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!

The Apocalypse - a baptism by fire

In my study of the Bible I learned, thanks to the Church Institute manuals, that one reason why it was so important that the Earth literally be literally baptized by immersion by the Flood was because the Earth needed that ordinance in order to receive the Holy Ghost. This later ordinance would take place just before the Second Coming during the Apocalypse, when the entire Earth would be literally burned with fire and literally purified.

This information was a little hard to swallow for me. Really? The Apocalypse is the Refiner's fire? The entire world needs to burn LITERALLY, NOT SYMBOLICALLY? I swear I had never heard this silliness before in my life. Is it not obvious what a bad idea that would be? All that smoke and ash will be a very serious problem. Besides isn't it going to be bad enough with the Four Horsemen running around? Do we really need a global fire? Mormon's don't really believe this, right? At least not any more, I hope.

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.