Gnome was never about that. Gnome was always about making the most FSF-compliant software. A true Stallmanite will tell you that making superior software is not as important as making "free" software. Gnu and the FSF have no room for pragmatism.

Gnome was, from the beginning, about politics first and technology second, It fell victim to the same bone-headed narrow focus that still plagues the FSF. Gnome came about not because anybody really needed it or asked for it, but because Miguel de Icaza was hot and bothered about the GPL. Its sole purpose was to be the anti-KDE (which was already usable, and based on a solid widget framework), because Stallmanites wanted to get their sanctimony on about Qt being distributed under a license that wasn't "free enough" for Richard Stallman and his fawning groupies. It was popular because the priesthood of the FSF got Red Hat to buy into their religion, which means that it was the default for many people's first Linux installs. It always felt a little bit fatter, uglier, slower, and clunkier than KDE. Its leaders were also always firm in their belief that they knew what you wanted better than you did, long before the "Gnome Shell" fiasco. I tried it once or twice in the 2.x days, and was really annoyed that there wasn't even a straightforward way to edit the stupid menu---evidently a deliberate design choice. It was like Apple, but worse. In short, Gnome was what you get when you cross the hubris of Steve Jobs with the hubris of Richard Stallman. I will not miss it.

Then what do we judge them on? What's going to happen in 1,000 years?

I have told you already that my faith influences my view of the evidence. If I know something is true by direct, personal experience, naturally that will color my view of circumstantial evidence that implies it may be false. Are you self-aware enough to admit that you are doing the exact same thing? You have decided that a book you have not read is false, and so you accept without question evidence of that falsehood. Any evidence that supports the Mormon narrative you dismiss, without examining it, as the work of apologists. Yet, if as you say, atheists, other Christians, Muslims, etc., become convinced of the Book of Mormon, would they not then become apologists, and in your view lose all credibility? What source could convince you, then? But more to the point:

Nonsense. Our claims are far too extraordinary for people to be convinced by mere circumstantial evidence. To wit:

What circumstantial evidence will convince you that a 14-year-old boy saw God the Father and Jesus Christ and that they spoke to him? None. The only way to test the truth of that claim is to go to mormon.org, have a couple of missionaries come by your house with a Book of Mormon, read it, and try the experiment contained in its very own pages. (What have you got to lose?) If you then learn that the book is its own best evidence, then it follows that Joseph Smith was the prophet he claims to be, because good fruit does not come from a poisoned tree. Everything else is just window dressing.

And right there you have hit on the exact point.

To be clear, I do think the evidence stands up to scrutiny, as long as you look at all the evidence. It's not that I'm afraid of academic debate. I would not be ashamed to build a hypothetical court case to try to an impartial jury (as if there is such a thing) in favor of my faith. I am confident that I could convince an impartial jury, by a preponderance of the evidence, that I am right. But as you point out, that evidence would fall far short of producing in my jury the kind of conviction that would lead them to commit their entire lives to a cause. When we speak of faith, we do not speak of blind belief. Faith is a vital force that leads to "being doers of the word, and not hearers only," and that fundamentally changes men and women internally. "Preponderance of the evidence" doesn't cut it. It's an interesting academic exercise, but ultimately worthless to producing any kind of meaningful, vital faith.

