All in all I found it rather amusing. One of the funniest lines in there was when the dad yells, "We're Mormons now, and we're having Family Home Evening!" although I don't know if it strikes the same funny bone in non-Mormons. :) I could've done without the incessant, non-too-subtle chorus of "dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb" behind the whole thing, though...
The story South Park presented had a lot of truth in it, including images and scenes that are *very* familiar in Mormon culture (the pose South Park's Joseph Smith strikes when he sees God and Christ in the woods is almost identical to a very well-known painting of the same event), but again it might breeze right by non-Mormons who don't live the stuff. ;)
There were of course some twists and omissions in the story they told to make it sound silly. I won't address all of them, because quite frankly to me, it just doesn't matter (I would hope South Park isn't used as reference material for finding unbiased truth about, well, anything). But I will tackle the "punchline". Joseph Smith was ridiculed and persecuted a lot for his claims that he had seen visions and been visited by angels (not to mention God and Jesus themselves), and there were many who seemed to make it their entire goal to stop Smith from doing his work. When Martin Harris took the 116 pages translated from the plates of Lehi, there was indeed the challenge to Joseph to retranslate. However, the reason God told Joseph not to do so (conspicuously left out of the South Park version), is that those who had the pages (not just Harris's wife) had more sinister plans: if he failed to translate it perfectly, it would disprove Joseph; if he succeeded, they would alter the original pages to create discrepancies, and disprove him that way.
As to the comment that it's that incident that "proves" the Book of Mormon is true, well, I don't believe that. There are aspects of that part of the story (there's more that I haven't gone into here) that support and strengthen the truthfulness of the work, but as far as it being *the* definitive evidence that the work is true, well, this Mormon doesn't go that far. |
