2 Nephi 4: Truth Table

The dying Lehi continues to give his extremely lengthy parting words to his children and grandchildren...only in this chapter, he finally gives up and dies.


Departing from the Way Ye Should Go
Lehi makes an interesting comment to Laman's children in verse 5:

I know that if ye are brought up in the way ye should go ye will not depart from it.

This is either an acknowledgement of the brainwashing that would later become a trademark of the church based upon this book, or simply one of the dumbest things I've ever read.  For modernism's sake, let's review this in the current vernacular:

I know that if you're raised to be good, you will always be good.

Or, alternatively:

If you're brought up to be righteous, you will never stop being righteous.

Neither one of these versions sound intelligent, but I think they capture slightly different nuances of Lehi's claim.  And I mean that to demonstrate the fact that, from multiple angles, this is complete nonsense.

Lehi seems to think that people don't change.  Does this mean every apostate from a faithful family is faking it?  Is every apostate is a victim of poor parenting?  Or maybe it's just wishful thinking.

Or...maybe it's just some idiotic drivel made up by some con artist and paraded around as the word of God.


Ask Not Amiss
In verse 35, during what appears to be Nephi's pep talk to himself while he mourns his father's death, he makes this statement:

Yea, I know that God will give liberally to him that asketh.  Yea, my God will give me, if I ask not amiss.

Interesting. This is a common practice in much of Christianity (and maybe other religions too) that always annoyed me.  There's this irritating tendency to cover all the bases.  It's like creating a truth table in which every cell evaluates to "THE CHURCH IS TRUE."

No matter what happens, there's always an explanation:  The Church Is True!

I suppose this means that, when I asked God if the Book of Mormon was true, I wasn't supposed to ask that?  According to Nephi, there can be no other explanation for the fact that I did not receive the confirmation I'd asked for.  But according to Moroni, I'm supposed to ask that when I read the book.

And so it came to pass that Nephi demonstrated that the Book of Mormon is not true, but is, instead, a tangled mess of self-contradictory balderdash.

Well done.