Agricultural civilizations normally have a huge population advantage on the surrounding hunters and horticulturalists.

I earlier suggested that the Nephite agricultural package may have been poorly adapted to the area.  Not impossible to grow, but marginal.  And that corn maize was a superior crop introduced from elsewhere but with a complex of idolatrous practices that went along with it.

This would neatly explain why Nephite numbers remained small and also why defections to idolatry were so common.  The later Lamanites may just have had a culture that in material terms seemed to require a lot less work.  Even during the European settlement of North America, a number of Anglos went tribal because it seemed to be a lot less work.

However, the Book of Mormon claims that their crops thrived.  For an ordinary historical document, we could dismiss this out of  hand as cope and jingoism.  Since the Book of Mormon is also a sacred text, we might hesitate to do that.

So here’s a new theory, inspired by recent reading about the settlement of North America.  Disease.

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I’m reading a book called The Barbarous Years about the settlement of North America.  Its description of the very earliest scene sounds eerily like the Bo0k of Mormon in the Zarahemla days.

The description is a tribal land that is massively wrenched deep into the interior by the introduction of new trade goods. In response, it turns into the cockpit of war.  Fortifications appear where there hadn’t been any before.  Small warring tribes combine or are conquered into a primitive state form where you have a supreme chief ruling over lesser chiefs, much like Lamoni and his ‘father.’    They envy, admire, ape, emulate, and hate the newcomers.

This isn’t proof of the Book of Mormon.  You can say that Joseph Smith may have had access to that early American history from a couple of hundred years before, and that he was a clever enough writer to ape the history but to do it subtly without hanging a lantern on his cleverness.

But for me, it is striking.

A new podcast/substack that was an instant subscribe for me.

https://projectembers.substack.com/p/the-form-of-godliness

The old king clung to his throne, but would not lift a finger to protect his kingdom. That was unfair.

The village scorned the poor farm boy. He had nothing and no one thought he would amount to anything. Grossly unfair.

A dragon descended upon the village and slaughtered its sheep, and their livelihood. Starvation is Unfair.

The dragon returned and killed the farm boy’s family, leaving him utterly alone in the world. Tragic and unfair.

Homeless and penniless, the boy knew little of swords, less of dragons, and precious little of anything else. He had no money, no training, and no reason to believe he could succeed. But the old king would not act, and no one else seemed willing to.

The Moment of Decision – he decides to act, to go on a quest – which is both unrealistic, unreasonable and unfair

Lost and starving in the mountains, he stumbled upon a hermit’s cottage. This hermit was the greatest wizard in a thousand years, a man whose exploits generations of philosophers still discussed. For a hundred years he had lived in those mountains, and never once had he come looking for anyone. But the farm boy asked to become his apprentice. To his surprise, the wizard agrees to teach the boy magic. Unfair! Even kings and emperors would have given their right arms for such a privilege.

A nymph of the mountain lake gave the boy a magic sword. Greater swordsmen than he had sought that blade for hundreds of years. With it, he faced the dragon, slew it, and fashioned a magnificent magic cloak from its hide. Unfair Advantage!

The village that had scorned him now welcomed him as its greatest hero and raised a statue in his honor. They sang songs that exaggerated his accomplishments a thousand-fold, with sincerity and love. Unfair Glory!

He took the throne from the dithering king. He recovered the dragon’s hoard, became fabulously wealthy, married seven beautiful wives, and ruled his kingdom with perfect justice.

This was Unfair!!! A little farm boy from a backwater village had slain a dragon, won a fortune, and become king. What fairness was there in that?

But there are greater things than fairness.

And the farm-boy king was not complaining.

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I think an Ezekiel themed Halloween could go big.  I want to see this.

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

Testimony meeting.  A young returned missionary–handsome, dapper, charismatic, deeply spiritual, normally well-spoken–gives a long rambling testimony about The Office

Your young teenage son gets up.  Paul, he says, doesn’t get talked about much, then he instantly starts talking about what you told him last month about the continental divide.  Then, teenager-like, he can’t think of how to end.  “Yeah, well, so, uh, inthenameofJesusChristamen”

You get up.  To your surprise, what you feel to say is “I have a testimony of the Saints.”  And you discover that you do.

Testimony meeting.  You never know what you will get.

I decided to borrow All Saints’ Day this Sunday.

We are going to spend some time remembering our Saints who weren’t pioneers, looking at the testimony of some post-Pioneer prophets and apostles, and, who knows, maybe having some jello and funeral potatoes.

When you have a teenage son you spend time trying to boil down your inchoate thoughts and high flown thoughts about manhood into simply pithy counsel for the young man.

