Episode 98: D&C 3 – Section 2-3
Breaking news! We have no officially added ‘Behold’ to the drinking game, which is just in time because without it there would have been no drinks in this whole episode! Section 2 comes and goes in a blink of an eye, and not much is said. Then we get Section 3 which is basically god scolding ol Joe for being stupid enough to lose 114 pages of his ‘sacred work’. Oh, and we also find out which auto insurance company god works for.
“Drink” Count – 5 (Almost one beer)
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My Book of Mormon 
October 26, 2015 at 7:50 am
God should admit that while humans can’t ultimately frustrate his designs and purposes, they can at least contrive to make him have to resort to the less preferable Plan B, as we’ll read about in Section 10, coming up. He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. He saw Martin Harris would mess up the Book of Mormon before Nephi wrote the first word of it. But he can’t always remember the grammatical rules of King James English, for some reason.
Yeah, those last few verses are kind of embarrassing, about the purpose of the Book of Mormon not being fulfilled, to convert the Lamanites. But don’t worry, say the TBMs, the prophecies and promises will ALL be fulfilled eventually. Section 1 said so! So expect a ton of Native Americans to flock to Mormonism. Any. Day. Now.
Should the church remove any embarrassing section from the D&C? I’m not sure how they would, at this point. After we all learned our scriptural references in seminary, are they going to go and renumber everything now, and mess us up? (We all DID learn our scriptural references in seminary, right? Well, at least I didn’t memorize the text itself, like a sucker.) Now, while many progressives, in and out of the church, would be happy to see certain parts of the scriptural canon disavowed, does the church dare offend its orthodox stalwarts, who love even the most racist, misogynistic, craziest parts? And are the non-nutty church members more or less likely to critically examine, oh let’s say, Section 132, when they notice a big smoking crater where it used to be? (Yeah, that’s gonna be a good one!) It’s the Internet age now. Nothing goes away.
Now as far as I’m aware, only two sections that were part of the D&C in Joseph Smith’s day were ever removed by the Salt Lake church, and neither was a “revelation”, as such. One of them was extremely boring, in my opinion, but the other extremely interesting. And thanks to the second-largest latter-day saint denomination, the Community of Christ, that section has not really gone away. I trust Bryce will bring that one to our attention at an appropriate time…
October 26, 2015 at 4:25 pm
Oh, and when I say two sections were removed, I wasn’t thinking about “Lectures on Faith”, but those were removed too. Is anything that was ever part of the D&C fair game for reading on the podcast?
October 30, 2015 at 3:30 pm
Good episode. I thought you guys did a better job this week of pacing out the commentary so we could also follow/understand what was going on in the text. I’m still not sold on comparing and contrasting the original text with the currently published one, but it worked better this week—maybe because there was only one difference, so it wasn’t too hard to follow.
@Duke of Earl Grey: The Church could eliminate/invalidate any part of the D&C if a prophet had a revelation to that effect. Not like I expect that to happen. Thirty-seven years since the last one …
October 31, 2015 at 10:09 pm
No, don’t cut off Bryce’s historical explanations! They’re the most interesting part. And I’d prefer hear them here, rather than sifting through Bryce’s podcast for the parts that apply to what you’re currently reading. I came into this podcast expecting Bryce to be the factual commentator and you to be the color commentator.
And I agree that the Book of Commandments comparisons may need to get the axe… It was great hearing you guys try it out, but the important differences are just too few and far between, so it’s not worth struggling through all the unimportant differences like how the verses are separated. If Bryce wants to devote a few Naked Mormonism episodes to going through them all at once, I’ll totally listen!
April 6, 2016 at 8:14 am
If you have a hemispheric model and who the Lamanites are, about half the church are lamanites. So I think that is a misplaced criticism.
April 12, 2016 at 5:41 am
Resurrecting an old favorite (if you’ll forgive the terrible pun), here again is Moroni visiting Joseph’s bedroom, with merely an obligatory touch of bosom on display beneath his exquisitely white, heavenly robes: