Over the next few posts, I’m going to sketch out an argument that believing in the historicity of the Book of Mormon is a rational choice. To put it briefly: the Book of Mormon does not need to strain historical plausibility nearly as much as it might seem; treating the Book of Mormon as a document that existed in history offers insights on the text that a focus only on its 19th-century context would overlook; and the historicity of the Book of Mormon offers a compelling explanation for a number of things that are otherwise difficult to explain.
Year: 2024
Believing History
In this next post in something of a series (I’m holding off numbering these or giving them all the same title, since the concept is a bit amorphous) I wanted to lay out my approach to belief in topics that are historical. This title is something of a play on words, as I don’t mean so much as believing a believer’s narrative about historical things pertaining to Mormonism. Instead, what I mean is that I “believe” what the historical documentation and scholarly evidence indicates. I “believe” history. Yes, I’m well aware that there’s a lot of debate about a lot of issues, but in my personal beliefs about God and theology, I’m on board with what scholars are able to demonstrate as the historical evidence. That is, I’m good with saying what the scholarly evidence demonstrates, as opposed to holding to scriptural claims of historical events without evidence.
This Abominable Slavery: A Review
This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah by W. Paul Reeve, Christopher B. Rich Jr., and LaJean Purcell Carruth is a fascinating and detailed glimpse into the debates about slavery and race in Utah Territory in the 1850s. Incorporating never-before transcribed accounts of the 1852 legislative session that saw Utah Territory leadership pass a series of laws intended to regulate unfree labor, this volume provides a thorough analysis of those laws, the debates that surrounded them and how they fit into the national context of the United States at the time. In doing so, the book also offers insights into the early development of the priesthood and temple ban against individuals with Black African ancestry in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
A Shrinking Church in a Shrinking World
Obviously I think the Church would bulldoze temples before it got this bad, but still, an interesting thought experiment. Over the next century or so we are going to potentially see a bizarre phenomenon with Church growth. In some countries churches will shutter en masse with wards and stakes being merged many times over–all while membership could be increasing or even exploding in terms of percent population. How can this happen? In many countries the background population will be cratering. Throughout the history of Church growth we have largely taken the growth or stasis of the denominator of background population more or less for granted. While Church growth ebbs and flows depending on historical contingency, the populations the Church has been ensconced in have been either growing, or in a few cases, in a state of stasis such as modern day Western Europe. This is about to change. The implosion of fertility rates has not received nearly the attention it merits. We’re talking zombie apocalypse here, with overgrown, abandoned towns and villages and a permanent state of economic recession from the aging population (and that’s in the developed world, in developing countries with low fertility without government resources to care for their aged old people without living children to care for them will literally be dying in the streets). When I was going to graduate school the five-alarm fire, “lowest low” fertility was around 1.3 children per woman. For a…
Rethinking the Biblical Narrative: Introduction
Having done a few posts on being a practicing Mormonism while disbelieving in Book of Mormon historicity, I wanted to shift gears a little bit to explain a few more aspects of my believing framework. I’ve talked about my views on what I see as the good that our religion (others too) does for the lives of its members here in life, and I want to start a series a posts on what I see as a historical framework to Mormon belief that I find compelling. I’ll go over this in more detail in upcoming posts, but the gist is that what I see as the combination of two themes. The first is what I’ve found in the research on my book, that JS believed that a central calling of his was to restore was what was known in his day as the “ancient theology” (sometimes called other names like the ancient religion, the universal religion, or simply, ancient philosophy.)
