What do you think of Mark Twain's assesment of the Book of Mormon?

He's allowed to have his own opinion on it. However as for him reading of the Book or Mormon if you start in Ether (85% of the way through it) you're not likely to understand much of it. He spent about as much time reading the book as he did writing his scathing review of it, starting right before the end doesn't give you much of a chance to really evaluate it.

Of course Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) was indeed a great writer if you base that on number of copies sold, the adventures of Huck Finn have sold over 20,000,000 copies since it came out and 200,000 sold each year, which is impressive. But less impressive when you consider that the book he dismissed as being horribly written have sold 150,000,000 to his 20M and is in 82 languages and included in the top 10 books that changed America. Time has been the judge on Clemens ability to speak for the value of a religious novel, you can't diss something as worthless that outsells your own book overall by a ratio of 7.5:1 and recently by a ratio of about 20:1 and growing. His comments look pretty stupid in hindsight, perhaps if he had the vision of what the Mormon church would be he would have at least read the entire book before critiquing it.

But he is a good author of American fiction! EDIT: Here is what Clemens wrote about Christianity - by the way, he claimed to be a Christian: There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory as it is—in our country particularly and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree—it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime—the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor his Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place.

Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled. EDIT - true, most copies of the Book of Mormon are given away for free.

Got me there, and it would toy with the official totals since many of them are received rather than purchased and it's not your common economic exchange. Huck Finn on the other hand sells virtually all of it's copies as "required reading" in schools. Also not a true market exchange since when I purchased a copy it was due to my teacher requiring it.

Mark Twain was a satirist. He made money and got famous for making fun of things, it was his job. Here is what he had to say about the Bible :"It is full of interest.

It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies." He had a lot more damning things to say about the Bible than he did about the Book of Mormon, google it.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.