The Nehor

Many sustainable agricultural practices were common in North and South America at the time. This isn’t an isolated practice they found. Just one they were interested in. The headline is pretty misleading. It suggests that this is an unexpected find and that similar agricultural practices weren’t widespread. It doesn’t support that Nephites or Lamanites were there. The Book of Mormon also doesn’t say anything that indicates the presence or lack of sustainable agricultural practices in any case.

You can actually just do all of that. You want Joseph’s marrying young teenagers to be the norm at the time. It wasn’t. Was it extraordinarily rare? No, not really. Was it illegal? No. Would some people side eye it? Yep. Pointing out that the law allowed it doesn’t mean it was culturally normal. The law allows all kinds of things that people strongly disapprove of. No, those aren’t really related. Can I quote you on this? I plan to use it to tell off God on Judgement Day.

That makes no sense. You are accusing others of practicing presentism and at the same time warning about the dangers of moral relativism? That is an interesting choice. You might want to pick a lane. And no, moral relativism does not require that everything be true or hold that facts are meaningless. Facts aren’t morally subjective things. Are you okay?

I see people being annoyed that a foreign institution is making the profits off a large portion of your land. It is easier to get angry at a church than a group of faceless shell companies or a few large corporations. Plus you expect the corporations to be evil. Churches can held to different standards. Having a religious entity in or near your lands making big profits can also lead to jealousy. See the Knights Templar for what can happen there.

Sorry, I got two accounts confused.

Not from the Expositor but I am thinking primarily of Oliver Cowdery’s description.

Not directly but they talked about it as a kind of ‘dirty little secret’ and used euphemisms for the most part.

It wasn’t teens that were working. It was children. Subsistence agriculture requires labor. Children worked as soon as they were physically able. Education was a privilege for those who didn’t have to labor. The big push for universal education in the United States came from the depression. Farming techniques had advanced to the point where capital was more efficient and less labor was needed and there was too much labor. Putting kids in mandatory schooling meant they couldn’t work and the value of labor went up and adults could make more money. Same reason Social Security became a thing. Get the very young and the very old out of the labor market. Oh, and education had the side benefit of letting teachers try to give kids more patriotic/nationalistic spirit in hopes of curbing the desire for communism or some other form of economic order. The robber baron experiment hadn’t worked that well. For some reason we have morons trying to bring back those days. Loosening child labor laws, gutting public education, and tearing down social safety nets. It is almost as if they want a socialist revolution. Or maybe they are just stupid and greedy? I don’t know. Studies show later marriages (assuming you mean by that early to mid twenties in age) tend to be much more stable than earlier ones. Usually marriages at younger ages are unstable and lead to divorces if divorce is permitted. Funny that there is a strange interest in making divorce more difficult for people too. Almost as if they want to trap people in unhappy marriages……

It is also worth noting that in many cultures people were getting married later for reasons that definitely weren’t due to a modern point of view. If you didn’t stand to inherit land you might not get married at all. In Imperial Rome if you were in the army you often couldn’t marry until you finished your service. Some had unofficial families that they would legitimize after they mustered out. The idea that 1800-1950s American marriage pattens are some kind of idyllic universal past that everyone practiced before evil moderns and educated people and globohomonazis came along and messed everything up is a handy political myth but it is a lie. The “quiverful” mentality in the Bible was also a practice for the elite. Having a large family could be a mark of distinction but if you were a peasant you didn’t want too big a family or you couldn’t feed them and your children wouldn’t be able to inherit and have their own families. So it is dangerous to take biblical injunctions and assume they were universal. They were mostly written for the kind of people that could actually read them. And yeah, we are burning down all the reasons people in the US were willing to start families young and then whimpering about how no one is doing it. I recently watched an old-timer in a state legislature whine about how lazy kids are and talked about how he worked a part-time job to support himself and pay his way through college. The idiot didn’t realize that that is functionally impossible to do now. Mostly because when he went to a state college tuition covered around 20% of the university’s income with most of the rest coming from state funding. This has reversed with tuition now covering somewhere between 60 and 80% of the university’s revenue. So the reason it isn’t possible is because people like him changed the system. He found success and then decided to pull up the ladder to make it harder for others to follow while claiming the young are too lazy to follow and acting as if the ladder is still there. If you want to fight social problems and provide opportunities you have to provide incentives. Complaining about ideological shifts won’t solve anything. Most of the ideological shifts come from people realizing the lack of incentives. I know people who want children but admit they probably won’t have them because they feel it would be irresponsible because they can’t support them.

What? Joseph Smith’s marriages were at the end of the 19th century? How? He was dead. Again, if it was normal back then why were Joseph Smith’s opponents back then able to make a big deal of it. Presentism is not a magic wand that justifies anything or everything. It also means you actually have to look at the time and see how normal marriages to 14 year old girls were. Spoilers: They weren’t common. There were cultures they were more common in in that time period and in other cultures throughout history but you can’t cry “presentism” if the people in the culture Joseph Smith were in thought it was weird and they did. This is like Confederacy supporters talking about how slavery was normal. At the time it was not. It was despised by a lot of the world. When you have hordes of people at the time saying it was wrong you can’t appeal to ancient Rome or whatever and say that it was accepted almost completely by other unconnected cultures and that somehow makes it okay. You have to know the actual culture and not base it on vague generalizations about the past. There are a lot of popular myths about the past such as everyone wanted large families, everyone married younger, etc. That could be true in some circumstances and high infant and child mortality meant you needed to have about twice the number of children you wanted but accepted truisms about the past as a whole are almost always wrong. One thing I have learned by studying history is that when people complain about some newfangled social or cultural thing they hate it has probably been around since the beginning of recorded history. When people talk about how things have always been they are usually talking about some temporary social construct that is probably only a century old.