Pharisees and Publicans, Thespians and Jocks
“God, I thank you that I am not like other people: even like this jock. I watch my language, am always worthy to pass the sacrament, am on the honor roll, and I give a tenth of all my income.” As a note, I put this post in the queue for the 5th a long time ago, not realizing that it was General Conference weekend, I’ll keep it up, but in posting on General Conference Saturday I’m in no way trying to draw attention from what should be drawing your attention today. With high school almost 20 years in the rearview mirror for me now it’s interesting to see individual trajectories and how they surprise or do not surprise me. There are myriad topics that could stem from this theme (for example, who would have thought the X-Box junkie became the most objectively accomplished person in our graduating class?) However, given the subject of this blog, and the fact that my high school was nearly all Latter-day Saint, an obvious variable of interest here is later-life relationship to the Church. And on this I noticed a seemingly paradoxical theme that I’ve also picked up elsewhere. Many (though not all) of the “goodie good” kids have left. These were the ones who were into seminary council (when that was a thing), drama, and The Beatles (in kind of a faux rebelliousness borrowed from their parents), and who actually read the book…
On Overreliance on Specific Bible Translations
One aspect of Islam that I appreciate is their approach to translation of scriptures. You see, the Quran is considered a sacred text that was originally revealed in Arabic, and translations into other languages are often called “interpretations”. This is because Muslims believe that the Quran’s sacred character is unique to the Arabic language, and that translating it into another language changes its meaning. While I don’t know that the original language of a volume of scripture is sacred per se, any translation of that text can be viewed as an interpretation that changes its meaning to one degree or another and should be approached with a degree of caution as a result. The Renaissance has an excellent example of why this is important to keep in mind while reading scripture. In Western Europe, the Vulgate (a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible prepared by Jerome) was the main form of the Bible used throughout the middle ages. As humanism began to gain traction, however, there was an increased emphasis on going back to original sources. Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (Erasmus of Rotterdam) was a key figure in this movement’s impact on Christianity due to his work on scholarly Greek and Latin editions of the New Testament. During his work in comparing the Bible text with earlier Greek manuscripts, Erasmus discovered that some Catholic doctrines were problematic because they relied specifically on the Vulgate in ways that the Greek did not…
Book Review: To Stop a Slaughter: Just War and the Book of Mormon by Morgan Deane
Among “amateur” LDS scholars (however you want to define that), Morgan Deane is, in my estimation, unfairly overlooked. While his specialty – military history – is something of a niche (though it shouldn’t be), it readily works with the Book of Mormon, especially with the accounts of wars. Part of the issue, methinks, is that “war” and “violence” are not particularly palatable topics amongst academics, and so we get occasionally forced eisegesis like the kind in the book Proclaim Peace (which, I think, has a decent premise taken way too far; we really should eschew violence as often as possible and proclaim peace, but given that one of the authors of that book has backed away somewhat from his absolutist stance, perhaps more nuance will appear in the discussion soon). In To Stop a Slaughter: Just War and the Book of Mormon, Morgan Deane (who is probably our #1 expert on Ancient war and the Book of Mormon) explores the ideas of Just War theory (something Proclaim Peace bafflingly ignores) in both Western and Eastern (mostly Chinese) history and applies it to the Book of Mormon (with applicability to modern times as well, though the focus is mostly on the text of the Book of Mormon). He covers ideas like when self-defense is justified, and even argues for a limited justification of preemptive strikes in certain extreme instances. All in all, this is a very comprehensive investigation of historical and…
On Marion D. Hanks
Marion D. Hanks is one of the most influential general authorities who never served in the Quorum of the Twelve or First Presidency. Today he is best known for his hymn, “That Easter Morn”, his advocating for Christlike service, and the support he lent to Black members of the Church in the years leading up to the Priesthood Revelation. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk, Hanks’s son and biographer, Richard D. Hanks, discussed Marion D. Hanks’s life and legacy.
My AI Generated Podcasts on the Bear Lake Monster and the Great Apostasy, And Other AI News
Apologies for doing another one of these so soon after the other one, but when it rains it pours. Since I last posted OpenAI released “advanced voice mode” to all plus subscribers. What this means is that the lag we’re used to when talking to AI is now gone, and now it is indiscernible from speaking to a real human being, up to and including detecting sarcasm, humor, and the like. I have been using it to brush up on my very rusty mission Spanish, and now any pre-missionary who wants to go above and beyond and practice, say, giving a first discussion in French with a personalized tutor that will correct their grammar doesn’t have to wait until they enter the MTC. They have put some safeguards in place so that it can’t just clone your voice, but the day when anybody can clone anybody’s voice and automate a thousand bots to call everybody in your phone is coming, so once again please be aware and discuss with your old and sometimes not so old-relatives that a phone call from somebody that sounds just like you asking for money isn’t necessarily you. Google is still very much playing catch up in the AI wars (and no matter how good they get, their AI will probably always invoke images of Black Nazis). Notebook LM has a fun new functionality that automatically generates a podcast-type back and forth based off…
Cutting-Edge Latter-day Saint Research, September 2024
I don’t usually respond to articles that I dislike, generally just letting them talk for themselves, but the Miller and Dunn chapter promotes the myth of “soaking,” which is supposedly a chastity loophole that I discuss here. They reference a college newspaper which cites TikTok, so still no real evidence that soaking is a thing.
Thoughts on the Second Wave of New Hymns
The Church recently released a new batch of hymns for the new Latter-day Saint hymnbook. I feel like some of my predictions are paying off with the new round of hymns. Back in 2018, I called it that “This is the Christ,” “Come, Lord Jesus, Come,” and “Amazing Grace,” would likely be added. (I could say the same for “Come, Thou Fount” with the last round, but that one was beyond obvious.) But, beyond those, there are some very excellent inclusions that I am excited about. Let’s go through each of the new hymns and I’ll share some thoughts and information (including some from the official press release):