Predicting Christ's New World visit

Around 600 BC father Lehi saw a vision of Christ and his apostles. He was even told that Christ would come visit the Lehites in the New World 600 years from their departure for the new promised land.

And yet despite that very explicit prophecy for centuries the following prophets are clueless. Look at how out of touch Alma is.

 

Unless everyone else was as ignorant as Alma, why would anyone be impressed by Samuel the Lamanite's prophecy? 

Why would this be? The answer could be as simple as this: Joseph Smith didn't know how he was going to bring about the advent of Jesus in the Americas during the earlier stages of writing The Book of Mormon, but by the time he finished up Moroni and went back to replace the missing 116 pages of manuscript with what became 1 Nephi through Words of Mormon he had the whole thing figured out and could include all the appropriate prophetic details.

Sound doubtful? Good. Doubt your heart out!

Why God requires polygamy 2

So why? Why polygamy? The three new essays released on lds.org all make sure to bring up Jacob 2:30 right away.

The Book of Mormon identifies one reason for God to command it: to increase the number of children born in the gospel covenant in order to “raise up seed unto [the Lord].” (See here.)

God declared in the Book of Mormon that monogamy was the standard; at times, however, He commanded plural marriage so His people could “raise up seed unto [Him].” (See here.)

Church members viewed plural marriage as a commandment from God, an imperative that helped “raise up” a righteous posterity unto the Lord. (See here.)

So the answer is: BABIES FOR JESUS! I'm not sure why God needs babies so badly when there are plenty being born all the time. What makes children born "in the covenant" so much more valuable than all the others. Shit, why's he need children at all? They don't even make money to pay tithing. Are children the only people who believe in god stories anymore? No missionary work? Just baby-making sex? Can't God encourage some inter-tribal adoption? 

"Hold on a second, sugar, let's let the pregnant ones catch up."

If God needed babies so badly why didn't Adam get a few hundred wives instead of just little old Evie? Why didn't Noah's boys fill the Ark with God's most fertile? Why didn't Nephi and his brothers have a shit ton of sister wives? Why didn't Jesus' mighty twelve just hang around in harems all day instead of going out and preaching? Why didn't Joseph have any children with his 30 plus wives? Why did Brigham only have a couple more children than he had wives? Why do we see that polygamy fails to produce more children than monogamy?

Does God suck at math? Or was Jacob wrong about the divine purpose of polygamy?

At least Lot had two daughters to rape him instead of just one.

It's all Greek to us

Joseph Smith had a very difficult time distinguishing Hebrew names from Greek and Latin ones. One of his biggest blunders shows up in Doctrine and Covenants 110, which reccounts the supposed visitations to Joseph and Oliver Cowdery in the Kirtland temple. In verse 12 Joseph says "Elias appeared, and committed the dispensation of the gospel of Abraham, saying that in us and our seed all generations after us should be blessed," which sounds totally cool and only slightly confusing (why's Elias officiating for the gospel of Abraham, and what the hell is Abraham's gospel anyway?). The problem occurs in the next verse when "Elijah the prophet, who was taken to heaven without tasting death, stood before us." The problem is that Elias is the Romanized Greek version of the Hebrew name Anglicized as Elijah. In other words Elias and Elijah are the same person, the former spelling of his name appears in the New Testament and the later form is found in the Old Testament.

LDS Church leaders have since decided that (1) there must have been some other prophet out there during Abraham's time named Elias (a Greek dude was hanging around with Abraham?) and that (2) Elias is probably a title for a forerunner prophet. I'm not making this shit up.

The more likely possibility seems to be that Joseph just didn't know the difference between Hebrew and Greek versions of the name in question.

Corroborating evidence to this latter theory is found in The Book of Mormon when Nephi uses the terms "Messiah," a Hebrew term, and "Christ," a Greek term - both literally meaning the anointed - in the same verse. Twice. Isn't that amazing? Nephi, a Hebrew is using messiah correctly (as a title) but using the Greek word Χριστός as Jesus' proper name. Nephi and Joseph need some serious help with their Greek.

