Vort

Is oxygenation of our blood more important than breathing? The question itself is defective. "Faith in Jesus Christ" and "the condition of our hearts" are not separate or separable phenomena. Faith in Christ determines the condition of one's heart, and the condition of one's heart determines the ability to exercise faith in Christ. FTR, the answer is "faith in Christ". That is the important determiner. On this point, the scriptures are clear.

I've never noticed any good correspondence between the Anton characters and either hieratic or Demotic Egyptian. (Although the multicrossed horizontal line is reminiscent of the wave glyph that I believe held the phonetic value "n": /\/\/\/\/\/\ <-something like that.) My limited understanding is that Demotic was often used on engravings, while hieratic was specifically developed as a cursive to be used when writing on papyrus with reed pens. It seems to me that would have made hieratic unusable, or at least very inconvenient, for engraving things on metal plates. I also wasn't aware that hieratic was particularly any more space-efficient than Demotic.

I have an admittedly curmudgeonly attitude toward the "Mormons are/aren't Christians" debate. I think it's misguided, ignorant, and useless. If we're being candid, I agree with the Mormon-haters about the use of "Christian" to describe Latter-day Saints; that is, from their point of view, I think their argument holds water. From a "traditional" point of view, post-Fall of Rome (more like post-AD 150), Christians were those who believed and accepted certain ideas (e.g. the Holy Trinity) and who disbelieved and rejected as heretical certain other ideas (e.g. premortal life). It's been close to 1900 years that Europe and western societies in general have accepted this definition, and by this definition, Latter-day Saints certainly are not Christians. Which I'm perfectly okay with. I worship the true and living God, about whom I am vastly ignorant but I may know some things about him that most who call themselves Christian do not. Whether they think I'm wrong or right has exactly zero bearing on whether I'm actually wrong or right. To them, the term "Christian" means something that doesn't apply to me. Okay by me. Whatever. The issue is not that I disagree with them. I simply don't care about their point of view. I know perfectly well whom I worship and to whom I pray. If they want to say that I worship A Different Jesus®, let them prattle on. I don't care. The honest ones among them will recognize the true spirit of Christ, and will probably not say such nonsense. As for the rest, they can and will go to hell with the rest of humanity to meet the god they worship, and I'm willing to leave them to their chosen destiny.

We know the plates were written in an Egyptian script. Joseph Smith referred to it as "reformed Egyptian", and the Book of Mormon mentions that the Nephites had altered the Egyptian to suit their purposes. This sounds for all the world like a form of what we today would call Demotic Egyptian, a recharacterized (reformed) Egyptian script where the normal glyphs were replaced with simplified forms. Coincidentally—or not—Demotic became common at just about exactly the time that Lehi left Jerusalem, maybe a few decades before. A question that we cannot answer is whether the Nephites used their "reformed" Egyptian characters to phonetically write Hebrew, or rather simply wrote in Egyptian. I tend strongly toward the latter view; I don't believe the reformed Egyptian was merely a sort of parallel with Coptic. (Coptic was a late form of Egyptian and was often written using Greek letters, so has the idea of a language written in the script of another, completely different language. Sort of like Japanese written in Romaji.) I suspect Mormon's writing on the plates was in the Egyptian language, which partially accounts for why they could write so compactly; it was not a true phonetic writing system, but a shorthand abbreviation using widely understood (among those who knew Egyptian) glyphs with indicators for meaning and phonetics. In Mormon 9:33, Moroni asserts that if they could have written in Hebrew, they would have avoided many of the otherwise inevitable errors that crept in. If you're writing phonetic values, you can spell out the Hebrew in Hebrew letters, Egyptian hieroglyphs, or cuneiform, and it's going to be pretty much the same. So that's why I tend to believe the Nephites preserved the Egyptian language as well as its script. Admittedly, this introduces a lot of complexity in some ways, such as a relatively small group of Nephites needing to keep alive a non-native religious language, at least well enough for the kings to record the Nephite history. In the end, we don't know. It's speculation. Such ideas have no real bearing on the important topics covered by the Book of Mormon. But they are interesting questions to consider.

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Indeed. I'm sure the first Mosiah was a tremendous man. My "thoughtlessly" wording wasn't meant to suggest literally no thought involved, but that they had strong (and very possibly justified) biases that seem to have made the outcome almost predetermined.

The Book of Mormon indicates that the people of Mulek had lost their language and much of their societal heritage. The text of the Book of Mormon seems rather broadly and (dare I say it) thoughtlessly attribute the obvious leadership to the Nephites, so that even though the Nephites were the numerical minority, the Nephite king was the obvious choice for leading the combined people. We may at least assume that this was the common Nephite viewpoint.

