Transcript of the podcast Mormon Expression Episode 276: How to build a transoceanic vessel. Featuring John, Megan, Randy, and Terrell.
John: All right, welcome back to another edition of Mormon Expression! I'm your host, John Larsen. We're here at the lovely orange and blue and white Studio Fist In Your Face in Salt Lake City with another great studio audience. Thanks guys! [Applause]
John: All right, we've constructed another fantastic panel. First of all, Terrell is sitting to my left.
Terrell: Hello.
John: The lovely... because he's sitting to my left; whoever's on my left is lovely. Welcome back! It's good to have you.
Terrell: Thank you, I appreciate it.
John: And all the way from England is Megan. Welcome back, Megan!
Megan: Thank you!
John: This is not the first one.
Megan: No, this is not the first one.
John: Well, it's always good to have you in town. And you flew in just for this podcast, right?
Megan: Oh, of course! I heard you were doing transoceanic boats, and how could I miss that?
John: We'll get to this later, but Megan was with me when I decided to record this podcast. Do you remember?
Megan: Yes I do! I do.
John: Okay! And then, our intrepid producer, Randy, stepping back behind the mic. Welcome, Randy!
Randy: Glad to be here.
John: It's always excellent to have you here.
John: Well, we've got a lot to go over tonight, a big week in news for Mormons. First of all, we did the podcast, last week, on Orwell, right? Is the Church listening!? Well, it was two weeks ago, but... guys! There's this thing these days called the Internet. And you can't... there's no such thing as the memory hole anymore.
John: So in a semi-historic announcement, Uchdorf kicked off the women's session, and announced that this was the first session of conference, and they talked about, "Now the women are being included! They're no longer just an auxiliary, they're part of conference!" Wonderful.
John: So we have that session. We have the morning session, the afternoon session, and then we have the priesthood session. The gentleman—does anyone know who? I don't care—there was a guy giving a prayer, guy giving the opening prayer, and in the opening prayer, he says that they're opening this, the fourth session of conference. Probably riffing off of what Uchdorf said, because in the Mormon faith, we believe that prayer should be extemporaneous, and if they're not, you're an abomination, right? That's one of the signs that the Catholic church is the great whore of Babylon, is that they have rote prayers. Never mind that we have rote prayers, but you're not supposed to have written down a prayer! I mean, we were all taught this. You're not allowed to write it down, no matter how nervous you are.
John: Well, the Church went and edited that prayer, and edited out the word "fourth," but they forgot that they're a big fucking organization with lots of outlets and they only edited one of their feeds and not the other feed, so there's the full feed of conference out there that has it, but then this special one... in typical corporate style, the Church threw the producer of the show under the bus, and didn't take responsibility for it.
John: But, wow! Straight out of 1984, right? You go back and edit the record on a prayer, which everyone knows is "extemporaneous," but they didn't edit out Uchdorf stuff... these guys are just lost in the woods. The battle's over, right? I mean, this is... they're... these are acts of desperation.
Randy: They need to work on coordinating a little bit better.
John: That's what the Church needs: more correlation! I could not agree with you more! [Laughter]
Randy: Which is strange... or they just need to reallocate their correlation a little bit.
John: So that, eh... way to go, guys. Um... then dopey shit was said in conference, that's not news. All right, um, next story, something did in fact happen, I think we promoted it here, said "Good job, guys," that they announced that they were going to have—they teased it—that somebody was going to get up in conference and give a talk in non-English! Of course, since most people in the Church outside of Idaho and Utah speak Spanish, we gave them the big middle finger and skipped to Cantonese.
John: But what's insulting about this is that they dubbed over it! If you were watching conference in English, you got to hear some guy in a booth talking right over the top of it! If you were actually in the conference center, it was like an opera, you know, the words came up... but, you know, here they had a chance to show that they're multicultural, and they just couldn't do it. They just couldn't listen to the guy give the talk in Cantonese.
Randy: Here's the thing that I like the best: I just popped out to the Church newsroom on their website, just to see what's out there. And they've got on there, the headline is, "Joseph Smith's 1833 prophecy fulfilled at general conference!!" Which, D&C 90:11, read it for yourself, but basically: "Someday, everyone will hear the gospel in their own language." Man, that's fantastic! We found a prophecy that we can fulfill! And not at all be a self-fulfilling prophecy! [Laughter]
John: Yeah, so, uh, way to go, guys. So, the big story for the week: the Church produced a movie—and there's just so much here, it's too bad Mormon Expression is retiring; we really need to spend six hours pulling this whole thing apart—but, Meet the Mormons, a movie produced by the Church, came out this last week, and it is now officially one of the top 100 grossing documentaries of all time. It was opened on 317 screens on Friday, and a very interesting thing that the news is picking up is the ticket sales dropped off 95% between Saturday and Sunday. Hmmm!
John: So, everybody picked up on this story, that the Mormons are encouraging... and what's funny is there's a talk by Jeffrey Holland out there, where he talks about how important this is, and he tells Mormons that they have the responsibility to go out and buy a ticket, and he says, "If you have the means, buy out the whole fucking theater." Right? Now, that's interesting, because Jeff Roberts, quoted in the Hollywood Reporter, I think he was either a producer or the director of the movie, said, "These are legitimate box office returns... I know that some members bought out entire theaters, but that didn't come from headquarters! At all! And we haven't rented theaters, these are traditional distribution deals..." We have your fucking boss on tape, telling people to go rent out theaters!
John: So what happened here is that the Mormons descended upon this movie en masse, specifically to try and keep it in theaters. I am reminded of a scandal that happened with Scientology in the early 90's, when they were exposed buying copies of Dianetics from bookstores, repackaging them, and shipping them back to the bookstores, and then they just kept buying them round and round and round to keep Dianetics up on the top of the list. This does not work in the age of the Internet! You're going to be exposed!
John: And the Church also made new history; they have the highest gap, as of today, on Rotten Tomatoes. There have been eight reviews—and it's going up, by the way—the way Rotten Tomatoes works is that they have two scores, and Rotten Tomatoes just goes out and gathers reviews from reviewers, from newspapers or television outlets or whatever. They don't work for Rotten Tomatoes, they just go out and gather those and compile them together. That has a zero,—there has not been one legitimate critic who has not panned the movie—and as of this afternoon, there were over 3,000 reviews at 92% positive rate. It has the single biggest gap of any movie, ever, rated by Rotten Tomatoes.
John: I need to chide some of my Ex-Mormon friends out there, because Rotten Tomatoes, I guess, is linked into Facebook? Because when I was looking at it, it says, "This is what your friends think of the movie!" And I see on there dudes that I know haven't seen this movie, giving it a 1... guys. Don't give it a 1! The Church is in much worse shape having a really, really positive review.
