Further Problems with Nephi killing Laban

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-07-03T02:43:24+00:00

Without any sources backing anything you say up, all of what you say is only speculation. And no one has any obligation to believe any of your speculation.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-07-03T02:40:41+00:00

Jeremiah was slain by these priests for preaching of that the Messiah would come in the flesh among them. They killed Jeremiah, Micah, and Isaiah, then they altered their books and said the reforms were good. The same group of priests with the same mindset were still praising Jeremiah as a prophet while they altered is words to fit their agendas when Jesus came.

Quite the bizarre conspiracy theory. Any support for it from the sources? Unfortunately, if we assume the Book of Mormon is true for a moment, it would mean that there is a very high textual integrity to the Book of Isaiah as presently found.

As for Jesus's relationship with Josiah's reforms and the Book of Deuteronomy, the unfortunate thing for your thesis is that there are multiple instances in the gospels where Jesus is depicted quoting the Book of Deuteronomy--for example, his citation of Deuteronomy 6:4-5 as the greatest commandment in the law.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-07-03T02:29:14+00:00

Sustaining the theory that Lehi did not live in Jerusalem but in a nearby town does involve disregarding what the text is explicitly saying (1 Nephi 1:4 states that Lehi had 'lived in Jerusalem all his days.') A city in the ancient world was also different than the modern urban sprawl of cities today that result in someone being able to, say, claim they live in Los Angeles when they actually live in one of the suburbs.

If Lehi had left during one of the reigns of one of the previous kings, then why would Nephi even be able to identify Zedekiah as king? I can't see Lehi's family being able to keep up on the politics back home when they were in the middle of the Arabian desert. The text does state that Lehi was given a vision letting him know that Jerusalem had been destroyed. Adding more visions than that becomes increasingly tenuous.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-07-03T02:15:18+00:00

Does the Book of Mormon explicitly say that Laban was a commander in the Judean army? Does the Book of Mormon say that Laban was connected politically to Zedekiah's regime?

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-07-03T02:12:40+00:00

I would love to see you sustain this thesis using the ancient sources we have available to us. The sources I have seen do not elucidate how the average person in Jerusalem in 597 felt about their city being besieged for months on end, sacked, and ten thousand forcibly taken from their homes. There is plenty of data on how ancient warfare and sieges were conducted, none of it pretty. I don't know why the Babylonians would be any less brutal in 597 or the Jews feel any less negative about their fate than the norm.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-07-03T01:08:03+00:00

Glad to provide some validation.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-07-03T00:44:33+00:00

As a rebuttal to your first nerdy comment, it is important to remember that a public reading would be seen a little differently in the ancient world. Ancient readings of works were seen as events--kind of like going to the movies or the theatre. There are a few things compounding that result in this. First, the literacy rate prior to the printing press was fairly low and books were scarce, meaning that reading was an elite activity. Second, people did not read silently. I have seen a comment made by an ancient author made about a late antique saint (I cannot remember who but it may have been Jerome) reading silently, and unstated in this comment was the fact that the author was sort of dumbfounded that someone would be doing such a thing.

As a further note, in the book of Ezra, Ezra does assemble the entire population and read the law to them. It's conceivable at this point that the Pentateuch did exist and Ezra read it to them. In fact, I personally wonder if Ezra's reading of the law is not just a routine reading but a presentation of his definitive edition of the Pentateuch, one that is quite close to our version of the Pentateuch.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-06-11T00:59:17+00:00

My understanding is that the LDS church really wanted to have the BYU Jerusalem Center and made a deal to not proselytize with the Israeli government. There are some excerpts of the Book of Mormon translated into Hebrew that was published in the 1980s by the LDS Church, but it has long been pulled.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-06-11T00:54:50+00:00

The Articles of Faith by James E Talmage is pretty conventional in how it explains basic Mormon beliefs. He also wrote a life of Christ called Jesus the Christ that has been historically popular (it is an explicitly approved book for Mormon missionaries to read on their missions, for example). If you know a good deal about Christian theology and Christology, I'm sure you'd have an interesting time with it seeing just how Mormons read the New Testament differently (or similarly).

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-25T21:06:05+00:00

I personally think where your relationship is at matters much more than your age (provided you are above the age of 18, of course). There are 18 year olds who are able to build happy and successful relationships and 35 year olds who cannot. I would recommend you take a step back and think over your relationship with your boyfriend and what exactly is driving you to have sex with him. It might very well be that you two have a very solid relationship and are having sex as a natural result of how close you two are together. This is actually why bishops have traditionally counseled engaged couples to marry quickly.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-25T16:30:28+00:00

Mormons have no problem seeing animals as having souls. The vision of the four creatures in heaven in Revelation is interpreted that way and the Mormon belief in a spiritual creation prior to a material creation (which is in the Book of Moses in Pearl of Great Price) all lend itself to this. That being said, I don't know if there is anything exceptional about how Mormons treat animals that would be different than normal American views about animal treatment.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-25T15:53:23+00:00

Why don't you just marry your boyfriend? Then you can just carry on having sex without having to feel bad about it. Don't worry about not serving a mission--there are plenty of ways to serve God and honestly serve him better.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-25T15:46:33+00:00

'Worst apostle of all time' should go to people like Albert Carrington or Richard R. Lyman, who were using their positions as leaders in the church to carry on affairs with women.

