Comparable to the Bible: The Sin of Rudeness

It's been a while since I picked up the Book of Mormon or wrote anything in this series.  Today, though, I was contacted out of the blue by some Mormon missionaries who somehow got my phone number, so I decided to open it up and remind myself of what I was dealing with, starting in 1 Nephi 18.  Here Nephi's remarkably descritionless ship is completed and launched.  Nephi and company board, with provisions, and set sail for the "promised land"—by which we mean the Americas.  They follow the winds and the magic compass mentioned earlier for "many days" and everything seems to be going well, but then the company falls into a terrible sin.  Nephi says he "began to fear exceedingly lest the Lord should be angry with us, and smite us because of our iniquity, that we should be swallowed up in the depths of the sea" (1 Nephi 18:10).

What is this horrible sin?  Jonah faced a similar dilemma and fate after ignoring God's command to go to Nineveh and trying to flee in the opposite direction (Jonah 1:1-16).  What terrible thing had happened on Nephi's ship to cause him to fear a similar fate?  1 Nephi 18:9 helpfully tells us:

And after we had been driven before the wind for the space of many days, behold, my brethren and the sons of Ishmael and also their wives began to make themselves merry, insomuch that they began to dance, and to sing, and to speak with much rudeness, yea, even that they did forget by what power they had been brought thither; yea, they were lifted up unto exceeding rudeness.

The verse lists several things that Nephi's brothers and in-laws did that troubled him:

• making merry
• dancing
• singing
• rude speech/actions
• forgetting what power got them this far in the first place

Of these five items, only the last can be taken seriously as a sin.  Forgetting God's power and provision does have a track record of being a very effective way of angering Him (Hosea 2:6-13).  However, that's not what Nephi fixates on, nor is it really revisited anywhere else in the chapter.  His main concern, the only one that is repeated twice, is how these merry-makers have lost their manners and delved into the "iniquity" of "exceeding rudeness."

The Bible says a lot about sin, and the Bible lists a great many sins, some of which our society today is not keen on acknowledging.  However one "sin" the Bible never addresses is this: the sin of rudeness.  The word "rude" is very hard to find in the Bible, in fact.  In the KJV (the version of Joseph Smith Jr's day) the word appears only once, in 2 Corinthians 11:6, where Paul defends his apostleship against accusations from the Corinthian church.  Here he acknowledges that he is "rude in speech" (that is, his speech is common and unsophisticated) but dismisses it as unimportant because he knows what he's talking about.  In modern translations this reference to rudeness is replaced with the translation "unskilled in speaking."  In such translations only one reference to rudeness remains, 1 Corinthians 13:5, which says that love is "not rude" (or, in the KJV "doth not behave itself unseemly").  Aside from this brief reference and the Bible's positive affirmations that we are to be kind to one another (Ephesians 4:32), the Bible does not seem to consider rudeness a serious infraction, or even a sin.  Jesus, who is explicitly without sin (2 Corinthians 5:21), broke social conventions almost habitually and did a number of things even we today would consider extremely rude (driving merchants out of the Temple with a whip and flipping over their tables, refusing service to a Gentile woman, calling His opponents the spawn of Satan, etc).  He did so without sin.

So why was the rudeness of Nephi's brothers and the sons and daughters-in-law of Ishmael such a big deal?  No firm connection is built between their rudeness and forgetting god.  They are not said to have blasphemed.  The biggest connection is between their celebratory antics, "making merry," "singing," and "dancing."  While it's popular in religious communities that are more about following rules than following God to believe that god is opposed to the egregious sin of having fun.  Of such societies its sometimes joked that couples will never have sex standing up because someone might see it and think they were committing the unpardonable sin of dancing.  The Mormon religion is famous for its many rules, including prohibition on caffeinated beverages (which is nowhere in the Bible, in case you were wondering), and falls solidly into this category.  God however, does not.  He gives us dancing, singing, and merriment, and enjoys us enjoying Him and the things He's given us (Jeremiah 31:13).

But despite Nephi's fears, it's not this sin of merriment and rudeness that almost dooms the travelers.  Instead it's when Nephi's brothers respond to his preaching of restraint by tying him to the mast for four days.  This caused the Liahona, the faith-driven god-given compass to stop working.  As I mentioned in the post when the Liahona was first introduced, I've been suspicious of the compass from the beginning.  Sure, God can use anything he wants to direct people (he used a cloud for the Israelite exodus), and he could make a compass if He wanted to, but the whole concept of a compass as the group's source of direction and guidance seemed suspiciously modern.  I've been waiting for some sign that the Liahona is a modern idea, originating from a culture spoiled by hundreds of years of reliance on compasses, to the point where navigating without them is virtually unthinkable to the average man.  Sadly, my suspicions were confirmed.  The compass stops working in verse 12 and in the very next verse—at the very beginning of the verse—the crew of the ship completely loses all sense of direction and blunders into a storm.  This is a hallmark of a plot hatched in an age dependent on magnetic compasses, for such a thing would have been implausible as late as the 17th century, at which time sailors were still navigating by the stars, as all travelers did in the time before the compass.  If Nephi and his companions were really ancient Israelites who'd navigated by the sun and stars their whole lives, they would have never become lost by the failure of their compass.  They simply would have fallen back on more familiar means of finding their way.  That they did become lost immediately is a telling sign that The Book of Mormon has a modern author (Joseph Smith, who was born into a 19th century already hopelessly dependent on the magnetic compass).

After four days in the storm, Nephi's brothers fear for their lives because of the storm and release him.  At this point I do have to give credit to Smith for one accurate detail: when released in verse 15, after four days of being lashed to the mast, Nephi's wrists and ankles are said to have swollen and been very sore.  While I couldn't find any concrete evidence of this, it does strike me as realistic and I seem to recall people trying to set records for longest time standing upright (which is essentially what anyone tied to a mast for four days would have been forced to do) facing similar problems.

But if this was a stroke of genius on Smith's part, he immediately spoils it.  The narrative has just reached the point of greatest tension, where the wicked brothers have repented in fear of the storm and freed Nephi, who may or may not be able to do anything to save them all, when it suddenly jumps backwards.  Why?  Because the narrator forgot to tell us what Nephi's parents, wife, and children were all doing during these four days and felt the need to explain to us why they couldn't have just freed him sooner.  It's a fair question, to be sure, but the solution presents more problems to the narrative than it resolves.  First of all, it completely wrecks the flow of the narrative.  More damaging, it introduces a major problem: it states that the reason that Nephi's parents (who were also the parents of Laman and Lemuel) didn't intervene was because they were on their sickbeds, very near death.  It goes on for two verses about how frail and how close to death Lehi and his wife are...and then forgets about them.  There is absolutely no mention of them either dying or recovering.  Skipping ahead, I can see that they do live on, since Lehi's death is mentioned as taking place in the Americas after a long speech in 2 Nephi 4, but the narrative in chapter 18 does not make that clear.  Before, I might have glossed over the question of why Nephi's parents (who are probably old and badly outnumbered) did not try to free Nephi themselves, but now I'm transfixed by a question of whether or not these very important characters will even survive the trip—a question which the writer leaves totally unanswered.  After telling us how sick they are and adding in a note about why their younger children (Jacob and Joseph, added to the family earlier in this chapter) and Nephi's own wife and children didn't intervene, the narrative skips back to the point where Nephi is freed and calms the storm with a prayer.