John: And go read some of the reviews! It's clear these people have not seen the movie. They use Mormonspeak: "How uplifting it was... what a blessing this movie is..." These are the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. So, basically, the Mormons tried to strongarm the world into watching this movie. And the critics are saying, "This is not interesting." And it's not really even... Robert, uh, is it Kirby? Robert Kirby?
Randy: Yes, my old Sunday School teacher! Old Robert Kirby!
John: Fantastic columnist in Salt Lake City, basically lays it out, and he says, "These are not the Mormons that any of us recognize. This movie is a portrayal of the way Mormons see themselves." And what it is, is a movie saying, "If you guys could only see us the way we see ourselves, wouldn't this world be so neat? Wouldn't it be so special!"
Randy: I loved how he closed his article, where he basically gives his review, and he says, "You can bet the LDS church won't do it"—referring to making a movie that actually shows them—"so just as soon as I can raise the funding, I'll get busy producing the sequel: Now Meet Real Mormons."
John: Well, I think, when you listen to Holland's talk, there's an element—and I always forget the name of it; I know I've referred to it before—it's basically acquired narcissistic personality disorder. There are people who have personality disorders—narcissism—from birth, or whatever. Then there's this legitimate disorder that happens to, like, pop stars and CEOs and people who are surrounded by yes-men. What happens is that they never have anybody say, "Oh, don't do that, that's stupid." This is the thing that happens to people like Michael Jackson. They just get surrounded by a posse of people who are always telling them how wonderful everything is.
John: And when you watch Holland's introduction to this thing, you can tell that's happening. It's like watching a car wreck in slow motion. He's like, "This played so well with the polling groups that we just knew we had to get this to the world!" And the problem is, they are so detached from the real world, and surrounded by people whose salvation depends on not giving these guys bad news, it's clear to me, more and more, that they are in trouble because they're disconnected with the world, and this is laying that bare.
Terrell: I was going to say, there is one version of Meet the Mormons that's available on YouTube that actually—it's the British version of it—that is somewhat of a good representation of what we are actually like.
John: The question is, who produced that movie? It wasn't the Church, was it?
Megan: No. Well, it was an outside producer, but the Church went to her and asked her to do it.
John: Oh, okay.
Megan: So it was in coordination with the Church. Which is why she had a person sitting at her elbow, constantly, telling her what she could and could not do. Constant minder.
John: Like North Korea. Yes.
Randy: Gotta make sure you stay on message.
John: And people ask, "What about the name?" And this explains the way the Church works too. According to the official Deseret News article, it was named by Monson because there was a campaign called "Meet the Mormons" in the '70's that he liked. Like, he didn't even pay attention to the fact that they'd already released a movie three years ago with the same name. He picked some name that he liked, and they all were like, "Oh, yes sir... Meet the Mormons... okay, here we go."
John: It'll be interesting to watch how this goes. When the Mormons stop stuffing the theaters, it's just going to crash. Like, who wants to go see it? The question to legitimately ask anybody is, "My Mormon friends... would you go see Meet the Scientologists? Look how shiny they are! Hey, Kirstie Alley!"
Randy: I would line up around the block for that one. It'd be so great. Actually, I believe I saw that movie. It was called Battlefield Earth, wasn't it?
John: Y'know... Battlefield Earth, what're you going to do? All right, that's the news.
John: Tonight's topic is "how to build a transoceanic vessel." Y'know, I was talking to a friend of mine—and I've been talking about this quite a bit for the past few weeks—and she said to me, I explained to her what the podcast was, and she said, "Oh, that's what you're talking about. I thought you were talking about some sort of spaceship!" [Laughter]
John: The idea for this podcast actually came from two places. My good friend Megan and I—Megan, welcome back—were in London. And which museum was it in?
Megan: That was at the British Museum.
John: We were at the British Museum, and they had an exhibit of a Viking longship that had been dug up, and in there of course there were bits of wood but a lot of iron, and they had basically taken this whole dig in situ and put it here in this museum. And you could walk around it, you could see the size of it. But what was brilliant, is on the walls, they had painted how many trees it took to build this, how many sheep it took to get the fabric for the sail and for the rope and all that kind of stuff.
John: And it basically said, "Hey, look how much material went into this one boat!" And immediately—because you can leave it, but you can't leave it alone—I thought about this! And I thought about, oh my God, if you sit in this room and look down in that hole, you can see what an impossibility this thing is. So we decided to record the podcast.
John: There was something else that I saw shortly thereafter and I can't remember what it was... it was talking about the complexity of the world we live in and how we dismiss that complexity all the time, because there's this mythos that comes from Phineas and Ferb and that sort of thing, and superhero movies... this is why I hate superhero movies! They can't just be the best at something! They're not going to build a robot, but they have to be able to build a robot in a weekend. And the movies and this attitude has pushed everything up, like anybody can do amazing, amazing fucking things.
John: The documentary I was watching said, basically, "Nobody alive has the means or the time or the know-how to build a skateboard from scratch." They said, you can't, it can't be done. You could take the whole rest of your lifetime and if you tried to build a skateboard from scratch, you couldn't do it. You don't even know enough to do it and you couldn't tool it, you couldn't make it done.
John: So we're not talking about a skateboard: we're talking about a transoceanic vessel in 600 BC.
Randy: You know what it reminds me of, just before we dive too far into this? It's that 12 year old version of me that was convinced that I could build a helicopter if I just had a lawn mower engine lying around, you know? [Laughter]
John: Okay! This comes from 1st Nephi chapter 17 and 18. And before we jump into that, we need to talk a little bit about myth and about miracles because one of the things that will be dismissed right away in this talk is, "You're talking about the world of man, John Larsen, and this is God and God can do anything he wants." I'll grant that! That's been a concept in religion for a long, long time. As a matter of fact, if I think if you went to a Greek and said, "Um, was Hercules a real guy or not?" Or, "Could he really do these things? Was there really a golden fleece?" They would just dismiss you, right out.
John: Traditionally, in human thinking, myth has been in its own realm. These are things that are truths that transcend fact in a lot of ways, and they're not necessary to establish the factual truth of it. The myth of Hercules to the Greeks or the Romans wasn't as important that it actually happened as what it told. And if you said, "I'm going to climb Mount Olympus to see if Zeus is really up there on his throne," that just wouldn't play out. That's not something that was necessary.
John: But then we have Joseph Smith who comes along and says, "All religions are an abomination," and says, "I've got these fuckin’ golden plates, and I'm running through the forest with them, and I'm burying them in the barrel of beans, and I've got a translator, and we lost 116 pages..." and over and over over again insisting on his authority based on the reality of this myth, right? I think for most of us growing up in the Church, it's very rare to be taught that myth is myth, and it doesn't matter if it's truthful. We were taught that these truth claims are real. When we talk about prophets, they are real prophets and they're really talking to God. And I went onto lds.org and they have a little video about the Book of Mormon and it still is insisting that it actually happened in the New World... that these are historical events.
