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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...

There are so many ways for numbers to seem special. In fact it's probably rare for a number to have nothing special about it. Once, in the taxi from London, Hardy noticed its number, 1729. He must have thought about it a little because he entered the room where Ramanujan lay in bed and, with scarcel...

I just mean that the reasonable non-Mormon doesn't have any particular story about how the Book of Mormon got made. Smith wrote it, or maybe he had help; maybe he used stuff he had read in books, or maybe he heard it or just made it up; maybe he had some fake plates made of lead shingles or maybe ju...

Imagine you’ve grown up with The Lord of the Rings , and then someone tells you it was all made up. Sure, there was Sauron, they say; and yeah, he was defeated and all the orcs disappeared. There were no hobbits, though, and no rangers or riders or Nazgûl. There was no Gandalf and there was no Ring....

If you look closely you can see that that guy is actually the Death Dealer’s more socially adept brother, the Zucchini Skewer Dealer.

So your understanding of implying and inferring is kind of like the two people in the conversation, one implies something and the other infers the meaning what what was implied? Yes, exactly. Implying is suggesting something, and inferring is picking up a suggestion. In this sense "imply" and "infe...

Implying is saying something without quite saying it. Inferring is hearing something that wasn't quite said. It's true that "affect" is usually a verb, and "effect" is usually a noun. If you affect something, then you have an effect on it. Unfortunately there are some more seldom-used words with som...

I was thinking of children younger than ten, like two to six. By ten I think most kids do have a lot of moral awareness. Some are mean and some are kind; some have lived in circumstances that make one or the other of those easier to be.