Gospel Doctrine for the Godless

An ex-Mormon take on LDS Sunday School lessons

Category: prophets (page 1 of 2)

BoM Lesson 30 (Plan of Salvation)

“The Great Plan of Happiness”

Alma 40 – 42

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To show Joseph Smith’s tendency to plagiarism, and to encourage readers to take time for things that matter.

Reading

For this reading, Alma continues his discussion about the Plan of Happiness. That means it’s time for this chart again (taken from the Gospel Doctrine manual). Maybe you’ve seen it.

pos

It’s lovely, isn’t it. As a kid, I always felt grateful that we had the Full Plan of What Life Was All About. And it was as simple as drawing circles on a board! (Which I did many times in teaching discussions to investigators.)

However, as basic as this plan is, it looks like the Book of Mormon contains no trace of it. How about that! Is this a case of God revealing things “line upon line”? Or had Joseph Smith not made it up yet?

Or perhaps Joseph Smith hadn’t yet run into the work Emanuel Swedeborg, a visionary and occult mystic from the 1700s? Swedeborg’s 1784 book Heaven and Hell and Its Wonders has a vision of heaven, and it comes in three flavours.

Swedenborg insisted: “There are three heavens,” described as “entirely distinct from each other.” He called the highest heaven “the Celestial Kingdom,” and stated that the inhabitants of the three heavens corresponded to the “sun, moon and stars.”

Celestial Kingdom, eh? That sounds familiar.

Not only that, but Joseph Smith probably became familiar with his work.

A library near the Smith home carried the book, Sibly’s Complete Illustration of the Occult Sciences. Historian Michael Quinn has already demonstrated that this book is the likely source for the Smith family’s magic parchments.

Joseph himself acknowledged his familiarity with Swedenborg. In 1839, Edward Hunter, a convert from Swedenborgianism, recorded a conversation with Joseph:

“I asked him if he was acquainted with the Sweadenburgers. His answer I verially believe. ‘Emanuel Sweadenburg had a view of the world to come but for daily food he perished.’” (William E. Hunter, Edward Hunter: Faithful Steward, pg. 316, original spelling).

And would you believe that the ideas of the three heavens was incredibly controversial in Smith’s time?

In fact, Smith’s description of the “Celestial Kingdom” was not only a copy from earlier written works, but also very controversial to the Latter-Day Saints.

The diaries of Orson Pratt and John Murdock from the 1830’s record their efforts to reassure members who questioned the 1832 vision of heaven. The two men described countless excommunications of Mormons, including branch presidents, who denounced “the degrees of glory” as a “satanic revelation.” Even Brigham Young had a hard time with it at first and described it as “a trial to many.”

Why were faithful Mormons choking on this idea of three heavens?

Quinn explains that it’s because members correctly recognized it as coming from the occult. The only other sources of separate degrees in heaven came from occult writers of Smith’s time.

Shoot, they knew Smith had been dabbling in the weird occult stuff.

Plagiarised or no, it’s not like having more circles on your chart makes any more sense. What it all really means is this:

planOfHappiness

Main ideas for this lesson

No one knows

Alma does his best to explain the resurrection.

Alma 40:4 Behold, there is a time appointed that all shall come forth from the dead. Now when this time cometh no one knows; but God knoweth the time which is appointed.
40:5 Now, whether there shall be one time, or a second time, or a third time, that men shall come forth from the dead, it mattereth not; for God knoweth all these things; and it sufficeth me to know that this is the case — that there is a time appointed that all shall rise from the dead.

Gee, he doesn’t know very much. The LDS Gospel Doctrine manual excuses Alma’s ignorance thus:

• Alma mentioned several things that he did not know about death and resurrection (Alma 40:2–5, 8, 19–21). What can we learn from the fact that Alma testified of the doctrine of resurrection even though he did not know all the details about it? (Help class members see that it is not necessary to understand every detail of a doctrine or event before receiving a testimony of its truthfulness.)

Ask: If someone claims to be a prophet, and have a direct line to God, then is their ignorance really excusable?

In the absense of a reliable source, I’ll go with this, which has the advantage of being observably true.

tyd_003

Click here to see the full comic.

But Alma soldiers on.

Alma 40:11 Now, concerning the state of the soul between death and the resurrection — Behold, it has been made known unto me by an angel, that the spirits of all men, as soon as they are departed from this mortal body, yea, the spirits of all men, whether they be good or evil, are taken home to that God who gave them life.

Wait — an angel told him? That’s what Korihor said.

Alma 40:12 And then shall it come to pass, that the spirits of those who are righteous are received into a state of happiness, which is called paradise, a state of rest, a state of peace, where they shall rest from all their troubles and from all care, and sorrow.
40:13 And then shall it come to pass, that the spirits of the wicked, yea, who are evil — for behold, they have no part nor portion of the Spirit of the Lord for behold, they chose evil works rather than good; therefore the spirit of the devil did enter into them, and take possession of their house — and these shall be cast out into outer darkness; there shall be weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth, and this because of their own iniquity, being led captive by the will of the devil.

This all sounds like Christian heaven and hell to me. Of course, this would later clash with Joseph’s newfangled three-degrees idea — to say nothing of “outer darkness” — so it was necessary to retool this into “spirit paradise” and “spirit prison”. It’s all very clever how things work out in the long run.

Alma 40:14 Now this is the state of the souls of the wicked, yea, in darkness, and a state of awful, fearful looking for the fiery indignation of the wrath of God upon them; thus they remain in this state, as well as the righteous in paradise, until the time of their resurrection.

Joseph Smith is plagiarising the author of Hebrews.

Hebrews 10:26 For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins,
10:27 But a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries.

Ask: Freaking heck — did Joseph Smith plagiarise everything?

Probationary state

Alma says that this life is a probationary state.

Alma 42:2 Now behold, my son, I will explain this thing unto thee. For behold, after the Lord God sent our first parents forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground, from whence they were taken — yea, he drew out the man, and he placed at the east end of the garden of Eden, cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the tree of life —
42:3 Now, we see that the man had become as God, knowing good and evil; and lest he should put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live forever, the Lord God placed cherubim and the flaming sword, that he should not partake of the fruit —
42:4 And thus we see, that there was a time granted unto man to repent, yea, a probationary time, a time to repent and serve God.

In this lesson, I gave some reasons why this life being a “probationary” state was a silly and wrong-headed idea. Here’s the short version:

God sent us to earth, having wiped our memory, so already the deck is stacked against us. Then he punishes Adam and Eve for taking a piece of fruit when they didn’t know it was wrong to do so. Or they wanted knowledge of good and evil, which is supposed to be a good thing. God punishes them and all of us by having us born into a fallen system. So already this is a set-up.

Alma 42:5 For behold, if Adam had put forth his hand immediately, and partaken of the tree of life, he would have lived forever, according to the word of God, having no space for repentance; yea, and also the word of God would have been void, and the great plan of salvation would have been frustrated.
42:6 But behold, pit was appointed unto man to die — therefore, as they were cut off from the tree of life they should be cut off from the face of the earth — and man became lost forever, yea, they became fallen man.
42:7 And now, ye see by this that our first parents were cut off both temporally and spiritually from the presence of the Lord; and thus we see they became subjects to follow after their own will.

42:12 And now, there was no means to reclaim men from this fallen state, which man had brought upon himself because of his own disobedience;

Brought upon himself? God set this system up. If he hadn’t wanted it to be this way, he could have arranged it differently. Why didn’t he?

God would “cease to be God”

Alma 42:13 Therefore, according to justice, the plan of redemption could not be brought about, only on conditions of repentance of men in this probationary state, yea, this preparatory state; for except it were for these conditions, mercy could not take effect except it should destroy the work of justice. Now the work of justice could not be destroyed; if so, God would cease to be God.

Would God cease to be God if he did something unfair or wrong? This raises an interesting theological conundrum.

I’m no theologian, but in discussions I’ve had with believers, God’s position seems pretty much set. After all, if he’s the Almighty One and some kind of moral expert, then what standard would we use to say he was doing something wrong? That’s if he’s the one making the rules.

But on the other hand, what if he weren’t? What if there were rules or principles that God had to obey? This is the view we’re taking if we say that God could “cease to be God”.

But if that’s the case — if God doesn’t make the rules, and he’s bound to principles that he has to obey — then why worship him? We could save a step and just worship the principles. Cut out the middleman. Clearly the principles are higher than he is, since he has to obey them.

Back to the first hand. If we’re wrong, and whatever God says goes, then we have another problem. He could declare by divine decree that murder was okay. Or that chocolate ice cream was wrong.

In other words, is a thing good because God says it’s good, in which case we’re bound to a moral tyrant who declares things sinful for arbitrary reasons? Or is the goodness in the thing itself, in which case God can safely be ignored? This is Euthyphro’s Dilemma, and it’s a game-ender for claims to theistic “objective morality”.

Cake or death

And finally, God gives us a choice: either we partake of the waters of life, or “evil shall be done unto” us.

Alma 42:27 Therefore, O my son, whosoever will come may come and partake of the waters of life freely; and whosoever will not come the same is not compelled to come; but in the last day it shall be restored unto him according to his deeds.
42:28 If he has desired to do evil, and has not repented in his days, behold, evil shall be done unto him, according to the restoration of God.

Remember, you’re not compelled — but if you don’t, torment forever. This is God’s idea of a free choice.

For more about why Jesus’s atonement makes no sense, check out New Testament Lesson 25.

Additional lesson ideas

More about ‘God would “cease to be God”‘

There’s something else strange about this verse.

Alma 42:13 Therefore, according to justice, the plan of redemption could not be brought about, only on conditions of repentance of men in this probationary state, yea, this preparatory state; for except it were for these conditions, mercy could not take effect except it should destroy the work of justice. Now the work of justice could not be destroyed; if so, God would cease to be God.

This is a funny sort of expression. It doesn’t seem to come up anywhere else in my experience. And whenever that happens, it makes me wonder if that was an idea that was floating around at the time Joseph Smith was working on the Book of Mormon. This is the same thing I found when I investigated the Mormon teaching that Jesus “bled from every pore”. (Scroll to the bottom of this post for more about that.)

So let’s investigate. We’ll do a quick Google Ngram search for “would cease to be God”. Here’s the chart.

Wow, look at that spike in 1820! This was clearly an idea that people were writing about in Joseph Smith’s time. No wonder it found its way into the Book of Mormon.

And if we zoom in on some of the books, we find a discourse about — what a coincidence! — the state of the soul after the dissolution of the body.

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The full text:

And this one:

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Again, the full text:

I have no idea if Smith or his friends would have had access to these books. But the idea that God could “cease to be God” if he did something wrong was clearly going around. The Book of Mormon is not a product of pre-Jesus Central America. It’s very much a product of 19th-century frontier-American theology. Whatever they were talking and writing about, that’s what got in.

Joseph Smith was a kind of cultural magpie. He borrowed whatever was at hand to construct an increasingly elaborate — and at times, contradictory — theology.

Wickedness never was happiness

Here’s a very popular verse.

Alma 41:10 Do not suppose, because it has been spoken concerning restoration, that ye shall be restored from sin to happiness. Behold, I say unto you, wickedness never was happiness.
41:11 And now, my son, all men that are in a state of nature, or I would say, in a carnal state, are pin the gall of bitterness and in the bonds of iniquity; they are without God in the world, and they have gone contrary to the nature of God; therefore, they are in a state contrary to the nature of happiness.

The LDS Gospel Doctrine manual says this:

• Alma explained that Corianton could not be restored from sin to happiness because “wickedness never was happiness” (Alma 41:10). Why can’t wickedness bring happiness? (See Alma 41:10–13; Helaman 13:38.) How would you respond to the argument that some people seem to find happiness in activities that are against the commandments?

Latter-day Saints are in a strange position. They claim that the Gospel makes them happy, while they more or less admit that actual church is kind of unenjoyable. And so they tolerate the unnecessary and self-inflicted strictures, while gazing enviously at those on the outside.

They have to invent some kind of narrative to explain this, and very often, it’s that other people aren’t “really happy”. Glenn Pace made that the title of a General Conference talk.

When our children were younger and we would be on our way to Sunday church meetings, occasionally we would pass a car pulling a boat. My children would become silent and press their noses against the windows and ask, “Dad, why can’t we go waterskiing today instead of to church?”

Sometimes I would take the easy but cowardly way out and answer, “It’s simple; we don’t have a boat.” However, on my more conscientious days, I would muster up all the logic and spirituality available to a patriarch of a family and try to explain how much happier our family was because of our Church activity.

I first realized I wasn’t getting through when on a subsequent Sunday we saw a family laughing and excited as they loaded their snow skis onto their car. One of my teenage sons said with a sly grin, “They’re not really happy, huh, Dad?” That statement has become a family joke whenever we see someone doing something we cannot do. When I see a teenager driving a beautiful, expensive sports car, I say to my sons, “Now there’s one miserable guy.”

It’s funny in that Mormon Dad way, but it’s also kind of tragic. How many hours did we spend in meetings, instead of having great times together? How many hours did we spend away from home in Stake Meetings, propping up a system that wasn’t true? How much money and effort did we expend on something that didn’t really matter? Were we really happy doing so? Or were we putting up with it so we could have happiness in the “next life”?

President Ezra Taft Benson said: “While [people] may take some temporary pleasure in sin, the end result is unhappiness. . . . Sin creates disharmony with God and is depressing to the spirit” (in Conference Report, Oct. 1974, 91; or Ensign, Nov. 1974, 65–66).

This from a person who made a living from creating unnecessary guilt for people who were doing normal things.

Here’s a chart you can refer to when you need to understand the Mormon logic surrounding this area.

Mormon logic

When they said that living a secular and responsible life was “wickedness”, when they denigrated it as simply “fun”… they were wrong. As they were wrong about everything else.

I think it’s important to call this what it is — sourness — and reject it.

Listen to this performance of Roderick Williams singing George Butterworth’s song ‘Bredon Hill’ (from A Shropshire Lad).

Ask: How do you think he felt when she ignored the church bells and stayed with him? Have you had the opportunity to have a lie-in with someone wonderful on a Sunday morning? How did it compare to sitting in church? Which gave you a better opportunity to feel like you were enjoying what life was really about?

Ask: How does he feel at the end of the song? Why is it important to spend time with those you love?

Watch Lin-Manuel Miranda’s sonnet from his Tony acceptance speech.

Ask: What are we promised in this life? Why is important to not waste one day?

