool the Bible-reading public. They screamed blasphemy and plagiarism at the top of their lungs, but today any biblical scholar knows that it would be extremely suspicious if a book purporting to be the product of a society of pious emigrants from Jerusalem in ancient times did not quote the Bible. No lengthy religious writing of the Hebrews could conceivably be genuine if it was not full of scriptural quotations.

"These were once the three commonest arguments against the Book of Mormon. Since they have been silenced by the progress of discovery, the emphasis has now shifted to two other points, (1) that the Book of Mormon contains, to quote another writer of Christianity Today, ‘passages lifted bodily from the King James Version,’ and (2) that it quotes, not only from the Old Testament, but also the New Testament as well . . . As to the ‘passages lifted bodily from the King James Version,’ we first ask, ‘How else does one quote scripture if not bodily?’ And why should anyone quoting the Bible to American readers of 1830 not follow the only version of the Bible known to them?

"Actually the Bible passages quoted in the Book of Mormon often differ from the King James Version, but where the latter is correct there is every reason why it should be followed. When Jesus and the Apostles and, for that matter, the Angel Gabriel quote the scriptures in the New Testament, do they recite from some mysterious Urtext? Do they quote the prophets of old in the ultimate original? Do they give their own inspired translations? No, they do not. They quote the Septuagint, a Greek version of the Old Testament prepared in the third century B.C. Why so? Because that happened to be the received standard version of the Bible accepted by the readers of the Greek New Testament. When ‘holy men of God’ quote the scriptures it is always in the received standard version of the people they are addressing.

We do not claim the King James Version or the Septuagint to be the original scriptures—in fact, nobody on earth today knows where the original scriptures are or what they say. Inspired men have in every age been content to accept the received version of the people among whom they labored, with the Spirit giving correction where correction was necessary.

Since the Book of Mormon is a translation, ‘with all its faults,’ [this was the title of a series of articles on Bible manuscripts and texts in Christianity Today at the time of Nibley’s article] into English for English-speaking people whose fathers for generations had known no other scriptures but the standard English Bible, it would be both pointless and confusing to present the scriptures to them in any other form, so far as their teachings were correct.

What is thought to be a very serious charge against the Book of Mormon today is that it, a book written down long before New Testament times and on the other side of the world, actually quotes the New Testament! True, it is the same Savior speaking in both, and the same Holy Ghost, and so we can expect the same doctrines in the same language. But what about the "Faith, Hope and Charity" passage in Moroni 7:45? Its resemblance to 1 Corinthians 13 is undeniable. This particular passage, recently singled out for attack in Christianity Today, is actually one of those things that turn out to be a striking vindication of the Book of Mormon. For the whole passage, which scholars have labeled ‘the Hymn to Charity,’ was shown early in this century by a number of first-rate investigators working independently (A. Harnack, J. Weiss, R. Reizenstein) to have originated not with Paul at all, but to go back to some older but unknown source: Paul is merely quoting from the record.

Now it so happens that other Book of Mormon writers were also peculiarly fond of quoting from the record. Captain Moroni, for example, reminds his people of an old tradition about the two garments of Joseph, telling them a detailed story which I have found only in a thousand-year-old commentary on the Old Testament, a work still untranslated and quite unknown to the world of Joseph Smith. So I find it not a refutation but a confirmation of the authenticity of the Book of Mormon when Paul and Moroni both quote from a once well-known but now lost Hebrew writing.

Now as to [the] question, ‘Why did Joseph Smith, a nineteenth century American farm boy, translate the Book of Mormon into seventeenth century King James English instead of into contemporary language?’

The first thing to note is that the ‘contemporary language’ of the country-people of New England 130 years ago was not so far from King James English. Even the New England writers of later generations, like Webster, Melville, and Emerson, lapse into its stately periods and "thees and thous" in their loftier passages.

For that matter, we still pray in that language and teach our small children to do the same; that is, we still recognize the validity of a special speech set apart for special occasions. My old Hebrew and Arabic teacher, Professor Popper, would throw a student out of the class who did not use ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ in constructing. ‘This is the word of God!’ he would cry indignantly. ‘This is the Bible! Let us show a little respect; let us have a little formal English here!’

Furthermore, the Book of Mormon is full of scripture, and for the world of Joseph Smith's day, the King James Version was the Scripture, as we have noted; large sections of the Book of Mormon, therefore, had to be in the language of the King James Version—and what of the rest of it? That is scripture, too.

One can think of lots of arguments for using King James English in the Book of Mormon, but the clearest comes out of very recent experience. In the past decade, as you know, certain ancient non-biblical texts, discovered near the Dead Sea, have been translated by modern, up-to-date American readers. I open at random a contemporary Protestant scholar's modern translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and what do I read? ‘For thine is the battle, and by the strength of thy hand their corpses were scattered without burial. Goliath the Hittite, a mighty man of valor, thou didst deliver into the hand of thy servant David.’

Obviously the man who wrote this knew the Bible, and we must not forget that ancient scribes were consciously archaic in their writing, so that most of the scriptures were probably in old-fashioned language the day they were written down. To efface that solemn antique style by the latest up-to-date usage is to translate falsely.

At any rate, Professor Burrows . . . falls naturally and without apology into the language of the King James Bible. Or take a modern Jewish scholar who purposely avoids archaisms in his translation of the Scrolls for modern American readers: ‘All things are inscribed before Thee in a recording script, for every moment of time, for the infinite cycles of years, in their several appointed times. No single thing is hidden, naught missing from Thy presence.’ Professor Gaster, too, falls under the spell of our religious idiom.

By frankly using that idiom, the Book of Mormon avoids the necessity of having to be redone into ‘modern English’ every thirty or forty years. If the plates were being translated for the first time today, it would still be King James English!" (Hugh Nibley, "The Prophetic Book of Mormon," [Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1990] pp. 214-218).

To add more proof that Joseph smith is a plagiarizer, the entire Book of Abraham(which if I remember correctly is in the Pearl of Great Price), which is, in reality, the Egyptian Book of Breathings taken from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, all of which is totally pagan material.

Min god anyone?