project mayhem: February 2011

Sunday, February 27, 2011

"Moroni's promise" was not about the Book of Mormon

Perhaps the most commonly cited passage of the Book of the Mormon is the three verses near the end of the book commonly referred to as "Moroni's Promise." From the tenth chapter of Moroni it reads:

3 Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts.
4 And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.
5 And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.

Traditionally, these verses are read as request by the book's final editor, Moroni, to pray about the Book of Mormon as a whole--to ask if the Book of Mormon "is true." However, if we look at the context of these words from Moroni we can see that, contrary to tradition, Moroni is not asking readers to pray about the 529 printed pages that preceded these verses (the whole Book of Mormon), but is actually asking the reader to specifically pray about the 2 pages that follow his request (specifically verses 8 through 26).

---READ MORE---

Friday, February 25, 2011

“War and Peace in Our Time: Mormon Perspectives” -- Claremont Graduate University

“War and Peace in Our Time: Mormon Perspectives”

Claremont Graduate University

March 18-19, 2011

Under the sponsorship of

The LDS Council on Mormon Studies

and the

Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies

at the University of Notre Dame

The program will address the critical issues of war and peace from a variety of Mormon perspectives. Elder Lance Wickman, former member of the First Quorum of Seventy and a Vietnam veteran, will deliver the keynote address on Friday evening, March 18.

Complimentary dinners and lunches will be provided for those who register by March 11.

Register by emailing information to: ldswarpeace@gmail.com. Please include your name, email address, institution or place of residence, and whether you want dinner, lunch, or both.

---READ MORE---

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Joseph Smith's Re-Vision-ing of the First Vision

I don't have a lot of time to thoroughly flesh this out write now, so it is just going to be a series of notes and thoughts.

Some of the premises I want to begin with are:

1. Joseph and his contemporaries' understanding of visions and "seeing" did not necessarily mean seeing with physical eyes (stimulus of the retinas with physical light)--seeing with one's "spiritual eyes" or "mind's eye" were just as real to them as seeing with physical eyes.

2. Joseph's revelations in the D&C involved Joseph putting his impressions into a first person voice. They were not dictations of an audible (sound vibrations entering the ear) voice. In other words, the primary content of the revelations were not the dictated words, but were rather impressions. The first first person voice was Joseph's projection of those impressions.

3. Joseph did not live at a time when one's past words, acts, and images are readily available for review and maintenance of one's memory. Today we constantly have written notes, photos, facebook walls, journals, etc to help us remember things we experienced, saw, and said. Joseph did not have most of those things, and much of what he recorded wasn't actually written by him. Furthermore, there is no evidence that he did any serious systemic theological contemplations. Rather his revelations and explorations seem to have been rather off the cuff, without attempts to merge them with previous (especially older) theological claims.

4. We make a much bigger deal about the First Vision than Joseph ever intended, forcing certain assumptions on him and his experience.

---READ MORE---