We can live good, ethical, responsible lives as unbelievers. It’s the only life we know we’re getting. Let’s not waste a single day on unreason or smallness of spirit.

BoM Lesson 29 (Alma’s fatherly advice)

“Give Ear to My Words”

Alma 36–39

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To encourage parents to give better parental advice than Alma does

Reading

There’s a bit of a lull in the action for this reading. Time for Alma to give one of his trademark fatherly chats! He speaks to his three sons — Helaman, Shiblon, and Corianton — and gives really terrible advice. Let’s see how bad it gets.

Main ideas for this lesson

Helaman

In his chat with Helaman, Alma explains that God’s love is unconditional… but with conditions.

Alma 37:13 O remember, remember, my son Helaman, how strict are the commandments of God. And he said: If ye will keep my commandments ye shall prosper in the land — but if ye keep not his commandments ye shall be cut off from his presence.

Ask: Would a good parent cast off children for not doing everything they say?

Musical number: Sing this song with the class. (CW: language, possible casual misogyny)

Free will and divine hiddenness

When you ask a theist why God doesn’t resolve his apparent lack of existence by just appearing to everyone, a common answer is that God wants people to believe in him in faith, without needing evidence. If God were to prove his existence, it would essentially force us to believe in him and remove the need for faith.

But what about Alma and his friends? They saw an angel, and that didn’t remove their free will.

Alma 36:5 Now, behold, I say unto you, if I had not been born of God I should not have known these things; but God has, by the mouth of his holy angel, made these things known unto me, not of any worthiness of myself.
36:6 For I went about with the sons of Mosiah, seeking to destroy the church of God; but behold, God sent his holy angel to stop us by the way.
36:7 And behold, he spake unto us, as it were the voice of thunder, and the whole earth did tremble beneath our feet; and we all fell to the earth, for the fear of the Lord came upon us.

But Alma’s certain that God will resurrect him. He’s just as certain as he is about the Exodus, and the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea… which also didn’t happen.

Alma 36:28 And I know that he will raise me up at the last day, to dwell with him in glory; yea, and I will praise him forever, for he has brought our fathers out of Egypt, and he has swallowed up the Egyptians in the Red Sea; and he led them by his power into the promised land; yea, and he has delivered them out of bondage and captivity from time to time.

Whoops.

And if you say that Alma is dumb for believing in fairy tales, then he has an answer for you. His belief makes him smarter than wise people.

Alma 37:6 Now ye may suppose that this is foolishness in me; but behold I say unto you, that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise.
37:7 And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls.

So what does all this mean for Helaman? It means that when he writes about how wicked everyone is, he’s supposed to hold back on information.

Alma 37:29 Therefore ye shall keep these secret plans of their oaths and their covenants from this people, and only their wickedness and their murders and their abominations shall ye make known unto them; and ye shall teach them to abhor such wickedness and abominations and murders; and ye shall also teach them that these people were destroyed on account of their wickedness and abominations and their murders.

In the LDS Church, there’s a pattern of incomplete disclosure. The church is cagey about its finances. It tells only one side of its history. Its higher-level ordinances (like the endowment) are not explained to people who have not already accepted a series of commitments — and who are therefore less likely to disengage from their investment.

Ask: What kind of organisation relies on incomplete informational disclosure to “protect” its membership from facts?
Answer: Check out Steve Hassan’s BITE model, under “Information Control”. While this model is not well-accepted by psychologists, it is interesting to see how many of the LDS Church’s practices it describes.

1. Deception:

a. Deliberately withhold information
b. Distort information to make it more acceptable
c. Systematically lie to the cult member

2. Minimize or discourage access to non-cult sources of information, including:

a. Internet, TV, radio, books, articles, newspapers, magazines, other media
b.Critical information
c. Former members
d. Keep members busy so they don’t have time to think and investigate
e. Control through cell phone with texting, calls, internet tracking

3. Compartmentalize information into Outsider vs. Insider doctrines

a. Ensure that information is not freely accessible
b.Control information at different levels and missions within group
c. Allow only leadership to decide who needs to know what and when

4. Encourage spying on other members

a. Impose a buddy system to monitor and control member
b.Report deviant thoughts, feelings and actions to leadership
c. Ensure that individual behavior is monitored by group

5. Extensive use of cult-generated information and propaganda, including:

a. Newsletters, magazines, journals, audiotapes, videotapes, YouTube, movies and other media
b.Misquoting statements or using them out of context from non-cult sources

6. Unethical use of confession

a. Information about sins used to disrupt and/or dissolve identity boundaries
b. Withholding forgiveness or absolution
c. Manipulation of memory, possible false memories

Ask: If the church is true, why would it need to roll out unpalatable information carefully?

There’s a scene from the Australian TV show Offspring that describes this situation.

***SPOILERS AHEAD for season 5***

Also don’t mock me for watching Offspring, I have a wife.

Here’s the short version:

In Wednesday night’s explosive episode of the popular Network Ten series Nina, played by Gold Logie-winner Asher Keddie, is confronted with the fact her new lover Thomas (Ben Barrington) is not only married, but had been cheating on his heavily pregnant wife.

His secret came out when a birth complication forced Thomas and his unknowing wife to Nina’s hospital instead of the maternity ward they had planned.

Quite a scene: Nina attends what she thinks is a routine delivery, and finds… her new boyfriend acting as birth coach to his wife.

When Thomas speaks to Nina later, he claims that his wife was actually his ex, and defends his lack of disclosure, saying:

Would you have started something with me if you knew my ex was pregnant?

Nina responds:

Well, shouldn’t that have been up to me?

And there it is. Maybe members would bail if everything were public. Maybe investigators wouldn’t like it if they knew that Joseph Smith had 30 wives, some as young as 14. But isn’t that up to them? How are we supposed to make good choices if the facts aren’t available?

Shiblon

Shiblon’s the middle child, so nothing interesting happens in his chapter. Alma tells the same conversion story that he just told Helaman, tells him to keep being good, yada yada yada.

Next!

Corianton

We all know Coriander because he’s the only character in the Book of Mormon who got any sex. This was, of course, with the legendary harlot Isabel™, who is one of only six women mentioned by name in the Book of Mormon, and the only one with an occupation.

Alma 39:2 For thou didst not give so much heed unto my words as did thy brother, among the people of the Zoramites. Now this is what I have against thee; thou didst go on unto boasting in thy strength and thy wisdom.
39:3 And this is not all, my son. Thou didst do that which was grievous unto me; for thou didst forsake the ministry, and did go over into the land of Siron, among the borders of the Lamanites, after the harlot Isabel.

Trivia: Who were the other five women? Answers are at the bottom of this post.

FB-Corianton-is-in-a-Relationship-with-Isabel

Observation about two names in the Book of Mormon: Corianton. Morianton. Discuss.

Alma’s parental counsel is terrible on so many levels. Let’s list them.

Alma blames Isabel.

Alma 39:4 Yea, she did steal away the hearts of many; but this was no excuse for thee, my son. Thou shouldst have tended to the ministry wherewith thou wast entrusted.

Why, that scheming hussy!

Alma wigs out, blowing sex all out of proportion

Alma 39:5 Know ye not, my son, that these things are an abomination in the sight of the Lord; yea, most abominable above all sins save it be the shedding of innocent blood or denying the Holy Ghost?

Mormons say that sex is “the sin next to murder”, and this verse is why.

Fancy that: a bit of casual boinking — even when pursued responsibly and consensually — is almost as bad as murdering someone. This is a kind of — excuse the gendered term — hysterical anti-sex attitude that turns the concept of morality upside-down. Sex harms no one when it’s done well, but it can be awful when done badly. Ironically, it’s this kind of attitude that causes it to be done badly. You cannot have a normal sexual life with priorities as screwed up as this.

A lot has been said on the futility of teaching abstinence. It does not prevent kids from having sex, but that’s only part of the problem. It also promotes rape culture.

Purity culture and rape culture are two sides of the same coin. Prior to marriage, women are instructed that they must say no to sex at every turn, and if they do not they are responsible for the consequences. This method of approach—“always no”—creates situations in which women are not equipped to fully understand what consent looks like or what a healthy sexual encounter is. When the only tool you’re given is a “no,” shame over rape or assault becomes compounded—because you don’t necessarily understand or grasp that “giving in” to coercion or “not saying no” isn’t a “yes.”

That’s from the girl’s perspective. From the boy’s side, you never learn what’s okay and what’s not okay because nothing is okay. Consent is a subtlety that doesn’t make the curriculum. This is not to excuse failure to obtain informed consent — you might have your own ideas about what’s twisted and what’s not, but they’ll have to be your own ideas; you won’t get them from the wider culture. Or you will, but it will be mixed up with a lot of other stuff.

This unrelenting sex-negativity is one of the most harmful things about the church. It fills people up with shame for their innermost desires. It tampers with who they are on a basic level.

For a better way, check out what I teach my kids about sex. I wrote this lesson a couple of years ago, and in the meantime, my youngest boy started dating. So I told him, “That means I have to tell you the things.”

“No,” he said, “you don’t have to tell me the things!”

“I do have to tell you the things, because it’s my job to tell you the things.”

So I told him the things, and afterward he said, “That wasn’t too bad.”

That’s how I broke the curse.

Alma blames Coriander for his own lack of success

Alma 39:11 Suffer not yourself to be led away by any vain or foolish thing; suffer not the devil to lead away your heart again after those wicked harlots. Behold, O my son, how great iniquity ye brought upon the Zoramites; for when they saw your conduct they would not believe in my words.

Oh sure, it’s not because Alma’s selling a shit product. It’s Coriander.

Why would Coriander’s actions have this effect on the Lamanites? They weren’t even Christians yet, and therefore unlikely to be puritanical ninnies.

Testimonies are not good evidence

The LDS Gospel Doctrine manual asks:

• Alma 36 contains Alma’s testimony as expressed to his son Helaman (see especially verses 3–5 and 26–28). Why is it important for children to hear their parents bear their testimonies? In what ways have your parents’ testimonies influenced your life?

I can tell you. My father told me lots of good things, but probably the worst information I got in life was given to me by him. It was when he sat me down, and very earnestly told me that if I had a question about anything, I could ask my Heavenly Father in prayer, and get an answer. And I believed him.

That was the worst thing anyone ever told me.

Rather than understanding that knowledge comes through careful, controlled observation, he taught me that knowing something was simply asking a deity and then sorting through your feels.

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Knowledge doesn’t come from feels. Basically he turned me into an an amateur intuitive. And that leaves people vulnerable to scammers and charlatans. Goodbye, critical thinking; hello, mysticism.

What parent tries to disable their child’s brain? Who tries to defeat their kid’s truth-finding mechanism? That’s not normal, but on religion it is.

I’m raising my kids with the Latin phrase nullius in verba. I’m telling them, “Don’t believe anything just because someone says it’s so — including me, because I could be wrong. Don’t believe anyone’s testimony.”

Additional lesson ideas

How to share?

The Gospel Doctrine manual asks:

• Alma counseled Shiblon to continue teaching the word of God, being “diligent and temperate,” using “boldness, but not overbearance” (Alma 38:10, 12.) How can we follow this counsel as we share our beliefs with others?

In fact, overbearance isn’t such a big problem, but backfire effect is. Telling someone correct information they don’t like can make them believe incorrect information more.

To avoid this, check out the Debunking Handbook by John Cook and Stephen Lewandowsky. It’s a must for anyone who needs to communicate ideas.

Answer: Mary, Eve, Sarah, Sariah, Abish, Beyoncé.

BoM Lesson 18 (Abinadi)

“God Himself . . . Shall Redeem His People”

Mosiah 12–17

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To show that ex-Mormons behave with much greater courage and strength of conviction than LDS leaders.

Reading

At the tail end of our last reading, a character named Abinadi popped up. He was a bit of a scold, but a plucky one. This lesson’s about him.

It seems that King Noah (invariably portrayed as obese) is wicked, and we know he’s wicked because he does the one thing you’re never supposed to do:

Mosiah 11:1 And now it came to pass that Zeniff conferred the kingdom upon Noah, one of his sons; therefore Noah began to reign in his stead; and he did not walk in the ways of his father.
11:2 For behold, he did not keep the commandments of God, but he did walk after the desires of his own heart….

Ooo — bad move! Remember, what you want is either evil or inconsequential because of that whole “natural man” thing.

What else does this wicked king do?

Mosiah 11:2And he had many wives and concubines. And he did cause his people to commit sin, and do that which was abominable in the sight of the Lord. Yea, and they did commit whoredoms and all manner of wickedness.

Wow, the Book of Mormon is really anti-polygamy. It’s amazing that early LDS people were able to accommodate both. What else?

Mosiah 11:3 And he laid a tax of one fifth part of all they possessed, a fifth part of their gold and of their silver, and a fifth part of their ziff, and of their copper, and of their brass and their iron; and a fifth part of their fatlings; and also a fifth part of all their grain.

Taxing their ziff? NOW HANG ON

This passage feeds into a lot of anti-taxation sentiment running about in the USA. I’m not a taxation specialist, but it seems to me that 20% is on the low side, as far as things go. It tends to run in the thirties for the USA, and they hardly cover anything.

That’s for individuals. For corporations, the tax rate is effectively zero, even in a socialist country like Australia. And churches? Pffft. They’re tax-exempt, and this is costing all of us.

Bottom line: Churches have a lot of nerve incorporating anti-tax sentiment into their theology.

Mosiah 11:8 And it came to pass that king Noah built many elegant and spacious buildings; and he ornamented them with fine work of wood, and of all manner of precious things, of gold, and of silver, and of iron, and of brass, and of ziff, and of copper;
11:9 And he also built him a spacious palace, and a throne in the midst thereof, all of which was of fine wood and was ornamented with gold and silver and with precious things.

Buildings and thrones that no one can find.

And we do keep finding artefacts from other civilisations. Here’s a team that found a 9,200 year-old settlement in Sweden. They were able to find fermented fish. Think about that. Archaeologists are able to find 10,000-year-old fish, but they can’t find enormous gold and silver buildings? (To say nothing of the ziff.) A civilisation capable of producing this would have left mountains of evidence, but no one can find anything. And Joseph Smith practically gave them the address of the Guatemalan neighbourhood it all took place in! Once again: fictional people don’t leave traces.

Mosiah 11:20 And it came to pass that there was a man among them whose name was Abinadi; and he went forth among them, and began to prophesy, saying: Behold, thus saith the Lord, and thus hath he commanded me, saying, Go forth, and say unto this people, thus saith the Lord — Wo be unto this people, for I have seen their abominations, and their wickedness, and their whoredoms; and except they repent I will visit them in mine anger.