To the point of the original article, I have personally known several former Mormons who have left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints over stuff they read on the internet. And I myself have learned many things as an adult that I did not know as a child, when my faith was still nascent. Confronted with those things, I had to ask myself honestly, "Do I still believe this?" The incontrovertible answer to me was (to return to our analogy), "Yes, this is definitely a tree. I have seen it and felt it. I have tasted its fruit. It is what it claims to be." In my opinion, that is also why so many leave when confronted with difficult questions. It's not that the evidence is so totally compelling, or that it can't be answered. It's that they have not had the deep, personal, individual experiences. They have relied on their parents' faith, or on momentum, or on social pressure, but they have never tasted the fruit personally, or if they did, they did not recognize it. Lacking that individual witness, they begin to feel they have been deceived, and that makes them angry. This is why we send missionaries out armed not with scholarly articles on the Egyptological basis of the Book of Abraham (for that you might try Hugh Nibley's An Approach to the Book of Abraham, but rather with blue paperback Books of Mormon. Their message is not, "Here are a bunch of evidentiary points that support the Book of Mormon," it is "Here is the book itself. It contains God's word. It was translated by Joseph Smith, who saw God the Father and Jesus Christ [not as part of a tree analogy, but with his physical eyes; a claim I do not make], and who was a prophet. If you want to know if the book is what it claims to be, read the book itself. It contains a promise you can test---that if you will personally read it, ponder on it, and then ask God if it is true, he will manifest the truth of it to you." This "manifestation" is the other sense I spoke of, one that we all have, and one that we have probably all experienced at some point, but that we must sensitize ourselves to.

Thus, to your point:

I would say quite the opposite. The books stand entirely on their own, because I have experienced the value of what's in them. I don't need an outside authority to tell me what to think about them. From that context, the story of where they came from and how they came to be is certainly interesting, but ultimately secondary. If I give you an apple and you eat it and find that it tastes good, the apple stands on its own. It tastes good regardless of where or how I got it. The apple is good even if you discover that the tree has some curious and unfortunate blemishes in the bark (we do not claim infallibility for our prophets or our members). The apple is good despite the latest cutting-edge research in biochemistry that has convinced many people who have never tasted an apple that they do not taste good. But you are correct that once I know the apple tastes good, that will color my perception. I will believe that the blemishes are only surface blemishes, because a tree that is not fundamentally sound cannot produce good fruit (i.e., Joseph Smith was not perfect, but neither was he an adulterer). If the latest research concludes that the apple can't taste good ("Cosmologists have discovered X about the CMBR, totally disproving God!!!"), I will not have a crisis of faith and think I must be wrong about the apple, because I have tasted it, and continue to taste it every day.

I'm not looking for an argument. You asked a question. I answered it. I will do so again, but please understand that I do not expect to convince you, because whatever I say, you will find a counterargument to. I will answer your remaining questions, but I'm not going to get dragged into a debate, because there is nothing to debate.

No, you misunderstand. Joseph purchased several papyri. They got passed around, sold, re-sold, lost, damaged, found again, re-purchased. So we have only scraps and fragments of those papyri Joseph purchased. We don't know which papyrus the Book of Abraham came from, and we don't know if that papyrus is among the surviving ones. The only one we definitely still have that definitely shows up in the Book of Abraham is fragments of one drawing. What he published in the Book of Abraham matches the remaining scraps as far as they exist. There are some features of the drawing that Egyptologists claim are "wrong," but they are saying the drawing is "wrong" because it does not match a classical Egyptian funerary drawing. The point is it's not supposed to match. It's a variation of an Egyptian funerary drawing used to tell a different story. As far as the text, Joseph's process of re-translating the Bible is instructive. He worked from and compared different versions of the Bible (he favored Luther's German Bible), but there are also large passages that he received as direct revelation. The existing text was more a jumping-off point. This is in contrast to the Book of Mormon, which he translated directly without interpolation.

Let me put it a different way. If a blind man came to you and tried to prove to you there are no trees, you would not be swayed. You tell him you have seen the trees, and he says he has not. You take him out and let him feel the bark of a tree. He says he has it on good authority that what he is feeling is corrugated iron. He says he has never seen wood furniture, or leaves, or fruit at the market.

And yet his limited experience does not and cannot negate your experience of actually seeing trees. He is simply lacking a sense that you have. God is not a theoretical construct to me, just as trees are not to you. Joseph Smith is not an exercise in "what if." What he did is a fact. The first and best evidence of what he did is the Book of Mormon itself. Returning to our tree analogy, I have seen the tree and personally picked fruit from the branches of that tree and tasted it. So your cleverest argument that it is not a tree, but rather a papier mache imitation of a tree built by a charlatan carries no weight with me. Even if you happen to find what you believe to be a scrap of newspaper or a dab of plaster near the tree, that does not change the fact that I know from personal experience that it is, in fact, a tree.

