The Nephites' Book of Mormon

We're lucky to live in a day and age when Heavenly Father has bestowed on us The Book of Mormon. There are so many unbelievable stories in there! One of the most incredible parts is that in this book about the colonization of the Americas by Jews contains within it a book about a previous colonization of the Americas by possible descendents of Ham (Noah's son) following the Tower of Babel. It's basically a Book of Mormon-like record for the people who then wrote the record that became The Book of Mormon. A Book of Mormon within a Book of Mormon, and it's called the Book of Ether! So cool.

Here's Dan Vogel on just how unbelievable the Book of Ether is:

"Moroni tells readers that he has abridged 'the twenty and four plates which were found by the people of Limhi, which is called the Book of Ether' (Ether 1:2; cf. Mosiah 8:9; 28:17-19). The book is named after the last prophet of the Jaredites, Ether, who like Moroni witnesses his people's war of total annihilation. In fact, the parallels between the two stories are so striking, down to the last battle occurring at the same hill, that Mormon writer B. H. Roberts wondered: 'is all this sober history? ... Or is it a wonder-tale of an immature mind, unconscious of what a test he is laying on human credulity?' It is puzzling why Smith would add a repetitive story to the the Book of Mormon, but it does emphasize the overall theme of his work, which is that Americans must repent or be destroyed." Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet, pg. 340.

Totally far out prophetic shit! Love it!

Age of the prophets

I always wondered, even as a very young child, just how the hell the early biblical prophets lives hundreds of years. It wreaked of bullshit even way back when.

How did I justify believing that Adam, Methuselah and Noah lived nearly a millennium each? God only knows.

Heavenly fatherliness #3 - Coping with emotions

According to popular wisdom, a good father must be able to express his feelings in a healthy, balanced way.

Talk to your typical Mormon and he'll tell you that the Heavenly Father feels love, pity, disappointment, wrath, and maybe a couple of other emotions, and because he's perfect he certainly never behaves badly when in a particular mood.

I say no way. If we take the stories of the Old and New Testaments as representative of God's standard behavior we have to conclude that he's anything but stable. It takes every effort you can muster to keep the Big Man from flying off the handle. Remember when he killed everyone on Earth except Noah and his small family? Remember how he killed Uzzah for trying to be helpful? Remember how he's supposedly responsible for earthquakes and pestilence and famine and all that sort of thing because that's how he expresses his anger toward people who don't obey His Holy Laws? When's the last time you met a father like that and didn't call the cops on him? Or at least think he was a total piece of shit?

But we should back up a bit here because I have a problem with the whole idea that God the Father feels anything at all. How can an omniscient being with a perfect spirit/soul (and a perfect body) be effected by any event or collection of events taking place in the universe that he himself made and utterly controls? If God has known since literally forever everything that we will have done in our lives doesn't that kind of soften the punch, if not totally neutralize it? If God's being is so complete (i.e. perfect) and integral how could anything we ever do move him in any direction, either towards happiness or sadness, peace or violence, contentment or frustration? What exactly is an omnipotent being supposed to be susceptible to?

Whether Our Father's the abusive shithead you read about in Scriptures, or the untouchable self-subsiting One beyond our petty emotions, I can only conclude that he doesn't sound like any dad I'd like to have.

*These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre as per their respective articles on what makes a good father.

The literal baptism of the earth

Growing up my favorite stories in the Bible were always the ones that had the most to do with animals. The more prominent role animals played in the story, the more I liked it. favorites included Daniel and the lion's den, Jonah and the whale, the plague of frogs in Egypt, Adam naming all things living in the Garden of Eden (duh!), and of course Noah's ark. The story of the ark is still hard to beat. I love the idea of saving and caring for all the animals in the entire world and being up close with so many exotic species in all their well-behaved glory. I would have given anything to be on that boat with essentially every kind of Earth’s land animals as my pets. 

My enthusiasm for the animals, however, did not deter me from posing the question of just how exactly Noah would have found them all (think of all the animals living near the poles or in Australia or the Americas), sexed them, brought them back to his ark (I liked to imagine a Divine hand guiding them all in a mysterious migration pointed in Noah’s direction), somehow fit them all in (maybe he knew Merlin’s song from Disney’s The Sword in the Stone), kept them fed (I remembered seeing a picture in my Zoo Books of how much food an elephant eats in a year and it was basically a small hill), kept their pens clean (cows on farms for example always seemed to be up to their knees in manure), and kept them from killing each other (because animals do that quite naturally). Then I couldn’t help but wonder how in the world they managed to get back to their respective habitats (imagine the box turtles hiking from the Middle East to the Eastern United States, for example). 

Even as a little kid I knew the story was fishy, to say the least, but I held on to it as best I could. Years later as a missionary I found myself reading the Student Manual to the Old Testament about how the earth had to be literallybaptized by immersion to eventually attain its celestial glory, and how maybe - just maybe! - the continents moved to their current locations during the year of total submersion. It was clear, just as it had been from my earliest memories of the story, that the contents of Genesis 6-9 were to be understood as literal, historical events.

It was all too staggeringly hopeful. The story of Noah's ark full of pairs of some ten million species and the supposed flood that covered every mountain top on planet earth pointed me to one single conclusion: THIS IS FICTION, NOT HISTORY. 

And yet I doubted my doubts and believed on.