Randy: Yeah. It carries through. That is the party line: These were real people. These are things that really happened. But it's because, I think if you get back far enough, so many of the truth claims of early Church leaders really are dependent on, "this had to have been an actual historical event." And it's supposed to be the most correct book ever, right? So there are no errors. There are no, you know, mythologizing people in it, there is none of this "turning them into a superhero" garbage in there. This really happened.
Megan: But don't you think that's also because Mormonism—I mean all Protestantism but particularly Mormonism—is such a post-Enlightenment religion? It absolutely wants to be scientific and real and grounded.
John: And it was scientific at the time. Early pseudoscience as they understood it. You know, like we've talked before about the Word of Wisdom. The Word of Wisdom as it sits in D&C 89 reflects the teachings of Dr. Graham (famous for the Graham cracker) and it was pseudoscience of the time, and it was believable to frontier people. And the cosmology sort of matches common understanding of the cosmology of the 19th century—not the 15th century, not the 8th century, not the 20th century... of the 19th century.
John: And so I think, yeah, Mormonism has always been grounded in, "this is a real religion, this is not just made up papal stuff out of Rome. We have the truth here!" And for years and years—and we still haven't moved away from it—Kolob, and mummies, and golden plates, and all that stuff was real, man!
John: Now, let's talk about miracles because I was kind of formulating: there's three levels of miracles for religious people. Miracle Category One is something that's convenient. You know, like, "I was running late to get to the beauty parlor to get my hair did, and I couldn't find my keys, and I prayed to Jesus and lo and behold, there are my keys by the front door. Miracle! Praise Jesus.”
Randy: Of course! that happens all the time! That's always the first place I go to when I can't find my keys. I ask Jesus and he sends me right to 'em!
John: I would say those are probable. If a scientific egghead was to come in and say, "it's probable on any given day that you'll be able to find your keys," the fact that you ascribe the miracle status to it... ehh... the likely outcome that it would have happened anyway is probable.
Randy: You did a very good job of saying what I would say: "there's an egghead scientist." [laughter]
John: The next level, Level Two Miracle, is in the realm of possible, but improbable. "I was driving, it was a snowy night, we were driving down the freeway 85 miles an hour, we were t-boned by a semi. We spun around three times, flipped over, landed in a ditch... we all walked away without a scratch. Praise Jesus." Maybe improbable, right? Maybe improbable, but it's still not impossible, right? It's still in the realm of possibility. This is a level two miracle. "We decided that my wife should be a stay at home mother and the last day of work, I got a raise that equaled exactly her income." Possible to happen, maybe improbable, but it's still in the realm of possibility. Scientifically we would say, hm, y'know, that's...
Randy: Yes, it's probable.
John: Level three miracles are, "this is fucking impossible." This is like, your brother-in-law gets his two legs crushed off in a car accident, the elders come to the hospital, give him a blessing and his legs grow back. That's a level three miracle. You don't hear about level three miracles very often in the real world!
Terrell: The only ones you hear about are what we're getting ready to talk about. So it's kind of an interesting thing.
Randy: Or they're removed enough from recent memory that there is no way anyone could corroborate them, even if you saw every possible source you could ever find.
John: Right? And these are more rare. I have a graphic I posted on Facebook, that says, "The probability of miracles," and it goes down and goes down and goes down, until the advent of Photoshop, and then it starts going way, way up again up again up again... [Laughter]
John: I was looking at, I can't remember how I ran into this, I was looking at "10 photos that'll blow your fuckin’ mind!!" You know, how like every article headline these days is, "YOU WON’T BELIEVE THIS IT’S SO FUCKING WEIRD!!!" That's how we write newspaper headlines these days.
Randy: Or, "the trick that your doctor doesn't want you to know!!" that some stay-at-home mom found.
John: Yes, yes! But they were like 10 photos, and I'm like, hm, yeah, hm, I, you know, I can do Photoshop better than that on my phone.
John: So yeah. Anyway, even if it's not Photoshop, it's not necessarily miraculous. There are some really ridiculously talented photographers out there that can get pretty crazy pictures. Some of these pictures were old pictures that looked like... a face, you know, coming down the stairs. But how many photos have been taken? A billion? Seven billion? Four hundred billion? What's the probability of one in 400 billion that some shadow in the picture will look like a face? That's our level two miracle.
John: Now apologists—why this is important—apologists like to argue for level one or level two miracles when it's convenient in the scriptures, because that's “proof.” A la Nahom, NHM or whatever it is—that it's a place that's named in the Book of Mormon, they find a place out in the Sinai peninsula and they say, “oh my God, look, this has to be this place! This is proof of the Book of Mormon!”
Randy: Except, It wasn't even actually a place, it was like a grave marker?
John: It was like a marker on a rock or whatever. It's interesting!
Randy: I will admit, it's interesting.
John: To me It's a level two. It's not probable, but it's not impossible.
Randy: Yeah, and given, if you looked around these areas for long enough, you'll find something that looks like it fits it. That's just how things work in probability.
John: Absolutely. So as we go through this, on building a transoceanic vessel, the apologetic response is gonna be, "these are all level three miracles. Why are you even doing this at all?" And my response and mentality is, "Why is this in the book at all?" If all they had to do was do like the Liahona—wake up and then there's a boat there—or better yet! They just wake up in, you know, they go to sleep in the Sinai peninsula, and then they're, “oh, oh my God, we're in Peru!” ...why not do that? If you're not binding God at all, then why not go there?
Randy: Why build this narrative that could be slightly believable given the time it was supposed to happen in the time the narrative comes out, but is still completely ridiculous? It doesn't make any sense. Why didn't he give them a zeppelin that could have just flown? Why didn't he give them instructions to build an airplane? This—as we'll get to—boat was ridiculously different than everything else...
John: Why wasn't there a blue police call box there? Because once you go into level three, once you say God is not bound by any of our rules—and in the book they sort of hint at that, but then they hint that they have rules—I'm saying this is important and everything we're going to say tonight is really important because once you go to level three... you're off the fucking reservation. There's no realm of reality at all anymore because you're not bounded at all and you can just say any religion makes sense at that point!
Terrell: And this is where I kind of draw my thought about the concept of faith. When they say that "this is to build your faith," this whole concept of them building this, and this unrealistic perspective is all to help you with your faith... it just doesn't make any sense.
Randy: Well, you know, if you want to build up my faith even more, let's go to the time this came out, the 1830s, right? Let's talk about them getting in a balloon and flying. Totally ridiculous for the time they really went. But, cutting edge technology in 1830, right? That would build up your faith pretty good if the story said that.
John: Well, and I would say also, whenever you see anything that could be if Joseph Smith wrote it, or it might be that it came from God... now I've done whole presentations explaining why the Lamanites are the Iroquois because those are the Indians that Joseph Smith had contact with and every description of the Lamanites matches the Iroquois...