After talking some trash, Abinadi gets away.

Mosiah 11:26 Now it came to pass that when Abinadi had spoken these words unto them they were wroth with him, and sought to take away his life; but the Lord delivered him out of their hands.

But two years later, he comes back in disguise.

Mosiah 12:1 And it came to pass that after the space of two years that Abinadi came among them in disguise, that they knew him not, and began to prophesy among them, saying: Thus has the Lord commanded me, saying — Abinadi…,

Well, you just blew your cover there, didn’t you? I mean, all you had to do was not say your damn name.

I don’t care how many people have pointed this out — it never gets any less hilarious.

Mosiah 12:1 …go and prophesy unto this my people, for they have hardened their hearts against my words; they have repented not of their evil doings; therefore, I will visit them in my anger, yea, in my fierce anger will I visit them in their iniquities and abominations.

12:3 And it shall come to pass that the life of king Noah shall be valued even as a garment in a hot furnace; for he shall know that I am the Lord.
12:4 And it shall come to pass that I will smite this my people with sore afflictions, yea, with famine and with pestilence; and I will cause that they shall howl all the day long.
12:5 Yea, and I will cause that they shall have burdens lashed upon their backs; and they shall be driven before like a dumb ass.

Let’s just take a second and consider that the god of the Book of Mormon will kill people for not doing what he wants. Again, it seems that we have a god who kills people to get his way. Good old Jehovah.

Ask the class:

  • How does this relate to free agency?
  • Mormons (and theists) often argue that God can’t prevent people from doing evil things, because that would curtail their agency.
  • If agency is so important, why does God then kill people for exercising it?
  • How plausible is God’s punishment for the wicked, in a world where people routinely commit evil acts?

Abinadi is captured and hauled up before the king and his priests. Obviously the first thing they would do is… grill him about Old Testament scriptures!

(Sorry; I didn’t mean to say grill him. Poor choice of words. #toosoon)

Mosiah 12:20 And it came to pass that one of them said unto him: What meaneth the words which are written, and which have been taught by our fathers, saying:
12:21 How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings; that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good; that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth;

There follows quite a discussion of feet. But the striking thing is that the discussion centres around a passage from Isaiah 53, which — you guessed it — wouldn’t have been available to the Nephites. It was written by Deutero-Isaiah, some hundred years after Lehi supposedly left Jerusalem.

Sadly, fictional Abinadi is put to death.

Mosiah 17:1 And now it came to pass that when Abinadi had finished these sayings, that the king commanded that the priests should take him and cause that he should be put to death.
17:2 But there was one among them whose name was Alma, he also being a descendant of Nephi. And he was a young man, and he believed the words which Abinadi had spoken, for he knew concerning the iniquity which Abinadi has testified against them; therefore he began to plead with the king that he would not be angry with Abinadi, but suffer that he might depart in peace.
17:4 But he fled from before them and hid himself that they found him not. And he being concealed for many days did write all the words which Abinadi had spoken.
17:5 And it came to pass that the king caused that his guards should surround Abinadi and take him; and they bound him and cast him into prison.

17:13 And it came to pass that they took him and bound him, and scourged his skin with faggots, yea, even unto death.
17:14 And now when the flames began to scorch him, he cried unto them, saying:
17:15 Behold, even as ye have done unto me, so shall it come to pass that thy seed shall cause that many shall suffer the pains that I do suffer, even the pains of death by fire; and this because they believe in the salvation of the Lord their God.

17:20 And now, when Abinadi had said these words, he fell, having suffered death by fire; yea, having been put to death because he would not deny the commandments of God, having sealed the truth of his words by his death.

We’ll see more about that Alma later.

Just to close out our discussion of Abinadi’s story: people make a big deal out of dying for their beliefs. It’s considered to be some kind of final statement that verifies their view. But I don’t think dying for a belief is worth much if your beliefs are nonsense. To me, that seems more like a fatal case of mental inflexibility. I respect someone who changes their beliefs in the face of evidence a hell of a lot more.

Main ideas for this lesson

Who is the Lord?

When Abinadi escapes the first time, he leaves King Noah with a lingering question.

Mosiah 11:27 Now when king Noah had heard of the words which Abinadi had spoken unto the people, he was also wroth; and he said: Who is Abinadi, that I and my people should be judged of him, or who is the Lord, that shall bring upon my people such great affliction?

That’s supposed to be a horrifying question: “Who is the Lord?” Why would I worship him? What right does he have to tell me how to live?

You’re just not supposed to ask those things. But really, if someone is demanding your worship, then asking who he is is a perfectly reasonable question!

If I came to you and told you that you ought to worship Burunfa, you’d be perfectly within your rights to ask who that is. As it turns out, Burunfa is a god that my six-year-old son invented. He has the form of a dog, and he pooped out the universe. If I told you that this was an insignificant detail, and you should worship him without knowing any of that — well, you might be justified in thinking that I was a bit embarrassed about those details, and I was trying to shut you down.

If I told you that you should worship Jehovah, but I didn’t want you to know that he’s a genocidal sexist homophobe, then I might not like it if you asked to know his true character, but that’s a question you should ask all the same.

Prophets v apostates

There’s something stirring about the story of Abinadi. It’s one man, up against those in power. Like the painting by Arnold Friberg.

abinadibeforekingnoah_1280x1024

It’s a very inspiring scene, even if it is a bit crowded in there. There’s barely any space to put the leopards. No wonder they’re testy.

That’s how we picture prophets. Boldly testifying of the truth.

So why is it that when you take a modern LDS prophet, and you question them, they turn into mice?

Check out the well-known interview with Gordon Hinckley, in which he goes all funny when asked if he’s a prophet.

Q: You are the president, prophet, seer and revelator of the Mormon Church?
A: I am so sustained, yes.

“I am so sustained”?

Why not “Yes”?

Essentially he’s saying, “That’s what they say.” Yes, but what do you say? Now’s your chance to testify of your power. “That is what I am, and the world should be paying attention because I am the Lord’s mouthpiece.” But instead we get this funny little dance.

Hinckley’s not the only one who’s done this. Have a look at this transcript of a 1904 congressional hearing involving the president of the church, Joseph F. Smith.

Mr. TAYLER. What official position do you now hold in the church?
Mr. SMITH. I am now the president of the church.
Mr. TAYLER. Is there any other description of your title than mere president?
Mr. SMITH. No, sir; not that I know of.
Mr. TAYLER. Are you prophet, seer, and revelator?
Mr. SMITH. I am so sustained and upheld by my people.
Mr. TAYLER. Do you get that title by reason of being president or by reason of having been an apostle?
Mr. SMITH. By reason of being president.
Mr. TAYLER. Are not all the apostles also prophets, seers, and revelators?
Mr. SMITH. They are sustained as such at our conferences.
Mr. TAYLER. They all have that title now, have they not?
Mr. SMITH. Well, they are so sustained at the conferences.
Mr. TAYLER. I want to know if they do not have that title now.
Mr. SMITH. I suppose if they are sustained they must have that title.
Mr. TAYLER. Are they sustained as such now?
Mr. SMITH. I have said so twice, sir.
Mr. TAYLER. Who were your predecessors in office as president of the church?
Mr. SMITH. My immediate predecessor was Lorenzo Snow.
Mr. TAYLER. And his predecessor?
Mr. SMITH. Wilford Woodruff.
Mr. TAYLER. And his?
Mr. SMITH. John Taylor.
Mr. TAYLER. Yes; go on back through the line.
Mr. SMITH. Brigham Young.
Mr. TAYLER. Yes.
Mr. SMITH. And Joseph Smith.
Mr. TAYLER. You are possessed of the same powers that they were possessed of?
Mr. SMITH. Yes, I am supposed to be possessed of the same authority that they were.
Mr. TAYLER. You believe yourself to be, do you not?
Mr. SMITH. I think I do believe so.
Mr. TAYLER. I do not know that there is any significance in your use of the word “think,” Mr. Smith, but one hardly thinks that he has a belief. He either knows or does not know that he has a belief.
Mr. SMITH. I think I do.
Mr. TAYLER. According to the doctrine of your church, you have become the successor of your several predecessors as the head of the church?
Mr. SMITH. Yes, sir.
Mr. TAYLER. And are supposed to be endowed with all the powers that they were possessed of?
Mr. SMITH. That is my understanding.

It’s infuriating! You want to grab him by his old-fashioned collar and say “Are you a prophet or aren’t you‽” Why is he playing coy?

See more examples in this astounding thread.

Same deal when Tom Phillips tried to haul Thomas Monson into court for fraud. No way did Monson go to testify on his own behalf. Instead, he was represented by a very un-prophetic legal team (who couldn’t get the name of the church right).

If there’s a model for how modern prophets behave, it’s not Abinadi. Abinadi represented himself in person, took the fight straight to his accusers, and made no apologies for what he was saying.

On the contrary; modern prophets use legal teams and PR flacks, instead of acting on their own behalf. They give comfy speeches in General Conferences for receptive audiences, but when it’s time to answer the tough questions, they hide behind anonymous undated essays. They’ve (allegedly) funded apologetics groups to make up excuses for them. President Newsroom seems to have more power than the Q15 themselves. And all of this architecture is to protect the leadership from having to say anything they can later be pinned down on. It’s all to maintain plausible deniability and to say as little as possible.

You know who speaks out boldly on their own behalf? Apostates.

In the last couple of years, members of the church — including Kate Kelly and John Dehlin (mp3 of John speaking at the Exmormon Foundation)— have been called into excommunication hearings for the sin of making themselves heard. Of all these, the one that seems most like Abinadi is Jeremy Runnels, creator of the CES Letter.

The proceedings of his excommunication hearing are a must read, and Zelph on the Shelf has all the info you need.

Jeremy: Cool, Thank you very much. Um, Okay, Uh, President Ivins can you read the rest of the apostasy definition? Like you read the definition, but there’s more to it.
Ivins: I’d like you to make a statement.
Jeremy: Okay, you’re not going to answer that?
Ivins: No, I’m not.
Jeremy: K, um, my experience with President Ivins unfortunately the past year and a half, is that he has never answered my questions. Not a single question. I’ve asked you three questions over and over and over and over and over and over and over 28 times and a specific question that I asked you is, What errors or mistakes in the CES letter or in the website is incorrect so that I can publically correct it? The second question I asked you is, if there are no errors or mistakes, why am I being punished for speaking and sharing the truth? Now the third question I asked you is, What question am I being punished for? And you have not answered a single one of them. Can I ask you why you are not answering them?
Ivins: You’re gonna make a statement.
Jeremy: So you’re not going to answer any questions this evening.
Ivins: I’m not. No. I’ve stated my evidence, you make a statement.
Jeremy: Okay. So do I have here, would you agree that I
Ivins: You make a statement Jeremy.
Jeremy: Why are you not answering any questions?
Ivins: This is not the time for that.
Jeremy: When is the time?
Ivins: We’re not going to get into a debate. You’re going to make a statement. Period.
Jeremy: I’m just going to make a statement. Why won’t you answer my questions? I’ve asked and they’re very reasonable questions that I’ve asked over and over. Like I don’t know what, if there are errors or mistakes, I want to correct them. I don’t understand why you are spiritually executing me over something, I don’t know what’s wrong. You claim I’m in opposition to the church. The church’s essays are in public opposition to the church. Out of curiosity, by a show of hands, how many of you have read the church’s essays? Nobody here? Okay, um. By the show of hands, how many of you have read the CES letter? Nobody here tonight has read the CES letter? Wow. And by the show of hands, has president Ivins prepared you tonight for this council by reading the CES letter carefully?
Ivins: Jeremy, make a statement.

When I read this, I picture someone fronting up against a bunch of silent priests. And the one in the centre, taking up the spot held by Abinadi, isn’t the stake president. It’s Jeremy.

Apostates act far more like Old Testament prophets than church leaders do. But this is the nature of calcified institutional religion.

Additional lesson ideas

Tense error

If you were sitting in the middle of the 19th century, and you’re telling a big story about the past, you might be expected to make a mistake in tense once in a while — especially if the events you were describing happened before your time, but after the time of your characters.

Jospeh Smith (or whoever) has exactly this problem when writing for Abinadi.

Mosiah 16:6 And now if Christ had not come into the world, speaking of things to come as though they had already come, there could have been no redemption.

Whoops! Nice save there.

Seriously, though, what do you do when you’re talking about a counterfactual hypothetical for something that hasn’t happened yet, but that you’re sure will happen eventually? English isn’t really set up for this. Clearly, this is a linguistic situation crying out for a solution.

Well, as a linguist, I can help. Ladies and gentlemen, the expectant future pluperfect.

And now if Christ will not be to have come into the world

You’re welcome. But the fraudulent prophet stuff — I can’t really help with that.

BoM Lesson 17 (Limhi)

“A Seer . . . Becometh a Great Benefit to His Fellow Beings”

Mosiah 7–11

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To point out that prophets are of no real benefit to humanity.

Reading

For this lesson, there’s a subplot. We’re in the city of Zarahemla. Zarahemla was a bustling metropolis teeming with people, which somehow left no traces for modern archaeologists to find. Which is strange, because Joseph Smith told them where it was: Guatemala.

View post on imgur.com

Anyway, some years previous, some of the Nephites left Z-town to find the land of Nephi. Ammon heads up an expedition to find them, and runs across Limhi and his people. Limhi’s problem is that his people are enslaved by the Lamanites.

Now how did they come to be enslaved? Simple. God allowed it because they killed someone (and that someone turned out to be Abinadai).

Mosiah 7:25 For if this people had not fallen into transgression the Lord would not have suffered that this great evil should come upon them. But behold, they would not hearken unto his words; but there arose contentions among them, even so much that they did shed blood among themselves.
7:26 And a prophet of the Lord have they slain; yea, a chosen man of God, who told them of their wickedness and abominations, and prophesied of many things which are to come, yea, even the coming of Christ.
7:27 And because he said unto them that Christ was the God, the Father of all things, and said that he should take upon him the image of man, and it should be the image after which man was created in the beginning; or in other words, he said that man was created after the image of God, and that God should come down among the children of men, and take upon him flesh and blood, and go forth upon the face of the earth —
7:28 And now, because he said this, they did put him to death; and many more things did they do which brought down the wrath of God upon them. Therefore, who wondereth that they are in bondage, and that they are smitten with sore afflictions?