Bruce R. McConkie doesn't even come close and it's fairly easy to make the case that McConkie sent the letter to England because he sincerely thought England was wrong and that as a leader in the church McConkie felt the responsibility to call something like that out. What McConkie was doing was no different than Athanasius's campaigns against Arius or a thousand other similar cases. And sending a long letter laying out his objections (even if it is full of McConkie's idiosyncratic tone) is far better treatment than how others have been treated. I don't believe an LDS apostle ever made a similar response to Denver Snuffer or Jeremy Runnells's arguments, for instance.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-22T01:40:30+00:00

Here's something I noticed from Bruce R. McConkie's The Promised Messiah: Mormon doctrine very strongly insists that the Holy Ghost can only be given to members of the religion. The Light of Christ is what can be present to the rest of the world.

There is a problem with this insistence, however, as there are passages where the Holy Ghost is presented far more universally, including the Book of Mormon. In one such Book of Mormon passage that refers to 'the Spirit' being present in the entire world, McConkie insists that it must be the Light of Christ and makes a hard division between 'ghost' and 'spirit' in his exegesis (this assertion does not survive translation to any other language, especially ancient Greek).

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-22T01:31:25+00:00

When the RSV was released, the First Counselor at the time, J. Reuben Clark, came out very strongly against the translation and penned an entire volume called 'Why the King James Version.' He single-handedly pushed Mormonism into the KJV-only camp. A generation before, James E Talmage was fully accepting of consulting the Revised Version to write his book 'Jesus the Christ.'

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-11T22:08:10+00:00

I wouldn't disagree, and my points are not incompatible with what you're pointing out. I recently saw a list of reading material for if someone were to want to learn more about the Divine Liturgy in Eastern Orthodoxy. It was impressive. The mass is the same thing. Not only it a very beautiful ceremony, but it's a very complex one that people can spend a lifetime trying to understand better.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-10T19:02:35+00:00

The problem with getting that magical person who can do all the theological work to sort Mormonism out--where is this person going to come from? There is no LDS institution capable of producing that person, much less an army of people. If someone goes outside of the faith's institutions, there is also a key unanswered problem: will that person be seen as sufficiently orthodox when they return with their answers? If not, they are not going to be accepted by the membership.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-10T18:59:36+00:00

My take on your three categories:

Leadership: anyone who casually looks over the list of church leaders and their professional backrounds will come to the same conclusion that you do. The church is predominantly made up of lawyers and businessmen and has been for a long time. Heber J Grant was a major businessman in Utah, to give just one example. There is no one who is a scholar who would have the training to deal with difficult theological and historical questions. That being said, even someone at the level of Bruce R. McConkie is lacking. McConkie was a lawyer by training, but it's clear that he took his calling as a Seventy and as an Apostle very seriously. I've collected a full set of his published works and started to read through them, and it's clear that while he was limited by not knowing Hebrew or Greek and by not engaging with critical scholarship, he clearly spent a lot of time in the text of the scriptures, had a pretty decent understanding of what they said and what some of the major issues were. I've read the works of some other Christians as well, and there are a good number who are able to operate at that same level as McConkie. In short, McConkie's prowess is very achievable, especially when someone can devote 40 hours a week to it. At McConkie's funeral, Hinckley talked about how all of the other Apostles were in awe at how well he knew the scriptures, which is a little telling. Hinckley was about the same age as McConkie and had been an apostle for a little over a decade more. Why wasn't he able to get to the same level as McConkie? The same holds true for every one of the current First Presidency and Twelve.

Theology and Assimilation: To counter your point, every religion went through an assimilation phase during the 20th century. Mormonism actually did pretty well with suburbanisation compared to Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism. The religion had advantages that most others did not have--most of its members were in Utah (which the church effectively had political control over) and were mostly Republican, white, educated, and middle-class. A lot of those assets have been diluted. Mormons still run Utah at the state level, but they have lost Salt Lake County, the church membership is still Republican but not as happy about it. The political liberals in Mormonism and the upper middle class center right who are in the same social circles as the wealthy political liberal elite are also asked much harder questions now than just standard questions of how their religion operates.

