Problems With 3rd Nephi

[drumdude]

It’s fascinating that Mormon God can’t give a pederast a heart attack, but can murder millions of innocents with a synchronized widespread flury of every natural disaster imaginable.

Agency is a strange and inconsistent concept in Mormonism.

Yeah the angel with a sword would have done amazing wonders had he bothered with Hitler or Mau Tse Tung, but no, other men's wives and daughters are more important for Joseph to the angel. As MG would lamely propose, "The atonement will make up for all deficits and suffering, so it doesn't really count, and it isn't really suffering in light of the pure great blessings to follow all the death, hate, bloodshed and carnage, screaming, drowning, being torn apart, gutted, raped, slashed, drawn and quartered, beheaded, and sawn apart. The angel can't stop God's plan of pain and suffering, but it sure can force help Joseph fulfill Celestial Marriage.

Mormon God’s priorities are indeed mysterious.

[Gadianton]

The Mormon God may go overboard with vengeance, but William Lane Craig says God can kill the Midianites if he wants because he's God. Thankfully, the atonement covers all the innocent ones. Horrible reasoning and definitely gives a free pass to Mormonism.

There is an alternative reading. Does it actually say Jesus caused all these disasters or is it implied? I honestly can't remember.

My mom taught me as a child that the earth has a spirit, and the "earth groaning" therefore, is not a metaphor. Destructions by natural disaster in the scriptures is the earth bristling in anger at the wickedness of the people living upon it. Kind of like a cornered animal.

[sock puppet]

This scene in 3 Nephi is one of the ones that has always made it hard for me, as a never-Mo, to agree that Mormons count as Christians because they follow Jesus. Instead it seems more as though Mormonism has simply attached the Jesus name to a completely different character, like the kind of fan fiction that asks, "What if Tom Sawyer were Batman?"

Great illustration. in that same vein, MAGA Jesus is, "What if Jesus was Rambo but played by a Nordic actor rather than the Italian Stallion?"

[sock puppet]

It’s fascinating that Mormon God can’t give a pederast a heart attack, but can murder millions of innocents with a synchronized widespread flury of every natural disaster imaginable.

Agency is a strange and inconsistent concept in Mormonism.

Yeah the angel with a sword would have done amazing wonders had he bothered with Hitler or Mau Tse Tung, but no, other men's wives and daughters are more important for Joseph to the angel. As MG would lamely propose, "The atonement will make up for all deficits and suffering, so it doesn't really count, and it isn't really suffering in light of the pure great blessings to follow all the death, hate, bloodshed and carnage, screaming, drowning, being torn apart, gutted, raped, slashed, drawn and quartered, beheaded, and sawn apart. The angel can't stop God's plan of pain and suffering, but it sure can force help Joseph fulfill Celestial Marriage.

That's actually funny. How can an irrational, vengeful God that kills innocents be trusted to make all the deficits and suffering just? It's only been 46 years since Mormon God decided blacks could have the priesthood and go to the temple despite all other people's having not yet done so, as prophet Brigham Young proclaimed. Will Mormon God really transform his character that much? Is there some kind of theistic intervention that will happen to turn Mormon God around before the atonement's impacts and consequences are fully realized?

[Manetho]

This scene in 3 Nephi is one of the ones that has always made it hard for me, as a never-Mo, to agree that Mormons count as Christians because they follow Jesus. Instead it seems more as though Mormonism has simply attached the Jesus name to a completely different character, like the kind of fan fiction that asks, "What if Tom Sawyer were Batman?"

My perspective is that the character of Jesus is always in flux. The versions of Jesus found in Mark and Matthew are pretty compatible with each other (given that so much of the text is the same), but the Jesus in Luke is a somewhat softened and more Gentile-friendly version of that character, and the Jesus of John is profoundly different. The Jesus of the Sethian Apocryphon of John is like none of those figures. Marcionites thought Jesus was an enemy of the Jewish god. Docetists thought he was an illusion. And as for a mass-murdering Jesus, you won't find him in the gospels, but you will find him in Revelation.

In medieval and modern times, the canonical status of the New Testament among all the surviving Christian groups acted as a bit of a tether on people's characterizations of Jesus, but only a bit. Francis of Assisi, Thomas à Kempis, and Kenneth Copeland all read the same New Testament, but ask them whether Jesus thought it better to withdraw from the world or actively engage with it, or whether he thought it better to have money or reject it. Jesus has been Mother Ann Lee, Haile Selassie, and Sun Myung Moon. The vast majority of Western civilization has been fixated on him for 1,700 years, so every possible interpretation of him has been suggested by somebody in that time. (Well, not every possible interpretation ― I doubt anyone before me has suggested that Jesus was a simulacrum of a human being constructed by sentient slime molds who engineered the events of his life and its consequences because they had a financial stake in the unleavened bread industry ― but you get my point.)

