Thinking on that, I've been puzzling over what verse or verses would come to exemplify that wisdom? I don't see the Moroni's Promise or "I will go and do" jumping to the head of the line among a hypothetical group of future wisdom seekers finding the divine in the Book of Mormon. But perhaps you could enlighten me on which candidates you think are sleeping giants of wisdom hidden in the text?
If there were an argument to be made against memic evolution as a worthwhile concept this might be it. I don’t know how many of us readily think of passages of the Koran or the Tibetan Book of the Dead such that we would casually assign these texts to the repository of world wisdom, and that would have little merit as a method of assigning importance to these texts.
This sounds to me like an implicitly culturally specific and narrow idea of wisdom, presumed to be universal but really not in the least. Of course one would expect a privileged, educated Western white guy to mention eastern and Stoic sages. (I generally go there too, as a fellow, privileged white guy.) Maybe not so much Native American myths, or Egyptian proverbs.
What does it mean for an ex-Mormon to say that the Book of Mormon has no real wisdom in it? Not much.
I find it interesting how honor refers to “I will go and do,” reflexively pulling out the least interesting and least noteworthy part of the passage—leaving aside the question of whether it is world-class wisdom.
What is at least marginally more interesting is what follows: “for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.”
Mormons find wisdom in this. We might say it is stylistically clunky or unoriginal, but wisdom sayings are not primarily valued for their novelty. The idea is probably much less dated and offensive than a lot of what one finds in Proverbs. It could be that, putting together the idea, its language, and its narrative context, this story is very powerful and useful to the community that values this text.
So, is it a mistake that many, many Mormons find it memorable and quote portions of it regularly in their community?
I suppose if we are each discussing what is personally enriching, or we are participating in the received, fashionable elite culture of our times, then we folk here on MDB probably will not immediately quote Egyptian proverbs, coyote stories, or Nephi.
What measure is that of their value, use, or wisdom?
I do see that speed of translation seems to be handicapped by involving too much complexity within a short amount of time. But I'd take a gander at saying God's processing power and delivery of information filtered through Joseph's mind using transliteration of concepts (pictures/visualization) through an organized sequence of mapping using Joseph's already fertile Biblical brain mapping (stories, teachings, prophecies, etc. from the Holy Bible) would out do the transmission of information from source to end through cellular technology. The human brain functions at a much higher processing speed.