When the LDS Mormon missionaries come to my door does anyone have any info I can share with them? —doo_unto_others

Give 'em twenty bucks and tell them to buy themselves a decent dinner. They just had their monthly stipends decreased last year.

If you really feel like challenging them over points of doctrine ... first of all it's probably pointless. They're with their companion so they have to keep their game faces on, not express any doubts or anything. Plus their lives are hard enough for those two years when they really believe in what they're doing. Coming home early has social ramifications, so it's usually in their best interests to finish it out.

But if you think it'll do some good, keep it focused on what they have in their hands: the LDS scriptures. Ask them who the Lamanites are today. Show them a verse like 3 Nephi 3:22 where it talks about "their horses, and their chariots, and their cattle, and all their flocks, and their herds, and their grain" and just ask them, "This is supposed to have happened somewhere in America around A.D. 17?" Show them the facsimiles in the Book of Abraham and ask them if they're aware these have been translated by Egyptologists.

I think at best you'll get blank stares, and a challenge to read it and pray so you can "know for yourself" that there were horses and pigs and cattle and chariots in America in A.D. 17. Good luck with that.

HighFlyDanger:
El guapo gives some pretty good points, but with a little research outside of anti-mormon websties, you'll see that horse bones etc have been found in the Americas. The Earth has not always been divided by water anyway, this goes way back then just Book of Mormon times.

And i doubt Egyptologist have translated the facsimilies correctly, "correctly" being the keyword.

Nice Try El Guapo.

HFD:
Thanks for the lesson in ancient American megafauna. Are we talking about horses in the Pleistocene epoch? Or Book of Mormon times? And just how far off do you think the modern study of Egyptology is?

Source(s):

"Most of America's big wild mammals (including its horses, most of its camels, and other species likely to have been domesticated had they survived) became extinct about 13,000 years ago." —Jared Diamond, "Guns, Germs, and Steel," p. 162

"All of this nonsense is illustrated by three facsimile woodcuts, depicting: (1) the "sacrifice" (falsely restored from a scene of Anubis tending Osiris on the funerary bier), (2) an astronomical scene of planets (actually a hypocephalus), and (3) enthroned Abraham lecturing the male Pharoah (actually enthroned Osiris with the female Isis). ... Smith's hopeless translation also turns the goddess Maat into a male prince, the papyrus owner into a waiter, and the black jackal Anubis into a slave." —Robert Ritner, Egyptologist, University of Chicago