I came to this conclusion long before encountering this quotation, but it sums it up quite well:

“Have you thought about what it means to be a god?" asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. "It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable.”

Of course, that doesn't determine whether any particular interpretation of Jesus deserves to be called Christianity. But arguments that any particular understanding of Jesus is un-Christian strike me as No True Scotsman fallacies. Looking at it from the outside, I think the Christian understanding of Jesus was unstable even at its beginnings. Wind the clock back to the days after his death, and you have at least a handful of people whose expectations about him were dashed, but who clung to the belief that he was important. Their justification for why he was important seems to have been pretty vague at first (Paul had to invent a lot of the details on the fly), and there are some pretty fundamental divergences about it even within the texts of the New Testament. Some of the interpretations that got labeled heretical may have emerged very early on: given that some of the beliefs that get grouped under the "Gnostic" umbrella show up fairly early in the second century, it's entirely possible that an embryonic form of those beliefs emerged in the first; and of course the author of Mark and probably the earliest Christians in Judea didn't think Jesus was a god.

The belief that Jesus is supremely important is and always has been the core characteristic of Christianity. Everything else, including the character of Jesus himself, is constantly being reinvented to meet the needs of his followers.

</rant>

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

This scene in 3 Nephi is one of the ones that has always made it hard for me, as a never-Mo, to agree that Mormons count as Christians because they follow Jesus. Instead it seems more as though Mormonism has simply attached the Jesus name to a completely different character, like the kind of fan fiction that asks, "What if Tom Sawyer were Batman?"

Apart from those trademark issues, the episode with "Jesus Christ" (as he names himself) toasting all those cities seems to fit well with the general Mormon project of re-imagining the Christian New Testament to make it more like a 19th-century Protestant impression of the Old Testament, with covenants and priesthoods and prophets. Except that even in the Old Testament the LORD doesn't seem quite as casually brutal as Jesus Christ in 3 Nephi. The LORD seems to content himself with destroying no more than two wicked cities at once, and although the LORD does end up raining fire and brimstone onto Sodom and Gomorrah, the story has actually shown some concrete wickedness in Sodom, innocent strangers being immediately attacked by a rape mob. And even then the story makes an extended point of having Abraham argue with the LORD about the injustice of slaying innocent people along with the guilty, famously haggling God down in steps until the LORD agrees to spare the city for the sake of just ten righteous citizens—if there are ten. Turns out that Lot's family don't quite make ten, and they're the best Sodom's got, so they get warned to leave and then the city is toast.

Even that famous episode makes the LORD of the Old Testament significantly less monstrous than Jesus Christ is in 3 Nephi. Meet the Newer New Testament, same as the Old Testament—except worse.

Less monstrous, hrm. I suppose the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the deaths of all firstborn in Egypt and destruction of the Egyptian Army in the Red Sea, the eradication of Canaanite cities, the genocide of the Amalekites including animals, the slaughter of the Midianites and the wholesale rape of their virgins, and a few other awful things like deception followed by murder.

Also, the 2nd Coming. Most Christian sects think there’s gonna be a big happening that causes death and destruction levied by Jesus or Gawd or angels - depending on who’s feeling murdery that day, I guess.

Oh, yeah. So many slaves..

Anyway, I know Jesus has the reputation of preaching peace and harmony, but if Matthew is to be believed, dude’s gearing up for some slaughter.

- Doc

[huckelberry]

This scene in 3 Nephi is one of the ones that has always made it hard for me, as a never-Mo, to agree that Mormons count as Christians because they follow Jesus. Instead it seems more as though Mormonism has simply attached the Jesus name to a completely different character, like the kind of fan fiction that asks, "What if Tom Sawyer were Batman?"

Apart from those trademark issues, the episode with "Jesus Christ" (as he names himself) toasting all those cities seems to fit well with the general Mormon project of re-imagining the Christian New Testament to make it more like a 19th-century Protestant impression of the Old Testament, with covenants and priesthoods and prophets. Except that even in the Old Testament the LORD doesn't seem quite as casually brutal as Jesus Christ in 3 Nephi. The LORD seems to content himself with destroying no more than two wicked cities at once, and although the LORD does end up raining fire and brimstone onto Sodom and Gomorrah, the story has actually shown some concrete wickedness in Sodom, innocent strangers being immediately attacked by a rape mob. And even then the story makes an extended point of having Abraham argue with the LORD about the injustice of slaying innocent people along with the guilty, famously haggling God down in steps until the LORD agrees to spare the city for the sake of just ten righteous citizens—if there are ten. Turns out that Lot's family don't quite make ten, and they're the best Sodom's got, so they get warned to leave and then the city is toast.