Not that their Hebrew was any better. In 3 Nephi Jesus gives the Nephites chapter four of Malachi and the Nephites write down that "the Son of Righteousness" shall arise whereas Malachi wrote about "the Sun of righteousness." Now unless Jesus was speaking to the Nephites in English, it would have been very difficult for them to hear shamesh (Hebrew for sun) and then write down ben (Hebrew for son). What are the chances that Joseph's scribe screwed things up and the mistake going uncorrected all these years? What are the chances that Joseph thought he was being clever and screwed up?

The Book of Mormon also inserts the use of synagogues "after the manner of the Jews" in Nephite America even though synagogue worship did not exist at the time Lehi left Jerusalem. So where did the Jewish synagogue practice come from? Might Joseph have imposed New Testament era Jewish worship on people who would have been entirely ignorant of those practices?

"Just because we'll be living in the New World without any kind of telecommunicative technology doesn't mean we won't know exactly what our fellow Jews are up to in several hundred years."

Well how about Jews going to church? Laban and Zoram, two Jews living ca. 600 B.C.E., apparently were church goers, if that makes sense at all. It seems as though Joseph really liked Hellenizing his Hebrews.

Abortion

Very much in line with conservative politics in the United States, most Mormons in the US are anti-abortion. Abortion is a very sad thing and the majority of women and couples who decide to have one typically do so with great reluctance and much deliberation.

One of the major topics of debate in the issue of abortion concerns our understanding of when life begins. Typically you either side with the "life begins at conception" team or the "life begins at birth" team. It's a sticky subject, to say the least. Your traditional Mormon take on things is that the zygote or embryo or fetus you have growing was predestined to come to Earth to have a body. There is a soul waiting for that body to slip out of the uterus and into the world so that soul can then take its place in the grand Plan of Salvation. Mormons would never want to rob a soul of its Earth body!

However I read something in the Book of Mormon that made me think Mormons shouldn't be all too worried about the souls of aborted fetuses. It's a nice little moment in 3 Nephi. The believers are about to be killed by the wicked because the sign of Christ's birth (the star) hasn't shown up yet and Nephi (no, not that Nephi) is so worried he prays for the protection of the believers. And guess what happens! The voice of the Lord (a.k.a. Jesus Christ, the dude who's about to be born into the world) bears Nephi tidings of great joy!

How the hell would Jesus have spoken to Nephi if his spirit were lodged inside the little fetus in Mary's uterus on the verge of being born? I looks like life just might begin at birth according to Mormon scripture... What's a boy to think?

If you wonder what the Bible has to say about abortion you might want to watch this Betty Bowers video:

True science

Growing up Mormon I learned that God was the Ultimate Scientist; He used science to make the Universe and uses it still to carry out miracles. What we know of science now is unfortunately little more than the grossest approximation to the kind of scientific knowledge God possesses.

The understanding of man is nothing next to the understanding of God, but thank God He's bestowed upon us such wonderful truths as our dire need for repentance and baptism, both of which are infinitely more important than any silly vaccine or some pointless taxonomy of life on our planet. I mean think about it, we all know that illness and pestilence come about because of our disobedience to God and that life on earth began in the Garden and spread from there. We don't even need science. Ok, I'm done being facetious. 

Here's a serious question: when has science ever confirmed the explanations of the natural world offered in the Standard Works? The Book of Mormon has that silly verse about how the earth revolving around the Sun, but the fact that the BoM shows up long after the scientific debate on the heliocentricity of our solar system makes Joseph Smith and his Nephi character (no, this is one of the other Nephis) look like a regular Johnny-come-lately.

Pairing up science with the Gospel was an obvious lost cause from the get go, but I did my best to remind myself that my brain was just too tiny to understand how revelation and science work together and that my heart yearned too impatiently to see the pieces fit. For years I put the issue on hold and trusted my faith.