I was telling my wife about WJT’s space-narrative takedown and my response to it. She is certainly more inclined to WJT’s reading than mine but she reminded me of something from a show she watches called Young Sheldon.
Young Sheldon is a prequel series to another show called the Big Bang Theory. I haven’t seen either series but I’ve heard they are quite popular. Sheldon is a very smart person, well beyond the intelligence of anyone else in his family and the vast majority of the human race. In a particular episode, Sheldon goes under the knife for gallbladder surgery and while under anesthesia, he has a dream.
The video below starts with this particular dream followed by a few others he has throughout the show’s seasons but all this post references is the first dream, which lasts about 30 seconds.
Of note, Sheldon captains a strange boat through Space. His boat is at the same time old/low-tech (because it’s designed like a sailing vessel) and new/high-tech (because it has rocket boosters, plasma guns, and various other futuristic instruments). One might say Sheldon’s vessel was not built “after the manner of men”. We find Sheldon and his crew battling what I will call a “sea monster” which resembles a whale that is somehow traversing Space next to Sheldon’s vessel.
Sheldon calls this whale an “inner demon” and his not-so-smart older brother says it’s a whale rather than a demon. The witty younger sister then replies: “it’s a metaphor, doofus”.
What’s unclear is whether the sister meant her statement only about the whale or about the entire dream. I’m going with just the whale and I think that helps neuter WJT’s criticism of the Space theory. Perhaps the travelogues from Lehi’s and Jared’s families were sprinkled with metaphors of wind, waves, monsters, etc to help an unbelieving future readership accept the stories while simultaneously telling the stories in such a way that make it nearly impossible to fit oceanic earth travels.
I mean let’s face it, 1830’s America wasn’t exactly beating a path to the nearest Mormon missionaries to buy the BoM, so having Lehi set sail into Outer Space would, I think, have been a bridge quite too far back then. And likely still would be today. Maybe whoever channeled the BoM to Joseph Smith softened this wild tale with metaphor for the reader’s sake while carefully threading breadcrumbs that would lead us to conclude these journeys can’t have occurred on earth. Sheldon’s sister finds this obvious, so maybe we should too lest any of us also be labeled a doofus.
Maybe this makes sense of why these travel tales are hard to fit cleanly in Space or on earth’s oceans. I suppose this idea cuts both ways and we could use the metaphor rationale to rid ourselves of any Space notions but I think it helps the Space theory a lot more than hurting it.
WJT
Looking at the text again, I see that all it says is that they couldn’t be harmed by sea monsters or whales on their voyage — perhaps because there were no such creatures in the “sea” they sailed?
As it stands, Ether 6:10 is ungrammatical because of the word “that.” One way of rectifying the grammar would be to amend it to “there was no monster of the sea that could break them, neither whale that could mar them.”
For me the big problem isn’t the whales. It’s replenishing their air supply by opening a hole in the top of the craft.
LEE
Yes but that mechanism is only slightly less problematic in the ocean, right? At the very least it’s a terrible design idea, one that is hard to ascribe to an intelligent God. You check it just once at the wrong time and down she goes! My wife said maybe it was a very small hole that you would check first and then open a bigger one if no water came in. Maybe? But the text doesn’t seem to back that idea.
There was also a hole in the bottom, remember. Why have them install both? If it’s because the bottom of the boat was sometimes on top (bc it rolled) can you imagine the upheaval that would cause? People and possessions and presumably human waste flying all over? They’d have all died from head injuries eventually.
Or, this is something we just don’t understand. I agree it is hard to see the hole idea working in space but I don’t see it working in the ocean either.