Okay, killing someone is bad, even if it is a trinitarian. But there’s something revealing in this passage.

Mosiah 7:29 For behold, the Lord hath said: I will not succor my people in the day of their transgression; but I will hedge up their ways that they prosper not; and their doings shall be as a stumbling block before them.

Let’s think about this. God’s a big guy; he’s bigger and smarter and stronger than those puny humans whose worship he demands. But if he doesn’t get it, he’s going to subject them to suffering, slavery, and affliction. What kind of being is this?

But there’s more: He didn’t just afflict them for their transgressions — he also put them through a famine for being “slow to remember” him.

Mosiah 9:3 And yet, I being over-zealous to inherit the land of our fathers, collected as many as were desirous to go up to possess the land, and started again on our journey into the wilderness to go up to the land; but we were smitten with famine and sore afflictions; for we were slow to remember the Lord our God.

It’s like you’ve got to focus your attention on him all the time. What a demanding narcissist! (I was going to say attention whore, but I realised that I didn’t want to demean sex workers by comparing them to God.)

Main ideas for this lesson

Prophets, seers, and revelators

Limhi has a problem: He has these gold plates — everyone did back then — and he needs them to be translated.

Mosiah 8:12 And I say unto thee again: Knowest thou of any one that can translate? For I am desirous that these records should be translated into our language; for, perhaps, they will give us a knowledge of a remnant of the people who have been destroyed, from whence these records came; or, perhaps, they will give us a knowledge of this very people who have been destroyed; and I am desirous to know the cause of their destruction.

Then there’s a bit of back-and-forth where Ammon and Limhi try to figure out who outranks whom in God’s hierarchy. Just the kind of thing enquiring minds want to know!

Mosiah 8:13 Now Ammon said unto him: I can assuredly tell thee, O king, of a man that can translate the records; for he has wherewith that he can look, and translate all records that are of ancient date; and it is a gift from God. And the things are called interpreters, and no man can look in them except he be commanded, lest he should look for that he ought not and he should perish. And whosoever is commanded to look in them, the same is called seer.
8:14 And behold, the king of the people who are in the land of Zarahemla is the man that is commanded to do these things, and who has this high gift from God.
8:15 And the king said that a seer is greater than a prophet.
8:16 And Ammon said that a seer is a revelator and a prophet also; and a gift which is greater can no man have, except he should possess the power of God, which no man can; yet a man may have great power given him from God.
8:17 But a seer can know of things which are past, and also of things which are to come, and by them shall all things be revealed, or, rather, shall secret things be made manifest, and hidden things shall come to light, and things which are not known shall be made known by them, and also things shall be made known by them which otherwise could not be known.
8:18 Thus God has provided a means that man, through faith, might work mighty miracles; therefore he becometh a great benefit to his fellow beings.

Glad they sorted that out.

So, given that prophets / seers can translate documents, how have prophets done at this job?

Since Joseph Smith, the translation history has been, shall we say, scarce. And that’s funny, because Joseph Smith was an avid translator. And by translate, I mean ‘make stuff up’. You couldn’t wave an ancient papyrus under his nose without him attempting to come up with a translation.

Take the Kinderhook plates. They were fakes, but Smith didn’t seem to recognise that. He offered a translation anyway.

kinderhook

And then there’s the Book of Abraham.

Back in 1835, Smith declared that some ancient documents that had fallen into his possession were written by none other than Abraham himself, and he produced a translation. Champollion’s decipherment of Egyptian, while published until 1832, wasn’t well-known, and it would have been difficult for anyone to catch Smith out on his inventions.

However, we know now the contents of the papyri, which turned out to be ordinary funerary documents. Smith’s supposed translation turned out to be wrong on everything.

2a5sban

Imagine how amazing that would be if God had provided a correct translation. What a stunning confirmation of Smith’s prophetic powers! But no.

Enough about translation. How about seeing the future? Even here, church leaders get it wrong.

The LDS Gospel Doctrine manual says:

“[Many years ago] the Brethren warned us of the disintegration of the family and told us to prepare. . . . “

I suppose they’re talking about The Family: A Proclamation to the World. It says:

“Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.”

Many things could be described as “the disintegration of the family”, but subsequent LDS Church rhetoric would strongly suggest that we’re talking about gay marriage.

Since the publication of the Proclamation, gay marriage has become the law of the land in many countries. So are they suffering “the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets”?

Not quite. They’re actually doing quite well. Many are on this year’s list of World Happiness Report.

gmhttp://worldhappiness.report
http://time.com/3937766/us-supreme-court-countries-same-sex-gay-marriage-legal/

Say what you want about correlation and causation, but we don’t even need to go there. The fact that the most “troubled” nations (in LDS terms) are doing quite well is enough to defeat the predictions of prophets (ancient and modern) that the “disintegration of the family” causes calamities.

And let’s just make a point here:

The world’s happiest countries are also the world’s least religious countries according to a new report released by the World Happiness Index.

Science Alert reports that every year, the World Happiness Index surveys numerous people from various countries around the world in search of, as the name implies, which country has the happiest population. This year’s winner is Denmark, followed closely by Switzerland, Iceland, and Norway. The US ranked 13th.

The report shows that the world’s happiest countries are also the world’s least religious countries. The happiest countries also tend to be fairly homogeneous nations with strong social safety nets.

What else did prophets fail to foresee? Well, I don’t think they foresaw the slowdown of conversion rates.

RNS: What do you make of the 2015 Statistical Report which shows a slowing rate of LDS growth?

Martinich: Annual membership growth has steadily declined in the last 25 years. It used to be 4-5% a year, and now it’s only 1.7%. I don’t think it will decrease much more than to 1.5%, though.

This was supposed to be the rock that rolled out of the mountain to fill the whole earth. And instead it’s like this slinky.

slinky-fail-o

So let’s get real here. A prophet — seer, what have you — is not “a great benefit to his fellow beings”. He’s a parasite who teaches wrong things, creates nothing useful, and bills people 10% for the pleasure.

Additional lesson ideas

Things that didn’t exist

This reading contains a lot of things that simply didn’t exist in this place at that time.

Swords and cimeters

Mosiah 9:16 And it came to pass that I did arm them with bows, and with arrows, with swords, and with cimeters and with clubs, and with slings, and with all manner of weapons which we could invent, and I and my people did go forth against the Lamanites to battle.

No swords or cimiters dating from this era have been found.

Apologists like to say that swords didn’t have to be metal. They could have been obsidian or wood. But obsidian and wood don’t rust, do they?

Mosiah 8:9 And for a testimony that the things that they had said are true they have brought twenty-four plates which are filled with engravings, and they are of pure gold.
8:10 And behold, also, they have brought breastplates, which are large, and they are of brass and of copper, and are perfectly sound.
8:11 And again, they have brought swords, the hilts thereof have perished, and the blades thereof were cankered with rust; and there is no one in the land that is able to interpret the language or the engravings that are on the plates. Therefore I said unto thee: Canst thou translate?

Plants

Mosiah 9:9 And we began to till the ground, yea, even with all manner of seeds, with seeds of corn, and of wheat, and of barley, and with neas, and with sheum, and with seeds of all manner of fruits; and we did begin to multiply and prosper in the land.

Wheat and barley did not exist in the Americas at this time. It’s as though Joseph Smith (or whoever) didn’t bother to do any research, and just threw in the names of things he was familiar with — along with some made-up words.

Ziff

Mosiah 11:8 And it came to pass that king Noah built many elegant and spacious buildings; and he ornamented them with fine work of wood, and of all manner of precious things, of gold, and of silver, and of iron, and of brass, and of ziff, and of copper;

I threw this one in because I like saying ziff. Let’s hear it for neologisms!

BoM Lesson 4 (Nephi’s Vision)

“The Things Which I Saw While I Was Carried Away in the Spirit”

1 Nephi 12–14

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To encourage readers to question the morality of the material in the Book of Mormon.

Reading

In our last reading, Nephi saw his father’s vision of the Tree of Life. But would you believe it, Nephi one-ups his father by getting special bonus content! (It’s almost like Nephi was trying to make himself look good in this narrative.)

This director’s-cut version of Nephi’s vision contains prophecies of future events that, by sheer coincidence, had already happened by Joseph Smith’s time. And nothing that happened after. And that’s the big lesson of prophecy:

  • Prophecies fail
  • If they succeed, either they were’
    • extremely vague, or
    • written after the fact.

Not only that, but isn’t it curious that prophecies given by God — a being so trancendental that he’s outside of space and time — reflect in precise detail the kind of knowledge, opinions, and prejudices held by people of the time? We’ll see an example of this in this lesson.

Seed

The Book of Mormon is the story of people who (allegedly) came from the Middle East, started a civilisation, clashed in a series of wars — and left no physical traces.

Erase all evidence - Lamanites

They didn’t even leave any DNA — Native Americans are the descendents of Asians, and not Middle Easterners.

Mormon apologists surmise that the DNA of Lehi’s family was “swamped”.

swamped

But in Nephi’s vision, the angel tells him that his ‘seed’ — his physical progeny — will be numerous.

1 Nephi 12:1 And it came to pass that the angel said unto me: Look, and behold thy seed, and also the seed of thy brethren. And I looked and beheld the land of promise; and I beheld multitudes of people, yea, even as it were in number as many as the sand of the sea.
12:2 And it came to pass that I beheld multitudes gathered together to battle, one against the other; and I beheld wars, and rumors of wars, and great slaughters with the sword among my people.
12:3 And it came to pass that I beheld many generations pass away, after the manner of wars and contentions in the land; and I beheld many cities, yea, even that I did not number them.

So why can’t we find anyone in the Americas with Middle Eastern DNA?

This is a huge issue in Mormonism, and I’m only going to touch lightly on it here. But we’re going to be delving into it more deeply in future lessons.

Dark and filthy vs. white and beautiful

Nephi sees that Laman and Lemuel’s progeny are dark, loathsome, and filthy…

1 Nephi 12:23 And it came to pass that I beheld, after they had dwindled in unbelief they became a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations.

whereas white people are beautiful.

1 Nephi 13:15 And I beheld the Spirit of the Lord, that it was upon the Gentiles, and they did prosper and obtain the land for their inheritance; and I beheld that they were white, and exceedingly fair and beautiful, like unto my people before they were slain.

Brian Dalton — aka Mr Deity — rightly calls out Mormonism for this racist doctrine.

In recent years, the LDS Church has tried to tamp down this idea, but they’ll never be able to completely disavow the racism in its foundational document. The idea that dark skin could be a punishment for sin is at the heart of the Book of Mormon. The only way to purge racism from the church is for it to disavow the Book of Mormon completely. And that’s not going to happen.

Main ideas for this lesson

The Great and Abominable Church

Nephi sees something curious — the formation of the G&A.

1 Nephi 13:4 And it came to pass that I saw among the nations of the Gentiles the formation of a great church,
13:5 And the angel said unto me: Behold the formation of a church which is most abominable above all other churches, which slayeth the saints of God, yea, and tortureth them and bindeth them down, and yoketh them with a yoke of iron, and bringeth them down into captivity.
13:6 And it came to pass that I beheld this great and abominable church; and I saw the devil that he was the founder of it.

Its founder is the devil.

1 Nephi 14:9 And it came to pass that he said unto me: Look, and behold that great and abominable church, which is the mother of abominations, whose founder is the devil.
14:10 And he said unto me: Behold there are save two churches only; the one is the church of the Lamb of God, and the other is the church of the devil; wherefore, whoso belongeth not to the church of the Lamb of God belongeth to that great church, which is the mother of abominations; and she is the whore of all the earth.

As a Mormon, I tried to make sense of what exactly the G&A was, but I was confused by the hopelessly contradictory descriptions. Was it a specific church? or just some kind of generalised ‘evil church’?

In the early days, Orson Pratt has it all figured out: It’s all of Protestantism and Catholicism.

The Roman Catholic, Greek, and Protestant church is the great corrupt ecclesiastic power, represented by great Babylon which has made all nations drunk with her wickedness, and she must fall, after she has been warned with the sound of the everlasting gospel. Her overthrow will be by a series of the most terrible judgments which will quickly succeed each other, and sweep over the nations where she has her dominion, and at last she will be utterly burned by fire, for thus hath the Lord spoken. Great, and fearful, and most terrible judgments are decreed upon these corrupt powers, the nations of modern Christendom; for strong is the Lord God who shall execute His fierce wrath upon them, and He will not cease until He has made a full end, and until their names be blotted out from under heaven.”
– Apostle Orson Pratt, Divine Authenticity of the Book of Mormon, p.84 – p.85

But later, Bruce R. McConkie, the unofficial church doctrinarian gave his view: It’s the Catholic Church.

It is also to the Book of Mormon to which we turn for the plainest description of the Catholic Church as the great and abominable church. Nephi saw this ‘church which is the most abominable above all other churches’ in vision. He ‘saw the devil that he was the foundation of it’ and also the murders, wealth, harlotry, persecutions, and evil desires that historically have been a part of this satanic organization. (1 Nephi 13:1-10)”
– Mormon Doctrine, p. 130 (1958)

and:

“Harlots. See Church of the Devil, Sex Immorality.
Literally a harlot is a prostitute; figuratively it is any apostate church. Nephi, speaking of harlots in the literal sense and while giving a prophetic description of the Catholic Church, recorded that he ‘saw the devil that he was the foundation of it.‘ … Then speaking of harlots in the figurative sense, he designated the Catholic Church as ‘the mother of harlots’ (1 Nephi 13:34; 14:15-17), a title which means that the protestant churches, the harlot daughters which broke off from the great and abominable church, would themselves be apostate churches.”
– Mormon Doctrine, pp. 314-315 (1958)

Fancy calling some other religion a whore.

McConkie had to walk that back, but when a young Steve Benson asked McConkie about it, he said his statement was right, but unpopular.

I asked McConkie why, in fact, his reference to the Roman Catholic Church as the “Church of the Devil” had been removed from the 2nd edition of his book, Mormon Doctrine.

McConkie insisted to me that it was excised not because it was not doctrinally sound but because it was too difficult for people to accept.

Which brings us up to the present definition of the Church of the Devil: It’s everything

Elder Bruce R. McConkie said, “The titles church of the devil and great and abominable church are used to identify all churches or organizations of what- ever name or nature—whether political, philosophical, educational, economic, social, fraternal, civic, or religious—which are designed to take men on a course that leads away from God and his laws and thus from salvation in the kingdom of God” (Mormon Doctrine, 2nd ed. [1966], 137–38).

