101 reasons to doubt Mormonism.

http://packham.n4m.org/101.htm

I read through this list, and I wanted to share the ones that were interesting to me.


#6. The Book of Mormon says that wheat and barley were mainstay crops in ancient America. This is false. Only in Europe were those crops known and cultivated. And the actual staple crops grown in ancient America are never mentioned in the Book of Mormon: beans, sweet potatoes, squash, manioc, peppers, breadnut, fruits.

#8. Mormon scripture (D&C 84:86, 91) says that true missionaries from God will not rely on their own money or supplies ("purse or scrip") for support, and this will be a test to distinguish them from false missionaries. Modern Mormon missionaries now rely on themselves for support; i.e., they do "carry purse [and] scrip."

#16 Mormons waver on the ultimate authority for doctrine between the Bible, Mormon scriptures, statements of former Mormon prophets, statements of living Mormon prophets, and individual "revelation" - apparently depending on what they think gives them authority to believe what they want to believe. All of those sources are often mutually contradictory.

#34 The Book of Mormon portrays Lehi as a devout Jew, but he is completely ignorant of which tribe he belongs to (1 Nephi 5:14-16). This would be extremely unlikely.

#45 The D&C says (116, also 78:15 and 107:53-57) that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri, but the Book of Moses (PoGP, supposedly written by the prophet Moses, 3:10-16) says it was near the River Euphrates, which to Moses and his hearers meant the river in present-day Iraq.

#51 The "Word of Wisdom" (D&C 89:8) recommends using tobacco as a poultice for bruises, and for sick cattle. This has no medical basis in fact.

#54 A basic teaching of the Book of Mormon is that the American Indians are descendants of Israelites who arrived in America about 600 BC. Anthropologists have shown that there is no Hebrew ancestry in native Americans, who are rather descendants of immigrants from eastern Asia who came to America at least 15,000 years ago, long before Book of Mormon times.

#65 Many Mormons assert that the reason polygamy was practiced in early Utah was because there were not enough men to provide husbands for worthy women. This is historically false - Utah census records for the 19th century show that Utah had a considerable excess of men.

#66 The Book of Mormon (Ether 1:33 ff) portrays the Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages that occurred there as historical fact. No linguistic scholar accepts the Babel story as a historical event or as the origin of the world's different languages.

#72 Joseph Smith claimed to have seen in vision both the prophet Elijah and the prophet Elias (D&C 27:6-9). He apparently was unaware that in the Bible those two names refer to only one prophet (one is the Hebrew version of the name, the other Greek).

#74 "Zion's Camp" (the 1834 Mormon military expedition sent from Ohio to Missouri to protect Mormon settlers there) failed utterly, even though it was organized pursuant to revelations to Joseph Smith. One of the important factors causing its failure was that over one third of the army contracted cholera. Joseph Smith was at a loss as to how to deal with the disease, and God did not tell him how to prevent its spread (it could have been prevented if God had told Joseph Smith to boil all the drinking water).

#78 Joseph Smith produced an "inspired translation" of the Bible. It was not a translation in any sense, but rather his own corrections and additions to the King James translation, made without consulting any ancient texts or manuscripts. His changes are not supported by any non-Mormon biblical text scholarship, and in fact preserve many of the errors which biblical scholarship has since discovered in the King James version.

#90 Mormonism's view of gender is that there are only two (male and female). This is no longer considered scientifically accurate, since geneticists now recognize that some people are born with sexual traits of both genders, and surgery is needed to adjust the physical body of such a person to conform to one gender or the other. (See the website of the Intersex Society of North America.) If Mormon, such persons are denied entrance to Mormon temples, and thus are denied the possibility of attaining the highest degree of Mormon heaven.

#91 In Mormon theology "Lucifer" is the revealed name of Satan. Although many Christians also believe that, the idea is due to a mistaken translation of the passage in Isaiah (14:12; also Book of Mormon 2 Nephi 24:12), a mistake which occurred only when Isaiah was translated into Latin in the fourth century AD, long after the alleged date that Nephi was writing.

#108 The explanation in the Book of Mormon for writing the important records in Egyptian (Mormon 9:32-33) is that it would have required too much space on the precious gold plates to write in Hebrew. This does not make sense, since Hebrew is a very concise language, using consonants almost exclusively, compared to Egyptian, which required a large number of complex characters and would have been unsuitable for engraving in limited space.