John: What I'm going to argue tonight is, even though they're building a transcontinental, transoceanic vessel, Joseph Smith describes it as if they're building a canoe. Because that's what he knows. He doesn't know anything about seafaring, but it's likely that he ran into people building a canoe or a barge. He lived right off the Erie canal, so his experience was probably with canoes and barges and I would say that his description here of how to build a boat matches with how you build a canoe. It does not match with how you'd build the Santa Maria.
Randy: And at best maybe he's seen some simple type sailing vessel that was out on the Great Lakes or something. But it's still within the same thing, where it's a canoe, basically, with a big sail on it.
John: Okay. No further ado. 1st Nephi chapter 17! Now there's a great setup for this story, and for anybody who's watched The Walking Dead or anything like that, this is very important. These guys leave Jerusalem and they wander in the desert for eight years.
John: ...Anybody camp? [Laughter]
Randy: On occasion, yes.
Megan: Yes.
John: What's going to happen to all of your equipment in eight years in the desert?
Terrell: It's gonna be destroyed.
Randy: You're going to have none of it left.
John: It's a beautiful setup to the story because they have nothing. Anything after eight years of wandering around the desert is going to be fried. Anything. They could not bring anything with them from Jerusalem. It would all have been worn out or destroyed.
Randy: Or just tossed to the side somewhere along the way. Because why in the hell am I hauling this pickaxe, right? I don't need this damn thing. It's heavy.
John: So, verse four: "And we did sojourn for the space of many years, yea, even eight years in the wilderness." Once again, God, "we did sojourn for eight years in the wilderness" would be sufficient.
John: "We came into the land, which we call Bountiful," in verse five. "There was much fruit and wild honey, and all these things were prepared of the Lord that we might not perish. And we beheld the sea, which we called, uh, ifrghjfmu[mumble]" [Laughter] And we pitched our tents. Okay. And verse eight: "And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto me, saying: Thou shalt construct a ship, after the manner which I shall show thee, that I may carry thy people across these waters. And I said: Lord, whither shall I go that I may find ore to molten, that I may make tools to construct the ship after the manner which thou hast shown unto me?"
John: Not a bad start, not exactly the right starting point, but it's not a bad start. "And it came to pass that the Lord told me whither I should go to find ore, that I might make tools." Okay.
John: And then verse 11, "And it came to pass that I, Nephi, did make a bellows." [Long pause]
John: ...Good... good. [Chuckles all around] You do need bellows, in fact, to make tools. Good on ya, Nephi.
John: Um, "to blow the fire, of the skins of beasts; and after I had made a bellows, that I might have wherewith to blow the fire, I did smite two stones together!"
John: Also very important in blacksmithing, to start the fucking fire! [Laughter] A very important first step... to start the fire. Very important.
Randy: It's interesting, the focus on details here, but the complete lack later on.
John: Yeah, because we know that they had bellows!
John: "And it came to pass that I did make tools of the ore which I did molten out of the rock." Verse 16. And then his brothers see that he's about to make a ship and they start to make fun of him.
John: Okay, so we'll get back into it, but I have narrowed down the steps, and I'm going to simplify it—the steps to actually build a transoceanic vessel. Let's talk about tools first.
John: Nephi actually has a bigger problem. The Lord shows him where there is iron ore because, let's be clear, we have to make a boat that is going to survive in a saltwater environment for quite some time. Gold, silver and copper will not do. They will not hold the boat together. He's got to be talking about iron. Right? Anybody disagree? We have any apologists with us tonight to disagree?
Megan: Actually, I'm going to disagree a little bit. Sorry, I'm an archaeologist so I do this pedantic thing. Iron's not the best... but it was the best he could have come up with.
John: Okay. Yeah.
Megan: Because he's not doing alloy, not doing titanium alloy—bronze or something like that. That might be a slightly better solution.
John: Okay. So he's got to get this iron out of the mountains. And these aren't like the pit miners up in Michigan where there are Indians who are digging iron out of the ground. That's not the way iron would be found in the Sinai peninsula. So he's got a bigger problem, which is, okay, he walks up this hill—remember he's been out of Jerusalem for eight years—and he identifies the fact that he needs tools. He doesn't say, "dear Lord, you had us take this big fucking load of tools around with us in the desert for eight years. What am I supposed to do with them?" It was, "No, I need tools."
John: So he climbs up this mountain, and he finds an iron seam... now what does he do?
Randy: That though is our middle level miracle, right? It's improbable, but still possible. So I can accept that one and move on with the story.
Terrell: The fact that he climbed the mountain? [Laughter]
Randy: Just, that he happened to find an exposed seam of ore.
Terrell: All right.
John: So what's he going to do to get the seam of iron out of the mountain!? Because we already know that he doesn't have any tools! Because he needs tools in order to build the boat! So he goes to find the iron in order to build the tools, which he clearly does not have, but without tools you can't mine the fucking iron out of the mountain!
Randy: Well... you know, maybe there are some moderate size boulders that he could carry down and start to build a pickax so he can go back and get the rest?
Terrell: So did he carry the bellows up with him? So that he can create fire or something?
Megan: Just melt it in the seam! Oh, that's it!
John: Okay. So let's fast forward. Somehow he gets this iron ore out of the rock. I'm going to give the book a pass on this because the book actually says the iron ore is embedded in rock—because it says "moltened it out of rock." So it's not an exposed iron seam. He's talking about stuff that's in the granite, it's stuck in there. But we're gonna pass that aside. So he gets the iron down to the seaside. Okay?
John: Well now what he needs is he needs—because the book says twice that he "moltens" it. Now let's remind you all what the word molten means in English, it means to melt iron. So what he has to do is he has to have a blast furnace.
John: During this time, this is the end of the Bronze Age. And in the Bronze Age, they cold hammered on bronze, which is why it wouldn't hold a blade very well because they didn't really anneal it like they did later in time, because you have to cook the iron... we're not gonna go through all that process.
Randy: You've got to heat treat it. Long story short, you've got to heat treat it so that the individual atoms line up together properly and once they line up, then you get a stronger blade.
John: So there was iron work at 600 BC, but they used what's called a bloomery at the time, which was a furnace that would sort of make iron soft, but it wouldn't molten it. Now if I burn wood, if I go burn wood and I even make myself an oven, like a pizza oven or something from the time, I can get the wood burning—raw wood, depending on the wood—between 500 and 1,000 degrees.
Randy: Which I can tell you, as a child who liked to build fires, that's hot enough to melt aluminum and that's about it.
John: It's hot enough to melt aluminum. Depending on the iron, you have to get the furnace up to 2,000 degrees before you can get it soft, and you really have to get it up to about 3,000 degrees before you can get the iron to go molten. And once again, these are processes that would not be discovered for another 1,500 years or so.