Indeed. Mulek is explicitly named in Mosiah 25:2 and Helaman 6:10. Alma 51-53 also mention a city called Mulek, which we may assume was named either for the original Mulek or for someone named for him. FTR, "Mulek" appears to be derived from "melek", meaning "king" (e.g. "Mechizedek" = "melek" (king) + "zadok" (righteousness) = "king of righteousness"). Mulek would thus be an appropriate title, or name, for the son of king Zedekiah. Here is a short but interesting BYU paper on the name Mulek.

"Mulekite" is a term coined by Latter-day Saints to describe what the Book of Mormon calls the people of Zarahemla. It's not found in the text of the Book of Mormon.

It has been at least a full generation, probably more like two, since the WSJ took over the place of "newspaper of record" from the loathsome NYT. I don't really read the WSJ any more, so I don't have a feel for its current journalistic practices. But I'll take it all day, every day, and twice on Sunday in preference to that NY rag.

My first thought was the pangram "Quartz glyph job vex'd cwm finks."

Don't pay me any mind. I'm just being cynical for the unsullied joy of rotting in my own private hell. In the end, Holmes will receive a small fraction of what should be legally due her. Those with political motivations will happily overlook her pure criminality so that they can tout their bottom line. Such is life in this fallen sphere. And I fear we are all guilty to some extent, though I believe honest people (present company included) try mightily to avoid doing such. It's been a bad few weeks, and I'm kind of grouchy. As I said, pay me no mind.

She's a victim, don'tcha know. A victim of oppression and prejudice against ambitious young women. Anyway, it wasn't her fault. It was the guy's fault, her loverboytoy. He got a stiffer sentence than her, so that pretty much proves it. Poor, poor Elizabeth, dragged against her will into shady dealings. She is not to blame. She's the victim, just as much as all those people who lost all their investments.

Very interesting, but this is certainly not proof or even strong evidence. Looks like someone's PhD dissertation idea. The land bridge idea is very compelling, but I'm certainly willing to entertain deep-sea routes. I agree with you that we severely underestimate the maritime skills of the ancients. It's like we assume that the Middle Egyptian model of sailing was the state of the art in the ancient world. Even at the time, that was not the case.

Really? I had not heard that. AFAIK, that's still our very best model, not only for human evolutionary origins but for the populating of the Americas.

I don't think either method will deliver the desired result. But given the choice, it seems to me that finding a geography that fits the descriptions well as given in the Book of Mormon would be a better guide to finding the authentic areas than trying to divine which blessings are being best fulfilled as per prophecy by which people in which area.

Oh, don't apologize. It was a joke. You were right to call me on my misattribution. I'm just slightly embarrassed that I typed that off without, you know, thinking about it.

Not to get out in the weeds, because I've always been happy to allow the couplet to stand alone and let the Spirit dictate meaning as needed, but the model of either-wicked-man-or-perfect-God is a false dichotomy. Christ was like us, yet still and always the Eternal God and Father of heaven and earth.

Oh, yeah, shame me for my misattribution. Very nice. As Joseph Smith said in General Conference, "Stop it."

What would God possibly need to be saved from? He is a perfect, all-powerful being with no sin or stain, the true Master and Creator of the entire universe. To borrow Emma Smith's phrase, the thought makes reason stare.

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And now President Nelson is all in on Think Celestial. D'oh!

Infant boys were circumcised on the eight day—that is, at seven days old, one week from their birth. Such one-based counting appears to be the standard in all or at least most ancient societies.

No. Laws are according to kingdoms. The celestial law exists only in the celestial kingdom, among those who inherit that kingdom. There is, for example, no eternal marriage outside the law of the celestial kingdom. It does not exist among the non-exalted, for that is the meaning of exaltation. We think of "sin" as something written on a list of do-nots, or perhaps something lacking from our personal list of should-dos. We are wrong. Sin is not the mere transgression of something someone said (even God). Sin means doing something false, something that transgresses the basic, fundamental moral physics of the universe itself. By "transgresses", I don't mean doing something impossible, because that is (by definition) impossible. Rather, to commit Moral Action A and then expect that the result will be Consequence B is sin. The consequence of Moral Action A is always Consequence A, never Consequence B. Choosing to commit Moral Action A, knowing full well that the consequence will be Consequence A (assumed to be something negative or destructive), is also sin, sin of a greater magnitude, the sinning of the damned. Those who live in terrestrial glory do so exactly because they abide a terrestrial law. Those who dwell in telestial conditions are allowed to do so because they obey telestial law. Those who will not conform to law are left to abide in a kingdom of no glory whatsoever, because being utterly lawless, they are incapable of receiving any glory to any degree. And the celestial will abide a celestial law, with the exalted receiving God's own fulness.

"Pleasant palaces" refers to various public buildings used by privileged government functionaries and the higher classes of people in Babylon (as well as other ancient empires). Those outward signs of opulence (and therefore decadence) will be left prey to savage beasts and monsters. I believe that's the general gist of things at this point of Isaiah.