I particularly admire how the author manages to tell everyone what a hard-working bad-arse he is without sounding like he’s bragging.

Of course, asking the question just before being fed to hungry monsters has its own perils and advantages.

It could theoretically be about equality (a mistaken verions of equality, but still a genuine one), but people aren’t just wired that way. They are not wired to hear religion and morality traduced, mocked, denigrated, and legally deemed irrational, and then go on respecting religion and morality and giving it a protected place in the world.

And for some, I suspect, the gay privilege is secondary to the laicist goal of pushing God’s peoples to the side.

Set aside the facile just-so evolutionary explanation.* What intrigues me is the implied corollary that couples with more kids are more likely to stay coupled, since the more kids, the more likelihood of having a son.

Could the Church’s encouragement to larger families and discouragement to divorce be synergistic? Perhaps even inspired?

—

*I think the argument for evolution is sound; the argument that most evolutionary explanations are the purest invention is even sounder. If the facts were reversed and daughters make divorce less likely, you could equally well argue that “evolution” explained the result because daughters without dads in the homes were more likely to enter puberty early and be easy sexually (this is true, btw) and therefore fathers needed to be around to get their daughters better quality mating opportunities. Which is plausible enough, except that experience apparently doesn’t back it up. The evolutionary argument proves little to nothing.

In fact, evolution aside, not wanting my daughters to be 13-year old tramps is one of my principal reasons to stay married, the other being, as anyone who knows the Lovely One can attest, that in the connubial cards I was dealt five aces and even this lackwit has enough sense to clutch them.

One point that jumped out at me is that its young men, not young women, who are most at danger from leaving the Church. To the sorrow of feminists who really were hoping for more female apostasy as a weapon in their struggle. And to the sorrow of parents, who worry that their sons will get lost and their daughters will have trouble finding a suitable husband.

So does my gut reaction to the following image show I still have a long ways to go? (Warning: Your eyes may run screaming from their sockets.)     

You were warned

Perhaps not. I think it’d turn my stomach even if the recipient of the big slobbery Stalin-kiss was a she-warrior.

I don’t even want to think about the concept of a she-Stalin.

Some wiley counter-cult agitator deceived them, perhaps. Behind their error is another’s sin.

More interesting are three classes of errors where no deceit is involved. They all start with some actual truth about Mormons or Mormonism, no lying involved.

The least interesting is over-generalizing. Someone has a genuine bad experience with some Mormons or reads something disturbing some Mormon really wrote* and then applies it to Mormons generally.

Next is assuming a common logic. Someone hears a Mormon belief, translates it into a logically equivalent belief, works out the logical implications of that logically equivalent belief, discovers that the implications are horrible, and is horrified. What this new-minted anti-Mormon doesn’t realize is that Mormons don’t accept that his logically equivalent belief is logically equivalent, or that his logical implications are logically implied. If you are dealing with someone fair-minded, it can be pretty funny watching the dawn of comprehension. To give credit where credit is due, it was a Catholic apologist who first put this error to me succinctly (see here, comments 50-53). Mormons sometimes inadvertently encourage this error by reformulating their beliefs in shocking terms both for rhetorical effect and to stick it to the bourgeois gentiles. The reformulations aren’t what we actually would want to stand by.

Finally, there’s lack of context. Some Mormon belief sounds weird or scary to them because they don’t see how it fits into the whole system of Mormon beliefs or into Mormon practice. Here’s Nate Oman on the subject:

when thinking about the “weirdness” of Mormon beliefs, those beliefs are almost always plucked out of the various historical, narrative, and theological contexts that give them their meaning. The effect is to accentuate the apparent implausibility of the belief and in many cases its apparent silliness and/or meaninglessness.

Here’s an analogy. Suppose that I reject the idea of evolution (for the record I do not), and I wish to explain why I regard evolution as false and absurd. I might say, “Those who subscribe to evolution believe that if one leaves foul smelling slime unattended in the right conditions for a while that the slime will organize itself into Mozart and an orchestra to play his Jupiter Symphony. This is strange, absurd, and implausible!” Note, those who subscribe to evolution do in fact believe something very like the belief attributed to them by the skeptic. Note also that stated in isolation the belief is in fact strange and implausible. What is missing, of course, is the intellectual context that gives the claim about slime and symphonies its meaning and plausibility for the person who subscribes to evolution. Something very much like this is happening when a few Mormon beliefs or practices are taken in isolation and then held up as evidence of the absurdity of the belief system.