I promise you, I am much more intimately familiar with this tree than you are. If it were a fraud, I would know it, because I have examined, analyzed, picked apart, and scrutinized it with all the same senses you possess. But what's more, I have seen and tasted it with senses you inherently possess but have not refined enough to be sensitive to them.

And that is why there is nothing to debate. Every time you bring up some point you think is damning evidence of a fraud, I see only a distraction; at best a "Hmm. Well, that's something I don't know yet." The Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham are their own best evidence of what they claim to be. Trying to prove or disprove them by indirect methods is a pointless exercise in futility that will convince neither side.

As pointed out below, there were witnesses, and in fact Martin Harris (who lost the manuscript) was one of them.

Only fragments of the original papyri have survived. The only part of the papyri that are reproduced directly in the Book of Abraham are two drawings, only one of which survives in part, and the most interesting and controversial parts are not among the scraps that have survived. Egyptologists have argued that the drawings are "wrong,*" but that's actually kind of the point. The author used a variation on the Egyptian funerary drawing to illustrate a story. As for the text itself, that may have come from a separate papyrus that did not survive, or Joseph may have received it as a direct revelation as he did many other passages of scripture. To me, how Joseph got from the papyri to the extant text is not so interesting as the text itself, which I have found to be extremely valuable.

*Some Egyptologists charge that Joseph merely interpolated his own fantastical but incorrect ideas onto the drawings. But the originals were, in fact, on display for a while when Joseph himself had them. Nobody reported then that they were incomplete or that there were any differences between the published drawings and the displayed versions, despite the fact that Joseph had many enemies who were eager to discredit him.

The Book of Mormon does not claim that Native Americans are, as a body, a "lost tribe." It claims that a group of people came from Jerusalem and settled here. They weren't the only ones to do so. But in any case, to say that it is definitively "disproven" that a group of Israelites lived in the Americas is ascribing to the archaeological and genetic sciences greater certainty than even their practitioners credibly can. We have found genetic links between certain Indian tribes and Mongols. That's very interesting and exciting, but does not prove or disprove anything related to the Book of Mormon.

About how you would deal with it if I laid out to you my theory for how I have disproved the existence of trees. You'd look at it and think, "That's interesting, but I know there are trees, because I've seen them. So I suspect there is something missing in your argument."

Occam's Razor: If a person on Slashdot invokes Occam's Razor, the most likely explanation is that he does not understand Occam's Razor and is using it wrong.

Why? Because you don't personally like what they say? What makes them less reliable than any other person? What vested interest did they have in lying for Joseph Smith? If they had one, what interest remained when all three eventually broke with Smith, left the church, and still adamantly maintained the truth of their testimonies? Why did two come back to the church, in abject humility, begging forgiveness from Brigham Young? Why did Martin Harris, the one who did not come back, defend his testimony as true in the most vehement terms to his dying day?

Who is "they"? Although many Mormons (erroneously, in my opinion) believe that the Book of Mormon is a record of people that spanned all over North and South America, the Book itself does not say that, and that idea is beginning to wane in popularity. Indeed, the official (but non-scriptural) introduction to the Book of Mormon used to claim that the people were the "primary" ancestors of the American Indians, while it now merely claims that they are "among" their ancestors. As an educated Mormon, I find the idea of the Book of Mormon spanning all of North and South America absurd and inconsistent with evidence internal to the Book itself. I personally believe they were limited primarily to the Yucatan. Any unique genetic markers that tie them back to Jerusalem (not Egypt) would be significantly attenuated by this point after 3,000 years of intermingling with other people. If such a marker were found, it would neither prove nor disprove anything to me, because I don't believe Native Americans of any variety are a homogeneous race. There is plenty of other historical and archaeological evidence in favor of the Book of Mormon. I find it all interesting and always love to learn more, but I do not base my testimony of that Book on such evidence. The Book of Mormon is a volume of scripture, not a history. I have personally tested and proved its value as scripture many, many times. The historical context is mostly interesting scenery that enriches my enjoyment in reading, but is subject to adjustment as we gain new evidence.