Many days and one verse later, the party lands on the shores of the "promised land" (which is so called twice in the same sentence).  They pitch their tents, plant crops brought as seeds from Jerusalem, and discovered a wealth of animal and mineral wealth in the forests surrounding their landing site.  This is where the final problem of the chapter presents itself.  While the last verse says that Nephi and his family found "beasts in the forest of every kind" it specifically names four species: cattle ("the cow and the ox"), horses, donkeys ("the ass"), and goats ("the goat and the wild goat").  Now I have heard from other sources that The Book of Mormon had problems regarding anachronistic animals in pre-Columbian America, but I hadn't expected anything so severe.  As it turns out every one of the species listed here is an anachronism: cattle, horses, donkeys, and goats were all introduced to the Americas centuries later, following European contact.  One species might be a fluke of translation or a mistake of modern archaeology, but all four?  That's a dead giveaway that, unlike the Bible, The Book of Mormon is fiction, not history.

How We Should Treat "One Another": a brief Bible survey

At church this past week.  We were given a "homework assignment" to find some of the "one another" verses: verses that direct us as Christians in how we are to behave toward each other.

There are a lot of ready-made lists you can find out there, and making one of your own isn't that hard, as long as you have a concordance or a program or website (like Bible Gateway or Blue Letter Bible) that can stand in for one).  The challenge for me is in understanding the list, going beyond a simple collection of chapter and verse citations to actual directions I can apply to my life.

So below I've sorted the results of several lists, grouped them by theme to try to get a feel for the overall message the Bible is telling us.  This is not an exhaustive list, merely a short one composed of other people's lists that I could find in a quick Google search.

Verses about Service:

• John 13:14: "If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet."
• 1 Corinthians 11:33: "So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another—"
• Galatians 5:13: "For you were called to freedom, brothers.  Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another."
• Galatians 6:2: "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ."
• 1 Peter 4:9: "Show hospitality to one another without grumbling."

Summary: Christ is to be our example in service, because He came to serve us.  We are to show our love through serving.  We are to use our freedom to serve and help one another.  We are to do it without complaining.

Verses about Love:

• John 13:34-35: "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.  By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."
• John 15:12: "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you."
• John 15:17: "These things I command you, so that you will love one another."
• Romans 12:10a: "Love one another with brotherly affection."
• Romans 13:8: "Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law."
• 1 Thessalonians 3:12: "and may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another, and for all, as we do for you."
• 1 Thessalonians 4:9: "Now concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another"
• 2 Thessalonians 1:3: "We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing."
• 1 Peter 1:22: "Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart."
• 1 John 3:11: "For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another."
• 1 John 3:23: "And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us."
• 1 John 4:7-8: "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God, and knows God.  Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love."
• 1 John 4:11-12: "Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
• 2 John 1:5: "And now I ask you, dear lady—not as though I were writing to you a new commandment, but the one that we have had from the beginning—that we love one another."

Summary: Love is paramount.  It is the only one of these that is actually called a command.  Love is the first command, Christ's command, a new and an old command.  Love fulfills the law.  Christ is to be our example in love.  We are to love because He loved us, as He loved us.  God the Father is also our example in love because He is love.  Our love is to be a sign that we know Him and that we are true disciples of Christ.  Failure to love casts doubt on whether or not we truly know God.

Verses about Encouragement:

• Romans 1:12: "that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith, both yours and mine."
• Ephesians 5:18-19: "And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart."
• 1 Thessalonians 4:18: "Therefore encourage one another with these words." (speaking about the resurrection and rapture)
• 1 Thessalonians 5:11: "Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing."
• Hebrews 3:13: "But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called 'today,' that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin."
• Hebrews 10:24: "And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works."

Summary: We are to encourage each other with our faith, with reminders of the coming rapture and resurrection, and with songs.  The goal is to encourage each other to love and do good works, and to keep our hearts from being hardened by sin.

Verses about Unity:

• Mark 9:50 "Salt is good, but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you make it salty again?  Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."
• Romans 12:4-5: "For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another."
• Romans 12:16: "Live in harmony with one another.  Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly.  Never be wise in your own sight."
• Romans 14:19: "So let us then pursue what makes for peace and mutual upbuilding."
• Romans 15:5-7: "May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God."
• 1 Corinthians 7:5: "Do not deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement for a limited time, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control." (in context this is talking about sexual unity between married believers)
• 1 Corinthians 12:22-27: "On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require.  But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.  If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.  Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it."
• Ephesians 4:1-3: "I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."
• 1 John 1:7: "But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin."

Summary: Unity is our identity.  We are one in Christ.  We are one body with many parts.  We are not who we are by ourselves.  We are only "us" together.  We are therefore to be together regularly, welcoming each other, having fellowship with each other, sharing our highs and lows, sympathizing with each other, and being at peace with each other.

Verses about Honor:

• Romans 12:10b: "Outdo one another in showing honor."
• Philippians 2:3: "Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves."

Summary: We are to have only one rivalry, only one competition, and that is in who can honor the other more.  This requires humility on our own part.

Verses about Instructing:

• Romans 15:14: "I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another."
• Colossians 3:16: "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God."

Summary: We are to be filled with goodness, knowledge, and Christ so that we may instruct one another in all wisdom.

Verses about Greeting:

• Romans 16:16: "Greet one another with a holy kiss.  All the churches of Christ greet you."
• 1 Corinthians 16:20: "All the brothers send you greetings.  Greet one another with a holy kiss."
• 2 Corinthians 13:12: "Greet one another with a holy kiss."
• 1 Peter 5:14: "Greet one another with the kiss of love.  Peace to all of you who are in Christ."

Summary: We are to greet one another, and it is to be with a kiss.

Verses about Forgiving:

• Ephesians 4:32: "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you."
• Colossians 3:13: "Bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgive you, so you also must forgive."

Summary: We must forgive each other.  Christ is to be our example in forgiveness.

Verses about Submission:

• Ephesians 5:21: "submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ."
• 1 Peter 5:5: "Likewise you who are younger, be subject to the elders.  Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God 'opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.'"

Summary: All of us are to be submitted to each other out of humility and respect for God.

Verses about Honesty:

• Ephesians 4:25: "Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for are members one of another."
• Colossians 3:9: "Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices"

Summary: We are to no longer practice falsehood, but to be honest with each other.

Verses about Praying:

• James 5:16: "Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.  The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working."

Summary: We are to honestly confess our sins to each other, and pray for each other's spiritual healing from these sins.  These prayers are effective.

Verses about not Judging:

• Romans 14:13: "Let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but decide rather never to put a stumbling block or a hindrance in the way of a brother."
• James 4:11: "Do not speak evil against one another, brothers.  The one who speaks against a brother or judges a brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law.  But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge."

Summary: We are to not judge, speak evil of, or hinder one another.  To do such things reflects negatively on our view of the law, under which Christ holds us forgiven and blameless.

Verses about What Else NOT to do:

• Galatians 5:26: "Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another."
• 1 Thessalonians 5:15: "See that no one repays anyone evil for evil, but always seek to good to one another and to everyone."
• James 5:9: "Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you be not judged.  The Judge is standing at the door."