Patrick O’Brien illustrates lack of context wonderfully in his Aubrey-Maturin novel The Reverse of the Medal. Captain Aubrey of the Royal Navy is on trial for stockjobbing he didn’t commit. The prosecutor, Pearce, points to the universal naval custom of flying false colors until the last moment before an engagement as evidence that naval captains are professionally prone to deceit and fraud. (An equivalent modern day argument would be that soldiers are particulary untrustworthy because they habitually wear camoflauge):

Then there was the most distasteful question of sailing under false colours. It would be proved by extracts from his own log-books and by other evidence that Captain Aubrey had repeatedly sailed under false colours, and any attempt by the defence to deny it was doomed to ignominious failure. Pearce had nothing to say about false colours in war, except that to plain men, to straightforward city merchants, false colours had an ugly sound – the immortal Nelson did not bear down on the enemy at Trafalgar under false colours, he believed. But was there not a danger that this habit of sailing under false colours – and Captain Aubrey must have ordered them to be hoisted scores or even hundreds of times – might spread to civilian life? That was the only reason that Pearce most reluctantly mentioned the subject.

It sounds plausible enough. But no one believes, and no one should believe, that BDUs make you prone to embezzlement.

I have two cautions to make. First, anti-Mormons do not uniquely err in these three ways. Mormons can err about Catholicism or Islam or anything else** when they overgeneralize, wrongly assume a common logic, or lack context.

Second, men of bad faith can and do use the errors sinfully. They are uniquely plausible, since they rely on a kernel of truth.

*Admittedly, sometimes the Mormon is Brigham Young or one of the Orsons, so the mistake is understandable.
**Except Wiccanism. One really cannot be too prejudiced or too unfair. Err like a trooper.

On my first few readings through the Book of Mormon, I supposed that there were further details that would have answered those questions, but the details were just not pertinent to the story, so they weren’t included.   I assumed that Laban might have been lying on an incline or some stairs, head down, so that when Nephi cut off his head, the blood ran away from his clothing.

In regards to Shiz’s death throes, people who are familiar with animal slaughter (hunters and farmers), and even combat veterans who have observed combat casualties,  know that sometimes a decapitated mammal does not immediately cease action.   There can still be a second or more of seemingly random muscle contraction and movement.    In the case of head wounds (that are not complete decapitations) that miss a certain critical area, the immediate aftermath is even more unpredictable, and in some cases violent.

Shiz’s death spasms causing him to (appear to) rise up on his hands, and (appear to) struggle for breath seem to be within the scope of  those types of reactions.

However, after reading some commenters in the bloggernacle dissing (and some dismissing) the Book of Mormon over the Laban/Shiz “smote off his head” issue,  the next time I read the Old Testament, I found that Judges 4:21  and 5:26 shed some light.

Judges 4:21. Then Jael Heber’s wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him (Sisera), and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.

Judges 5:26. (Deborah and Barak are singing about the victory over Sisera, see v. 1.) She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen’s hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.

Judges 4:21 makes it clear that it was a mortal head wound, but not decapitation.  Yet Judges 5:26, while describing the exact same blow,  mentioning the same nail (tent peg) and hammer, calls it “smote off his head.”

May we then conclude that “smote off his head” was an idiom for a mortal head wound?  It seems very likely to me.

If we then think of Nephi and Coriantumr inflicting mortal head wounds  to their victims, not clear-through decapitations, then the questions that arise in modern minds are immediately answered.

A piercing head wound inflicted by the  point of a sword at a particular spot could fit  Laban’s situation.   If inflicted in one certain spot (where police/military snipers usually aim for) , it can produce little or no blood, yet act immediately as on “off switch.”

In the case of Shiz, missing the “off switch” spot, or perhaps inflicted with the edge of the sword, and not the point, could have still been a mortal wound, but just not immediate, giving him the few seconds to instinctively rise up on his hands and gasp for breath.

Conclusion:  The overview or “big picture” nature of scriptures necessitates that many details had to be left out. Nephi tells us that his two books (that start off the Book of Mormon) are the “Small Plates,” a summary, and that more detail can be found on his “Large Plates.”  Mormon constantly reminds us that he included less than 1% of the things from his source documents.   And, one should also be able to easily excuse the writers for not including minutia of deadly encounters.

Yet, an even better answer to the questions that arise in the matters of Laban and Shiz is the use of the phrase “smote off his head” in Judges, to indicate something other than decapitation.