I don't know if you've ever read through one of Mark Twain's earliest books -- his autobiographical travelogue book entitled Roughing It -- but if you haven't, it is a hoot and filled with insight and curiosities of the early american West in late 1800's.
In one section, chapter 16, he focuses on the Mormons because he visited Salt Lake City and also got his hands on a copy of the Book of Mormon. Throughout the chapter he gives his critique of the book, and boy-howdy, it is a thing of beauty!
I was born and raised in southern Idaho, and I'm acquainted intimately with LDS culture and their bizarre religion, and upon reading this section years ago by Twain it rang so true and clear I'd been meaning to post it up on my blog, and finally got to it. Enjoy!
"ALL men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle--keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone, in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.
The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James's translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel--half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast. Whenever he found his speech growing too modern--which was about every sentence or two--he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceeding sore," "and it came to pass," etc., and made things satisfactory again. "And it came to pass" was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet."
