Why do people get mad when I point out that their anti-Mormon propaganda is false?
First of all, Mormons have great latitude in thought. Secondly, hieroglyphics were not used, but the Demotic. Virtually every character of the Nephite script is identical or nearly identical with the Egyptian Demotic. We don't know how many gold plates there were. The indication is that the writing was very small. Joseph Smith didn't plagiarize the Book of Mormon. No other book comes close to it. The Nauvoo Legion was legal and not anti-US.
One man, inspired by an angel, wrote the Book of Revelations. Point?
Galactic Officer, I have seen the Anthon transcript, and I have compared it to characters from the Demotic dictionary, and they are all near or very nearly the same. Perhaps the Demotic dictionary is fake? Written by a Mormon? I don't know where you can go from there.
Most of the so-called Egyptologists tauted on anti-Mormon websites are just ministers of other churches. We have our own credentialed Egyptologists who believe the Book of Mormon to be true.
Galactic Officer, books about chiasm were rare and expensive in 1830. Joseph Smith was a poor back-woods farmer. According to his mother, Joseph didn't even like to read. Nor does your accusation take into account that these structures - which sometimes span entire chapters in the Book of Mormon - were dictated by someone who didn't even have a scrap of paper in his hand.
Galactic Officer, sharing a few ideas does not amount to plagiarism. Not one paragraph in the Book of Mormon was taken from View of the Hebrews. Yes it was common for people to imagine that the lost 10 tribes may have come to America, but that doesn't mean it was the source of the Book of Mormon. In fact, the Book of Mormon mentions the lost 10 tribes as separate from those who came to America. The Nephites didn't count themselves as part of the lost ten tribes. (2 Nephi 29:13)
Galactic Officer, as far as the Book of Abraham, that is a much deeper subject and there isn't sufficient space here to do it justice. The bulk of the papyri was lost in a museum fire, so no Egyptologists have translated it. The only part that survived is the front piece - the badly worn outer layer of the book, which contained the drawings and the beginning of the Book of the Dead. It survived because it was glued to cardboard, because of its deteriorated state, and never sold to the museum.
Galactic Officer, the Book of Abraham has more in common with the Apocalypse of Abraham than the Book of Mormon shares with View of the Hebrews. By your own logic, the Book of Abraham is true, since Joseph Smith couldn't have plagiarized the Apocalypse of Abraham. It hadn't been discovered yet.