The Necessity of the Historicity of the Book of Mormon (Plus (a Smidgen of) Zootopia Watch)

   I feel kind of restless not doing homework right now, even though I don't have anything do till Monday-- the downside of learning executive functioning, I guess. I've got it under control and know exactly what needs to be done, and am going to bed instead of doing that anyway, but-- I actually have a way to kill two birds with one stone, because one of the assignments due on Monday is for my Book of Mormon class.

   Remember how I signed up for a Book of Mormon paper due on Monday on my first day of classes? And got a decent grade on it, by which I mean 98-99% which yeah is really good. The class has a "putting it all together" assignment once every few weeks, with the first assignment due on Monday. The subject of the assignment is on one of the lessons we've reviewed in the time period leading up to the due date. The form of the assignment is elective; it can be, for example, a talk or an essay, a discussion with a friend or an FHE lesson, a PowerPoint or a podcast... or a blog entry.

   And I saw that and was all, yesssss.

   I was reading the Book of Mormon in the temple today, going over the title page: "wherefore, it is an abridgment of the record of the people of Nephi..." except, of course, I realized, that's not 100% accurate, because only the Mosiah-4th Nephi stuff is an "abridgement" of those records. 1st Nephi-Omni isn't an abridgement at all; the actual abridgement of those parts is lost, but we've got a separate unabridged record appended on! So, you're wrong, Moroni! Not that Mormon knew why he was appending the original small plates of Nephi onto the abridgement of the large ones...

   One of the things I noticed while studying the origins of the Book of Mormon for my class paper on the first lesson, The Divine Origin (and Inspired Purpose) of the Book of Mormon, is, actually more of a question: why does the Book of Mormon need to be historical? If Joseph Smith was a prophet, couldn't he just have received revelation of scripture, like he did in the Doctrine and Covenants? Even if the revelation tells the same story of the fallen people, why claim this backstory of a fallen civilization pressing one final record of their existence into our hands? Who would make that up?

   (I go over all of this in a bit more detail in my paper, which I'm debating on whether to post the full text up of or not, most likely as a separate page. Comment below! (Also like and subscribe! That's how we YouTubers get the big bucks.))

   The conclusion I reached is this: the Book of Mormon needs to stand separate as an independent record, and that ant is back on my screen okay it crawled off, I never told you this but ants, man, they've been around... record, anyway, separately observable and provable independent from Joseph Smith's claims of being a prophet. You'd believe the Book of Mormon (or whatever we'd have) true if you believed in Joseph Smith anyway, but there'd be no real reason to believe in it outside of believing in him-- if the Book of Mormon is a historical document, though, if it exists separately, then it can be true separately... but only through Joseph Smith's translation through the power of the Lord, so the end product of belief is the same, but through a wholly different independently verifiable path. If that makes any sense.

   So that's what I've got for you. I'm not sure if it's cheap, doing the post on the same topic I did the paper on... I did have some novel stuff apart from that, like the Title Page observation from only this morning... I've still got three days after this in which to do a separate "putting it all together;" if you're commenting anyway you might as well also say whether to choose a topic from a different lesson also to do a post on.

ZOOTOPIA WATCH
   I knew this day was coming... with today's release of The Finest Hours, Zootopia is going to be the very next movie Disney is releasing.

   That is all.