It's a shame I hadn't watched this documentary before the Mormons called earlier this week. I'm sure the two missionaries who called would be unaware that DNA evidence proves that one of the Book of Mormon's core messages, that Israelites travelled to the Americas and settled there, is a complete fabrication. I'm happy to let them know all about it next time... when they will of course refuse to listen to me again.

If you know nothing about the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, ie the Mormons, the first few minutes of this video give a good summary of the supposed 'history' found in the book. The remainder smashes it all apart, using that tried and tested tool, science.

One little irony is that the video was produced by Living Hope Ministries, a decidedly Christian organisation, whose tag-line is 'sharing Biblical truths with Latter-Day Saints'. Christians using science to disprove religion. Hmmm. Only someone else's religion of course, not their own!

The video is around 50 minutes long but if you don't want to watch the whole thing you can get the general idea from the first 15-20 minutes. However, you will miss most of what I find to be the most open-minded of the people in the video, although I don't doubt the honesty of the others featured in it. Thomas Murphy, a Mormon anthropologist and scholar (the man in the still image shown above, before the video plays), is still a Mormon. While the others are all ex-Mormons, Murphy is coming at the subject from within the LDS Church, and he is genuinely struggling with what he knows to be true - the DNA evidence is irrefutable, and as a result the Book of Mormon must be false. In his words, 'the book of Mormon would not stand up in a court of law today'. See the footnote below for more from Thomas Murphy.

The bottom line: Joseph Smith just made it all up, and the Book of Mormon is a book of lies.

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Footnotes:
Apologies for the inevitable Christian message delievered in the last five minutes of the documentary. As I said, this was a production of a Christian ministry, so you'd expect them to put a Biblical slant on it. But Christians should remember that science disproves their holy text, the Bible, just as firmly as it disproves the Book of Mormon. I laughed out loud when he said that Mormons were wrong to use the excuse that God changed the DNA on purpose to 'test them'. Isn't that exactly what some Christians say about radiometric dating? That the world isn't billions of years old because God made the world appear to be artificially old to 'test our faith'?

Ignore the hypocritical message of Christianity in this video because the science itself, the DNA evidence proving that Native Americans did not descend from the Israelites, is good.

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Attacks on the validity of the Book of Mormon using DNA data
Thomas Murphy and Simon Southerton, both of whom are Mormon scholars from the video, are featured heavily on this web page. There is also a large list of links to related reading.