Summary: We are not to provoke, envy, grumble against, or do evil to one another.  Instead, we are to seek to do good to one another.

 I have to admit that all of this is rather humbling and convicting for me.  I spend a lot of time alone.  I could spend a week or more without speaking to a single person.  I have a very solitary nature.  But God has called me outside my comfort zone to be a part of a larger community.  That's not something I'm good at, but it's something I need.  I need to serve and encourage, and I need encouragement myself.  I need prayer.  I need love.  I need the kind of community that would exist if we actually did this, and none of it is happening without me stepping up to bat and doing it myself to others.

One thing that did get me thinking was the verses about greeting each other with a kiss.  It's easy to dismiss this as an outdated social custom, like wearing togas, and headdresses, and hats.  But the Bible says this one repeatedly, through different authors.  That alone makes me wonder.  Then I think about the reasons why we don't kiss other Christians.  We're generally alright with kissing close family members, but other Christians we greet with a respectful handshake or a casual "Hey."  But I think the Bible is deliberately calling us to use the same greeting for fellow Christians that we would normally only use for close family.  After all, that is what we're supposed to be as the Church, a family.  And there is something to be said about the profound and elusive power of touch on our psyches.  A kiss may make us uncomfortably close to some people, but maybe those "untouchables" are just the people we need to touch, to remind us that they are a part of us, and to remind them that they are honored and family in Christ.  There's also the whole idea that Christianity isn't supposed to leave us content in our comfort zones in the first place.  It's definitely something I'll need to look into further.

Response to "Bill Nye Fights Back"--or "Winning Scientific Debates by Poisoning the Well"

Popular Science's latest issue features an article titled "Bill Nye Fights Back" about how Bill Nye (the Science Guy) has recently thrown his hat into the ring on the Creation-Evolution debate and plans to use his reach and understanding of science to topple the rise of Young-Earth Creationism in America.  I saw it on my desk this afternoon and set aside some time to read it tonight, expecting to engage seriously with some of Bill's scientific arguments, or maybe just a sample or snippet of one argument, whatever the writer chose to include.  After all, this is Bill Nye the Science Guy, the one who used all those cool hands-on experiments in videos to teach us Newton's Third Law in grade school.  I expected something great.

I was disappointed.  To be fair, it is not a reflection on Nye, since he did not write the article, but it does raise some sobering questions about the direction of popular thought on science in America today—though I doubt very much it raises the questions the author intended it to raise.  The issue is that the article does not present any scientific arguments at all.  It is entirely rhetorical.  The whole piece is a sketch aimed at presenting Nye as an all-around American good-guy with a passion for science, humanity, the environment, progress, and critical thought and contrasting him with Ken Ham (his debate partner) who is smeared as a snake-oil salesman rooted in an environmentally-toxic and patriarchal past based solely on blind faith in a book Nye could pull apart as a fraud in five minutes.

There are a couple things that really bug me here, laying aside for a minute whether or not either caricature is even a remote resemblance of the truth.  First of all, for a magazine with "science" in the title and an article supposedly about a man fighting for scientific and critical thinking, the article is an absolute vacuum of both.  Evaluating any two competing sets of ideas (or theories, if you will) based solely on caricatures of their proponents is about as far from science and reason as you can get—but it is exactly what the article asks us to do.  It is not even logical.  It's a prime example of one of the fundamental logical fallacies: argumentum ad hominem: trying to disprove the truth of an argument or idea not by countering it but by assassinating the character of the person who made the argument in the first place.  By putting all these rhetorical insinuations (2.5+ pages worth of them) before even the first allusion to a scientific argument, the author is guilty of "poisoning the well", presenting adverse information about an arguer in advance of their argument so as to cast everything they say in a negative light.  This is terrible logic, utter illogic, and if that is the standard of popular scientific thought in America today, then we are in very big trouble.

The second thing that bothers me is the hubris of the position it presents.  There is no debate presented between Creation-science and Naturalistic (macro-evolutionary) science.  The debate is cast frimly as a battle of enlightened science vs blind gibbering-idiot-level faith.  There is no acknowledgment that even psuedo-reasonable arguments for the other view might exist.  There is such self-assured pride in the naturalistic cosmology that the author feels no need to justify any of its claims, or explain to us why anyone who does not immediately embrace them is a Neanderthal trying to shove us back into a new Dark Age.  The Earth is 4.5 billion years old.  The dinosaur fossils go back to 65 million years old.  All the matter that makes us up comes from stars.  All species evolved from a common ancestor over the course of millions and millions of years of gradual changes.  Anyone who needs to ask, How do you know? is given no answer.  Obviously such a person is a Neanderthal trying to shove us back into a new Dark Age and is a danger to humanity as a whole!

The problem with this attitude is that it goes beyond being simply illogical and unscientific.  It does not simply fail to pass the test of critical thought or rightly apply critical thought.  It actively suppresses critical thought (do not criticize these scientific ideas: they are simply right).  It actively discourages logic (do not apply logic to this: just listen to the bandwagon of scientists who believe this is true and know that it is—and certainly do not look up the bandwagon fallacy on Wikipedia!).  In the end, it is not just bad science, it is anti-science.  If science is the pursuit of knowledge, of asking questions and answering them with evidence, this line of thought tells us to stop questioning, stop pursuing, stop looking at the evidence, and simply go along with whatever we are told.  We are not to continue the quest for knowledge, but instead to stop at explanations as in-depth and satisfying as children's stories.

This is how science stagnates, turns in on itself, and ultimately dies.  While modern rhetoric has tried to paint faith vs reason as the backdrop of Galileo Galilei's trial and the public condemnation of heliocentric astronomy, this is a historical fallacy.  As we see from Galileo's sudden turn from astronomy to physics (specifically, the physics of falling bodies, which was said to prove that the Earth was stationary), the real backdrop was a debate between an established science (Aristotlean physics) vs an emerging one (astronomy).  It is less a story about how religion stifled science than a story about how dogmatic insistence that one scientific school of thought be accepted without criticism held back the pursuit of truth and knowledge throughout the 17th century.

We are in danger of the same thing happening today, in the 21st.  The naturalistic cosmology will broke no competition, no criticism, no questioning of its inherent truthfulness, and anyone who dares examine it's claims is automatically branded a heretic and excommunicated from the ivy halls.  This is what is holding us back.  This is what poses a threat to us as a civilization founded on scientific progress and the pursuit of truth.  The solution that will save us is not children's TV stars spouting empty rhetoric, and it is certainly not making caricatures of our favorite "heroes and villains" in this debate, as the article does.  The solution instead is a commitment to examine the truth, logic, and evidence of all things and follow it wherever it may lead us...even if it leads away from the politically correct bandwagon.

Comparable to the Bible: the Ark vs Nephi's Ship

It has been a while since I wrote or read anything about the Book of Mormon.  It is good, however, to remember what we have in the Bible and to appreciate it in contrast (and comparison) to those books (like the Book of Mormon) which pretend to be its equal.

So resuming where I left off, after the incident with the bow, Nephi and company travel eight years eastward until they eventually reach a sea they call "Irreantum" on the shore of a land they call "Bountiful, because of its much fruit" (the name and the reason behind it being repeated twice in the space of two verses).  Where this is in the real world is a little difficult to parse out since the only point of known geography mentioned in the book has been Jerusalem.  However, since the overall direction of the journey has been southeastward of Jerusalem, we can say it's probably the Indian Ocean and the southern shore of the Arabian Peninsula.  This is, in fact, the only possible destination given their direction of travel.