I have a .30-06 that would easily go through the door, and through the intruder, and across the street, and maybe stop at the neighbor's stone fence. But you don't want to shoot at what you can't see, and .30-06 is not a great home defense round. Honestly, for most thugs, the sound of you racking a slide or loading a shell is probably enough to persuade them to pick another home to invade. If not, take up a good defensive position, and nail them as soon as they get through the door.

Yeah, but there could be downsides, too.

FYI, evidence of subsequent remedial measures is generally inadmissible.. It's a good rule, designed exactly for this kind of situation. This is from the Federal rules. As far as I know, most states have similar state rules.

Actually, while the parent was a bit extreme in his paranoia, he was closer to correct than you are. You infringe on a patent whether you saw the patent or not. For copyright, the plaintiff has to prove that you copied the work in some way. If I coincidentally wrote a book that word-for-word identical to Twilight, for example, without ever having seen the original, technically I wouldn't be infringing on the copyright.

You sound like a man at war against himself. On the one hand, you sound like you almost desperately want to believe for some reason. On the other hand, you are angry and disillusioned because you felt hopelessly abandoned. You do not deny that you have felt the influence of the Holy Ghost, but you have deemed those communications unreliable. You want evidence. So let's lay aside Fanny Algers and the Adam-God Theory for now, because those are historical questions that necessarily are heavily influenced by a person's perspective on whether the church is actually what it claims to be. Let's start with experimenting on the word as it is in the present tense.

Your thesis is that the church is a cult for extorting tithing from the members. How does that thesis hold up to examination, beyond the fact that the church receives money? Who benefits? Not President Monson, apparently, since he lives quite modestly. The church builds a lot of impressive buildings, but his personal residence is not one of them. He gets a modest stipend as far as we know, but he is not getting rich off of it. He does not have immense personal holdings to establish a great financial dynasties. He has a great deal of control over the church's expenditures, but he is not intermingling church funds with his own money. Yes, he travels quite a bit, but not to sip Margaritas on the beach. He is constantly meeting and ministering to people. So what does he personally get out of this extortion?

What about the rest of the Twelve? Some seem to have a bit of money, but if this is an extortion racket, it seems odd that those who had the most remunerative careers before they ascended to the upper echelons of this great financial cult are the ones who are best off financially now that they have been admitted to that inner circle. So what are they getting out of it personally? Where are the tithing-funded memberships in exclusive clubs and two-a-month tithing-funded golf vacations at exclusive resorts? Where are the tithing-funded ski junkets? Where are the tithing-funded gilded Cadillacs? Where are the prostitution scandals and secret mistresses of the Twelve? Why do we have to go back to the 1940s to find even a one-off bizarre incident of one of the Twelve being disciplined? If this is a coverup, it is the most insanely successful coverup in the history of the world.

The extortion theory doesn't stand up to rational evidence, so let's move on to an alternative. Let's test the theory that they're really just a bunch of nice old men who, like millions of other Mormons, are sincerely deluded into believing that they are guided by this mystic force called the Holy Ghost that is really just a frenzied mind. If so, doesn't it seem odd to you that this delusion is so general in convincing people to do good things, to help their neighbors, to pay fast offerings, to contribute to communities, and to have strong families? Isn't it odd also that it has warned so many of danger, averted personal catastrophes, and otherwise given sound counsel?

And that's my real point. Faith is not just believing that something will happen, or even merely believing that something is true. Proper faith is a principle of action, and that is what Alma is urging in Alma 32. Experimenting on the word is not just praying and asking if it's true. That's the equivalent of looking up a physical constant in a textbook and trusting that the result is true. Experimenting is doing something and deriving the physical constant yourself. And then repeating the experiment over and over again. If you keep getting the same result, you start to trust that it's not just something written in a book that may or may not be wrong, and that's this isn't merely some one-off quirk or that you got lucky this time. If you want to experiment on the word, let the Holy Ghost direct you to some action, or choose some commandment to keep, and then see what the result of that action is. Then let him direct you to another action and try that one out and see what happens. Be scientific about it. Every time you feel that quirk of emotion we call the Holy Ghost, write down what you think that weird emotional quirk is directing you to do. Then try doing it. Write down the result. See how listening to that weird emotional quirk affects your life over time. I have tried this many times, until it was no longer even faith. As I said in another post, God is no more a theoretical construct to me than is my own mortal father. He is somebody I know personally. We converse frequently, and always to my benefit.

