However, the problem is bigger than any scriptural tradition. What we see through our telescopes and in the fossil record seems to indicate that God (and by implication Christ as well) is NOT exclusively non-violent, however much that offends our culture. And if there were no God, we’d still be stuck with the idea that the universe was a violent place that was unimpressed with moderns’ concept of morality.

For example, google “Death Star Galaxy”. You’ll be led to a NASA photograph of a small galaxy passing through a radiation jet from the black hole of a larger galaxy. Thousands of stellar systems of the smaller galaxy are being steralized by the radiation, their atmospheres being blown away like Noah’s flood spread across the stars.

God as creator. God as destroyer. The same God. And our attempts to comprehend and follow must be willing to encompass both aspects.

He maketh the asteroid to fall on both the sentient and non-sentient, so to speak.

#1 – I had not considered this angle before (this event made it impossible for Laman & Lemuel to sneak home). Great point!
#2 – ‘scuze me while I barf
#4 – Nevertheless, they still tied him up to the mast of the ship. That’s gotta be pretty humiliating for a grown man, regarless of cojone size!
#5 – OR, this is clear premeditation (if you are the district attorney)

That’s both hilarious and sad. *chagrined grin*

You’re not bad yourself, Doug. *real grin*

Of course you are correct, I didn’t quote you accurately and then I even went further and launched into another dissertation. You know for a high councilmen, you’re really ok. My apologies…

Thanks,

1. The Lord needed the Lamanites to be a scourge and reminder to the Nephites. Therefore the Lord needed Laman and Lemuel in the New World. Laban’s death in this manner prevented L & L’s going back to Jerusalem.

In contrast to Comment #6, I believe that the first suspects upon Laban being found dead indeed would be those pesky sons of Lehi, who tried to beg then bribe Laban for the plates. It would have been known (by Laban’s household at least) that Laban had stolen Lehi’s stuff from the boys, and had ordered some of his servants to go kill them. So Lehi’s boys would be the prime suspects because of motive. And the missing Zoram would likely lead some to beleive that he was killed by Lehi’s kids too.

The upshot of this point, is that by being the #1 suspects, Laman and Lemuel now can’t openly go back to Jerusalem. They can’t ditch Nephi and Lehi in the wilderness and go back and pick up their old life. Which is what I would have done if I were in their shoes, and thought my father and brother were idiots. (When they went back to get Ishmael and his family, they probably did it clandestinely.)

2. Maybe God did Laban a favor.

Background: A quick decapitation (or other quick form of brain death) while anesthetized with alcohol was likely a relatively painless and quick death. And it’s technically possible to sever the spinal cord from the back without cutting into major veins/arteries of the neck. The spinal cord is towards the dorsal (back) side of the bones of the spine. You don’t have to cut even half-way through the spinal column to reach it.

Also, “smote off” does not necessarily mean a severing of the neck. With a stabbing motion, Nephi could have disrupted Laban’s medulla oblongata (base or brain stem), causing instant death (think “pithing” a frog in biology class), with virtually no blood letting, also solving the bloody clothes dilemma. “Smote off” could have been an idiom, and not meant to be taken literally as we would think.

Now think what would have happened to Laban had he lived:

The “favor of a quick death” comes into play because had Laban lived to see the conquest by the Babylonians, he, being a ruler/official, would have been singled out for some extreme torture by the Babylonians. He would not have been taken into captivity, except to be tortured to death. IE, he was going to die anyway, and most likely in a much more painful way than what Nephi did to him.

3. It’s possible that God was training Nephi for future wars with the Lamanites. This was his first blooding.

4. Laban’s execution by Nephi shows L & L, and the entire entourage, that he’s got cohones, that he’s warrior/leadership material. Like David killing Goliath, little Nephi now has gravitas and respect, he’s grown up, he’s now a man. Nephi’s possession of the sword and clothes is pretty good evidence that he did kill Laban even if L & L weren’t there to witness.