Even that famous episode makes the LORD of the Old Testament significantly less monstrous than Jesus Christ is in 3 Nephi. Meet the Newer New Testament, same as the Old Testament—except worse.

Less monstrous, hrm. I suppose the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the deaths of all firstborn in Egypt and destruction of the Egyptian Army in the Red Sea, the eradication of Canaanite cities, the genocide of the Amalekites including animals, the slaughter of the Midianites and the wholesale rape of their virgins, and a few other awful things like deception followed by murder.

Also, the 2nd Coming. Most Christian sects think there’s gonna be a big happening that causes death and destruction levied by Jesus or Gawd or angels - depending on who’s feeling murdery that day, I guess.

Oh, yeah. So many slaves..

Anyway, I know Jesus has the reputation of preaching peace and harmony, but if Matthew is to be believed, dude’s gearing up for some slaughter.

- Doc

Hi Doc, I was reviewing Manetho's observations about how the understandings or images people have of Jesus and Christianity are variable, have grown over time and susceptible to being shaped to peoples desires, not always the good ones.

In my reading of the apocalyptic material in Matthew, and moreso in Revelations, I see what people do to each other as in wwI or wwII or other such parties.(Romans destroying Jerusalem) Not what God is doing to people. I realize not everybody reads it that way and some people hope for God taking vengence on outsiders.

I read the brutal material in the Old Testament with two filters. One the stories were written by people beaten down by powerful empires and looking back on a few remembered victories and enlarge these in story telling for encouragement. They look overdone or overcompensated for. I also see just plain fiction. The flood is a fiction with a message. It is clear it did not actually happen. The invasion of Canaan, a horrid story did not happen or only happened on a rather limited scale.

Obviously I read the Bible as people's thoughts growing toward better understandings but also containing the shortsightedness of humans.

This leaves the comparison to 3 Nephi a bit trickier. There is nasty destruction but I think the problem is that it does not fit a historical development very well. What point does it serve?

[IWMP]

What would you think if Hitler, after killing, torturing and maiming millions of people, decided to visit the concentration camp survivors and pass out band aids and hugs? Would you praise and worship Hitler?

I was a child when this happened, so this is a decades old memory and I might be wrong on the details, but your paragraph reminds me of the Kuwait war when UK bombed them then went in after with aid and supplies to restore civilisation. I never understood why the government would bomb a place and then pay to fix it. This was my understanding of it at the time. Can't remember the year... I suppose I could Google it. Hmm... Not sure... It was in the 90s. I was very young. I think I might have misunderstood what was going on before because I can't find it.

[I Have Questions]

What would you think if Hitler, after killing, torturing and maiming millions of people, decided to visit the concentration camp survivors and pass out band aids and hugs? Would you praise and worship Hitler?

I was a child when this happened, so this is a decades old memory and I might be wrong on the details, but your paragraph reminds me of the Kuwait war when UK bombed them then went in after with aid and supplies to restore civilisation. I never understood why the government would bomb a place and then pay to fix it. This was my understanding of it at the time. Can't remember the year... I suppose I could Google it. Hmm... Not sure... It was in the 90s. I was very young. I think I might have misunderstood what was going on before because I can't find it.

is this what you’re referencing?

Operation Desert Storm, the combat phase of the Gulf War, began with an extensive aerial bombing campaign by the air forces of the coalition against targets in Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait from 17 January 1991 to 23 February 1991. Spearheaded by the United States, the coalition flew over 100,000 sorties, dropping 88,500 tons of bombs,[4] widely destroying military and civilian infrastructure.[5] The air campaign was commanded by United States Air Force (USAF) Lieutenant General Chuck Horner

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign

From what I understand (and I’m not defending the campaign) bombing was deemed the most effective way of removing the Iraqi invading force, and the aid that was given after was for the Kuwaiti people that had suffered both an invasion and a bombing campaign aimed at removing the invading force.

[I Have Questions]

What would you think if Hitler, after killing, torturing and maiming millions of people, decided to visit the concentration camp survivors and pass out band aids and hugs? Would you praise and worship Hitler?

