Yes, Virginia, There is A Nephi

[_Darth J]

Dear Internet---

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Nephi. Papa says, “If you see it in The Book of Mormon, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Nephi?

Virginia O’Hanlon

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be Mormons or members of any other dogmatic religion run by a stifling bureaucracy, are begging the question. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Nephi. He exists as certainly as his one-dimensional characteristics of self-righteousness and being a know-it-all and his insufferable self-styled piety exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest tediousness and inanity from the Peter Priesthoods who try to emulate him. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Nephi! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no prolix Bible fan-fiction, no maudlin pseudo-psalms, no Mormon Mary Sue to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in things that really happened in actual reality. The eternal pyramid scheme with which Mormondom fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Nephi! You might as well not believe in Nephites. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the possible locations in the Western Hemisphere to catch evidence of a vast, pre-Columbian, advanced Hebrew civilization that lasted for a thousand years, but even if you did not see any evidence of the civilization described in the Book of Mormon, what would that prove? Nobody sees the Nephites, but that is no sign that there are no Nephites. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world---even if those wonders involve falsifiable claims of historical fact.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart, because Mormons want to conflate metaphysical claims about religion with claims about ancient civilizations that allegedly existed in the physical world. Only arguing from ignorance, contrived suppositions, ad hoc assumptions, meta-mythology, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the superstitious mythology and tall tales beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Nephi! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of Mormondom.