One of those is on the question of excuses.  His excuses have been bugging me, even when plausibly justified, and what I eventually told him was that men were about success or failure.  Excuses are for children.  There is no curve and no grade.  Only the deed and the outcome.

So I’m musing a bit about it.  There are three ways to never have to offer excuses.  The first way is to never screw up.  Unrelenting perfection, all variables accounted for.  This is probably beyond any mortal.

The second is to screw everything up so comprehensively that minor failures along the way don’t matter.

The third is to dare so greatly and succeed so fully that minor failures along the way don’t matter.  So greatly and so fully that all former failures are revealed to have been minor.

It occurred to me that God has chosen the third.

There is no good answer to the problem of evil in this life because it hasn’t been answered yet.  It will be.

Jeremiah preached doom and was hated for it.  Reputedly eventually stoned to death *after* his prophecies had all come true.  Cassandra had nothing on Jeremiah.

But nowadays preachers of gloom do pretty well by themselves.  So much so that its hard to tell who is sincere and who is a grift.

Meanwhile in the middle of dozens of undeniable social and political ills, some of which have serious catastrophic potential, church leaders are markedly NOT preaching gloom.  We seem to be in a reverse Jeremiah situation.

So what gives?

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I went on a rabbit hole on the word ‘stocks’ in the Book of Jeremiah, chapter 3.

And it came to pass through the lightness of her whoredom, that she defiled the land, and committed adultery with stones and with stocks.

In context, its disparaging idols by referring to them as utilitarian everyday objects and I had a vague recollection that in older English a stock could be an upright wooden object, like a post but more substantial–our only survival of which would be

I was on my phone, nothing serious.  It turns out that other translations use the words tree, wood, or stocks, so not extremely helpful.

But while I was noodling around, I saw a translation of Jeremiah that put it in poetic lay out, something like this

In the lightness

of her whoredom she defiled

the land,

and committed adultery

with stones

and with stocks.

It was wonderful.  But I can’t find it this morning.  Anyone know of anything like that?  It might have been a layout of the NIV but I am not sure.

I was reading Elder Gong’s talk from conference.  He mentioned the importance of being consistent in good habits and it put me in mind of something that a firearms instructor told me a couple of days ago.

He said that consistency is the most important thing.  If someone is consistent but inaccurate he can easily figure out the problem and fix it.  But if someone sometimes accurate, sometimes notm all over the map, it’s almost impossible to know what to do to help them.

The metaphor here is that if we are being consistent in our righteousness, consistent in good habits, but we’re still not getting the promised blessings it’s probably not going to be too hard to identify that spiritual component we’re missing, be it prayers or service or stillness; but if you’re constantly beginning and dropping habits, beginning and dropping sins, you’re a mess and who knows why, you’re just a mess.

But for all that the good habit it’s most important to be consistent at is repentance.

Continuing our trend of telling  you what to think after you’ve already formed your own opinion.

• Truth is fallen in the streets, pick it up. Isaiah 59 14

•  Isaiah’s consistent message is that we are oppressed and need to be liberated. Do you feel oppressed? Do you feel the need for liberation? We are so oppressed that we have internalized our oppression. The first liberation we need is to liberate our conception of what it means to be free.

•  The last few chapters Isaiah there are some startling differences in the reference to gardens and gardening across multiple chapters.  The garden is used as a symbol of God’s care for His people, as a symbol of the natural upwelling of goodness and righteousness when order and peace are restored, as a symbol of prosperity and abundance, and also associated with idolaters and people who are blatantly breaking the covenant. I feel like this isn’t just a coincidence. I’m like, there is some meaning that ties together into a whole.

• The need for righteous judgment is acute, the soul calls out for judgment, not just to liberate us from the evildoer, what a garden this place could be if the minority of tear downers for themselves turned down, but because we need to know how we fall shorts that we can receive a blessings.

• The blessings in Isaiah 58 for keeping the fast and keeping the Sabbath are astounding. Does anyone take them seriously? Can anyone take them seriously? They are, in effect, promises of healing, of radiance, of light, of power, of dominion. If I have received those blessings, it is only in a small part.  The challenge here is that, in this chapter, God does not call us to live the Sabbath more rigorously or to fast more rigorously (although most of us would be part of it), but to live the Sabbath better and to fast better. Those are different things.

• Put in one hand the paradise dreams of the world, and then in another the paradise dreams of the saints. They are very different. Look at Isaiah 65.. This is no lotus-eating paradise. It is a place to labor, but unlike in our world, “you shall not labor in vain.”

I will choose their delusions and will bring their fears upon them.

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