Upon their arrival at the seashore, Nephi goes up into the mountains and God commands him to build a ship with which to cross the ocean.  This will be a special ship, not made in the fashion of any normal human shipbuilding but according to special divine instructions (1 Nephi 18:1-3).  Nephi then asks where he will get the ore to make the metal tools necessary for ship building.  Much is made of the manner in which Nephi constructs these tools, down to describing how Nephi constructed a bellows and started the fire to melt the ore to make the tools, etc.

The curious thing is that Nephi's question and the descriptions of his work that follow miss the point.  Tools are the easy part of any such ship-building endeavor.  Primitive shipbuilding did not require much in the way of specialized metal tools.  Even a small ax could be used to accomplish much of the work, cutting, splitting, and planing wood, as well as driving in nails with the back side (axes are, really, terrifically useful tools common to every culture and era, which is one reason why Gary Paulson was able to convincingly write two books revolving around a plane crash victim surviving alone in the wilderness with only a small hatchet).  Knives could be used for chisels or for sealing the cracks between boards with cordage.  In fact, it is difficult to conceive of any primitive tool shipbuilding would require which would not have been with Nephi's party already.  Without an ax, they would have been unable to cut wood either for the making of Nephi's bow in chapter 16 or for the making of the forge fire in chapter 17.  Without a knives, they would be unable to skin and dress the game they survived upon in the wilderness for eight years...so either they had pretty much all the tools they needed already or they couldn't have made it this far in the narrative to start with.

Of course, we might assume that more specialized tools might have been required, but again, making them should not be too difficult.  What would unquestionably be difficult and what explicitly required direct input from God was designing and building a ship.  Curiously, this part is glossed over.  There is absolutely no description of the design of the ship Nephi built, nor of its materials or manner of construction, even though all are said to have been directly commanded by God.  In the Bible, God commands Noah to build a ship with a specific design, but there in Genesis the design of the ship is described in detail, as are its construction materials.  There the hard part which required God's direct intervention is described to us while irrelevant details (where Noah got the tools) are left out.  In the Book of Mormon the opposite is true.

It is difficult to believe that the same God who painstakingly described the special design of Noah's ark would be sidetracked from doing the same with the special design of Nephi's ship.  However, an alternate explanation exists.  The designs for the Ark contained in Genesis are complete enough to allow scientists and engineers to create scale models of the Ark to test its seaworthiness and estimate its cargo capacity, both of which verify the Biblical accounts.  If God truly designed Nephi's ship as well, inclusion of its design would similarly result in proof of the Book of Mormon.  But no design is included.  This may be because, in fact, God did not give a design to Nephi, Joseph Smith did.  Smith grew up in a landlocked region as a farmer and knew nothing of nautical engineering.  However, he did know that people would have trouble accepting the idea that ancient Jews from Jerusalem managed to build a vessel seaworthy enough to cross the oceans to the Americas over 2,000 years before Columbus.  Someone was bound to object that the Israelites of the 6th Century did not know how to construct such ships, so Smith claimed the design was special from God and even used different techniques.  However, if he included the design and techniques to verify his claim there was always a chance someone would test them and find him a fraud.  As he did with the Lost Pages, Smith took the easy way out and omitted any reference to an actual design, anything that could be tested and verified.  Smith calls us to trust blindly.  God calls us to test Him and see that He is true.

Reliance in our Religion

I'm tempted sometimes to envy the church-goer who seems to have it all together.  Such a person's life seems to have clear direction and meaning derived from their church and approved of by the Christians around them.  Maybe they are a missionary or a Sunday school teacher.  Regardless, they've got that all figured out and their life is on track for that goal, that ministry, that work that both God and man will approve of.  When temptations or distractions come their way, they seem immune.  Through sheer force of will, they push through and accomplish their goals, without even messing up their hair in the process.

Such a persona, of course, is a myth.  There are no doubt people who try to live that myth, who pretend to be unshakable and always act like they always know exactly what they're doing.  Underneath the mask, these people are human, too.  Still, it remains an ideal to attain to: to find or borrow some kind of inner direction to unerringly steer us through life, and the strength with which to resist temptation and never deviate from our course.

But is this really an ideal we should be drawn to?  In the end, who does this system rely on?  It may give lip-service to reliance on God, but in the end it is our ability to parse out His will that guides us, and our ability to grit our teeth and try harder in spiritual life that gets us through.  This makes me leery.  I have found that any system that, at bottom, relies on man is doomed to fail, no matter how much lip service it may give to God.

The Bible seems to agree.  On the subject of guidance, Isaiah 50:10-11 praises the faith of those who, when they "walk in darkness" and have "no light" choose to "trust in the name of the LORD and rely on...God."  They place their trust and reliance on Him, His name, His character, who He is, and trust Him to guide them rather than trying to illuminate everything and figure it all out by themselves.  They may remain in the dark, but even there God can guide them.  By contrast, the passage rebukes those who take the matter of guidance into their own hands "who kindle a fire and equip yourselves with flaming torches."  To such as have made their own sense of things and come up with their own plan to guide them, God says, "Walk by the light of your fire, and the torches you have kindled!  This you have from my hand: you shall lie down in torment."  He gives them up to their own devices and plans, but they do not end well without Him!  I don't know about you, but I would rather lead a "dark," seemingly aimless life with God than try to figure it all out and "lie down in torment" without Him.

It doesn't stop at guidance.  So often in the day-to-day battles against temptation we seem to be relying on our own strength.  At so many Bible studies where the topic of temptation and habitual sin comes up, the answer people give seems couched in terms of human effort.  Try harder.  Pray harder.  Read your Bible more.  Resist temptation.  Avoid the source of it.  Memorize these verses.  Read these books.  Pray for God to bolster your own strength so that you can try harder and do it all again.  I don't believe I have ever seen or heard of such an approach working, though I'm sure many people think it works because they have traded one sin for another (lust for pride, maybe) and I'm sure many others (myself among them, I confess) have pretended that it worked and announced ourselves as cured by our own efforts so that we can escape the constant badgering to perform beyond our capabilities.  I'm sure someone will say that it is not our capabilities that matter but God's, and that His power in us is what will make these effort-based techniques work.  But it is not so.  God is not the one trying to memorize Bible verses in the vain hope that being able to recite scripture chapter and verse will make you immune to temptation.  God is not the one installing monitoring software on your computer or outright smashing it to bits (a la Fireproof) in hopes of breaking your porn addiction.  God is not the one putting pennies in the swears jar every time you cuss.  You are, and if you are doing these things of your own effort, then it comes down to a human feat no matter how much lip service we may give to God.