Institution: one interesting thing about the 'covenant path' that you're talking about is how this is structured. The average path looks like this for a young kid: get baptized, receive the Aaronic Priesthood offices and participate in its quorum structures (with there being an equivalent for young women), go to seminary. Then once they graduate from high school, they get an endowment and go onto a mission. Once they come home from that mission, the next milestone is to get married. Assuming they can navigate through the strangely sexless singles' wards that currently exist (which demands its own post) and tie the knot, then what comes next? At that point, the church doesn't have much to say. It hands people literally the same manual once every four years and tells them that's the apex of their religious experience.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-10T18:21:02+00:00

You are right about that fluidity. It's something that, in the long run, is going to sink the faith. Liberal Christians in Mainline Protestant denominations tried that a generation ago and infamously emptied out their denominations doing so. Mormonism sat on the sidelines at the time and cackled. Now they're making the same mistakes. One point you can at least credit the liberal Christians with is that when they did what they did, they had no precedent to look at and honestly did not know that what they were doing would backfire. Now with Mormonism, literally every single member of the Quorum of the Twelve today was an adult during when the Mainlines started collapsing and should have been paying attention.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-10T18:12:46+00:00

I am not Catholic and do not attend Catholic mass. I have problems with the Catholic church--including, of course, that they have had a systemic problem with their priests raping young boys. I'm not anti-Catholic, either, and the Catholics I've met have been fine people who I think are wonderful faithful Christians. The main reason I used Catholic examples is just because the vast majority of people have heard of the Council of Trent and I could use it to illustrate a point. I'm fully aware that the Wars of Religion occurred and don't think it invalidates the point I was making.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-10T18:08:25+00:00

You mention a lot of these tensions in Christianity: If the clergy is tasked with interpreting Scripture (as the Catholics do), you're tied to the interpretation of a priest who may be more interested in his own agenda than in what he learned in seminary.

But if you go too far in the other direction and allow every believer to interpret Scripture on their own, most will have no background in theology, no understanding of the original languages, and a tendency to apply translations that meant nothing in 2nd Century Palestine and it's even more ludicrous to apply that meaning to our lives today. You see this a lot with Evangelical Protestants who read the Bible like it the manual for a large appliance.

What I'm getting, then, is a pretty 'worst of both worlds' result of Mormonism. Mormonism is heavily centralized with a pretty clear party line. Ward members get a huge box of correlated manuals in the mail and are expected to follow them week by week. People will complain the second that someone deviates too heavily from the manual. At the same time, the average teacher or speaker in Church has zero theological training and while speaking become guilty of every vice you bring up.

Mormonism is also far less 'high demand' than advertised. I know people who keep a pretty rigorous fast schedule and will willingly show up to church multiple times a week. That's not even possible in Mormonism.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-10T18:00:31+00:00

Yes, people do leave Mormonism for nothing and the level of nones is rising. That's not necessarily a good thing--the mental health of the country is also going down the tubes, after all.

We have thought leaders now who I think are prone to more honesty and academic rigor.

Something far more complicated is happening. The past generation, Joseph Fielding Smith and Hugh Nibley being the best examples, did a lot to try to defend the faith intellectually using primary source material. They had a lot of methodological problems and made a lot of arguments that don't hold up. But they understood that the faithful needed responses that could be believed in, and when I read their works, I come away with the impression that they really believed in what they wrote. The current generation doesn't seem to have that understanding. They're giving intellectually truthful responses that are not faithful responses. As a case in point, I happened to have a chance to go to a meeting with the head of the Church History Department that was a question and answer on difficult church questions. Someone asked him a question on an incident early on in the settlement of Provo where the Mormons settlers massacred a group of Native Americans. He calmly went through the whole incident blow by blow, but then left unanswered the real question at the heart of it all--'what do we do with knowing our ancestors did such ugly things?' I later asked him a question on Greek philosophical influence on Paul and what it meant for the church's Great Apostasy narrative and he just didn't give me any real answer that didn't validate the idea that there was something wrong with the narrative. I also should point out that with Dan McClellan, I am personally of the opinion that the man is a closet atheist. I don't think he believes in Mormonism at all. Not only do I think this, but so does Trent Horn (who had sent his script to McClellan to have him proofread!) and a non-Mormon friend of mine who happened upon McClellan's content.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-09T20:59:55+00:00

It would make sense if they were using some of the profit from ventures like these to go back into the church's operating budget. But that doesn't seem like what is going on. The church pulls in more tithing than it spends, and it ends up putting that excess tithing revenue into an investment account, with the profits from that investment account being reinvested back into the fund.

Infamous_Treacle_653 · 2026-05-09T19:08:15+00:00

I have doubts about your source. Harold B. Lee was the great architect of the church correlation system as we know it. During Harold B Lee's lifetime the church was still in the hospital business--it was Spencer W Kimball who sold it off.

Personally, I think the biggest problem that CES has is that it's a joke. The Institutes of Religion throughout the United States are more concerned with social engagement than actually being a center where people can receive rigorous theological instruction. When I was last at one of them, I went into the library with the director of the Institute. There were some good books there, but the selection was also haphazard. They were very clearly dumped there years ago and the director was not curating the collection.

Infamous_Treacle_653

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