Interesting Stuff in Alma

I'm on my second time through the Book of Mormon this year. I'm not keeping up with Sunday School, which I feel guilty about, so here's for repenting soon. In the mean time, I noticed a couple of interesting things from Alma's experience in Ammonihah.

One is the fact that Alma and Amulek were "convicted"-- or, at least condemned-- for testifying of Christ, which I find to be really interesting. Abinadi, Jesus Himself, Lehi, Joseph Smith, and some other people I thought of before but have forgotten now, were also condemned for this exact thing. My question is: why care at all, let alone that much? If you don't believe in God, what's the point in condemning someone else who is just talking about Him coming? I know that this isn't a new idea, but it really struck me this time: Weird. Interesting.

The other thing that I noticed is that these people (back to Ammonihah) took the "perpetrators," and then murdered those who believed them, in front of them. This also defies any logic except for the most hellish kind. When you get to the point of a) killing people just because they believe something, and b) killing not even your main targets, because you are trying to get to your main targets psychologically by killing others, then you are literally evil beyond description.

One last, somewhat more cheerful thought, brought up by Elder William Oswald's conference talk on teaching, in which he referred to Moroni as a teacher: how much leeway do angels get? I mean, you have this assignment: go tell Alma to repent; go tell Alma that he's doing well, but he needs to go back to Ammonihah; go tell Joseph Smith that he needs to go find some gold plates that you buried nearly two thousand years ago, and give him extra instructions besides about how to get the kingdom off the ground (er, you know); and so on. You have thus-and-such audio-visual equipment available. Remember the cultural context of the person you are talking to. You must cover these points.

When I was younger, I used to assume that God always told angels what to say, word-for-word, and I have very little doubt that this is sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, the case. But if He would trust Nephi (Helaman's son, in Helaman 10) to not do anything He wouldn't do, isn't there a possibility that Moroni got a less than word-for-word assignment on what to say to Joseph Smith? An on the other hand, Joseph said that he DID repeat his message word-for-word, which would tend to lend weight to the idea that each word was deliberately chosen for itself. And on the other hand, if you have a thousand years to prepare for an assignment (including time and resources to watch a language develop), you might just whittle it down to the exact words you want, no more and no less. It gets you wondering (or daydreaming) about ideal teaching situations, you know?

Yes, I have enough hands to do that many "other hand"s. Go watch Fiddler on the Roof.

I just noticed that I said "When I was younger" rather than "before I heard this talk," which tells me that at some level, I think I have been moving away from the rote-talking idea for a while. Maybe Touched by an Angel had some unrecognized effect on me. Maybe my lifelong longing to be an angel has had an effect on me (I always wanted to be an angel when my primary class acted out scripture stories, and to this day remember the Sunday when said longing was fulfilled). Surely it has, but this is leaking into being another topic for another posting, so I will promise (as I notice I often do, falseley) that I will write more later.

Jeremiah 10:4

Sorry. Decided not to put this one up after all. I may choose to email it to you if you ask me to; I just realized that it was not something I wanted in this public place.

A Religious Blog: Ruth

Since I have written several things lately for this blog, I decided that it is about time to write something religious. Since I don’t really feel like writing a structured essay right now, I’m just going to list a few of my favorite scriptures, and why.

My Favorite scripture story: Ruth

As far as I know, this has been my favorite story for a long, long time. The other day, I slept over at my sister’s house, where my niece T is always the first one up besides me, and since 1) I always do my scripture study in the morning, and 2) I have an extremely difficult time just ignoring any child who happens to want to talk to me, I ended up including T in my scripture study. I read the book of Ruth aloud to her, with commentary.

The thing is, I think that I first loved this story because it is the only (romantic) love story that is in the scriptures, just as a love story; as in, the love story part is the main event, rather than a side event in the long saga of someone’s life. And then one day, some teacher told me that the Book of Ruth is completely full of people who aren’t thinking of themselves: Ruth is taking care of Naomi, Naomi is seeking happiness for Ruth, and Boaz is looking after both of them. I must say, I don’t think that this interpretation is entirely untrue; but I think that even when we are looking after other people as much as we should, there is a way of taking our own desires in to account which is right and proper, and focusing on that interpretation doesn’t bring this fact to light so much. Specifically, my niece, T, interpreted all of Boaz’s actions as “so romantic” (I should mention that she is eight, and really likes romantic things; if memory serves, she clasped her hands together, laid them next to her tilted head, and sighed at least twice while making this, her own commentary on my favorite scripture story). As I read along, I found myself being pulled in to T’s point of view. I mean, OK, sure, you figure that you should be good to this, a woman who is clearly in the class of “worthy poor;” but there are accepted avenues of doing that which don’t include telling your servants that they should give her all the food she wants at lunch, besides on purpose dropping extra for her as she is “gleaning” (now more like “harvesting along side”). But the one that really got me was this: so, it is harvest time. You are busy. You may or may not be short on sleep, but in any case, at some point before 6:00 in the morning (probably) someone wakes you up, and says that you are in line to marry them, and somehow in your groggy state you IMMEDIATELY know that no, actually, someone is in line before you.

I mean, does it really seem to you like Boaz hadn’t ever thought of this question before?

So, that’s my new interpretation: Boaz really did like Ruth—you know, in the romantic sense-- but he was being really proper about the whole thing (if I had to guess, because there was that other guy before him, and because he was evidently somewhat older than her).

Incidentally, I was thinking about chick flick movies the other day, and I wondered: is there one where the girl is really proactive? I have known of several couples (OK, just a couple—er, of couples) in real life where the girl was the one who proposed, but I don’t ever remember a movie with this in it. But now I have found at least a written example, and it IS romantic (as just described), and it is scriptural to boot.

Here’s hoping I haven’t damped anyone’s spirituality with the above.

This blog seems quite long enough as it is, without going on to other topics. I've written more, but I'm going to save posting that for another day, when I've had more of a chance to edit it.