John: So let's assume that Nephi could build a blast furnace... [long pause]
Randy: ...Kay?
Terrell: I'm with you so far.
John: Okay, but we've already discovered another industry! For anybody who plays games, you'll know about the industry tree of building civilization up. He has to have charcoal to get the oven above 1,000 degrees because like I just said, if you're burning really hot, burning wood, you can still only get that oven up to about a thousand degrees. Really, we weren't able to achieve those 3,000 degree furnaces until we started burning coal. And coal is anachronistic for the Sinai Peninsula in 600 BC. The only thing that could possibly have is charcoal, but charcoal requires burning the wood in charcoal ovens. Charcoal is not just discovered, and in the kind of quantities that they would have to have—we're not even there yet!—they would have to deforest acres and acres and acres of forest. I'm not kidding here, just to get the charcoal, in order to get the furnace hot enough to build the hammer that he needs to go get the iron out of the mountain!
Megan: But John, he had bellows! [Laughter]
John: He did have bellows! He did! Made out of animal skins, no less. Which are an important part. But this is where Joseph Smith is thinking about the blacksmiths he sees. They could in fact do this, but they would have charcoal or coal that they would get from other industries. They wouldn't make it themselves. There will be tradesmen who would build their furnaces. They would buy the bellows. It's not like they went out to Pennsylvania and said, "I'm going to be a blacksmith, let me go get a deer so I can start tanning the leather so I can make the bellows!"
Megan: Oh wait, wait. You just brought up another industry: tanning.
John: Tanning.... [Groans] We're going to get there.
Randy: I think we can assume, they had eight years in the wilderness, they've got that one down.
Megan: They just spent it just developing—
Randy: Yeah, they just practiced a lot.
Megan: ...That's why it took so bloody long!
Randy: They were out there eight years; they had to replace their clothes. Unless they're bringing a lot of sheep with them...
Megan: Ah, well, we might get there too.
John: Well, so we're also assuming—oh, hey, come on up.
Audience Member: Hello! So, I am not an apologist by any extent of the imagination, but just listening to this conversation and, I'm unfamiliar with this topic, it just, it just occurred to me: why couldn't they barter for charcoal and tools and all this kind of stuff? Maybe they could fish by the seaside and barter for what they needed? Why is that not possible?
John: It is a possibility. The book sort of implies that they're... the book says in the chapter, and I can find it, that they actually... remember I told you it said that they had to strike stones together? So that they could make fire, like a caveman? And because it says that God miraculously made all their meat "sweet" so they didn't have to cook. The implication is that they were avoiding civilization completely. So they go from not even gathering driftwood to make a fire at night, to cook up a little rabbit... to an entire ship smithing industry.
Randy: I also would find it interesting, the fact that he has to smite two stones to start this fire... reading into it very deeply, that implies they're not around anybody else. Otherwise you would have walked to the guys' camp over there and said, "Hey, can I borrow some coals out of your fire? Can I borrow that burning stick for five minutes?"
Terrell: I understand we're talking about iron now, but I think it's the chapter before, two chapters before, he has steel. So why don't we just assume he found a big pile of steel? [Laughter and groans; steel is anachronistic for this time period.]
Randy: Well, because of what steel is...
Terrell: Oh, I know what steel is! [More laughter] And I understand that there's a big issue, but this is the chapter before the chapter we're talking about. He got a steel bow.
Randy: Yeah, you're absolutely right.
Megan: Slightly problematic...
John: The fact that he can get iron molten pretty much implies that they're using steel. But yeah, for our points we're giving them a benefit of the doubt by saying iron because that's easier for them.
John: So he finds the stone, which is not a small... we're not going to go through all that stuff, but not every rock can withhold 3,000 degrees, you have to find the right rock that has the right water content, otherwise rocks explode if they get too hot! So what I'm saying is there's all these things... the slagging process and like... getting molten iron is not a small feat! And doing it from scratch?
John: I'm already laying down the line this early in the discussion. This is impossible. Right? Human beings do not do anything from scratch. We built on the backs of other people. And going out to a seaside wilderness and building a blast furnace 600 years before Christ?
Randy: It's Gilligan’s Island level ridiculousness.
Megan: First they found some coconuts...
John: So let's skip ahead and let's say they've got this blast furnace. They've got this whole blacksmith shop. They're going to need to start making stuff. And, Megan, when you and I saw the shipwreck, the thing that's left is a whole hell of a lot of iron. Nails, strapping, fasteners of all kinds. And, we're going to talk about sailing here in a minute. We're gonna go over time, by the way. I hope the Reasonability people are forgiving.
John: You know, one of the problems that a boat has—a transoceanic boat—is it's getting pitched side to side. If you have a canoe, you only really have to worry about moving forward in the water. So a boat that has to cross the ocean, if you have stormy seas, you have large seas, like... if you were on a Viking raiding ship and the storms came, you just scuttled the boat on the shore and then you went ashore and waited it out.
John: So the boat building had to be of such caliber that it could withstand the buffeting of the waves and the storms for long extended periods of time. That's why it took so long to get to that point, because before then the boats would have just been bashed to smithereens. And there are boats of the time that were just tied together with leather and other sort of things. But I know of no instance of a vessel that could go transoceanic, by design, without any sort of metal.
Megan: No, not that I know of.
John: So he's got to have it. So he's going to do tools, so he's going to need hammers, at least. He's going to need saws. And he's going to need things like awls, because he's got to drive the nails in. And then they're going to need a fucking buttload of nails.
John: So normally what you would do, is you would go down to the nail smith and you would say, "I need this many nails." They don't have a nail smith! So that means he's got to spend time on the forge making God knows how many nails—I don't remember, painted on the wall, how many nails there were in there...
Megan: Thousands and thousands.
John: A boat of this size could easily have ten thousand nails. And what they've got to do is they’ve got to pound that iron out and stretch it and then cut it and then pound the top of it down to make each nail. One, by one, by one, by one. Because there's no source for nails anywhere on this island, let alone the strapping, which has to be long, right? Because it has to be able to hold that boat together and you're going to have to hammer those things together in such a way that they're bound strong. This is not easy work and it takes time. It takes a long time.
Randy: Just building a boat with that many nails... that'd be ridiculous for me. I didn't use that many nails the last time I worked on some of my house!
Terrell: Right? Also let's hope that they have enough wood to actually build this where they were located.
John: Oh yeah, we're going to get there in a minute.
Randy: Sadly they burned it all down.
John: Just to get the charcoal, to coke the furnaces, to make the nails, would literally take acres and acres of forestry. And this is the whole progression of civilization! That you can't do this.
John: Now, Megan, you were throwing out hours before on the longboat.
Megan: Yes, because a group of enthusiastic archeologists got together in Denmark and decided to do a recreation of a Viking longship based on what they've excavated. I do have it on notes. And they figured, from the work that they did, that—it was a 30 meter long ship, so that's not hugely long. It's one of the longer ones though—it took 40,000 work hours to construct that ship. Now that includes the iron, the ropes, the sail, but it doesn't include any of the transportation it took to get those materials to where you are building it.
Megan: So if you assume that you're working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, so you're doing absolutely nothing else—you're not hunting, you're not doing anything else—it's going to take 10 people about a year to construct that ship.
John: And that's not counting time to cut down the trees.
Megan: Oh, no, you're assuming you've already got the timbers.
John: Not just timbers. They've got lumber.
Randy: That's just time onsite.
Megan: That's time onsite to build the boat. I think that you would have included at that point because unless you're—this is another point—unless you're building a boat like a box, you want the ends to be slightly pointy, so a little bit better construction, so you have to actually steam those timbers so that you can bend them.
John: Yeah, we're going to talk about the keel in a minute here... so okay, so we've got, let's do it step by step. We've got our blast furnace and we've made a big pile of nails and our other tools. Step two: you need a dry dock.
John: With a canoe, you can carve that sucker out on the shore and then you can all push it down and have a canoe party. With a boat that's the size of a barn you cannot build—despite what happens in Pirates of the Caribbean where they beach the vessel—you can't do that in the real world.
Randy: They just wait for high tide to come in there. So they've got a way out at least in the cinematic world, right? They're not building that ship on the beach.
John: So what you have to do, in the ship building process—and really, whole towns in later periods sprung up around this. And even before this, you know, like the Phoenicians were seafaring, the Greeks were seafaring, the Egyptians—and if you went to the coastal towns, there'd have been a whole district of the dry docks. What you need is you need a big hole in the ground that can support workers going around, and then it has gates. I don't know how long it would take to build a dry dock, but it's probably an order of magnitude and you know, not as complicated as building a boat, but it's pretty close.
John: To build the dry dock itself would take Nephi and crew several years to accomplish. Because if you think about it, you have to dig a hole down below the waterline and not have water seeping in. Have you ever tried to dig a hole next to a river? Have you ever tried that? Like when you were a kid? You run into a problem: the water immediately starts running into the hole! It's not just a matter of moltening a shovel and then starting to dig a big fucking hole! They have to take care of all this stuff!
Randy: I mean, best case scenario, they get lucky and water doesn't come in, but if you're below sea level, it's saturated there. You've got to have some sort of pumping system to pull the water back.
John: They're going to have to pump water out. They're going to have to probably line it with timbers and clay. Probably lime or some other sort of cement material to keep the water from rushing in. They're going to have to build out of timber, in a watertight fashion, the gating to open the gate and close the gate and hold the water out. So they have to have a dry dock before they can even build this boat, after they've already built the blast furnace!
Audience Member: Another genius idea from the stand-in apologist: a barn sized boat made out of wood and metal lashings... how about a giant deck with rollers on it to distribute the weight over the beach, and timbers for rollers, and you roll it into the ocean?
Megan: Unfortunately it's not straight on the bottom. It's curved on the bottom, which comes to problems because it's going to tip over when you try and roll it.
John: That's a perfect segue, because it talks quite a bit about working timber in these passages. It talks about the woodwork. So the most important part of a boat is the keel, which is basically this bottom... it's the main spine of the boat, and laying the keel down is the most important part about shipbuilding.
John: Now when you have a small boat like a canoe, you can sometimes find a big tree. And you're right, there is a whole pattern of steaming and bending wood. Because once you start building ships, you can't have straight corners. You can't have 90 degree corners because they leak. So there is a whole art and craft to actually shaping wood and timber. So you have to have, not only access to a lot of wood, but you have to have access to the right kind of wood.
John: And unfortunately, or fortunately, the wood that was pliable enough to bend to really make transoceanic vessels possible—you think about the round beautiful shape of a boat—that wood is semi-porous. So we also had the invention of resins and pitches and stuff that we could coat those with, because before that you had to use hard wood so that it would hold out the water, but that wood was not pliable enough to make the kind of boat shapes that we need. So once again, this is like your home state, North Carolina, the tar hills. They're the tar hills because they were extracting all this tar from the pine trees there to send back to the boat builders in the Old World to put on the boats because they needed that wood to not leak, right?
John: So when you're building a transoceanic vessel, you first of all have to have a big fucking keel. Now there's no trees around that you can do that with. So you have to make one, which means you have to interweave and line and veneer wood. You can't just go saw down a tree. You have to actually make that thing. And it has to be strong enough to hold the entire weight and body of the ship, to withstand the buffeting of the waves and the storms, all the cargo in it, and be waterproof at the same time.
John: Nephi and crew have this task before him and the Lord commanded them to go work timbers in curious fashion or whatever. But that keel is very important, and it's important that it's deep because as the boats are being buffeted, as I keep saying, when you're sailing, you have two important things in a boat and it's called trim and balance.
John: Trim is moving the boat side to side because you don't want your boat to tip over. Balance is front to back. And when you're riding over big waves, keeping that boat in perfect balance is extremely important. And the keel was very, very important on these oceanic sailing ships to keep the boat from tipping over. So it becomes even more important as a structural element, but it makes it so it's sail-able.
John: And building one of those things is hard. There would be craftsmen, in a ship building city, that would do nothing but build keels. That's all they would do. They wouldn't build the spines of the boat, they wouldn't do anything else. And that's where, when you take and you look at these industries, there'd be thousands and thousands of people, not just man-hours, but in specialized skillsets to be able to do this.
Megan: Just steaming and bending the keel alone... that task, because it has to happen so quickly before the timber cools down again, you have a very short working time. It would take 40 to 50 men to bend that because it takes enormous strength and they had to work very, very quickly.
John: And they would have their own tools... we just talked about a dry dock! They would have a whole army and array of different tools they would use to bend the lumber. Now the problem comes in bootstrapping; those things would have themselves been built out of steamed and bent lumber. And that's why it takes thousands of years to develop these things, because they have to incrementally build one technology on top of the other, on top of the other, on top of the other, and to build this dry dock and this steaming station and timber bending station as well as the tool station... again, would take just an enormous amount of effort before you even get to the boat.
Randy: And if anybody doubts that, I would just give you the challenge: think in your mind, how would you build a hammer without having a hammer?
John: And that's just step one of like a 70,000 step process they're going through here!
John: Okay. So they bend the ship and they start building the ship up together. Their next thing... we talked about that they really do need some sort of resin. So we're gonna kind of skip over that, but they really absolutely need something like that. Otherwise the boat's going to leak.
Randy: They had an ample supply of used chewing gum. [Eruption of laughter]
John: Yeah, yeah, we'll just give that to them.
Terrell: Used chewing gum!