If you ask most Mormons what their favorite part of the Book of Mormon is, most will tell you 3rd Nephi when Christ finally visits the Americas. Reddit had a very interesting thread on several of the issues found in 3rd Nephi:

The most overlooked problem with the Book of Mormon is that Jesus kills millions of innocent women and children right before he appears in the Americas.

General Discussion
3rd Nephi Chapter 8 describes a series of cataclysmic events that would have killed more people than at any other time since the global flood (also problematic for the same reason).

On a single day on January 4th, 34 AD, Jesus initiates a simultaneous “great and terrible tempest”, earthquake, volcanic eruptions, and what appears to be a tsunami which destroys Zarahemla by fire, drowns the city of Moroni, and obliterates Moronihah by a volcano.

Such simultaneous destruction can’t be explained by random geological or climate patterns. No, this was from a god deliberately and in anger laying waste to millions of people.

From a reader’s perspective it’s easy to gloss over this level of destruction and forget it even happened by the time you get to chapter 11 but I want you to imagine a sweet innocent 7 year old girl’s body catching fire and screaming in agony.

Imagine it’s your daughter. Her hair, flesh, and face are on fire caused by a god who is not going to save her just because her dad did something god didn’t like.

I want you to imagine a group of innocent women living in Moroni gasping for air as they drown in a tsunami by water sent to kill them by a god who will not come to save them.

Finally, I want you to imagine this level of pain and agony happening to hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of people who just so happened to not be living in Bountiful or some of the other more righteous cities that were spared.

The truth is that an earthquake, volcano, tsunami, and hurricane aren’t going to differentiate between the righteous or wicked. That’s never been how it works. No, this was total destruction and there was no where to hide for the innocent ones.

And who was responsible? It was Jesus who killed these millions of innocent people in his wrath moments before he appeared to his favorites and just hours after he supposedly completed the Atonement in the Garden of Gethsemane.

This story is absolutely disgusting and even if it were true, this god as described is not worthy of my adoration or worship.

Good thing none of it happened.

Some very astute comments:

u/sofa_king_notmo avatar
sofa_king_notmo
•
2d ago
But it is all cool because Jesus does a cute photo op blessing little children after he brutally murdered their friends and families.

u/run_dr_run avatar
run_dr_run
•
2d ago
I had always loved the part in chapter 17 where Jesus heals the sick and angels descend to minister to the children. It only occurred to me recently that Jesus had just spent 3 full days killing thousands or millions of innocent children through mass destruction.Very twisted story. Screwed up. Makes no sense.

u/Then-Mall5071 avatar
Then-Mall5071
•
2d ago
It makes literary sense, I mean if it were actual literature. Conflict is the foundation of a good story. But good writers don't make their protagonists turn on a dime. Then again Joseph Smith wasn't a good writer.

u/Rushclock avatar
Rushclock
•
2d ago
And in Mormonism old testament god is Jesus. He wreaked havoc there.

MyPalFoot_Foot
•
2d ago
Guess he forgot what his atonement was about...in all of two days.

MinTheGodOfFertility
•
2d ago
Its been a while since I read all of this, but in the Bible right before, wasn't he supposed to be saying something like 'Forgive them father for they know not what they do'. Seems a bit of a jump to say that and then murder millions.

PanaceaNPx
OP
•
2d ago
Jesus had just been tortured to death so maybe he was feeling a little morbid and wanted to pass on his trauma to the Americans

MinTheGodOfFertility
•
2d ago
Sounds fair - since they weren't the ones that killed him.

u/truthseekingpimo avatar
truthseekingpimo
•
2d ago
Fu$k them kids… but I still love them and would die for them - Jeus

sanatanic
•
2d ago
the most overlooked problem with the Book of Mormon is it came from a rock in a hat.

u/kimballthenom avatar
kimballthenom
•
2d ago
I loved this part of the My Book of Mormon Podcast, where a nevermo read the Book of Mormon for the first time while giving his unfiltered thoughts about it. The heinous extent of the murder spree followed by God loudly bragging about it was so absurd the guy was only able to laugh through it.

u/Purplepassion235 avatar
Purplepassion235
•
1d ago
Maybe this is why most members don’t bat an eye at the death of women and children in Gaza.

u/1Searchfortruth avatar
1Searchfortruth
•
1d ago
This caused me cognitive dissonance again. Jesus in the Mormon church is not the Jesus I believed in

https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comme ... are_button

From what I have seen, members tend to treat scriptural stories in the abstract. Like they didn’t really happen. A parable. When forced to confront them as real events it all gets a little awkward and members will retreat to “I know the Church is true” as a way of dealing with the dissonance.