The Bible addresses this too.  The Apostle Paul, frustrated and concerned by a Galatian church that had turned from faith to human effort challenges them.  "Let me ask you only this," he says, "Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by the hearing of faith?  Are you so foolish?  Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?" (Galatians 3:2-3).  I confess that many times, I am that foolish.  I know that salvation is something God accomplished for me, the death and resurrection of Jesus bringing me from death to life, through the work of the Spirit within me.  Having acknowledged this, I put it firmly in the past and determine to grit my teeth and pull of a successful spiritual life (which I myself define) through my own efforts.  If I acknowledge God's present involvement at all, it is with the expectation that He will allow me to try even harder and redouble my efforts.  But this is all wrong.  It is the work of the Spirit that perfects us, and His is a work that starts on the inside and works its way out (rather than vice versa, with our efforts).  He starts by removing our heart of stone and giving us a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 11:19 and 36:26), by replacing the lies that made us slaves to sin with the truth that set us free (John 8:32) so that we may have life to the full (John 10:10).  A book I've been reading, Pursued by Jud Wilhite (in a commentary on Hosea 2:16-17), puts it in a different way:

"In fact, the love of God is so powerful it sweeps us off our feet and makes us forget all about those counterfeit loves we pursued.  God says He's going to erase the worship of false gods from the people's midst.  God wants to fulfill the emptiness inside us with a love that will cause all our idols to fall by the wayside.  This is why I believe that conquering our idols and habitual sins is ultimately a matter of being swept up by His love rather than gritting our teeth and trying harder.  If we give Him a chance, God allures us and woos us with loyal love by showing His enormous strength, patience, and gentleness."

This is something I've been sensing about Him for a long time, but never before knew how to put into words.  That God doesn't conquer the sin in my life the way I've been trying to do it, through efforts to avoid temptation, pound myself into obedience, and punish myself for failure, but through captivating me with love.  He doesn't overwhelm me with the consequences of my sin, because He took care of that on the cross (and to wallow further in guilt is to account His sacrifice as nothing).  He doesn't send me to memorize whole books of the Bible, because Satan himself knows the Bible better than we do (and it's not doing him a whole lot of good).  He does not have me smash my computer or move into a cave to live like a hermit, because even hermits can be tempted.  Instead, He transforms my heart and awakens a vibrant desire that loves as He loves.  When temptation comes, it has no power.  It is like a thief with glass beads trying to bribe a jeweler who has seen real diamonds.  When obedience is called for, it flows naturally from a heart that wants to obey.  It isn't a transformation that can even be attempted by my own efforts.  It is totally a work of the Spirit.  And while it does not come with handy human signposts and "torches" to let me know I am on track to some known end goal, it is the only place where I have seen victory, healing, and growth occur.  I would rather have such reliance on God in the darkness than work by my own effort in my own light.

Objections to Online Dating

For the past two months, God has been leading me towards online dating. I know that this is a decision that some of my friends will probably object to. I was not sure about it myself at first either, so I wanted to take the time to address some of the objections, to be sure I am not overlooking some bit of wisdom.

The first objection that comes to my mind is 1 Corinthians 7:27, "Do not seek a wife."  It seemed like a very straightforward online-dating-nixing command...one which, of course, would have broader applications, too.  But this was before I read the context and noticed that in verse 25 Paul explicitly says that this is not a commandment from the Lord, but simply his own personal judgment.  Some would say that this doesn't matter and would insist that because verse 27 is in scripture, and all scripture is inspired by God (2 Timothy 3:16) therefore the advice to "not seek a wife" is really a command straight from God that must be obeyed, verse 25 notwithstanding.  In fact, they would accuse anyone who tries to downplay verse 27 as Paul's opinion of cherry-picking verses and only paying attention to the ones they want to follow anyway.  The problem with this line of reasoning is that it is completely hypocritical.  In order to say that "Do not seek a wife" is a Biblical command of God and maintain the accusation that those who ignore it are cherry-picking amongst inspired scripture, one must do some cherry-picking of their own.  The whole argument completely ignores the context and specifically contradicts verse 25--which is just as much a part of inspired scripture as verse 27!  Some might ask if it really matters whether the words "do not seek a wife" come from Paul or God Himself, but it is a matter of no small importance.  After all, these words are not the only words of the Bible that are attributed to someone else.  If we go about ignoring these attributions, the Bible becomes a meaningless jumble of clashing words which can even be used as a proof for atheism--after all, it says at least twice, "There is no god" (attributed to the fool, Psalm 14:1 and 53:1).  So if we do take all of Scripture as inspired, we must take to heart the fact that 1 Corinthians 1:27's advice for singles to not seek out a relationship is simply Paul's opinion of what is best for them.  While it should be given due weight as the words of an apostle, it should not be allowed to override the direction of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

Looking for other objections, I found that they came mostly from emotional purity groups, who did not object to one seeking a wife, but are pretty vocal about seeking a spouse in a way they don't condone.  This is hardly surprising, since emotional purity would see online dating as its opposite (since of course "dating" is always code for sleeping around in the eyes of emotional purity, and doing it online now means your sleeping around with total strangers).  Looking at one such group's website, I find that the first objection is that I am being unfaithful.  I am putting my faith in a website rather than God, and I should just keep praying and waiting around for God to act.  There are several problems with this.  The first is that this line of reasoning essentially says that faith equals passivity.  This is actually a fairly common thought among Christians, but I'm not sure where we get this idea.  It certainly isn't from the Bible.  In the Bible, faith often compels people to action.  By faith, Abel offers a sacrifice to God, Noah builds an ark, Abraham leaves his homeland and sacrifices his son, Isaac and Jacob bless their descendants, Joseph elects to be buried in the promised land, Moses' parents hide their son, Moses refuses his status as prince of Egypt, wanders in the wilderness, returns to free Israel, keeps the Passover, and crosses the Red Sea...the list could go on and on.  Why then do we think that faith in some aspect of our lives is to be completely passive in it and wait around for God to miraculously make up for our total failure to take initiative and use the resources He's given us?  When we do this, are we not like the man who buried his talent in the ground, rather than the two who invested theirs (Matthew 25:14-30)?  Note that in this parable of Christ, it is the two servants who took initiative and acted that are called "faithful," while the one who sat around being completely passive is called "wicked" and "slothful."  There is nothing faithful about laziness.  Of course the whole idea of the "just wait for God to do it all" approach being faithful falls apart wen the Spirit has actively commanded us to do something (such as, in my case, approach online dating).  We can never claim to be faithful to God when we are ignoring or disobeying His direction in our lives!

Another objection is that I should not be even considering a relationship if I'm not ready for marriage. Am I ready for marriage? I confess this is a question I have often asked myself. How can I be financially prepared when I rent the smallest bedroom I've ever lived in, have lots of school loans to pay off, and make only $16k a year? That doesn't seem like enough to start off with, and might it actually be so little that it would discourage a match? How can I be ready for marriage emotionally and spiritually when I have never even been in a relationship before? Everything I have learned and observed tells me that relationships are hard, and that marriage is about the most epicly difficult thing two human beings can choose to do with their lives. How can anyone honestly say they are ready for that?! But going back to faith, I am reminded that these are all the wrong questions. If I am to be married, it will not be my strength, my finances, my emotional and spiritual maturity that will get me through and in which I should place my confidence. My confidence and my faith should be in God. If I allow these other concerns to stop me when He calls me to seek a wife, I am found to be looking at the waves rather than the Master of them.

Another objection is that dating is promiscuous by its nature (this argument specifically from an emotional purity standpoint).  This applies specifically to situations where one is dating multiple people simultaneously, or a number of different people in succession.  Both are necessary evils of the online dating strategy, and emotional purity proponents would put the emphasis on evil.  But, as I have elaborated at length before, there is no inherent evil, no sin, in opening oneself romantically to another.  There is further, nothing in the dating process which necessitates premarital sex any more than there is anything inherent in marriage which necessitates adultery.  Furthermore, dating and "courtship" produce different expectations and thus different approaches and attitudes, which leads to a general misunderstanding when one attempts to look at one with the attitude of the other.

In the typical emotional-purity approved courtship, a couple will know each other for years as "just friends" before courting and during this time they will be extremely careful to "guard their heart" and make sure they feel no romantic or sexual attraction for each other at all, sometimes to the point of not really even being friends.  Then, one day, some authority figure will give them the green light and they will begin courting.  Since the whole point of the emotional-purity courtship model is to make sure you only "give your heart" to the person you marry, it is assumed that if a couple begins courting or is even approved to court, they will marry, and probably within a matter of months.  Since the moment you begin courting, marriage is (assumed to be) certain to follow, courting couples may feel free to exercise very little restraint and simply give themselves heart and soul to each other.  The emotional pace of the relationship builds like the velocity of a bullet from a gun--from 0 to supersonic in less than a fraction of a second.  People who examine dating with a courtship-mindset are horrified by the thought of blasting into total emotional openness with complete strangers and giving yourself away completely to people you may not wind up married to--not to mention the seemingly excessive length of dating relationships (two years is forever for a courting couple).

But these conceptions are based on faulty assumptions.  In the typical purposeful dating, emotional speed builds more slowly than in a courtship.  If a courtship takes off like a bullet from a gun, a dating relationship picks up speed like a semi rolling down a shallow grade.  In dating, it is understood from the beginning that any given person you date is unlikely to be the person you marry.  There is a chance, and you date to see how great that chance is.  The chance is never assumed to be 100% until you are at least engaged, which generally occurs after a couple has dated for some time.  This can lead to a more emotionally and sexually guarded approach.  You are always aware that the person you're dating may not wind up being the one you marry, so you keep your feelings from running wild, keep your secrets close until you know it's safe, and keep the other person out of your bed.  Courting couples have basically one line of defense for their hearts, which acts like a flip-switch with two settings: completely shut down and totally open.  Dating couples have multiple lines of defense which act like a dimmer switch, allow for a gradual increase in intimacy as a relationship progresses over time.  So dating multiple people does not mean giving one's heart to multiple people (in fact, if a person is dating non-exclusively, that likely means they aren't giving their heart to anyone at the moment).  It is the stance of someone who's being reserved and examining their options, not someone who's being promiscuous.

Another objection is that online dating distracts from the real world, replacing it with a virtual one.  This, again, is a misconception.  The entire point of online dating is to aid in the creation of a real world relationship.  Virtual communication that starts on a dating site but doesn't proceed to a real world meeting within a reasonable amount of time will be severed by an experienced online dater.  So if online dating is replacing one's real world with a virtual one, this simply means that they're doing it wrong and missing the point.

A final objection is that dating, and especially online dating, is deceptive in nature.  It is said that when people date they present only a facade of what they think the other person wants to see and never show their true self, and that this is much more likely to happen online where the screen forms an additional barrier to hide behind.  It is true that such deception can happen, but it is not the goal.  People who are not real with themselves and others while dating miss the point and fail to determine whether or not they would be a good marriage match for the other person.  Honesty is essential, and any breech in trust, when discovered, can often lead to a break-up of the relationship.  But online dating isn't the only place where you will find people wearing masks.  In fact, I find that one of the things that attracts me more to online dating than courtship is that there are, in my own mind, fewer masks in the former than in the latter.  In courtship, during the initial phase, my experience and my impression is that you wear a mask for years saying that you are not interested in a relationship, are not attracted to the other person, only want to be friends, and love them in a Christ-like way even if you can't really get to know them because they're a member of the opposite sex--while of course the reality is that you are interested in a relationship, are attracted to the other person, want way more than friendship, and don't really know them or love them for who they are so much as have a professional relationship with them from church.  Talk about dishonesty!  Half the time you're even lying to yourself by either denying that you're attracted to this person or saying your romantic feelings for them are a sin (when, of course, there is no such sin as emotional impurity).  Then, suddenly, someone give you the green light and you spring into intimacy with one another while donning the masks of your respective gender roles (male: leader, breadwinner, home despot; woman: servant, homekeeper, babymaker) and donning another mask to make believe to yourselves and the world around you that you actually enjoyed all the abuse you received over liking each other before you started courting (this actually happened with a friend of mine: I talked with him before, when he liked a girl but wasn't courting her and he shared how he was being called out and rebuked by leaders for his feelings for her and was basically being forced to break off their friendship--then a year or so later, when they had courted and married, he told me this abuse had never happened and it had all been his own choice).  I can think of no more dishonest way to start off a marriage than this.  In contrast, in online dating, everyone who logs onto the site is publicly declaring themselves to be looking for a relationship, and very often openly specifies what kind of relationship they're seeking and whom with.  Attraction and intentions are openly stated or candidly implied as they come into play, and declarations of love are saved until they actually mean something.  No one has to lie about how the couple met or initially felt, and relationship roles can be arranged in a way that best suits the real dynamics of the couple (which is well established by the time marriage comes around) rather than adherence to a doctrine (which is all courtship couples have to work with).  It is, of course, still possible to lie on any or all of this, but anyone who knows better than to give their bank account number to the infamous "Nigerian prince" email knows to be on their guard against deception online and liars are quickly found and rooted out.  It is much harder to expect and be on guard against deception in the pew sitting next to you.

If God Promised Us a Rose Garden...

"The scripture tells us to be a prisoner of hope!  The world may tell you that you'll never get out of debt, that business is bad, but you just tell them, I can't help but hope for good things.  I'm a prisoner of hope!"
"Those who follow God's laws will gain in monetary wealth!  Repent and be baptized, and God will pour out of His cup a blessing you cannot contain!"

Such are the (paraphrased) promises of the prosperity gospel.  Basically, it tells us that, as Christians, we are entitled to material blessings from God.  God wants us to be happy, healthy, and wealthy--and if we do the right things, we will receive these blessings from Him.

There are a number of problems with this position.  Finer minds than mine have taken it upon themselves to write on the topic.  They have pointed out that the entire theology is backwards and egocentric, making everything revolve around pushing the right buttons to obligate God to do our will rather than seeking to do His--essentially reducing him to a Cosmic Vending Machine.  They have pointed out that, in the scriptures, "the love of money is the root of all evil" (1 Timothy 6:10), that one of the most critical of the Ten Commandments is "do not covet," and that Christ lambasted the wealthy with a fervor only paralleled by his venom for the religious (Matthew 19:24).  I do not want to cover the same ground, though I applaud those who have.

What I want to do instead is test the idea of a gospel of wealth not against the individual "proof texts" of scripture, but against its overall story.  Does the Bible, at bottom, present us with a story of a God who consistently overwhelms His faithful with material blessings--happy, healthy, wealthy lives--or does it tell a different story?  According to the gospel of wealth, if we do the right things, material blessings will always follow, and the Bible is full of the the stories of many people who followed God's commandments and did the right things.  It should logically follow, then, that the Bible is full of stories about extravagantly wealthy, healthy, and happy people, right?

