I read an internet exchange once where someone said, “You have arrived at the right answer, but for the wrong reasons. And so you will revert to your earlier wrong opinion.”

The author of this article is doing just that. I was considering not putting a link because a) I’ve never linked to the bedwetters at townhall.com, and I hesitate to start, and b) there’s an annoying ad there urging you to fight some kind of imaginary liberal bias in the media. I’m linking anyway if you want context, but wash your hands afterwards.

He raises a lot of issues about Joseph Smith (who Mormons consider to be a prophet) in the form of a quiz:

After I was asked to read about (and consider converting to) Mormonism, I came across some rather disturbing accusations against Joseph Smith, Jr. Were he alive today, I would submit the following true/false test to the founder of Mormonism:

1. True or False. Among your 33 well-documented plural wives, there were close to a dozen unions in which the wife was already married to another man.
2. True or False. In your lifetime, you married four different pairs of sisters.
3. True or False. You once married a young woman and also married her mother.
4. True or False. At least one of your plural wives was as young as fourteen.

And so on and so on.

His implication is that if Joseph Smith did those things (and I have no reason to doubt that he did), that somehow invalidates Smith’s claim to be a prophet. But there’s an assumption here: God wouldn’t tell Joseph Smith to do those things because I don’t think God would condone that behaviour. And why wouldn’t s/he? Is the columnist so in touch with the divine that he can figure out what God would do? Seems that a lot of people are claiming the privilege of theo-telepathy lately.

This is the same kind of trap that atheists commonly fall into when they discuss the problem of evil: how could God allow suffering? After all, I wouldn’t allow it, and God must be… just like me! And then they are easily countered by scriptures like “Your ways are not my ways.” After all, maybe God is an sadistic God who likes to see suffering, but who you should worship anyway. Or he has his own reasons for doing things, which even a cursory glance at the Old Testament will confirm.

Atheists are only on slightly firmer ground when we say, “God claims to be loving, but allows suffering, and that doesn’t seem very loving.” And then the believer finds a way around it with the ‘free-agency’ argument or the ‘growth through adversity’ argument, or any argument that comes to mind — they’ve evolved millions of them.

No, the way to attack this is like so:
1) Smith claimed to receive revelations from God.
2) The existence of God is unsupported by any real evidence.
3) There are therefore other non-supernatural explanations for the things Smith wrote and did. We accept those explanations because it is more likely that Smith was mistaken or deceptive than that God exists.

And then you can debate that without having to get into guessing the mental states of hypothetical beings.