It's interesting that most mainstream Christians find the Mormons "out of touch with reality". They also question "Where are the golden plates that Joseph Smith used to write the Book of Mormon?" And since no one knows where the golden plates are, most people feel that Joseph Smith either made it all up or "channeled" the information from some spiritual source. Most people find that laughable and not a very good foundation for a religion.
And yet these same people never question where the original Old Testament texts are or where the tablets of the Ten Commandments are, or for that matter even original texts of the New Testament. The fact is, that none of those originals exist either. And yet for some odd reason we don't smirk and laugh off Judaism and Christianity; why is that? The oldest Old Testament texts in existence date from the Babylonian Captivity and many historians have gone so far as to say that the reason that none older exist is because they were only written during that period by the exiled Jews to create for themselves a history and a theology to distinquish themselves from their captors and give themselves some kind of identity.
Likewise the oldest Christian manuscripts that we have date from the 2nd and 3rd centuries, long after the last apostles died. Historians unanimously assert that those gospels labled as the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were most certainly NOT written by those apostles, but by later writers who simply used their names to lend a mark of authority to the writings. The bulk of Christianity is a creation of the apostle Paul who was not even an original apostle, but a persecutor of the new religion prior to his conversion. It is entirely possible that the gospels were written afterward to back up the religion which Paul created. The Emperor Constantine saw Christianity as a means of uniting and consolidating his empire and went to great lengths to assure that only writings that supported Christian theology were included in the Bible canon while those writings which did not were destroyed. And while the gospels themselves and their teachings of love and forgiveness and the value of each human may seem revolutionary for their time and undoubtedly the teachings of a Messiah, yet we now know that those same teachings were taught by the Essene Community long before Jesus ever preached. So it is entirely possible that Christian theology and writings were created entirely unrelated to anything that Jesus himself taught or anything that the original apostles wrote during their lifetime. So the fact of the matter is that Christians and Jews have no more empirical proof for their belief systems than the Mormons.
The WTS always claimed that the Bible was the Word of God because it was the oldest religious work in existence, but that is entirely untrue since we don't have any original texts. Yet oddly enough, the Pyramid Texts of Egypt which are at least 4,000 years old DO EXIST, I have seen them for myself. And the Code of Hammurabbi, the Babylonian "ten commandments" DOES exist and can be viewed in the museum on cuneiform tablets. Likewise there are far older Hindu and Buddhist texts in existence. Now that does not necessarily make them the "Word Of God" either because the fact is that all religious texts were written by men with an agenda and a desire to control others.
Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.