5. Look at 1 Nephi 4:3: Now behold ye know that this is true; and ye also know that an angel hath spoken unto you; wherefore can ye doubt? Let us go up; the Lord is able to deliver us, even as our fathers, and to destroy Laban, even as the Egyptians.

Nephi is stating, or at least implying, ahead of time, that Laban is going to die. I think he knew in advance that Laban was to die, even if he didn’t know he was going to be called upon to be the executioner.

It’s possible that the angel even said that Laban was to die, or even that the boys were going to kill Laban under the Lord’s direction and with the Lord’s power.

BTW, when I joined the church, and in my mission, we asked people to read 3 Nephi chapters 11-26 first, along with Moroni 10:3-5.

In the words of Ray, we’re just going to have to agree to disagree on this point.

Murdering an unarmed man lying in the gutter just goes too far. I have no issues with a man defending his family and his life and therefore deciding to take another. But even in those very rare insistences, there is usually a peaceful way out.

I think we both understand that not everyone who claims communication from God is actually speaking to him. My belief is God is not two faced. He isn’t going to command men saying “thou shalt not kill” and then tell Nephi, go ahead the end will justify the means. To be honest, had our members believed this as I’m trying to convince you to believe, the Mountain Meadows Massacre would never have happened. Don’t you see, if your life is based on certain core values, nobody is going to convince you to put a gun to a young girl’s head and blow her brains out. To believe that in certain circumstances it could be ok is dangerous if not insane. I don’t believe you’re insane Ben, so please tell me why you’re not dangerous.

I happen to agree that it’s really difficult to conceive of God ordering someone to kill someone, then allowing them to follow through with it, and I especially agree that it opens a can of worms. Especially since my comments on today’s topic about Satan is essentially taking the position that for evil to persist it MUST be convinced that it is in the right. I take the position that those who do evil are either convinced that it is either right or they are acting irrationally (that is, they are either temporarily or permanently insane). Taken together, that means that you have to accede that the 9/11 hijackers truly believed that what they did was righteous.

It does not mean, however, and this is important, that you have to accept that what everyone claims they were told to do by God actually came from God. Generally speaking you can exclude murder as a thing that God will tell someone to do, but the OT seeks to clarify what you can and can’t exclude as legitimate acts of God’s direction by establishing a set of direction. It does so poorly in many instances, and time has eroded so many of the lessons. Nephi is doing many of the same things, and I think he does so more clearly. He’s essentially saying that if God makes a command to do something that seems out of touch with the norm, and you question it, you will be told why, and that you have the right to explain it.

I think if the OT were more complete, we’d find the same thing about many of those battles. God says, “Go kill everyone in that city, even the innocent babies, the animals and the old people”. Joshua [was it Joshua?] says, “That seems harsh, Lord, why can’t we just let some of them live–kill only the soldiers and men. We’ll raise the children as our own.” And God saith unto him, “I have required this thing of thee so that those children may come unto me and rest from the torment of their days, and so that the blood of the innocent may cry up from the ground as a testament as to the wickedness of their fathers, and so that the disease which doth issue forth from that place shall not spread forth into the land.” Or something like that. At least that’s how I see it. Frankly, I think that the Lord may have had any number of reasons, and he may not always reveal them all to his prophets, but I do think that if the Lord makes a requirement like this, he would explain it.

Now, would something like that happen today? I doubt it. Frankly, it doesn’t seem necessary. Remember that all of these things happened not just with the leader of the church, but generally with the leader of the nation as well, which puts it in a different light. They were acting as a sovereign dispensing high justice in many cases, or in a time of war, which puts all this in a different light. Even Nephi, whose legal status was a bit murky, has some claim as a war-figure or a sovereign. Not as clearly as Moses or Joshua, but the connection is possible. That changes things a lot.

I think we will have to agree to agree on 90% and disagree on 10%.