Megan: It had been eight years collecting that!
John: All right, let's talk about rope. Now somebody might say they didn't have rope, but the verse actually tells us on verse 11 of chapter 18, that Nephi was binded with rope.
Megan: If they didn't have ropes, they did not sail.
John: They didn't have rope, they did not sail.
Megan: Simple as that.
John: So, making rope. You can make rope in one of three ways. You either can use a plant-based material like hemp, you can use flax—which is sort of a plant-based material—or you can use wool.
Megan: Well, you can use animal hide.
John: I guess you could use animal hide!
Megan: Sorry, the Vikings made them out of walrus.
John: So how did they make their rope?
Megan: They made it in three ways. You had something called bast, which would be more fibrous. They also made them of wool. So they would have been... some of them were plaited, but a lot of them were plied and twisted, which is what you're talking about, which takes an enormous amount of time and lots of people. Or they would plait them out of walrus hide. But they were all used for different things. In the Levant area, which we're talking about, they usually used hemp.
John: Well, the problem with a wool rope is it gets wet and it stretches. For sailing, you need materials that can be wet and still hold their tensile strength. And I looked up some of the rope, the kind of rope in the diameter you need for sailing. It takes specialized tools—again, they'd have to create the rope building tools—but it takes three strong men or strong women probably to make the rope. And you kind of have to build it up strand by strand, and build these, just like you take wool and then you make string, and then you make yarn, and then you make rope, and you keep binding it together. It's a long, cumbersome process. And boats need a lot of rope in order to sail.
John: Now some might say that, well, maybe it wasn't a sailboat, but in verse 22 of chapter 18 it says, "and it came to pass, I, Nephi, did guide the ship that we sailed again towards the promised land." So we know it was a sailboat.
Megan: Also, wasn't he bound to the mast?
John: He was bound to the mast.
Megan: You wouldn't have a mast, unless you had a sail.
Randy: ...Unless they put one there just in case they needed to bind somebody? [Laughter]
Megan: "We'll just put this big post here, don't worry Nephi, it's fine!"
John: So these guys would have had to take like a year or two off from the tooling just to make the rope. And they would've had these piles and piles of rope sitting there that they would've had to keep away from mice and whatever else. Because there's nobody minding the store, right? They're going to have to keep all this stuff together.
John: That leads to the sails.
Megan: Oh boy.
John: So... it's a sailboat. That's how it's powered across the ocean. It needs to get there, so they have to have these big, big sheets of very sturdy material. They have to loom it, so they have to build looms. Once again, we're going back now. They go back to the beginning and they're building looms and then they need a whole bunch of sheep, a lot of sheep, like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sheep and they need shears. And they need to keep shearing these sheep and having the wool not rot year after year after year because they're going to need a whole bunch of this...
Megan: I can actually drop some stats on what's here.
John: Let's hear 'em.
Megan: So, in order to make—again, I'm going with Vikings because that's what I know—a Viking sail is usually between 50 square meters to 100 square meters. For transoceanic you're talking about 100 square meters for a sail. That's actually not all that big.
Randy: Yeah. You'd probably need several of them...
Megan: You would need several.
Randy: Or are you saying, “let's focus on one?”
Megan: Well, I think we're just doing one, and not talk about patching it, or repairing it, while you're crossing the ocean. In order to do that, for every square meter of that sail, you need at least two fleeces from a sheep, so you're talking about 200 sheep just to produce—that's just to weave, that's not talking about the thread you're going to need to sew it or anything else—so 200 sheep just for that one sail. Then you're going to need patches and you're probably going to want to have additional sail as well, and keep in mind, you can only shear a sheep once a year.
Megan: ...So where do these sheep come from?
John: If you have, let's say, 500 sheep, you have to feed those sheep. You have to water them, you have to tend to their young. You have to have them fenced in, you have to take them out to pasture. Now, this is a good time to bring up this point. If you've ever played Settlers of Catan, you know that you need resources, but there's not that many golden spots. Think about this wonderful spot that they found! Not only does it have iron ore, but it has hundreds of miles of forests of timber. That's seafaring grade timber. And it has plenty of pasture land and feral sheep. Apparently water. Just everything they could possibly need. And it does talk about leather. So they have goats, I would assume. So not only do they have sheep, they have goats in a high quantity.
John: This is this amazing miracle place that has every resource... because if you go to the shipbuilding capitals, like, Plymouth, England, these aren't necessarily like the bread baskets. These are the places that all the materials are being shipped to.
Randy: This is essentially the most convenient midpoint for where all the materials are.
John: Right. And these networks would, if you trace them out... I remember seeing something in junior high school where they traced out the building of a pencil, and they were going India for this stuff and materials were going across the globe. Wasn't it the NPR guys who just did a t-shirt recently? They did a documentary where they made a t-shirt and they traced down the materials and just went all over the world. These guys have to have all these materials in one... let's say they're on foot, they don't have motorcars. All these materials really need to be within 20 or 30 square miles, right? Otherwise they're going to have to build huge transportation networks on top of all this other stuff.
John: Okay. So sails. So for sailing, we've already established that they need big masts. And again, part of the New World was important because there were these big, straight growing pine trees. So not only do they have the trees that they can use to bend and shape and make the spines of the boat and the keel, but they also have the wood growing there on the Sinai peninsula that's tall enough and the right strength to be a mast. Right.
John: And then they need a rudder. The only problem is a rudder wasn't invented until the twelfth century! But we can go with that miracle route and say that God showed them how to build a rudder. But a rudder requires ropes and pulleys and all sorts of things. There's a remote chance it can be done, but really, you can't navigate transoceanic with the old paddle system, which is sort of even how they navigated the the Viking boats, didn't they? Didn't they use a big paddle?
Megan: It was called a steer board.
John: The technical term's not "a big paddle?" [Laughter]
Megan: That's the lay term.
John: So you've got all those other elements. Okay. So let's fast forward. They've got the boat built. Now the problems start.
John: You have to navigate this boat across the ocean. Now it tells us in the story, conveniently they find a compass and they refer to it as a compass several times and the compass quits working. Now we all know that compasses point to magnetic north, but this is a magic compass that points in the direction they need to go.
Randy: Well, it was Jack Sparrow's compass, obviously.
John: But that's not sufficient to get you across the ocean, to have a compass that points you in the right direction. Because—well, we're talking magic here, but—the compass only points a certain way and you need to be able to find where you are. Latitude, longitude, as well as... what's the other latitude...
Megan: You just said both of them! [Laughter]
John: ...It'd be helpful if you could see my hands right now... that you need to be able to go across. So you needed a sextant as well as a compass to do transoceanic navigation.
John: Now there's this little queer thing in this book, which is verse 13 of chapter 18. His brothers, who apparently are not busy doing all the different jobs that sailors do... because you can't sail a boat, despite what Pirates of the Caribbean said, with one guy, right? There's a lot of jobs to be done!