This is where a problem appears, for in fact, the Bible is not a book where every page drips fine perfumes and tells of gilded halls inhabited by whole and happy people.  Rather, the Bible is a book where every page drips blood, sweat, and tears.  It is a book filled with enormous, unfathomable suffering, poverty, sickness, and even death.  According to prosperity gospel, these things should never befall the truly faithful, since they can simply claim God's blessing for their lives and enjoy material prosperity--so one would be tempted to say that all of the suffering in the Bible is just the wicked people, or maybe just the result of lack of faith on the part of those suffering.  But closer analysis shows that this is not so.  In fact, of the heroes of the faith, the truly righteous and faithful people of the Bible, only one of them seemed to enjoy material blessings because of his faithfulness toward God--King Solomon...and did I mention he suffered from depression (a la book of Ecclesiastes, the most down and depressing book in the Bible by far)?  Here is a brief survey of people in the Bible who didn't get a rose garden when they followed God.

• Able--The original righteous man deserves special mention.  He offered a more excellent sacrifice than his brother Cain (Hebrews 11:4).  His reward was being counted righteous by God...and materially-speaking being the first murder victim in human history.  I'm sure that was fun for him.
• Noah--The only righteous man in his generation ("blameless" in fact, Genesis 6:9).  His material reward was that he and his family were the sole survivors of a watery apocalypse that wiped out all other human life, after which they got to start out on a virgin world--rebuilding from an ecological catastrophe of unfathomable proportions that would have entailed enormous hardships...oh, and also the lifespans of his children and their offspring were cut to about 10% of the lifespan pre-Flood humans enjoyed.  It would be as if you and your kids had to start over after a nuclear winter killed everyone else and you had to face life knowing that your children would only make it to their fifties, your grandchildren to their forties, and that a few generations later your descendants wouldn't live past their teens.  Cheery thoughts.
• Abraham--Abraham is an interesting character in that he is one of the few people God promised material blessings.  Specifically, God promised him an innumerable host of descendants and an enormous tract of land including at least all of present day Israel, Lebanon, and parts of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt (conservatively).  God did eventually fulfill His promise, but neither Abraham nor his descendants for seven generations would live to see it.  Abraham himself spent his entire life as a nomad, living in a land that was not his own and dwelling in tents.  When he died, he had only one living heir, and owned no more land than a small burial plot.  This would be the extent of his descendants' real estate for more than a two centuries (longer than the sum total of American history).  He would pass on the expectation of a material blessing that never materialized two his son, grandson, and great-grandchildren, all of whom imparted promises of possessing large tracts of land, resources, and cities to their offspring only to have those offspring live their entire lives as landless nomads in strange territory.
• Jacob--Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, deserves special mention.  Like his forefathers, he looked toward the promised material blessing of land but never owned any.  While he was initially prosperous in other ways, famine reduced him to sending his children to beg bread in a foreign country.  Things became so desperate for him and his family that he willingly sent his favorite son to beg for food in Egypt knowing full well that it would probably result in his death.  As for health, Jacob was one of the aforementioned descendants of Noah who lived only a 10% of what was previously considered the normal human lifespan (and he knew it, describing the days of his life at one point as "few and evil").  It is true he was a dastardly little villain in his youth, but he pulled a 180 and did something that I'm sure any prosperity gospel preacher would consider a commendable act of faith.  He wrestled God and refused to let Him go without first receiving a blessing.  He was given a new name--and a limp that would stay with him for the rest of his days (so much for the blessing of health).  As for getting blessed with happiness...well, the guy had more family drama and domestic violence in his household than half of our cable networks put together.
• Joseph--As a young man, Joseph was a paragon of virtue amidst the dark feuding of Jacob's wild family.  His father favored him (not really because of this, more so due to the fact that he was the child of his favorite wife) and gave him material blessings, including an expensive and impressive coat.  His brothers took it away, tossed him in a hole, and sold him to human traffickers.  After being bought up by the Egyptians--whose ancient slave labor is infamous even today--he was thrown into prison and left to rot there as a direct result of his doing the right thing and refusing to violate God's sanction against adultery.  When he used his divinely given dream-interpreting gifts to help a friend in prison get out, the friend immediately forgot about him.  Joseph's life did eventually turn around for the better, but he had to take some enormous lumps along the way.
• Moses--Moses was adopted into the royal Egyptian family.  He was a prince of Egypt, enjoying its immense power and wealth, the finest education and healthcare in the then-known world...and then God came along.  Moses lost all of that.  He spent the next forty years as a herdsman in the desert.  After that, he returned to Egypt only to be scorned by his own people and the Egyptians as he struggled to set the enslaved Israelites free.  When he was finally successful, his material reward was wandering around the desert with the whiniest people on the planet using him as their designated complaint department.  While Egyptians died with style and were buried in massive monuments that impress tourists to this day, Moses was buried in an unmarked grave at a funeral that nobody attended.
• David--David was a man after God's own heart.  He was the man God chose to rule the kingdom of Israel as the first of a line that would stretch all the way to Christ.  And when God made this known to David, the young man's world fell apart.  He had become a famous warrior, a champion of Israel who stood at King Saul's right hand during parades.  But soon he was a fugitive, running through the wilderness, seeking shelter in caves and holes in the ground, begging for asylum in foreign cities, feigning madness to escape his enemies, grabbing a meal wherever he could (including the one place where the commandments laid down by God specifically said he was not allowed to).  When he did become king he still had to struggle all his life with family infighting and treason, including the awful experience of having one of his own sons killed by his trusted friends after said son ran him out of town and publicly had sex with all of David's wives on the palace rooftop.  Before David died, he also got to experience circulation problems which gave him perpetual chills.  Fun times.
• Solomon--An odd character, Solomon was the wisest, wealthiest, most powerful, and least happy man in the Bible.  His final work, the book of Ecclesiastes, is so dark and depressing that many Christians skip over it entirely.
• Jeremiah--A godly prophet in a godless time, Jeremiah and his friend and scribe Baruch were explicitly given a single material blessing from God for their service: survival.  They witnessed the capital city of their nation sacked multiple times.  They experienced poverty, brutal sieges, starvation, betrayal, arrest, imprisonment, and forced relocation to a foreign land (which was also sacked brutally as soon as they arrived).  He is known as "the weeping prophet" and wrote the only book of the Bible that compares with Ecclesiastes for unpleasantness and depressing content: the book of Lamentations, whose name literally means weeping.  The prophet is perhaps best known for his promise that God has plans for us "to prosper...and not to harm" us...but few remember the context of these words.  In context, they are a promise delivered to Jews taken as prisoners of war to a foreign land hundreds of miles from home, to whom Jeremiah has just delivered the news that neither they nor their children will ever see their homeland again, that they will remain exiles, foreigners in a strange land, for the next seventy years--oh, and by the way, they are the lucky ones!