It’s Protestantism, it’s Catholicism, it’s Communism, it’s secularism — everything that isn’t Mormon is the church of the devil. Which stretches the definition of church, wouldn’t you say? By including everything, Mormons make this scripture meaningless.

The colonization of the Americas

If the last part of this reading is disturbing, this part of the Book of Mormon should have alarm bells ringing for anyone with a social conscience.

1 Nephi 13:10 And it came to pass that I looked and beheld many waters; and they divided the Gentiles from the seed of my brethren.
13:11 And it came to pass that the angel said unto me: Behold the wrath of God is upon the seed of thy brethren.
13:12 And I looked and beheld a man among the Gentiles, who was separated from the seed of my brethren by the many waters; and I beheld the Spirit of God, that it came down and wrought upon the man; and he went forth upon the many waters, even unto the seed of my brethren, who were in the promised land.

The spirit of God wrought upon Columbus? Let’s see about the kind of people that the Holy Ghost liks to hang out with.

The Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman checks in.

1

Native Americans have their view:

And here’s the history:

Columbus’ rule in Hispaniola was tyrannical and cruel. Unruly colonists were summarily executed and natives were either sold into slavery or worked to death. The death rate for natives under his rule was 80-90%, punishments including cutting off of hands, nose, tongue and ears. Dismembered bodies were regularly paraded about the colony to deter the rebellious. In 1500 he was sent back to Spain in chains for trial under allegations of genocide and cruelty. He was widely hated by both the natives and the natives, however today he is celebrated.

Columbus was a religious maniac and used to justify a litany of cruel and savage practices. He saw conversion to Christianity as the main purpose for his mission, yet freely denied natives baptism so as to sell them into slavery. Towards the end of his life he wrote the ‘Book of Prophecies’ in which he claimed his own role in the discovery of the new world had bee prophesied by the Bible. He also outlined some events that would occur, such as the whole world being converted to Christianity, the last Crusade to the Holy Land to finally defeat Muslim rule, that King Ferdinand of Spain would become the Last World Emperor. In the end, Columbus was a corrupted, disease-ridden and more than a little deluded.

Mormons think that the Holy Ghost is offended if you say “damn” and “hell”, but Columbus gets a pass.

And h still gets a pass from Mormons. Check out how the Ensign references this Book of Mormon scripture on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery.

What, then, do we know of the real Columbus? What were his motives in pursuing his world-changing enterprise? Perhaps the greatest motivating feature of his life was his faith. His writings and the records kept by his contemporaries indicate that Columbus had unshakable faith that he was an instrument in God’s hands.

And, indeed, the Book of Mormon affirms that he was.

The erstwhile prophet Gordon Hinckley refers to this scripture as well.

We interpret that to refer to Columbus. It is interesting to note that the Spirit of God wrought upon him. After reading that long biography, a Pulitzer winner of forty years ago, titled Admiral of the Ocean Sea—I have no doubt that Christopher Columbus was a man of faith, as well as a man of indomitable determination.

I recognize that in this anniversary year a host of critics have spoken out against him. I do not dispute that there were others who came to this Western Hemisphere before him. But it was he who in faith lighted a lamp to look for a new way to China and who in the process discovered America. His was an awesome undertaking—to sail west across the unknown seas farther than any before him of his generation. He it was who, in spite of the terror of the unknown and the complaints and near mutiny of his crew, sailed on with frequent prayers to the Almighty for guidance. In his reports to the sovereigns of Spain, Columbus repeatedly asserted that his voyage was for the glory of God and the spread of the Christian faith. Properly do we honor him for his unyielding strength in the face of uncertainty and danger.

Let’s face it: the LDS Church doesn’t hesitate to stand up for one of the worst and most cruel people that Europe has produced.

Revolutionary War

Nephi sees the American Revolutionary War.

1 Nephi 13:16 And it came to pass that I, Nephi, beheld that the Gentiles who had gone forth out of captivity did humble themselves before the Lord; and the power of the Lord was with them.
13:17 And I beheld that their mother Gentiles were gathered together upon the waters, and upon the land also, to battle against them.
13:18 And I beheld that the power of God was with them, and also that the wrath of God was upon all those that were gathered together against them to battle.
13:19 And I, Nephi, beheld that the Gentiles that had gone out of captivity were delivered by the power of God out of the hands of all other nations.

This seems as good a place as any to mention one of the probable sources of inspiration for whoever wrote the Book of Mormon: The Late War.

The Late War is a history of the USA, written in a high-flown scriptural style. (Sound familiar?) It contains — dare I say — a number of 4-grams (4 words in a row) that match the Book of Mormon (though see here for some criticism).

The interesting thing about the Late War is that telling stories in biblical style was a thing. Try reading some, and see if it doesn’t match the Book of Mormon for tone.

Again, notice that Nephi’s prophecy runs right up to Joseph Smith’s time, and stops. It seems prophets can only see the past.

Additional lesson ideas

Apostasy

True to the Faith, a currently used “correlated” booklet, summarizes the Great Apostasy this way:

“After the deaths of the Savior and His Apostles, men corrupted the principles of the gospel and made unauthorized changes in Church organization and priesthood ordinances. Because of this widespread wickedness, the Lord withdrew the authority of the priesthood from the earth. During the Great Apostasy, people were without divine direction from living prophets.

This would be a weird way for a god to do something. After working to build his church, god decided to give a big middle finger to humanity and sit around for a few centuries.

As one redditor put it,

Heavenly Father was apparently content to let generation after generation pass away without access to true knowledge regarding himself or the authority and rituals his alleged children require to return to him. Now he is super concerned with trying to get the word out?

Disbelief is not dwindling.

To finish out this lesson, I’d like to address a theme we’ve seen a few times already, even in the short readings we’ve done. I’d like to point out the word dwindle, and how believers use it to describe the unbelieving.

1 Nephi 4:13 Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.

1 Nephi 12:23 And it came to pass that I beheld, after they had dwindled in unbelief they became a dark, and loathsome, and a filthy people, full of idleness and all manner of abominations.

What’s all this about dwindling in unbelief?

I had an LDS friend ask me about this once. She knew I didn’t believe, and she was concerned. After all, if you’ve ben told over and over again that disbelief is a prerequisite to dwindling, you might be scoping out the unbelievers you know for signs of dwindling!

So she asked me hesitantly, “Are you okay? and happy in your life and your beliefs?”

I responded, “Yes. I’m fine.

“I’m living a good, happy, ethical life as an unbeliever.”

It’s true. I’m someone who has left the church, and is doing better than ever. I’m flourishing in unbelief. Sure, I know some people who haven’t done so well, and the church was barely enough to keep them (unhappily) in check. But there’s no reason why a reasonably smart person with an internalised moral code needs a cage.

My poor friend, who’d been conditioned by the church to worry about me. How unnecessary. What a burden for our Mormon friends.

I want to say that we should show our LDS friends how well we’re doing after Mormonism, but that isn’t quite right either. I don’t want to put on a display and become an ad for my ideology — that was for then. Some of us aren’t doing well. And some of us avoid saying so to our LDS friends and family because we don’t want to prove them right. Aha! — we told you you’d dwindle.

What’s the answer?

I think the best thing is to be how you are. If you’re flourishing in unbelief, then it could be instructive for members. And if you’re dwindling, don’t go to great lengths to not show it, and be sure to ask for help from understanding people when needed. All of us can dwindle from time to time, belief or no belief.

BoM Lesson 2 (Killing Laban)

“All Things According to His Will”

1 Nephi 1–7

LDS manual: here

Purpose

To encourage intellectual independence, and discourage the intellectual docility and immorality that results from a focus on obedience to “what God wants”

Reading

Here we go, into the Book of Mormon, starting with 1 Nephi 1.

This first part is the best part of the whole book. It’s a rollicking adventure tale that really moves. I think the reason that it works so well is that the author (let’s say it was Joseph Smith) had two goes at it. The first draft was probably burnt by Lucy Harris (Martin’s wife), and — mechanical reproduction not being an option in this age — Joseph had to write the whole thing again. The second draft is always better, isn’t it?

• Lehi has a vision that Jerusalem is to be destroyed and he has to leave.

1 Nephi 1:13 And he read, saying: Wo, wo, unto Jerusalem, for I have seen thine abominations! Yea, and many things did my father read concerning Jerusalem — that it should be destroyed, and the inhabitants thereof; many should perish by the sword, and many should be carried away captive into Babylon.

• He tries to warn the people, but they try to kill him, because Jews. Nice to see some consistency between the anti-Semitism of the New Testament and the anti-Semitism of the Book of Mormon.

1 Nephi 1:19 And it came to pass that the Jews did mock him because of the things which he testified of them; for he truly testified of their wickedness and their abominations; and he testified that the things which he saw and heard, and also the things which he read in the book, manifested plainly of the coming of the Messiah, and also the redemption of the world.
1:20 And when the Jews heard these things they were angry with him; yea, even as with the prophets of old, whom they had cast out, and stoned, and slain; and they also sought his life, that they might take it away. But behold, I, Nephi, will show unto you that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance.

• The family — Lehi and Sariah, Laman, Lemuel, Sam, Nephi, and an undetermined number of sisters, not worth mentioning — head into the wilderness.

1 Nephi 2:4 And it came to pass that he departed into the wilderness. And he left his house, and the land of his inheritance, and his gold, and his silver, and his precious things, and took nothing with him, save it were his family, and provisions, and tents, and departed into the wilderness.
2:5 And he came down by the borders near the shore of the Red Sea; and he traveled in the wilderness in the borders which are nearer the Red Sea; and he did travel in the wilderness with his family, which consisted of my mother, Sariah, and my elder brothers, who were Laman, Lemuel, and Sam.

• Lehi sends Nephi and his rebellious brothers back to Jerusalem, to get some brass plates containing their scriptures and history.

1 Nephi 3:2 And it came to pass that he spake unto me, saying: Behold I have dreamed a dream, in the which the Lord hath commanded me that thou and thy brethren shall return to Jerusalem.
3:3 For behold, Laban hath the record of the Jews and also a genealogy of my forefathers, and they are engraven upon plates of brass.

• After making some long boring speeches to his brothers, Nephi kills Laban and steals the plates. Zoram, a servant, joins the party.

1 Nephi 4:18 Therefore I did obey the voice of the Spirit, and took Laban by the hair of the head, and I smote off his head with his own sword.
4:38 And it came to pass that we took the plates of brass and the servant of Laban, and departed into the wilderness, and journeyed unto the tent of our father.

• Lehi tells Nephi to return to Jerusalem for a third time, and bring Ishmael, and his daughters for breeding. Whether the daughters had any say in the matter is unknown. Already it’s not looking great for women in this book.

1 Nephi 7:2 And it came to pass that the Lord commanded him that I, Nephi, and my brethren, should again return unto the land of Jerusalem, and bring down Ishmael and his family into the wilderness.

Main ideas for this lesson

Mormon role models

Nephi is probably the Book of Mormon’s greatest hero and spiritual role model.

And he’s a pain in the ass.

It’s hard to say this without sounding like Laman or Lemuel — which I suppose is the point of having these two characters in the story — but it’s true. Nephi goes on at length about his own righteousness, and responds to any opposition with sanctimonious hectoring and long religious speeches.

Ask: What unpleasant effects could Nephi-as-role-model have on Mormons?
Answers: Poor boundaries, calls to repentance, lack of respect for other people’s life choices, insufferability

To see this story from another angle, try reading the Book of Lemuel.

DEAR DIARY,
It looks like dad is serious about this leaving thing. He says that he had “a dream in which God told him to leave Jerusalem. I guess it couldn’t have had anything to do with the mostaccioli he ate before he went to bed. I always have dreams like that if I eat pizza before I sleep.

Laman and I are resisting, but it looks like we’re going too. We don’t really have to, I guess, but if we don’t, how will we eat? Despair. I have a girlfriend and my own horse. Dad is loaded with gold, which we can’t take into the wilderness because it’s too heavy. of course, that momma’s boy Nephi is eager to go. He makes me sick I think I’ll hurl my lunch if I see him again today.
LEM.

Nephi kills Laban

I want to focus on the most morally problematic action in this reading: the killing of Laban. That’s because I find it especially revealing of a lot of things I find troubling about the intellectual and moral climate of Mormonism, and theism in general.

As a young missionary, I handed out a lot of copies of the Book of Mormon. Sometimes investigators would actually read the damn thing. And sometimes the conversion process would come to screeching halt when they got to the part where Nephi kills Laban and takes the brass plates.

I’m embarrassed about this now, but at the time I never understood the objection! If God commands something, then you do it, right?

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This is what I grew up with. My bishop used to say, “If the Prophet told me to go up to the top of a mountain, stand on my head and peel grapes with my toes, I would do it.” And he was supposed to be some kind of spiritual role model.

Like this guy.

wpid-Photo-Feb-18-2014-802-PM

And that’s part of the problem. When “doing what God says” is the most important thing, we have to ask, “How do we know what God says”?

There are two answers. One is “Leaders will tell you”.

But when LDS leaders tell members to obey God, and that they speak for God, they’re really just telling people to obey them.

I-am-God

This sets up a system ripe for abuse and exploitation.

God's message

The other answer is even more problematic. According to LDS theology, revelations from God can come in the form of “promptings” — thoughts or impressions.

Ask: How does Nephi know that God wants him to cut off Laban’s head?
Answer: He hears a voice in his head.

1 Nephi 4:10 And it came to pass that I was constrained by the Spirit that I should kill Laban; but I said in my heart: Never at any time have I shed the blood of man. And I shrunk and would that I might not slay him.
4:11 And the Spirit said unto me again: Behold the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands. Yea, and I also knew that he had sought to take away mine own life; yea, and he would not hearken unto the commandments of the Lord; and he also had taken away our property.
4:12 And it came to pass that the Spirit said unto me again: Slay him, for the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands;

So with this lesson, the LDS Church is essentially teaching millions of people that if you have an spiritual impression to do something (like cut off someone’s head), and you feel okay about this, and it seems like there are some good reasons for doing so, you should go ahead and behead.

(Or not. Church leaders sometimes give contradictory advice about this.)

Packer v Nephi

The whole idea that “doing God’s will” comes first seems calculated to engender a kind of intellectual docility, at best.

At worst, it can give believers a motivation to do any atrocity with divine sanction.

