DiscussMormonism.com

If you want to know what gravity is, you need to learn about General Relativity . Gravity is the geometry of spacetime. What we mostly think of as gravity is actually a very slight difference in how fast time flows in different places. It flows very slightly slower the closer you are to a heavier ma...

Why do stars get big when they start to “run out of fuel”? It’s an interesting mechanism. Stellar fusion is self-limiting. It would go faster and hotter if the star were denser, but with heat there is pressure. The star’s own gravity packs it together but the pressure from all that fusion limits the...

I don’t know about libertarianism but I’m firmly committed to ish.

Some people really have had unusually large impacts on history. Some people really do have unusual talents or circumstances of some kind. But what also really does happen is that some people have unusually strong psychological urges to feel that they are special and important. Anyone who is even beg...

The three great epics of Classical antiquity are all very episodic. So are the Gospels and Acts. To clarify my previous posts, pointing out ways in which the Book of Mormon is simpler than a long novel was not meant just to dump on the Book of Mormon as a bad book. As Kishkumen points out, there ar...

Yes, and that made them much easier to compose than a novel. I don’t know how much education their ancient authors would have had, but I’m guessing it might have been less than Smith’s.

The length of the Book of Mormon doesn't seem like a big issue to me. Writing a long coherent novel, with an intricate plot and many vividly realistic characters who grow over time—that's a major intellectual challenge that usually requires years of practice to achieve. Merely writing a long book, o...

Why does either name need an explanation at all? Nephi is from Judges. Lehi is from 2 Maccabees. I didn't know, or at least didn't remember, either of these. Picking obscure Biblical names is a smarter move than just trying to make up Hebrew-sounding names, and I guess if you read the Bible a lot y...

It's true and important that people with different histories experience things differently. It can even extend to elementary perceptions. A lucid conversation in an unfamiliar language sounds like gibberish; you can't even tell where words stop and begin. Someone who does know the language, on the o...

Those recollections claiming to remember the names Nephi and Lehi do make me think that Smith might well have done some cribbing from Spalding. On the other hand I gather that lots of people had notions about ancient Jews populating the Americas. I think that for a long time European Christians coul...