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More

The Unix tool called more lets you browse text files but you can’t go backwards so there’s another tool called less that has more options, on the theory that less is more. Now there’s still another tool called most that has even more features than less! I’m holding out for least.

Moroni

In Moroni chapter 9 his father Mormon reports that he is still alive, but the delightsome Lamanites were victorious in battle, and a number of leading white Nephites have been slain. Mormon fears that the delightsome Lamanites will utterly destroy his people. Nevertheless he is still preaching the Word of God to them, but when he uses harsh words they get angry, and when he uses soft words they harden their hearts against it. I guess the trick when preaching to genocidal maniacs is to use medium-harsh words.

The delightsome Lamanites took many prisoners in the battle. They slew all the men. They fed to the women the flesh of their husbands and they fed the children the flesh of their fathers, and gave them almost no water. Still, these atrocities paled in comparison to those of the white Nephites in Mariantum, who availed themselves of the daughters of the delightsome Lamanites, tortured them to death, and ate their flesh. Mormon asks his son, rhetorically, how God could be expected to withhold judgment from such a people. He especially grieves for the widows and their daughters in Sherrizah, who are starving because both armies have carried away most of the food. And Mormon can do nothing for them, because the army of the delightsome Lamanites is between him and that city.

In 421 CE Moroni wrote a few more things before adding his plates to the ones his father sealed up in the hill Cumorah in western New York, which just happened to be where Joseph Smith Jr. used to go looking for buried treasure when he was a kid. Moroni asks anyone who reads the records in the latter days to ponder them in his heart and ask God in prayer, in the name of Christ, if the things are true. And if they ask with a sincere heart, the truth of them will be made manifest through the power of the Holy Spirit. He is asking that the seeker rely on an interior emotion to verify the truth value of the records.

Because this inner assurance, if it comes, is the gift of God, and here Moroni adds the apostle Paul’s dissertation on the fruits of the spirit found in 1 Corinthians 12, despite the distribution of that epistle being limited to the Eastern Hemisphere. Except that he differs from Paul in that Paul said faith was the gift of God (as he also does in Ephesians 2:9) but Moroni says only that great faith is the gift of God, which seems to leave open the door for the doctrine that a basic faith is of ourselves.

Failing all that, Moroni recommends we accept what he says in the records is true now, because it will save a lot of grief when we see Moroni in heaven and God says, “Did I not declare my words unto you, which were written by this man, like as one crying from the dead, yea, even as one speaking out of the dust?” So he pretty much closes the Book of Mormon with Pascal’s Wager, which reduces faith to nothing more than a risk-benefit calculation from game theory. “I covered my bets, Lord!” I’m sure that will go over well with the Judge.

Then he falls silent. The last of the white Nephites had passed away, and the delightsome Lamanites reigned victorious throughout the Western Hemisphere. Their descendants are found today as the native American community. Except that in actual history the Jews (thus Lamanites) are caucasoid (white), while the original Americans are mongoloid (delightsome), originating in the steppes of east Asia and migrating here over a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska around 9,000 BCE.

Mulholland Dr. (2001)