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The really frightening thing is that Mormons are being taught this kind of fake morality, and then are released into the public, among the rest of us! Why aren’t there more problems?

Oh, wait.

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Let me reshare Greta Christina’s great post on why religious faith is such a problem.

Religion is ultimately dependent on belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die.

It therefore has no reality check.

And it is therefore uniquely armored against criticism, questioning, and self-correction. It is uniquely armored against anything that might stop it from spinning into extreme absurdity, extreme denial of reality… and extreme, grotesque immorality.

There’s no reality check saying that their actions are having a terrible effect in the world around them. The world around them is, quite literally, irrelevant. The next world is what matters. And since there’s no way to conclusively demonstrate what will and won’t get you a good place in that world, or whether that world even exists… the sky’s the limit. There’s no way to test the assertion that God wants women to wear burqas and have clitoridectomies… or that God wants us to ban same-sex marriage and teach children dangerous lies about sex. The reality check is absent. The brake lines of morality have been cut.

In light of all this, take another look at the title of this lesson: “All Things According to His Will”.

It has sinister overtones, doesn’t it?

Plot holes

1. Wasn’t there some other way that this could have been accomplished?

Nephi v Laban

2. After the murder, Nephi puts on Laban’s clothes. How much blood would there be in a routine beheading? I imagine Nephi appearing to his brothers in Laban’s gory clothes.

1 Nephi 4:28 And it came to pass that when Laman saw me he was exceedingly frightened, and also Lemuel and Sam. And they fled from before my presence; for they supposed it was Laban, and that he had slain me and had sought to take away their lives also.

Yeah, I’ll bet they fled. “Look, it’s our psychotic delusional brother! What the fuck has he done now?”

3. (And this is the big one.)

Why did Nephi need the plates at all? Couldn’t the Lord just reveal the information again?

This argument becomes hard to refute in the light of the Church’s release of this photo of a rock that Joseph Smith used to translate the book of Mormon.

Seer_Stone_Weldon_Anderson_Richard_Turley_Image_Large2

One of the implications was that the plates — that were so important to preserve — weren’t actually used in the translation process, and needn’t have been recovered at all.

Naturally, Nephi was pretty ticked about this.

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Zedekiah is an anachronism

I’m not a historian, but others have pointed out that the Book of Mormon events wouldn’t have happened as written. The king that Nephi says was a king wouldn’t have been king.

As per 1 Nephi 1:4 which states:

For it came to pass in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah, (my father, Lehi, having dwelt at Jerusalem in all his days); and in that same year there came many prophets, prophesying unto the people that they must repent, or the great city Jerusalem must be destroyed.

Zedekiah was set up as ruler over Judah by Nebuchadnezzar II after Babylonian capture. Jeconiah should have been the king of Judah in the Book of Mormon.

Whoops. Guess that’s what happens when you’re fictional.

NT Lesson 4 (Jesus: Early ministry)

“Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord”

Matthew 3–4; John 1:35–51

LDS manual: here

Reading

For this reading, Jesus is getting started on his ministry. He’s about 30 years old, which means that for the last 18 years, he’s been doing things that Christians have tried hard to hush up. (Mormons aren’t the only ones who can sanitise a history, you know.)

This lesson covers the following:

  • Baptism of Jesus
  • The temptation of Jesus
  • The marriage at Cana
  • Driving the money-changers from the tample

Main ideas for this lesson

John the Baptist

John the Baptist is a prophet from the Old Testament tradition. Those guys were great. They’d get naked and prophesy, they’d cook bread on a fire made from their own dung. John would have fit right in; he wears hairy clothes, and eats locusts and honey.

So John baptises Jesus, and then God speaks from heaven, and the Holy Ghost comes down in Bird Mode.

Matt. 3:16 And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him:
3:17 And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

But Jesus is not unique in that regard. The same thing happened to Robert Plant. God was a huge Zep fan back in the day.

Little known fact: Space Moose was also there.

(Disclaimer: No one should read Space Moose comics. They are terribly offensive and weird.)

This experience seems to have made quite an impression on John,

John 1:36 And looking upon Jesus as he walked, he saith, Behold the Lamb of God!

but later on when he’s in prison, he doesn’t seem so sure. He sends a couple of his disciples to ask Jesus if he really is the Lamb of God.

Matt. 11:2 Now when John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples,
11:3 And said unto him, Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?

I’ve heard people explain this away by saying that John knew Jesus was the Messiah, but he wanted his disciples to meet Jesus in person. That’s a bit silly; lots of people met Jesus, and not everyone was into him. Actually, people went hot and cold on Jesus in amazingly short periods of time, depending on where in the story we are. But more on that later.

Temptation

There’s something interesting here: Satan, who hasn’t been seen since Job, is back, and he’s here to tempt Jesus three times, for a few minutes. This is in contrast to the rest of us, who Satan is apparently working on more or less full time.

There’s a contradiction in the two versions of this story. Notice the verse numbers. The two parts of the story are flipped.

Matthew 4:5–10 Luke 4:5–12
Satan takes Jesus to the top of the temple 4:5 Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple,
4:6 And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.
4:7 Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
4:9 And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence:
4:10 For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee:
4:11 And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.
4:12 And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
Satan takes Jesus to the top of the mountain 4:8 Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them;
4:9 And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.
4:10 Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.
4:5 And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.
4:6 And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it.
4:7 If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.

The supposed existence of Satan in the world is a bit of a puzzle. What in the world is Satan doing roaming about? As parents, we try as hard as we can to reduce our children’s exposure to harm. God’s just the opposite; he’s like, “Go for it, Satan!”

Why is God allowing this? Apparently it’s so that we can have agency. He is truly a kind and wise creator.

Actually, Satan isn’t all bad. He was really just trying to help.

Turning water into wine

At a wedding in Cana — plot twist: apostle Orson Hyde taught that the wedding was Jesus’ own! — Jesus performs his first conjuring trick / miracle: turning water into wine. That’s kind of an old one. Dionysus was supposed to have done it, and devotees of Sai Baba say he once turned water into petrol. (One would suppose that with that power, it might be incumbent on one to solve problems related to the world energy supply, but I digress.)

Wine: Was it just grape juice?

With the Mormon prohibition on alcohol, members have a hard time accepting that Jesus drank wine. Some go so far as to insist that the ‘wine’ Jesus drank at various periods was nothing but non-alcoholic grape juice.

I remember this bit from a terrible book called Day of Defense (PDF), which was handed around my mission, and was my introduction to proof-texting and quote-mining. Such legalistic line-by-line cherry-picking — done not to find out what’s true, but solely to establish one’s own pre-conceived view — is the stock in trade for so much apologetics. It was this approach that helped me to see that religious reasoning was not an honest way of getting answers to questions, for which I’m very grateful.

Here’s what Day of Defense says about wine:

The wine used in the Lord’s Supper was nothing more than grape juice, or as the scriptures stated it “fruit of the vine”.

Womp womp. As discussed in this Reddit thread, grape juice starts to ferment almost immediately, and it wasn’t until 1869 that Thomas Welch figured out how to pasteurise grape juice to stop the fermentation. Unfermented grape juice wouldn’t have been possible in Jesus’ day.

Anyway, the Bible has people calling Jesus a ‘wine-bibber‘, which seems unlikely in the absence of wine.

Activity for readers stuck in a real Gospel Doctrine class: See if anyone tries the ‘grape juice gambit’. Do they resist the facts when you point them out? Put your experiences in comments!

Flipping tables in the temple

I always liked the story of Jesus driving out the money-changers.

John 2:13 And the Jews’ passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
2:14 And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting:
2:15 And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables;
2:16 And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise.

It puts a new spin on an old acronym. Who would Jesus lash?

On the other hand, it doesn’t make him much of a “job creator“.

Additional lesson ideas

40 days and 40 nights = Hebrew idiom for “a long time”?

There are a lot of examples of things happening for “40 days and 40 nights”, including the Flood and the starvation of Jesus. The repeated appearance of this number, combined with the fact that it’s not really possible to survive 40 days without water, has made people suppose that “40 days and 40 nights” is some kind of idiom for “a long time”. I haven’t found anything conclusive, although some writers agree.

At a late stage in my deconversion, I was talking to one of the counsellors in the Stake Presidency — a good guy, BTW — and he told me that he thought it was just an idiom. I must have assumed that everyone was as literal-minded about the scriptures as I was, because this came as kind of a surprise to me.

“Doesn’t this weaken the claims of the Bible for you?” I asked.

“The Holy Ghost tells me what to believe,” he replied.

Partial credit to him, I guess, for moderating the amount of nonsense he was willing to swallow, but it seemed to me — both then and now — that if one is willing to take this view, it makes the job of understanding the scriptures well-nigh impossible. Everyone can have their own view because every every every detail can be understood multiple ways. God is the author of confusion.

Jesus abuses his mum

Jesus has this bad habit of giving his mother some sass. Here he is at the wedding of Cana.

John 2:3 And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine.
2:4 Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.

Joseph Smith tries to save the situation, unconvincingly.

“What wilt thou have me do for thee? that will I do” (Joseph Smith Translation, John 2:4)

The LDS manual has this under the heading: “Jesus shows respect and love for his mother”. Way to turn it around, chaps. But no, Jesus is being kind of a dick again.

OT Lesson 46 (Daniel 2)

“A Kingdom, Which Shall Never Be Destroyed”

Daniel 2

LDS manual: here

Reading

We’re finishing the book of Daniel today. Actually, no, we’re looking at one part of Daniel 2, the one that says, Gee, isn’t the church growing and isn’t that awesome?

There’s a whole other section that the official lesson manual isn’t going to touch. It’s Daniel’s vision of the end times. Other millennial religions love this part. Seventh-Day Adventists really go to town on it. Mormons, not so much.

The latter half of Daniel can be summed up like this:

  • Angels show Daniel cryptic symbolism about the end of the world
  • Daniel asks for an explanation
  • The angel gives him more cryptic gobbledegook
  • Daniel asks for an explanation again
  • The angel tells Daniel to piss off

12:6 And one said to the man clothed in linen, which was upon the waters of the river, How long shall it be to the end of these wonders?
12:7 And I heard the man clothed in linen, which was upon the waters of the river, when he held up his right hand and his left hand unto heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever that it shall be for a time, times, and an half; and when he shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished.
12:8 And I heard, but I understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things?
12:9 And he said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.

Daniel must have been easily impressed; I’m not. Why would a god speak in riddles like this, if his goal is to communicate his message to mankind? A god wouldn’t need to, but people who are just making stuff up would.

I used to take the end-of-the-world stuff very seriously, and wonder over what it meant. That was before I met people on my mission who took it even more seriously, and I thought they were crazy. Now, all I can think is: Isn’t it nice not to have to wonder about that silly nonsense any more? What a relief.

Main points from this lesson

How’s that stone going?

This lesson hinges on a reading of Daniel 2. King Nebuchadnezzar has had a dream. He can’t remember it, but he wants the court magicians to tell him the interpretation. They’re like, “Tell us the dream, and we’ll tell you the interpretation.” But the king’s like “Eh, if I tell you the dream, I know you’ll just make up some crap. You read my mind and tell me the dream.” He’s not so dumb.

Of course, they freak. “No one’s ever expected us to do anything like that before!” They backpedal faster than an embarrassed psychic.

Daniel, however, is able to tell the king about the dream. The king saw a big statue, representing major world kingdoms.

2:32 This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass,
2:33 His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.

There seems to be broad agreement about the kingdoms represented by the parts of the statue, except for the ten toes. People used to say it was the ten countries of the EU, but they stopped saying that when it got more than ten member nations. The lesson manual fudges it and says, “Eh. It’s Europe.”

What about before the EU? The Adventists thought it was earlier empires: the Ostrogoths, the Huns, and so forth. Check out this old chart, where it says “The Ten Kingdoms” at lower left. And look at all the Very Serious Calculations! You can tell this is the distillation of a thousand deranged notebooks.

What a farce. Interpreting prophecy is just the process of grabbing any explanation in your immediate vicinity.

Anyway, then a big stone rolls out of a mountain and knocks the image down.

2:34 Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces.

So what’s the stone?

President Kimball taught: “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was restored in 1830. . . . This is the kingdom, set up by the God of heaven, that would never be destroyed nor superseded, and the stone cut out of the mountain without hands that would become a great mountain and would fill the whole earth” (in Conference Report, Apr. 1976, 10; or Ensign, May 1976, 8–9).

And this is the part where Mormons trot out the fantastic stats. Here’s the chart that Mormons are seeing in Sunday School this week:

That seems impressive. And the church loves to say that it’s the fastest-growing religion.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reported an increase from 4,224,026 U.S. members in 2000 to 6,144,582 members in 2010, a 45.5 percent jump.
That is “far and away the largest gain reported by any [Christian] group,” the report noted, not just in percentage but also in actual numbers.

But don’t all religions say that?

So what’s the story here? Well, yes, the church is growing in absolute numerical terms. But there are a few things to remember.

• LDS Church population numbers, as stated, are underwhelming
Here’s a graphic that shows the percentage of Mormons v the rest of the world. Those two minuscule slivers up the top are Mormons, inactive and active ones respectively.

Not much of a stone. More like an intrusive formation. And that graph hasn’t really moved in the last 20 years.

• The church is only just keeping up
Church membership is growing, but so is the population as a whole, so the church is really just keeping pace with population.

• The church inflates its numbers
If someone simply stops going to church, it appears that they are counted as members until they’re 110 years old. Missing, presumed faithful.

• Not everyone who is counted is active.
A whoopsie moment happened this year when a church statistician let a cat out of the bag: Only 36% of members are in the pews on a given week.

“…36 attend sacrament meeting on a weekly basis”

The item was quickly redacted from the Deseret News article it appeared in, but it was saved by sharp-eyed Netizens and can be found in various locations.

Butts in seats isn’t the same as activity rates, but to the extent that they match up, thirty-six percent of 15 million equates to about 5.4 million active members worldwide.

Another way of looking at the activity issue is census records and polls. We can ask people what religion they identify as. For example, the church claims 2% of the US population, but according to a 2008 ARIS poll (PDF), only 1.4 percent of the US adult population will say they’re LDS, and that’s been holding steady for decades.

There’s an interesting angle to the ARIS numbers. Sometimes political pollsters will ask some pretty crazy questions, and we can use these to see what baseline crazy looks like.

Here are some results from Public Policy Polling. I’ve put some of these in descending order, so the beliefs get zanier the further down you go.