Apparently my lack of ability to express myself is showing. I’ve never said that God doesn’t have the power and the right to give and take life. I guess that’s my whole point, it’s His power not ours. So when somebody writes in the scriptures that they’ve taken a human life and then seeks to justify this act by making God an accomplice, I can’t go there. I don’t limit this to Nephi and Laban but to all the Old Testament killing, raping, lying and so forth in the name of God. Once God commands someone to kill, the Pandora’s Box is open. Now anyone can say “thus saith the Lord” and commit all types of atrocities. I don’t believe God ever opened that box. Men trying to justify their sins may have written it, but murder is murder any way you slice it or him. (Sorry, bad humor)

I also can’t abide this notion that 2500 years ago life was any less precious to God than it is today. So if God did command men to kill then, what would prevent him from commanding it again today? Perhaps the prophet get inspired to have Doug G killed because his writings on the internet are hurting to many people’s testimonies and God has let him know that it would be better for one man to die, than a whole cyber community dwindle in unbelief. What do you think? I know, I know, my blogging here is not influential and therefore not a threat. But if it were, some of you may be willing to be a tool in God’s hand… (Ha, ha)

The 9/11 hijackers were very convinced that God had commended them to fly those planes in the Trade Centers and Pentagon. In the Muslim religion, they are heroes and have many virgins waiting for them in heaven. How are they any different then Nephi? To the Muslim world, our capitalist society is evil and needs to be brought down. If they can’t do it with terrorist acts, then perhaps killing the economy with higher and higher oil prices will work. Hopefully you a least see my point…

So we have to conclude that God not only wanted Laban killed, he wanted Nephi to do the actual killing. So why? What would Nephi learn from this? First, I think, that God puts our mortal probation on a slightly different scale than we normally do. From our limited scale, it is the ultimate evil to kill someone. Why? Because of the irrevocability of the act–it is a violence that cannot be redressed and that person may have unrepented sins (I’ve been pondering the Philosophy of Sin for a long time now, and it’s something I think we should be paying attention to more carefully). Such a fact cannot apply to God, however, meaning that it is not evil for him to take the mortal life of one of his children, precisely because he can restore them to life should he so choose, and because he also knows the state of their soul and whether or not they would choose to repent (probabilities and quantum states not withstanding, I think God has a pretty good handle on the which of the potential outcomes will happen if He changes something, which is why we get statements in the scriptures like, “the days of suffering must shortened, were it not so all life must perish”, which I believe is somewhere in the D&C referring to the last days, but I’m having trouble with the source, as usual).

So what else does Nephi learn? He already knew minor obedience–getting the plates. I think it teaches the cost of obedience, the cost of faith. Like Abraham, Nephi had to learn that faith can demand a high price. I think the FLDS are learning that now. Is their religion the same as mine? No, and it may ultimately may not be ‘inspired’, but that does not lessen their faith in it, and in God. I think that for the majority of them, things will be will well with them at the day of judgment. Their leaders, if they have acted in bad faith, will pay any cost for any abuse, not those who have trusted in God and their religion, whose faith is sincere.

I think Nephi would have come away with a heightened sense of value for the plates, as someone else mentioned. I think this is why when his bow later broke, he is the one who remained strong while others wavered a bit. I wonder how long it was before he told his family what he had done. How long before this became common knowledge? Or did his use of Laban’s clothing make it obvious? Was he tempted to lie and say he simply took the clothes off the drunken man? (Of course, I might have taken the clothes off him first, then killed the sot…).

It is a weighty passage, and I had an investigator who couldn’t get past this part. I don’t blame her, and at the time I lacked the sophistication to deal with it. I’m not sure that anyone could have convinced her that this was proper, and there are a lot of members of the church that have trouble with it, obviously. In the end, it comes down to, I think, does God have the right to hold mortal life in his hands?

To God, our life is a brief interlude in the span of eternity. The duration of life is not nearly as important as the caliber. I personally believe that each of God’s children will be given the absolute best situation possible to give opportunity for them to return to Him. If they are missing certain elements of life during their lifespan it is only because, at the very least, those elements are not necessary for that person’s exaltation.

Btw, I would never “condom” them either. *grin*

Wow, I can’t believe I missed that one…nice catch

I think you missed my point. I didn’t talk about the baptism rate in Japan (although that is very low as well). I said the retention rate was bad which shouldn’t have been if reading the book provided such a strong assurance that it’s true. I spent five years in Japan and I know if what I speak…

Not that I’m a skeptic or anything (yah right), would you mind providing some data to back up this statement?

“Also, nearly all of the solid conversions I experienced in Japan were a direct result of the Book of Mormon -among those who read the entire thing and did exactly what it asked them to do. That’s the same thing I have heard from others who were teaching non-Christians. The process works often when fulfilled;”

Your statement sounds good to members who need the confirmation that the promise works for non-Christian people, but that hasn’t been my experience nor does it seem the numbers show much success in places like the orient. Good salesmanship may have gotten lots of baptisms at one time, but if only 10% are staying, what does that say about the promise?

Ray, I’m not trying to be difficult, but Japan is one area that I’m all too familiar with…

Also, nearly all of the solid conversions I experienced in Japan were a direct result of the Book of Mormon – among those who read the entire thing and did exactly what it asked them to do. That’s the same thing I have heard from others who were teaching non-Christians. The process works often when fulfilled; not much when it isn’t. That’s our problem, not the book’s. How can we say it’s circular reasoning when it actually works quite well when it is followed?

Btw, I would never “condom” them either. *grin*

I think you answered this conundrum in the only way you could. Your logic doesn’t work because the missionary program of the church has never encouraged investigators to read the whole book before praying about it. I’m not sure how missionary work is being done now, but during my time we were told to get people committed and in the water within two weeks or they would never make it.

The promise is circular logic and as I believe the evidence has shown, the BoM as not been very effective in helping non-Christians accept Christ. I spent a fair amount of time in Japan myself and I can tell you that retention numbers are dismal.

Bruce,

I wondered where you’ve been hiding… Life is never as simple as you or I would like it to be. I’ll agree that the majority of questions concerning God are up to interpretation and in the eye of the beholder. Is it so wrong to believe that God does have some core values that are non-negotiable? For me, I can’t make myself believe in any other kind of God. The fact that so many things are done in his name that hurts innocent people is telling.

I don’t believe in judging people, but I certainly have the right and the responsibility to judge actions. You know the whole judge the sin not the sinner thing. So, to be very honest with you, I won’t excuse the actions of early church leaders when they lied, committed adultery, or murdered a group of emigrants. I’m not going to judge what Gods punishment may be for those crimes, but I won’t condom them either.

The promise in v. 4 is VERY different than the promise in v.5. Verse 4 says God will “manifest” the truth of the Book of Mormon – meaning “to make clear or evident to the eye or the understanding; show plainly.” There is no statement about HOW that will be done – just that the truth will be clear or evident – that it will be understood. That doesn’t imply “knowledge” in any way; it just promises some kind of recognition or understanding.

Verse 5 says that all things “may” be known by the *power* of the Holy Ghost. “May” is “used to express possibility” – meaning it is the power of the Holy Ghost that makes it possible to “know” all things. This verse doesn’t say that everyone, or even anyone, can know all truth; it doesn’t say that one must have the “Gift of the Holy Ghost” in order to know truth; it says nothing about HOW the Holy Ghost’s power works or operates in allowing us to know; it merely says that it is the power of the Holy Ghost that allows us to “know the truth of all things”.

http://farms.byu.edu/display.php?table=jbms&id=430

As always, it’s important to study and then consider the environment in which the record was created. For example, how many people consider that this story was recorded well after it actually happened and that it might be a part of a larger allegory? (Those are just a couple of issues considered in the linked article.)

First, in order to get to the promise in Moroni, one should have read the entire Book of Mormon. I can’t stand it when members or missionaries jump to that invitation after just a few select passages; it should be the culmination of reading the entire thing. If someone has shown their sincere effort to “investigate” by reading that much, at the very least they have exercised a degree of faith (at least desire, as described in Alma 32) in that process.

Next, when you look at Moroni 10:3 the key is to “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.” The key word is “remember” – and that remembrance can be of the mercies of God in ANY people’s history. Once the reader remembers God’s mercy to others (including their own ancestors/people), they are told to ponder and pray about what they have read – which is FULL of references to and teachings about Christ. Hence, if one exercises enough faith to read the book, then remembers God’s mercy, then ponders the words of the Christ-focused book and prays about it – then they can pray with real intent, having faith in Christ.

I believe we short-circuit the process of the exercise of faith by introducing the promise too early and jumping to “pray about it” without inviting the reader to follow the prerequisite steps laid out in the invitation itself. In that situation, the reader really can’t pray “having faith in Christ;” with the proper and prescribed preparation, that same reader definitely can pray with sincere faith.

Doug G, I used to think this way too, so I do understand where you are coming from.

But hasn’t the thought ever crossed your mind that maybe, just maybe, on really really rare and exceptional occaisions, that your personal conscience just might fail you due to lack of full information?

It was that realization that finally changed my mind. Prior to that, I was (without actually realizing it) holding on to a near perfect faith in my own conscience and also my own ability to discern right and wrong based on whatever facts happened to be available to me at the time.

But with time I came to realize that the idea that God would never ever do something that I would initially see as evil (given my lack of information that is) was impossible and even self contradictory if I’m assuming God has all knowledge and I don’t. I was finally forced to surrender that notion in favor of faith in God instead of in myself.

And once I surrendered it, I realized that it was quite reasonable that God *would* expect Nephi (and me through Nephi’s story) to learn this very fact first hand as a way of learning to give up my faith in myself in favor of faith in Him.

That is why I do in fact see Nephi’s story as possibly completely consistent with God’s will. I am in no position to see things as God does and so I cast no judgment on such an act and will let God do so instead.

Now I know what the standard counter argument is to this point I’m making. It’s “well now you’re allowing everyone to do whatever they want so long as they say God said so!” No, I’m not saying that. I am saying it’s never ever my place to judge them in the final judgement and that I’m going to let God do it. I simply lack faith in myself to be the final judge with the complete level of certainty I used to hold.

But in the mean time, I will make non-final judgements based on whatever knowledge I currently have available and using my meager and imperfect ability ti discern. To me this means I will obey and up hold the law of the land. If that means I arrest a polygamous group for breaking a law that in fact God commanded them to do, so be it. I have faith that God will understand that without Him giving me a revelation on the subject, I was right to arrest them. Since God didn’t give me that particular revelation, I will certainly not be held accountable for following the law of the land (as He has commanded me in scripture) in the mean time.

People will do many bad things in this life and using God as an excuse is how we always do it, even atheists. (Of course atheists justify it via “ethics” rather than via “God’s will” but that is in fact the very same thing. They just don’t know it.) So I don’t really buy that the idea of revelation from God somehow causes people to be more apt to do immortal acts. I think the cause and effect are backward when stated that way.

But ruling out the possiblity that a seeming immortal act is in fact moral once you have all the facts is way too much faith in myself to believe any more. And it’s just not reality of our complex and morally messy world.

Thanks for your perspective. I appreciate your respectful approach to my understanding of God even though it conflicts with your own. I absolutely believe God has many “nevers” in his work with us here on earth. I’m of the opinion that if a war in heaven really did occur, and free agency was the supreme decider for being on God side, then God by necessity has many things he will never do. Killing and commanding other to kill would undo much of what he was all about in the beginning… Just my opinion and worth about what you’re paying for it.

As you brought up the promise in Moroni, perhaps you could help me with the circular logic here. The title page of the Book of Mormon states that the purpose of the record is to convince both the Jew and the Gentile that Jesus is the Christ. The promise in Moroni states that in-order to find out if the Book of Mormon is true, one must ask with real intent, having faith in Christ… In other words, only those who already have faith in Christ can get a witness that this second witness of him is true. That make the Book of Mormon’s mission statement un-attainable for Jews as I discovered in my first area in Australia which was around 80% Jewish.