Droopy wrote:Anyway, Joseph Smith's Bible Fanfic doesn't so much as "point out variations in human morphology" as attribute variations in human morphology to divine retribution for sin.
The "curse" set upon the descendents of Laman and Lemuel, for their rebellion against God and treatment of their father, an authorized and chosen prophet of the Lord, was a curse of cultural separation, as well as of the cultural degeneration experienced by that lineage in comparison and contrast to the high civilization of the Nephites.
Those changes attributable to a certain branch of the Lamanites were symbolic of their spiritual state and the cultural changes that are the outward manifestation (on a societal scale) of that spiritual state. Interestingly, the same changes did not come upon other of the Nephites, even when they became more wicked than the Lamanites, and the Lamanites skin color did not change when they became righteous, and indeed, more righteous than the Nephites. Follow this through to the obvious: skin colore alterations, in the Book of Mormon, are both signifiers of spiritual, moral, and cultural attributes, and, at the same time, not signifiers of such attributes. Samual the Lamanite was a righteous Lamanite prophet nearly murdered in cold blood by the Nephites at the bottom of one of their "pride cycles," but his skin was still dark.
In summary: God gave the Lamanites a dark skin because they were wicked. And why do you have "curse" in scare quotes? That is the word that the Book of Mormon consistently uses.
Also, the Book of Mormon never says anything about Samuel the Lamanite's skin color. It only says he was a Lamanite, but we know there were white Lamanites. Like Zelph, for example. Why wouldn't Samuel have turned white when he became righteous, like that Navajo kid that Spencer W. Kimball told us about?
And the Nephites, in the abyss of cultural decline, were still light skinned.
In fact, according to the tenets of the Restored Gospel, there have only been two peoples in the history of the world who have been cursed with a dark skin because of sin: the Native Americans and the Negroes.
Even more interestingly, the Book of Mormon itself relates dire warnings to those who engage in ethnocentric bigotry. Jacob 3:9 warns:
Wherefore, a commandment I give unto you, which is the word of God, that ye revile no more against them because of the darkness of their skins; neither shall ye revile against them because of their filthiness; but ye shall remember your own filthiness, and remember that their filthiness came because of their fathers.
Yes, Jacob certainly dispels the notion that the Book of Mormon equates skin color with righteousness. Especially in
the preceding verse:O my brethren, I fear that unless ye shall repent of your sins that their skins will be whiter than yours, when ye shall be brought with them before the throne of God.You and others here, steeped in the modernist superstitions of political correctness, insist on associating phenomena like skin color with race, but there is no concept of "race" in the Book of Mormon (unlike the 19th century culture in which the Book of Mormon was written). There is no doctrine, teaching, or attitude within the Book of Mormon that imputes, innate, inherent deficiencies, moral, intellectual, or psychological, to the Lamanites, nor any inherent superiority associated with being a Nephite or having lighter skin. The only deficiency attributed to them, ever, is that of the cultural/moral state of their society brought about by the "traditions of their fathers" to which they were wedded through cultural transmission and socialization.
3 Nephi 2:15And their curse was taken from them, and their skin became white like unto the Nephites;The problem with the Nephites, in other words, was sin, and any morphological changes were only a symbolic marker - a warning to the Nephites - that cultural integration with them would mean abandonment of Nephite culture, to the extent Nephite culture was representative of the gospel.
Sin and cultural deterioration of exactly the same kind brought about exactly the same consequences when the Nephites engaged in it as for the Lamanites.
But you just said the Nephites did not turn dark-skinned when they were in the abyss of cultural decline.
There is, fascinatingly, not a sentence of racism in the entire book (any claim that the Lamanites were innately inferior, sub-human, or of an inherently lower order), but only claims regarding their behavior, attitudes, and culture.
Strange, it is, that the Book of Mormon is the antithesis of the white racism of the 19th century, as well as the sanctified intellectual national socialism of contemporary multiculturalism.
It denies them both.
Why, of course! Sin is not the result of dark skin. Rather, dark skin is the result of sin. Certainly nobody in the 19th-century thought that the dark-skinned natives were loathsome and lazy and primitive, as the Book of Mormon describes their forefathers.
And did you really just say that multiculturalism is national socialism? Because if there was one thing the Nazis were known for, it was multiculturalism.