By the way, I don't know how long Slashdot keeps stories "alive," but this one is getting fairly old. If it goes down, feel free to contact me off-list. I'm happy to continue this conversation.

If you have any glimmer of hope left, read this talk. You've probably seen it before, but perhaps you have not looked at it with an eye to the question you just asked. If you feel that God abandoned you, remember that even his own Son once felt (wrongly) that his Father has abandoned him. And as Elder Holland points out, it happened so that the rest of us could know, when we felt abandoned, that we are not alone in our suffering. God does keep his promises, but not always in the way that we hope or expect. I don't know your specific circumstances or what your wife was suffering, or how it turned out. I pray she was okay in the end. But if she was facing a critical or even terminal illness, and especially if your worst fears for her were realized, the most rational comfort I can think of is those very temple ordinances you were keeping. If you feared she may be taken from you, what greater comfort could he give you than to know that no power on earth or in hell can rend her from you permanently so long as you keep your temple covenants? If those temple covenants are true, how has God abandoned you in your moment of need, when he has promised you that you can be reunited with her? What better fruit could you ask for?

As for why he did not give you the emotional comfort you desperately craved, there may be a rational reason for that too. I have been not necessarily in the circumstance you were, but certainly there were times I desperately needed emotional comfort and there seemed to be none. Why would God do that to us? My favorite analogy is the book Dune. Have you ever read it? Why were the Fremen so awesome? Because it was hard. They had to be awesome to survive. Why is Marine Corps boot camp so indescribably awful? Because if it was easy, Marines would be wimps. If God is trying to raise up a race of gods, why does he sometimes leave us casting about in the dark, feeling like there are no answers anywhere, and like we're on our own to figure it all out? Because that's how you raise up a race of gods. It's not just about "testing" us to see if we'll be good. If the Fremen got an extra cup of water, just for the asking, every time they were really, really thirsty, they wouldn't be the most fearsome army in the known galaxy. If God gave us relief from suffering, just for the asking, every time it really, really hurts, we wouldn't learn the fortitude necessary to become like him. But that doesn't mean that God isn't aware of us, or that he stopped caring. It just means that sometimes he gives us what we need instead of what we think we need, and sometimes what we need is the strength to persevere through grief.

Regarding the anti-Mormon stuff you've read, I've seen it. You're right that not all of it is false. Some of the troubling facts alleged (mostly about the prophet Joseph Smith) are true. Others are pure conjecture and innuendo. Some can even be partially verified on the church's own familysearch.org website. But anti-Mormon literature also tends to assume a great deal. It is highly selective in choosing those facts that cast the prophet in the worst light, raising an eyebrow, and assuming bad motives. Unfortunately, many Mormons are just as bad about ignoring the troubling or difficult facts of the prophet's life because they don't want to have to deal with them, or they make silly conjectures like believing none of Joseph's plural marriages were consummated (despite abundant evidence that at least some of them were). I have studied the prophet's life extensively. I'm aware of the facts that are supported by credible evidence. And I am quite pleased to see that the church is recently starting to open up about some of the difficult incidents in our history. I hope they will start to do even more of that. In the meantime, we can ask for each fact alleged: (1) What is the source? (2) How reliable is it? (3) Is it corroborated, and if so, by whom or what? (4) Are there other indicia of reliability that compel me to credit the allegation? (5) How much of the allegation is fact vs. interpolation or interpretation? (6) If I am fully satisfied that this alleged fact is true, is it impossible that God could command his prophet to do this thing, even if I'm not sure why he would? That line of inquiry has yet to yield something that I cannot reconcile with my faith, even when the facts are not things I would choose to do if it were up to me.