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From: jonw@tekmdp.UUCP (Jonathan White)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Re: The true origin of the Book of Mormon
Message-ID: <2214@tekmdp.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 10-Sep-83 13:54:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: tekmdp.2214
Posted: Sat Sep 10 13:54:09 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 11-Sep-83 04:50:31 EDT
Lines: 31

Thank you Russell Anderson and Dennis McCurdy for your detailed, point-for-
point rebuttals of the Spalding-Rigdon theory.  This is the type of response
that I had been hoping my "Case against the Book of Mormon" articles would
elicit, but never did.  Most of your response consisted of the stock-standard
counter-arguments that have been around for years, and have been soundly
refuted in books such as "Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon?" (by Cowdrey,
Davis, and Scales; published by Vision House in 1978).

Due to a busy personal schedule, I will probably not be able to generate a
detailed reply for several weeks, but in the meantime I would like to see
at least one of you respond to a paragraph in my article that both of you
apparently overlooked:

  (Note that in later years, the Mormons published [Spalding's] first novel 
  under the erroneous title of "Manuscript Found", even though that title 
  appears nowhere on the manuscript.  This was clearly done to discredit the 
  Spalding-Rigdon theory, but they only succeeded in damaging their own case.
  There are over 75 similarities between the first novel and the Book of 
  Mormon.)

If the Spalding-Rigdon theory is as feeble as the Mormons would have us
believe, why then did they feel it necessary to commit fraud in an attempt to
discredit the theory?  It is interesting to note that author Wayne L. Cowdrey 
(a descendant of Oliver Cowdery (the spelling of "Cowdery" has been altered)) 
left the Mormon church after reading Spalding's first manuscript and then 
realizing that the Mormon church had lied about the fact that there is a great 
deal of similarity between that manuscript and the Book of Mormon.

							Jon White
							Tektronix
							Aloha, Ore