• Job--God Himself declares Job to be a blameless and peerlessly righteous and faithful man.  He is one of the few people in the Bible God is explicitly said to have blessed materially with wealth, children, and health.  And then, God took it all away.  No act of faith on Job's part could make Him restore it.  Job suffered the most devastating personal catastrophe in human history.  In a single day he lost all of his children and all of his wealth (and the guy had a diversified portfolio, for pity's sake!).  Thereafter, his health went to pieces in a disgusting and humiliating way.  Thereafter, Job repeatedly confessed to having suicidal thoughts.  The consolation was that he got to keep his friends and wife--but this consolation came with a knife in the back because all of these people were apparently prosperity gospel preachers who thought that Jobs suffering was entirely his own fault and argued long and hard to prove it was so.  Eventually, God showed up to straighten things out, but never gave Job any kind of explanation for his devastating losses and intense suffering.
• Paul--Paul enjoyed a measure of prestige in 1st Century Palestine that few could afford or attain too.  He was born with Roman citizenship--the mark of the upper-crust of Imperial society that many spent fortunes trying to attain.  He was also born with an impressive Jewish pedigree.  He studied under the greatest religious teachers of his day and became renowned among them, surpassing all of his peers.  He had health, wealth, prestige...everything a man could want.  Then, he met Jesus on the road to Damascus.  They say he fell off his donkey, but thereafter it's evident that he just kept falling.  He suffered severe health problems with his eyes from that time forward.  This is possibly the "thorn in the flesh" that he applied the prayer of faith to for healing three times, only to have God point blank refuse to heal him!  His old friends became his new enemies.  Before the week was out he was running for his life.  He was despised, even by fellow Christians who resented his claim to apostleship and constantly attacked his ministry.  In 2 Corinthians 11:23-33 he gives a summary of his sufferings so far, which includes being beaten within an inch of his life (by legal definition of the time) five times, three less severe beatings, suffering a (barely) unsuccessful execution (we're not talking lethal injection--we're talking stoning), three shipwrecks, 48 hours on the open water, perils of every kind, cold, hunger, thirst, poverty, betrayal, stress...the list goes on and on!  But don't worry, it get's worse because after this letter Paul would be arrested and sent to the most infamously evil ruler in ancient history (Nero), in whose capital he would spend the rest of his days as a prisoner in increasingly deteriorating conditions until he was finally beheaded.  He never did get to see his dream of spreading the gospel to Spain come true (Romans 15:24-25, note that Paul was arrested in the middle of the Jerusalem trip mentioned in verse 25 and spent the rest of his life as a prisoner).  Paul's life was great in terms of material blessings, until he met Jesus converted, and started doing the sorts of things the prosperity gospel preachers tell us to do.  Thereafter it took a downward spiral ending in dank prison cells, isolation, betrayal, and gruesome death.
• The Disciples--It is worth noting that of the twelve Apostles chosen by Christ (eleven, if we discount Paul, Matthias, and Judas Iscariot), only one of them died of natural causes, and he lived out his remaining days in exile and isolation on a tiny Mediterranean island.  Unlike Paul, these men hadn't been huge successes before meeting Christ, but the meeting certainly didn't improve their material situation much.  Christ warned them that they would face tribulation, be cast out of their local congregations, hauled before judges, thrown in prisons, and killed by people who thought their death was commanded by God.  All of it came true.
• Jesus--Saving the best for last, there is Jesus Christ Himself.  God the Father loves us just as He loves Jesus.  Jesus was perfect, so we can be sure that anything that went wrong in His life was 100% not His fault as a result of faithlessness or failure to follow the gospel of wealth.  He was also, according to the Bible, tempted in every way that we are but did not sin.  Whatever is not of faith is sin--so if we can screw up the material blessings God wants for our lives by not pushing the right divine buttons, He had equal opportunity to do so but didn't.  Knowing this we should expect Jesus to have lived--in accordance with the prosperity gospel--a life of unparalleled opulence, abundant wealth, extraordinary health, and giddy happiness.  But if this is our portrait of Christ, we do not believe in the Jesus portrayed in the Bible.  In the Bible, Jesus was the poor son of a working-class couple who lost his father before he was thirty.  He grew up in the social and economic backwater of a country occupied by foreign powers.  He was not wealthy by any stretch.  He was not particularly good looking (Isaiah 53:2)...and this was before He began His ministry.  His ministry's start was marked by forty days of fasting in the wilderness, wherein He suffered extreme hunger and temptation from Satan himself.  Materially speaking, it went downhill from there.  Jesus discouraged one would-be-follower by telling him that even the birds and the foxes were wealthier than He was, because at least they had a place to spend the night (Matthew 8:20).  He suffered hunger, thirst, weariness, and feelings of being overwhelmed on his journeys.  He and His disciples pooled their resources into a single purse from which they gave money to the poor who constantly pressed in on them--but it was a bag with a hole in it named Judas, who apparently listed kleptomania among his more admirable qualities (some have proposed that the others just didn't notice because the amount of money the disciples commanded was so huge the skimming went unnoticed, but in the ancient world huge sums necessitate multiple purses for the practical reason that gold and silver have a property called mass, which tends to add up quickly in any significant amount--instead, it may be the at the opposite is true and they didn't notice because they ran out of money so quickly they couldn't tell if it was legitimately spent, given away, or snatched up by Judas).  While He did not seem to suffer any health problems that we know of, He was far from the happiest man in the world.  He was described as "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" who is never expressly said to have laughed or smiled, but is said to have "wept" on multiple occasions.  His family thought He was crazy.  The crowds didn't know what to think of Him but followed Him everywhere as if He were giving out free candy.  He was run out of town multiple times, forever in trouble with the religious authorities, and was forced to escape mobs hungry for his blood on several occasions.  The culmination of His life and His self-declared mission from the Father was to be betrayed by a member of His inner circle, abandoned by all of his friends, dragged around town to be assaulted, insulted, and convicted for crimes He didn't commit, turned over to foreigners who mocked Him and beat Him so severely that He was no longer recognizable as human, handed over to a blood-thirsty mob, dragged out of town, subjected to the most public, painful, and horrific form of execution ever devised by man, cut off from the Father, and robbed of His sole earthly possessions--His clothes--by the men who executed Him.  And then He died.  In some versions, He went to Hell, but establishing that in Scripture is ticklish business.  Needless to say, He did not enjoy immense material blessings in this life.  In fact, His life is a portrait of unparalleled material destitution and suffering (especially considering that before coming to Earth He lived and reigned in Heaven of all places)--and He was doing everything right!

From the above, we can conclude that in the Bible the faithful do not enjoy material blessings as a result of pushing the right divine button combinations.  Often it seems that instead the more faithful a person is, the more they suffer materially as a result.  This does not align favorably with prosperity gospel.  If prosperity gospel is correct and it is God's sole or highest function to give us material blessings in this life as a reward for good behavior then there are, in my mind, only two ways to reconcile this with the plain fact that people--in the world today as in Scripture--do not materially benefit from obedience to God but rather often suffer material loss.  The first explanation is that God is, for some reason, unable to provide these blessings in the measure to which we are (in the language of prosperity gospel) "entitled" to them or in a timely manner.  The second is that He is personally able, but that other forces intervene to bring material suffering into our lives, overriding the blessings God gives.  In the first case, God would be incompetent, cripplingly incapable of discharging His duties as a result of His own faults.  In the second case, God is impotent, powerless against forces in the world and in our lives that are stronger than He is.  Neither case describes the God of the Bible.  Clearly, prosperity gospel cannot be worshiping Him!