I personally have found [the Book of Mormon] more powerful than the Bible or Qur'an.

Can you expand on that? What is this perception of "power" you get in varying degrees from such books, and what is the relation between that sensation and deciding whether anything in those books is true?

I've read the Bible and the Qur'an, and while I haven't read the Book of Mormon, I have a copy (souvenir of a visit to Salt Lake City). I'll have a look at it if you like, but I'm not expecting much, because of the sort of thing that books like these are. Neither the Bible nor the Qur'an convince me that any of the events recounted in them ever happened, or that any of the supernatural entities they talk about ever existed, or that their various moral prescriptions should be followed simply because they appear there. How could they?

A large part of the Bible is purported history, and to do history right you can't rely on a single collection of old and multiply-translated documents which don't amount to a primary source for much beyond their own existence, especially when archaeology (so I understand) doesn't turn up all that much to substantiate it. And things like the Genesis mythology are just mythology. The world was not created in six days. Proverbs, Wisdom, the "whatsoever things..." passage, and so on, fine: but I read them in the same spirit as reading the rationality quote threads here. Where there be any virtue, indeed.

The Qur'an consists primarily of injunctions to believe and imprecations against unbelievers. I'm not going to swallow that just because of its aggressive manner.

So, that is my approach to religious documents. This "power" that leads many people to convert to a religion, that gives successful missionaries thousands of converts in a single day: I have to admit that I have no idea what experience people are talking about. Why would reading a book or tract open my eyes to the truth? Especially if I have reason to think that the authors were not engaged in any sort of rational inquiry?

That is, BTW, also my approach to non-religious documents, and I find it really odd when I see people saying of things like, say, Richard Dawkins' latest, "this book changed the way I see things!" It's a frequent jibe of religious people against atheists that "atheism is just another religion", but when people within atheism convert so readily from one idea to another just by reading a book, I have to wonder whether "religion" might be just the word for that mental process.