  • 51% of voters say a larger conspiracy was at work in the JFK assassination, just 25% say Oswald acted alone
  • 29% of voters believe aliens exist
  • 21% of voters say a UFO crashed in Roswell, NM in 1947 and the US government covered it up. More Romney voters (27%) than Obama voters (16%) believe in a UFO coverup
  • 20% of voters believe there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism, 51% do not
  • 15% of voters think the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry “invent” new diseases to make money
  • 14% of voters believe in Bigfoot
  • 13% of voters think Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, including 22% of Romney voters
  • 9% of voters think the government adds fluoride to our water supply for sinister reasons (not just dental health)
  • 7% of voters think the moon landing was faked
  • 5% believe exhaust seen in the sky behind airplanes is actually chemicals sprayed by the government for sinister reasons
  • 4% of voters say they believe “lizard people” control our societies by gaining political power

You can watch the beliefs get nuttier and nuttier as you go down this list. Pretty soon, we get to moon hoaxers, chemtrail believers, and finally it’s the Reptilians at 4 percent. Four percent is sort of baseline cray; it’s really difficult to crack that barrier and find a question that fewer than four percent will agree to. That could be because four percent of people will drink paint if you tell them to, or perhaps four percent of people will say yes to any question — possibly because they’re really suggestible, or they really like messing with pollsters.

But I think it’s very telling that, despite all this, you can’t get four percent of the population to admit to being a Mormon. For that question, you get a paltry 1.4 percent; less than half of what you get for Reptilians. Some people will say they believe in the Lizard People, but being a Mormon? Whoa — that’s too crazy. Isn’t that something.

Convert baptisms slowing
There are more missionaries than ever before due to the lowering of the mission age, although this is ending as those missionaries are digested through the system. However, the church’s gains haven’t come through convert baptisms.

In the year and a half since the LDS Church lowered the minimum age for full-time missionary service, the Utah-based faith has seen its proselytizing force swell from 58,500 to more than 83,000. That’s a 42 percent leap.

The number of convert baptisms last year grew to 282,945, up from 272,330 in 2012. That’s an increase of — less than 4 percent.

Instead of converts, the church is getting its growth from the children of members. But even this is looking grim, as — like with all religions — youth are decidedly unenthusiastic about religon.

Steve Benson heard it from a friend that youth inactivity is up to 75%. (Don’t take this too seriously, even though I do take Benson seriously.)

She said that when she was a Young Women’s president, she attended a Salt Lake City-wide conference for area youth leaders. There they were shown pie charts displaying an alarming rate of youth inactivity throughout the LDS Church. She said that at the time, among the 850,000 Mormon youth in the United States, there was a whopping 75% inactivity rate, with inactivity defined as three months of non-attendance at sacrament meeting.

Conclusion

There’s your stone, rolling forth and filling the whole earth. Not very impressive. When you realise that everyone now has access to information about the church, and the church is approaching saturation — its growth peaking, baptismal rates falling — it’s looking even worse.

The Lord’s great latter-day work is a fizzle. A damp squib. The LDS Church is an insignificant sect that most people don’t care about.

Resignations up

Meanwhile, more and more of us are resigning. This Pew Forum poll from 2008 (PDF) shows that (as with many religions) more people are leaving the LDS Church than are joining it. There’s every indication that the exodus has only increased since then.

Here’s what someone asked Marlin K. Jensen of the Seventy at an LDS meeting:

A questioner asked, “Has the church seen the effects of Google on membership? It seems like the people who I talk to about church history are people who find out and leave quickly. Is the church aware of that problem? What about the people who are already leaving in droves?”
Jensen’s response:
“The fifteen men really do know, and they really care. And they realize that maybe since Kirtland, we never have had a period of, I’ll call it apostasy, like we’re having right now; largely over these issues.”

But how many are resigning? Since all we have is anecdote and hearsay, we shouldn’t take this too seriously, but Richard Packham knows someone who had the “inside scoop” on resignations. These numbers are old, but here they are.

1995:………. 35,420
1996:………. 50,177
1997:………. 55,200
1998:………. 78,750
1999:………. 81,200
2000:………. 87,500

If this trend kept going in logarithmic fashion until today (but surely hasn’t), we’d be seeing something like 120,000 people leaving a year.

It’s a good idea not to be too optimistic about resignation numbers. Obviously, the church is not going to report them. And it’s tempting for ex-Mormons to overestimate the extent of the attrition. There’s a psychological reason for this: When you leave the church, suddenly apostates seem like they’re everywhere. This could be because there really are more of us, or it could just be the availability heuristic: a thing seems more common if you can think of lots of examples of the thing, like people who have left. So a healthy sense of restraint is appropriate when approaching numbers like these.

Should you resign?

Many people I’ve talked to have no desire to write an exit letter and have their name formally removed from the records of the church. They see it as yet another hoop that the church is making them jump through, and they prefer to have nothing more to do with it. They want to leave the church on their own terms.

As for me, I decided to write my exit letter and formally resign. My reasoning: if you’re still on their records, they’re counting you, and they can use the number you represent as support for their actions, like fighting marriage equality or promoting superstition. My resignation meant I’d told them (in detail!) why I was out. They knew it. My status on the outside was the same as on the inside. For me, that meant consistency and integrity.

But there might be something eating into my small victory…

Do they still count you if you resign?

There is some debate on this, and I’ve never seen a conclusive answer. But David from Mormon Disclosures thinks they keep counting you.

Apparently, the LDS church does not appear to be subtracting resigned and excommunicated members. Also it would seem only the deaths of active members are reported to church headquarters and accounted, making its death loss much lower (3.6 in 1,000) than the actual death rate.
Thus, the additions made each year are overstated, and the subtractions are understated. This goes on year after year and the official number of members gets farther and farther from the truth.

Richard Packham has more numbers.

Official membership increased from 10,752,986 to 11,068,861 during 2000. This consists of 273,973 convert baptisms and 81,450 increase in children of record. The loss of 39,548 is due primarily to deaths, and various adjustments. The First Presidency is aware of the problem of the “name removed file” growing to hundreds of thousands of names, all still included in the 11 million. It appears that they are reluctant to change the policy, and therefore they still count those people as part of the total membership.

Others who have resigned report that church leaders somehow know about them on a ward and stake level, which would mean that some trace of their former membership is retained.

It’s hard to say what’s going on when the church is not forthcoming about its practices on stats. That’s been one of the most frustrating things about putting this lesson together — the lack of transparency means that everything is speculation. Other churches don’t operate this way. A friend of mine who was a Seventh-Day Adventist told me that they approached him and asked if he still wanted to be on the rolls. He said no, and was duly subtracted. They don’t seem too concerned about the numbers. Mormons do.

Even with all the above, I’m still an advocate for resignation. If nothing else, it’s a way to send a message to Church Headquarters, even if it goes unread and uncounted.

Additional lesson ideas

Prophecy after the fact

I only know one way to tell the future: look at the past, find patterns, and apply them to new data. If you’re using something silly, like revelation, you’ve got no better than random chance.

So how do prophets get it right sometimes? Simple — they watch what happens, and then write it down after the fact. 100% success rate!

This was a bit of a mind-blower for me as a true believing Mormon (TBM), but I got a hold of the Oxford Companion to the Bible (page 151), and found this discussion of “prophecy after the fact”.

TL;DR: The Book of Daniel predicts “the future” until a certain point, and then gets it wrong, probably because the writer was really writing about the past the whole time. Things later happened that the prophet would probably have wanted to include, but mysteriously he didn’t. Why not? Because it was in the future. He couldn’t have known; he wasn’t a prophet. No one is.

The book of Daniel is one of the few books of the Bible that can be dated with precision…. The lengthy apocalypse of Daniel 10-12 provides the best evidence for date and authorship. This great review of the political maelstrom of ancient Near Eastern politics swirling around the tiny Judean community accurately portrays history from the rise of the Persian empire down to a time somewhat after the desecration of the Jerusalem Temple and the erection there of the “abomination that makes desolate” (Dan. 11:31)…. The portrayal is expressed as prophecy about the future course of events, given by a seer in Babylonian captivity; however, the prevailing scholarly opinion is that this is mostly prophecy after the fact. Only from 11.39 onward does the historical survey cease accurately to reproduce the events known to have taken place in the latter years of the reign of Antiochus IV. The most obvious explanation for this shift is that the point of the writer’s own lifetime had been reached. Had the writer known, for example, about the success of the Jewish freedom fighters led by Judas Maccabeus in driving the garrison of the hated Antiochus from the temple precincts (an event that occurred on 25 Kislev, 164 BCE, according to 1 Macc. 4:34-31), the fact would surely have been mentioned. But evidently it had not yet happened!

Setting it to music

Here’s a bit I like because it’s connected to music.

10:18 Then there came again and touched me one like the appearance of a man, and he strengthened me,
10:19 And said, O man greatly beloved, fear not: peace be unto thee, be strong, yea, be strong.

Ralph Vaughan Williams used this bit of text from verse 19 in his Dona Nobis Pacem, first performed in the uncertainty of the inter-war years. The relevant part begins at 30:12.

I love the music on this. Daniel — or war-ravaged Europe, what have you — feels discouraged, and when the angel tells him “Be strong”, the music takes an inspiring change of key. But then it sinks back to the original key, almost as though Daniel, still despondent, is thinking “I can’t.” Then the music does the key change again: “Yea, be strong!” This is wonderful writing.

Surprisingly, the angel that spoke to Daniel had a moonlighting job as a video game minion.

10:20 Then said he, Knowest thou wherefore I come unto thee? and now will I return to fight with the prince of Persia: and when I am gone forth, lo, the prince of Grecia shall come.

Times are tough, even for angels. That does explain why minions are able to respawn round after round, though. Nice to have that mystery solved.

OT Lesson 43 (Ezekiel 1)

The Shepherds of Israel

Ezekiel 18; 34; 37

LDS manual: here

Reading

We’ve seen some wild behaviour from prophets in the Old Testament. We’ve seen performance art from Jeremiah, a serious cuckold fetish from Hosea, and the bear-tearing hijinx of Elisha. But now we’re going to see the most truly psychotic prophet of all, Ezekiel.

With that comment, I mean no disrespect to people with mental illness. It’s a real problem, and one that can be treated and managed with the help of modern medicine. But Ezekiel didn’t have the benefit of such treatment — and was hailed as a prophet for his erratic behaviour and his deranged rantings. What does it tell us about a society when its craziest people are held up as heroes?

Okay, I just took a look at our society, and you don’t have to answer that question.

But still, Ezekiel is the kind of guy you have to keep a tight leash on. The book of Ezekiel has 48 chapters, and the LDS lesson manual only wants you to read six of them. Why? Steve’s list of the weird bits is not to be missed, but here’s my list of highlights:

• Ezekiel had to build a little fort to besiege the city of Jerusalem, represented by a tile. This was more difficult than it may seem; couch cushions were rare in that region.

4:1 Thou also, son of man, take thee a tile, and lay it before thee, and pourtray upon it the city, even Jerusalem:
4:2 And lay siege against it, and build a fort against it, and cast a mount against it; set the camp also against it, and set battering rams against it round about.
4:3 Moreover take thou unto thee an iron pan, and set it for a wall of iron between thee and the city: and set thy face against it, and it shall be besieged, and thou shalt lay siege against it. This shall be a sign to the house of Israel.

• Then he had to lay on his left side for 390 days, and then he got to turn over and lay on his right side for 40 days.

4:4 Lie thou also upon thy left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel upon it: according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon it thou shalt bear their iniquity.
4:5 For I have laid upon thee the years of their iniquity, according to the number of the days, three hundred and ninety days: so shalt thou bear the iniquity of the house of Israel.
4:6 And when thou hast accomplished them, lie again on thy right side, and thou shalt bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days: I have appointed thee each day for a year.

• He had to bake bread in an unusual manner. Have you ever seen that Ezekiel 4:9 bread?

It’s based on this passage:

4:9 Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof, according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat thereof.

Well, that sounds pretty good. I don’t mind barley, or even millet. (I’ve never eaten a fitch.)

But for some reason, the makers of this bread don’t print the method of cooking on the packet.

4:12 And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight.
4:13 And the LORD said, Even thus shall the children of Israel eat their defiled bread among the Gentiles, whither I will drive them.

Yep, bread cooked over a fire made with human dung.

If you’d like some help making your own Ezekiel bread, you can try this book:

Oh, but that’s not all. You’ll remember that Jeremiah portrayed Israel as a harlot. Well, old Ezekiel takes it over the cliff.

23:20 For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.

Or as the NIV has it:

There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

Or as the Internet has it:

Main points from this lesson

The sin of Sodom

Many times, I’ve had Mormons (and Christians) defend their anti-gay bigotry by making reference to the destruction of Sodom. Clearly the people of Sodom were doing something terrible. 
Well, in Ezekiel, Jehovah explains what the “sin of Sodom” was.

16:49 Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.
16:50 And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.

It’s very instructive that sins like pride and not taking care of the poor appear on this list, but homosexuality does not (unless it’s coming in under the general category of ‘abomination’). Something you can toss into a discussion when it comes up.

Sticks of Judah and Joseph

Ezekiel 37 contains probably the clearest example of the way Mormons cherry-pick from the Bible. All through my youth, I heard that the Bible prophesied of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, based on this scripture:

37:15 The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying,
37:16 Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, For Judah, and for the children of Israel his companions: then take another stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim and for all the house of Israel his companions:
37:17 And join them one to another into one stick; and they shall become one in thine hand.

What could this mean? The LDS lesson manual rather blithely states

• How has the prophecy in Ezekiel 37:15–20 been fulfilled? (See 1 Nephi 5:14; 2 Nephi 3:12; D&C 27:5. Explain that the word stick in these verses refers to a type of wooden writing tablet commonly used in Ezekiel’s day. The stick of Judah symbolizes the Bible, and the stick of Joseph symbolizes the Book of Mormon.)

A wooden writing tablet? I don’t speak Hebrew, but that isn’t one of the meanings in Strong’s. It just refers to trees, or actual sticks.

But that doesn’t really matter. All we have to do is keep reading to see what Ezekiel meant:

37:18 And when the children of thy people shall speak unto thee, saying, Wilt thou not shew us what thou meanest by these?
37:19 Say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will take the stick of Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel his fellows, and will put them with him, even with the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and they shall be one in mine hand.
37:20 And the sticks whereon thou writest shall be in thine hand before their eyes.
37:21 And say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen, whither they be gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land:
37:22 And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all.