Adding to this canonizing John Taylor’s mournful statement about his recently dead friend was a really strange move. The guy was in pain and was mourning. Imagine someone at a funeral for a dead spouse eulogizing and saying they were the greatest person who ever lived. Then someone takes that statement and decides that God approves and agrees and suddenly it becomes a matter of faith to believe it is literally true. Meanwhile: Michael/Adam and Eve: Ummmmmm…….we are standing right here.

Scholars don’t “consider” that at all. It was common for Jewish girls at the time to be betrothed between the ages of 12 and 16. That is not some determination in a specific case. That is a wild guess saying it wouldn’t be strange if this happened. Jumping from that to scholars having reached a conclusion is silly. King Josiah reportedly did have a child abnormally young. That was fairly normal for aristocratic families. Producing heirs young was important. Throughout most of recorded history aristocrats have generally married younger than the bulk of the population. The ‘value’ of a woman in particular diminished with age if she was unmarried as it had commercial and alliance value. They had different incentives from commoners. It would have been more odd for a commoner to marry that young. Not unheard of but not super common. We let our understanding of marriage practices in history be governed by the age of elite marriages because those are the ones we tend to have records of. Extrapolating that to peasant families is unwise. They had very different incentives. Juliet was a member of an elite family. She was intended to be married young. The reason elite families tended to marry their girls young was to keep lustful Romeos from spoiling the marriage value of their daughters. The play was a tragedy. The age of first marriage varies a lot by culture in the ancient world. Greeks had a higher age for male marriage and a low one for female marriage. It was common there for men to have to wait to inherit before marrying. Higher ages of women marrying correlates with women having more rights in that society. Women had virtually no rights in Greek society. In Roman society, while still having abysmally less rights than today, were better off than the Greeks. The woman had to consent to the marriage though there were all kinds of reasons that consent was coerced both directly and indirectly. There women married older. Also neither Joseph Smith nor his quasi-bride of a non-legal marriage were nobility so that doesn’t really track. Comparing Joseph Smith to Victorian elites or ancient elites isn’t that helpful. The median age for a first marriage for women in the US in the 19th century was in her early 20s. It is not presentism to see that marriage as unusual. It would have been unusual then if it were an actual legal marriage (which it wasn’t). Treating the beginning of the modern period of history like it is the ancient world is just not helpful. There is a reason women married younger in the distant past. Suggesting that we should do the same when the entire incentive structure has changed is deeply flawed. It was weird. Joseph Smith’s critics knew it was weird. They thought it was disgusting back then. Crying presentism suggests they shouldn’t have thought it was that bad.

I call it the “Utah accent”.

Like there being more support for polyandry than polygyny in the D&C.

So it counts as taught in the correlated curriculum if it: - is taught in a Primary lesson - the Church embarrassingly has to admit something most adult members know because they are caught not teaching plural marriage specifics to literal children so they publish an essay about it. It does not count as part of the correlated curriculum if it: - is taught in the scriptural canon - is taught in any class other than Primary. - is extensively taught in seminary and institute classes. Your standards for this “gotcha” are incredibly weird. I mean, I guess by your rules you made up you win (if you squint carefully at all the right places) but I don’t expect anyone to be impressed by this absurd take down of the Church. Wouldn’t it be easier just to claim that plural marriage is evil or something? Or to point out more obvious and more extensive coverups in church history? Why make up this unconvincing one?

The best response is to refuse to answer the question unless it is reframed into something more positive.

That wouldn’t have proved him right.

This.

I doubt it. They generally said it very sarcastically.

The Bible has the advantage of being from an archaeologically examined and proven millieu. They have the disadvantage that their stories from about the 6th or 7th century going backwards doesn’t have a lot of support for their story. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Yahweh was originally a storm deity of a local pantheon whose supporters vied with another storm deity (Baal) and Yahweh’s followers won. Then a hard turn to henotheism with a deity that basically had an intricate vassal contract with his people. Then dealing with the confusion of what a vassal contract means when the promised granted lands aren’t there anymore. It is really hard to credit the idea that something like henotheism or monotheism existed and then became polytheistic before going back which is what the stories of Moses and the patriarchs would require. Or, as a history professor in college told me, any culture claiming its traditions have continued unchanged for centuries or millennia should be doubted. It rarely works that way.

I had people on my mission tell me the Holy Ghost told them no about the Book of Mormon. They told it to me right after I suggested it was a way to find out the truth so they were either very spiritually attuned and got a very fast answer or they were trying to wind me up. Knowing the people in my mission I favor it being the latter.

I think a more common scenario is not getting any answer at all. Or at least not one the person perceives which amounts to the same thing.

Much more interesting then copying “gotcha” takes from others on the internet but it also requires effort and intellect so I understand your reluctance.

This is actually a credible charge against many Church leaders. It is a pity you debase it and make it facile and cheap with your weird “gotcha” approach to using it.

One of the secrets to critically reading documents is that some information can be credible while other information is not. Read a polemic against Cleopatra or the strange and somewhat undeserved praise for the Gracchi brothers. Or read the sources in Britain during the First World War describing the rape of Belgium. Many of the details in that case were blown up or made hyperbolic but the death and suffering was very real.