Mormonism is a Blatant Lie

I think we should start with the ludicrous nature of the church's founding, and the rather shady details of the life of Joseph Smith. Smith's background is something that should have discredited him. As a practiced conman for about ten years before his biggest con; he would basically go around with a band of companions and get people to pay them to look for buried treasure o their land, and then flee once they had received the money, he had cemented his position as a charismatic fraudster who could easily manipulate credulous and gullible people to his own ends. You say that this is an ad hominem argument, and that the religion should be separated from the man; but when the religion is based upon something revealed by a convicted conman with no testimonials from other people ( I will come to that in a little while) and solely by him, anyone with an inkling of rationality must link the two together. The origins of the church are just as questionable for anyone with traces of intelligence and reason. Golden Plates that only Smith was permitted to read, and translation employing seer stones in a hat that only he was permitted to see both call to question of how credulous his followers really were, and gives a valuable insight into the power of charismatic demagogues over other human beings. I am not saying that Joseph Smith was unintelligent r ignorant. I am saying that he was cunning, disingenuous and selfish. The Book of Mormon, described by Mark Twain as 'chloroform on print', is made of a mixture of word for word cannibalising of the King James Bible, convenient revealings from God and strangely, all the translation errors that were in the King James Bible from its numerous translations, so unless Smith was given the translation first in Aramaic, then in Ancient Egyptian, then in Ancient Greek, then in Modern Greek and then in Latin, before being translated into Middle English; he was clearly fabricating it and plagiarising the most common book in the western world at that time. By rationalising the existence of black people as being 'cursed' with dark pigmentation because of the sins of their ancestors and Native Americans being a lost tribe of Israelites, not to mention the 'fact' that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri. Finally, there is the shady nature of polygamy and the confiscation of property. Threatening women and girls as young as fourteen with eternal damnation unless they married, or enter as some apologists describe it as, 'sealing ordinances' with Smith is obviously him appeasing his carnal desires, a tactic to expand the church quickly, or a mixture of the two. Selfishness and pragmatism are two things that can motivate all kinds of decisions, especially with regards to ones taken quite literally as 'Gospel'. Also, the establishment of the Mormon Bank as a way for the leader to swindle new members of the church out of their worldly possessions was obviously a ploy to take advantage of the credulous for personal gain. This is again a mixture of selfishness and pragmatism, as Smith was both appeasing his lust for possessions by acquiring large amounts of money from his followers (See L. Ron Hubbard), and a pragmatic way of expanding the church through building temples and monuments to advertise and accommodate new believers (read: victims) into the church. Both embezzlement and polygamy are principles that have now been thrown out of the church by convenient religious experiences that occured when there was the hint that their status as a religion may be under threat by the government. So either it was a series of very convenient, coincidental truths, or it is a complete and absolute falsehood. Which one is more likely, given the evidence or lack thereof?