Unlikely events
Matthew Yglesias on why some crazy ideas are crazier than other crazy ideas:
the Book of Mormon seems to me to be an unusually transparent fraud for a religious text. It's supposed to have been written in the ancient New World and yet it contains extended metaphors about sheep and shepherds. This is the sort of thing you would write if you lived in 19th century America, were familiar with the Bible, and wanted to write something along those lines. It's not at all the sort of thing you would write if you lived in pre-Columbus America where there were no sheep. Metaphors aside, there's talk of literal herds of livestock (llamas, perhaps), horses, steel and all manner of other things that didn't exist at that time.
This is a start, although it's still not totally clear how this makes LDS's overall premise more or less crazy than those featuring resurrected god-men or prehistoric space wars.
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