Ezekiel’s meaning is rather straightforward: he was taking two sticks and putting them together, as a way of saying that Jehovah / Jesus was going to join the tribes of Israel together after their separation. There’s nothing to suggest that any books are involved.

The LDS lesson manual allows for the “reunion” interpretation, and yet sticks to the “sticks” interpretation.

Explain that Ezekiel’s prophecy of the sticks of Judah and Joseph has a dual meaning. It refers to the latter-day combining of the scriptural records of Judah and Joseph (Israel). It also refers to the latter-day reunion of the kingdoms of Judah and Joseph (Israel).

So the church is hanging a lot on tenuous word games. No surprises there.

Additional lesson ideas

Failed prophecy about Tyre

With his prophecy of the destruction of Tyre, Ezekiel falls flat. God says (three times!) that Tyre will be destroyed, and never be built again.

26:7 For thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will bring upon Tyrus Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, a king of kings, from the north, with horses, and with chariots, and with horsemen, and companies, and much people.
26:8 He shall slay with the sword thy daughters in the field: and he shall make a fort against thee, and cast a mount against thee, and lift up the buckler against thee.

26:14 And I will make thee like the top of a rock: thou shalt be a place to spread nets upon; thou shalt be built no more: for I the LORD have spoken it, saith the Lord GOD.

27:36 The merchants among the people shall hiss at thee; thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt be any more.

28:19 All they that know thee among the people shall be astonished at thee: thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more.

Actually, Tyre still exists, and has for thousands of years. It’s on Wikipedia’s list of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world.

Even Jesus is said to have visited it. One wonders if he was puzzled by its persisting existence in defiance of his edict.

But then Ezekiel said the same thing about Egypt, and that didn’t happen.

29:9 And the land of Egypt shall be desolate and waste; and they shall know that I am the LORD: because he hath said, The river is mine, and I have made it.
29:10 Behold, therefore I am against thee, and against thy rivers, and I will make the land of Egypt utterly waste and desolate, from the tower of Syene even unto the border of Ethiopia.
29:11 No foot of man shall pass through it, nor foot of beast shall pass through it, neither shall it be inhabited forty years.

Oh, Ezekiel!

More of him next time.

OT Lesson 42 (Jeremiah 2)

“I Will Write It in Their Hearts”

Jeremiah 16; 23; 29; 31

LDS manual: here

Reading

Jeremiah was a bit of a drama guy. He liked to act stuff out. One time he broke a clay jar in front of a bunch of people, as a way of saying, “This is what God is going to do to you.”

19:1 Thus saith the LORD, Go and get a potter’s earthen bottle, and take of the ancients of the people, and of the ancients of the priests;
19:2 And go forth unto the valley of the son of Hinnom, which is by the entry of the east gate, and proclaim there the words that I shall tell thee,
19:3 And say, Hear ye the word of the LORD, O kings of Judah, and inhabitants of Jerusalem; Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will bring evil upon this place, the which whosoever heareth, his ears shall tingle.

19:10 Then shalt thou break the bottle in the sight of the men that go with thee,
19:11 And shalt say unto them, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Even so will I break this people and this city, as one breaketh a potter’s vessel, that cannot be made whole again: and they shall bury them in Tophet, till there be no place to bury.

Another time he wore a yoke around his neck, like so:

27:2 Thus saith the LORD to me; Make thee bonds and yokes, and put them upon thy neck,
27:3 And send them to the king of Edom, and to the king of Moab, and to the king of the Ammonites, and to the king of Tyrus, and to the king of Zidon, by the hand of the messengers which come to Jerusalem unto Zedekiah king of Judah;
27:4 And command them to say unto their masters, Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Thus shall ye say unto your masters;
27:5 I have made the earth, the man and the beast that are upon the ground, by my great power and by my outstretched arm, and have given it unto whom it seemed meet unto me.
27:6 And now have I given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant; and the beasts of the field have I given him also to serve him.
27:7 And all nations shall serve him, and his son, and his son’s son, until the very time of his land come: and then many nations and great kings shall serve themselves of him.
27:8 And it shall come to pass, that the nation and kingdom which will not serve the same Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, and that will not put their neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, that nation will I punish, saith the LORD, with the sword, and with the famine, and with the pestilence, until I have consumed them by his hand.

So, you know, he liked his props.

But because of the bad reviews, Jeremiah got pretty cranky. Murderously cranky. He asked God to kill everyone who didn’t believe him.

18:19 Give heed to me, O LORD, and hearken to the voice of them that contend with me.
18:20 Shall evil be recompensed for good? for they have digged a pit for my soul. Remember that I stood before thee to speak good for them, and to turn away thy wrath from them.
18:21 Therefore deliver up their children to the famine, and pour out their blood by the force of the sword; and let their wives be bereaved of their children, and be widows; and let their men be put to death; let their young men be slain by the sword in battle.

He was basically the angry guy at the train station muttering to himself.

Then the governor threw him in prison, and Jeremiah got so cranky, he told the governor that Jehovah was going to kill him and all his friends.

20:1 Now Pashur the son of Immer the priest, who was also chief governor in the house of the LORD, heard that Jeremiah prophesied these things.
20:2 Then Pashur smote Jeremiah the prophet, and put him in the stocks that were in the high gate of Benjamin, which was by the house of the LORD.
20:3 And it came to pass on the morrow, that Pashur brought forth Jeremiah out of the stocks. Then said Jeremiah unto him, The LORD hath not called thy name Pashur, but Magormissabib.
20:4 For thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will make thee a terror to thyself, and to all thy friends: and they shall fall by the sword of their enemies, and thine eyes shall behold it: and I will give all Judah into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall carry them captive into Babylon, and shall slay them with the sword.

And then he said he’d kill the entire world.

25:32 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, Behold, evil shall go forth from nation to nation, and a great whirlwind shall be raised up from the coasts of the earth.
25:33 And the slain of the LORD shall be at that day from one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth: they shall not be lamented, neither gathered, nor buried; they shall be dung upon the ground.

One of the crimes of the Baal-worshippers was that they sacrificed their children, which Jehovah said hadn’t even occurred to him.

19:5 They have built also the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings unto Baal, which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither came it into my mind:

No? What about Jephthah’s daughter? When Israelites sacrifice their children to Jehovah, they can’t stop talking about how great it is.

Anyway, what’s Jehovah going to do to show them that killing children is wrong? Make them eat their kids, of course.

19:9 And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.

Sounds legit.

Main points from this lesson

God will write his law in the hearts of his people.

The real lesson manual says this:

• As recorded in Jeremiah 31:31–34, what did the Lord promise to do in the latter days?

31:33 But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.

What does it mean to have God’s law written in our hearts? What must we do to have God’s law written in our hearts?

I have to say that if God could write his law in people’s hearts, this would actually be a good way for a god to do things. At least, it would be far better than his current method of writing books. I’ve mentioned before that human language is a really terrible way for a god to get his message across because it’s imprecise, it changes over time, and it requires translation to get to different people. Each of those things allows for the introduction of error — and wiggle room for apologists. So it would really be quite sensible for a god to skip human language altogether, and just beam his message directly into people, so they’d know what he wanted.

Except it doesn’t work out that way. For one thing, if God is “writing his law in people’s hearts”, there sure is a lot of variation in the messages he’s sending them. Anyone who’s had a doctrinal disagreement with someone in church — and had the other person defend their view by saying “I’ve prayed about this” — knows that this is no way to defend a point of view. Why is it so easy to dismiss someone else’s view if God has written it in their hearts? Why would he have different people come to opposite conclusions?

When I was at the dear old Brigham Young University in 1986 — yes, that long ago — there was a production of West Side Story. (This was the official Drama department production; not the one I was in.) The big talk on campus was that a Black student named Michelle Harris didn’t get cast because she was Black. Pretty ironic, considering the anti-racism subject matter of the play. Here was the clincher, though. At the time, Harris told the media — and I can’t recover this from the Internet, so this comes from my imperfect memory — that she prayed to know whether she’d been discriminated against, and the Spirit™ told that indeed she had. I don’t doubt this was the case, but having lived in Utah, I didn’t need a ghost to tell me that. For her, though, this was good enough to take it public.

At the time, I was dismissive. Sure, I thought, revelation could tell you about the meaning of life and existence of a god, but surely it wasn’t reliable for that! But why not? Why didn’t I see that I didn’t really believe in personal revelation?

The Mormon community is composed of a lot of people driven by emotional reasoning. What a weird and irrational way for people to be.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said (or was it Dolly from the Nietzsche Family Circus)


Even if the law were written in our hearts, why would it be reliable? Jeremiah even warns:

17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

Again, it would be incredibly useful for a god to communicate directly; the problem is that he doesn’t. He tells everybody something different, which is why religions proliferate.

Prophet v Prophet Deathmatch

There’s a great story here between Jeremiah and another prophet, Hananiah. Hananiah tells everyone that everything is going to be fine, and Babylon won’t invade.

28:2 Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, saying, I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon.
28:3 Within two full years will I bring again into this place all the vessels of the LORD’s house, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away from this place, and carried them to Babylon:

Jeremiah, still wearing his yoke, tells everyone (and rather snippily, too) that Babylon will in fact capture Israel.

28:6 Even the prophet Jeremiah said, Amen: the LORD do so: the LORD perform thy words which thou hast prophesied, to bring again the vessels of the LORD’s house, and all that is carried away captive, from Babylon into this place.
28:7 Nevertheless hear thou now this word that I speak in thine ears, and in the ears of all the people;
28:8 The prophets that have been before me and before thee of old prophesied both against many countries, and against great kingdoms, of war, and of evil, and of pestilence.

Yep, it’s a prophet-off.

So Hananiah, in a theatrical gesture, breaks the yoke off of Jeremiah’s neck!

28:10 Then Hananiah the prophet took the yoke from off the prophet Jeremiah’s neck, and brake it.
28:11 And Hananiah spake in the presence of all the people, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon from the neck of all nations within the space of two full years. And the prophet Jeremiah went his way.

Jeremiah can’t think of anything to say to that. But then later, he thinks of the perfect retort:

28:12 Then the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah the prophet, after that Hananiah the prophet had broken the yoke from off the neck of the prophet Jeremiah, saying,
28:13 Go and tell Hananiah, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Thou hast broken the yokes of wood; but thou shalt make for them yokes of iron.

Don’t you hate it when you think of a great comeback, but it’s like the next day?

When two different people predict something, how do you know who’s right? Well, with science, it’s not impossible. You look at the different models, and see whose model best fits the data. But religion doesn’t have a good way of settling a situation where you have conflicting prophets. You have to either wait until the thing happens — in which case, what’s the point of having a prophet? — or God will kill the prophet who’s wrong, in which it becomes some kind of prophetic war of attrition. Again, what a strange and unreliable system.

Jehovah does kill Hananiah later on that year. Under ambiguous circumstances that could have been natural.

28:17 So Hananiah the prophet died the same year in the seventh month.

Say, is this where Mormons got the idea that God will kill any prophet who leads people astray?

Additional lesson ideas

Hunters and fishers

Here’s one from Jeremiah. Who are the ‘hunters and fishers’?

16:16 Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the LORD, and they shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks.

The real lesson manual explains:

Elder LeGrand Richards said that the fishers and hunters described in Jeremiah 16:16 are missionaries of the Church (in Conference Report, Apr. 1971, 143; or Ensign, June 1971, 98–99). What do fishers and hunters have in common with missionaries? (See Matthew 4:18–19.)

Answer: For both, after they catch something, the thing ends up dead. Notice also that animals and fish don’t want to be caught. They have to be grabbed. Tricked, if necessary.

Looking at investigators as prey is a very unhelpful way of looking at people with different beliefs. I say ‘unhelpful’ because of my own experiences as a missionary. We were told that success in the mission field was predicated on our obedience to mission rules and personal righteousness. It was as though we were trained to think of investigators as largely inert beings with no direction or history or thoughts of their own. They could be influenced to believe in our message because of things that we did.

But why would that be true? Imagine if that were the case. A family needs the gospel so they can return to live with Heavenly Father, but in order for God to make them feel inspired to join his church, God first demands that a couple of twenty-something missionaries starve themselves for a while. Whoops, one of them beat off a couple of times, so no eternal salvation for that family. It’s such a surreal scenario that I can hardly believe that I bought into it for so long.

Bad, evil, and naughty

The King James Version of Jeremiah shows us some interesting changes that were happening to English in Jacobean times. One concernes some very naughty figs.

24:2 One basket had very good figs, even like the figs that are first ripe: and the other basket had very naughty figs, which could not be eaten, they were so bad.

Nowadays, we think of naughty in a mischievous (and often a sexual) sense. But when the word first arose in about 1400, it meant ‘having nothing’ (from naught). It didn’t take long for the meaning to change into something different: by 1460, the word meant ‘bad’. Usually naughty was used for people,

Sir Richard Benet, parson of Estcodford, a nawghty man.

but also for food.

The bigaroon cherries..were fraudulent, sour, and naughty throughout

This meaning has faded since the 1600s, and in fact naughty isn’t as naughty as it used to be. Rather than describing someone of low character, it now could describe an impish child, or perhaps someone you’d like to meet.

If naughty has become nice, then evil has become downright debased.

24:3 Then said the LORD unto me, What seest thou, Jeremiah? And I said, Figs; the good figs, very good; and the evil, very evil, that cannot be eaten, they are so evil.

We don’t usually use evil to describe food (unless perhaps an evil smell is emanating from the kitchen). Evil has always been pretty evil since the word began in the 900s. For a time, though, the word was applied to things that were substandard or unwholesome, and this sense in captured in Jeremiah.

They govern themselves

Again, from the lesson manual:

• Joseph Smith was once asked how he successfully governed so many people. He said, “I teach the people correct principles and they govern themselves” (quoted by John Taylor, in Journal of Discourses, 10:57–58).

Ask: Do Latter-day Saints seem self-governed, or micro-managed?

If a church:

  • Tells you what to eat and drink
  • Tells you what to read
  • Tells you what kind of entertainment to select
  • Tells you what kind of cards not to use
  • Tells you what to do and what not to do on Sunday
  • Tells you what kind of artwork to have in your house
  • Tells you what you’ll be doing from ages 18–20 or so
  • Controls every aspect of your life during that time

then how is this allowing you to ‘govern yourself’? The ‘governing oneself’ style was probably never a part of the church, but it’s especially incompatible with the authoritarian religion that the LDS Church has become. Which is too bad.

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