Randy: Even that says you can't sail a boat with one guy, that's a plot point in the first one, they go to the big ship, right? They'll never be able to sail that with two people!
John: So verse 11, Laman and Lemuel get mad and they bind Nephi with cords and at this point the compass stops working. But they said, "and we were driven back upon the waters for the space of three days." How the fuck did they know? How in the world, if you're in the middle of the ocean, do you know that you've gone backwards for three days? If you're sailing without any landmarks, it can look like you're going forward, but you're riding a bigger current that's actually pushing you backwards. Oceans are tricky that way! You cannot visually know in the middle of the sea how fast you are going, let alone measuring that in terms of days. What does that mean!? "A day." "Three days." In what? In the doldrums? With the wind? With what? I mean, what does it even mean? "With no compass?" So their compass is not working, but yet he knows—well just go in this other direction three days since you already know which way three days is! What do you need the fucking compass for?!
Randy: Maybe he's just trying to make the point they were adrift for three days, but didn't know the word "adrift."
Megan: There's no reformed Egyptian for "adrift." [Laughter]
Randy: Adrift does not exist in reformed Egyptian.
John: Okay. So now we have the big problem, which is food and water. What's interesting here and shows Nephi, a la the writers of the Book of Mormon, knew nothing about sailing—the big problem of transoceanic sailing is not the nails. It's not the keel. It's water. Because water is heavy and you really don't want water in a boat. That's what you're trying to avoid. But you can't drink the ocean, so when you're traveling for long periods of time, you need to be able to store a lot of water, which are the reasons that the Phoenicians and the Greeks and the Vikings would stay close to the shore, because what they would do is they would sail for two or three days, then they would go raid the village, rape the women, grab some water and get back on the boat.
John: When you're on the boat for six months, you've got a huge problem. And the problem, as you all know from Talk Like a Pirate Day, one of the big problems is scurvy. Because there are certain foods that you need, but they go bad, they spoil and it's really hard to keep fresh things. So we're told this is a land of milk and honey, but what we didn't talk about is that for years they had to create a whole pickles and food preservation industry because you can't just load up barrels of honey onto a ship—first of all because you don't have any barrels. Where are the Coopers!? [Laughter]
Megan: They weren't invented yet, John. You can't have barrels.
John: So to get water, enough for a six month voyage, you had to have barrels to store the water in and that's an entire different industry of barrel making.
Megan: But John, first you had to invent barrels.
John: This is true, this is a technology that did not exist.
Terrell: And you also had to have the wood to make those as well...
John: And then the binding, the metal strapping around them...
Randy: And possibly, well, maybe they used skins, maybe they used clay jars... first of all, clay jars full of water on a ship on the ocean, sounds like a good idea to me.
Audience Member: What were they going to do with those 400 sheep when they were ready to sail? You couldn't carry them all. So, they murdered them all and made wineskins!
Megan: The problem with that is that then you have to tan those skins in order for them... because if you just dry them and then you put something liquid in them, guess what? They become wet again and then they start rotting. It's amazing. So they would have had to tan those skins and the difficulty is, that first of all, you need tannic acid, which you get from oak, but also it is actually a several year process to properly tan a skin.
Randy: Well, they just had so many feral sheep running around that as they sheared one, they slaughtered it, tanned its hide... they were thinking ahead on this! There were just so many sheep. They didn't have to worry about that.
John: So they have to have all the food for the voyage and then when they land on the New World, in verse 24 of chapter 18, "And it came to pass that we did begin to till the earth, and we began to plant seeds; yea, we did put all our seeds into the earth..." These guys don't have an insurance policy! "...which we had brought from Jerusalem." So not only do they have to have enough food for their own voyage, but they bring enough to start an entire civilization.
Megan: I have a question. So they brought seed from Jerusalem and they managed to keep it fresh and viable through the eight years in the desert and then crossing the ocean with the salt water?
Randy: And however many years it took to actually build this ship.
John: What I like, is the chapter heading to the Book of Mormon says, they land in the New World between—because the revelation says they left Jerusalem on the year 600—so it says they land in the New World between 591 to 589. The scholars of the Book of Mormon assume everything we just talked about took place between one and three years. One to three years to build this boat. [long pause]
John: ...Man.
Megan: That includes the voyage as well.
John: ...That includes the voyage as well! Indeed. Yes. Going that direction... by the way, going west is harder than coming back east.
Randy: Well it could be. You're saying sailing from east to west is harder than sailing from west to east? Let's say you're going to England on the water.
John: Sailing, because of the jet stream...
Megan: The Gulf stream?
John: The Gulf stream, yes. Because of the ocean currents, it's easier to sail from the New World to Europe than it is to go the other direction.
Randy: But, I've also heard many apologists claim that they set off somewhere on the Arabian peninsula and sailed to the west coast of South America.
John: So an even longer journey.
Randy: Yeah. It is even longer... it's still ridiculous either way, but I don't really think, from anything you get in the narrative, we can really even guess which direction they really went into.
Terrell: Exactly.
John: So the point is that these—building a ship, getting the food, getting the water—requires literally tens of thousands of people and civilizations that are enormous in size. As a matter of fact, we're here in Salt Lake City. There's Home Depot and Lowe's everywhere. I guarantee you, if I gave you a $10,000,000 check and told you you could go to the Home Depot, and I want you to build me a boat. You can use the internet all you want. I give you a plot of land in Malibu, you have $10,000,000, you have a plot of land. There's no way you could do it. Even if you can get down to Home Depot. Let alone your point of, oh, go make a hammer for next summer. Go make a saw.
Randy: That's your Mormon Expression homework assignment. So next summer's project: make your own saw or hammer—
John: And try not to get scurvy while you're doing it.
Randy:—and send us pictures, please.
John: Yeah. So this is an impossibility. Are we all in agreement now? People ask about smoking guns and stuff... this is not real. This is not possible.
Randy: The smoking gun is called, "read your scriptures and think about what they're claiming." And that's usually the smoking gun, right?
John: It's ridiculous. And even if you compare it to Noah's Ark, this is more ridiculous than that, right? Because how many years did Noah spend on his ark? 200, 300? And he built it just on the land. The water was going to come; he didn't have to launch the damn thing, which these guys had to do, right?
John: This is just, this is not possible. And so once you say, "okay, well God can do that which is not possible," which is where we started the podcast at the beginning... then why is it here at all? Why? Why waste two chapters of the book about this? Saying something that you can't even do?
Randy: It's like someone who was not educated in the intricacies of this was trying to write a narrative... and was trying to spot plot holes so that people wouldn't tear his book apart... but didn't know enough about them to actually not still leave plot holes...
Terrell: Lots and lots of plot holes.
John: So, there you go. How to build a transoceanic vessel. I think the book of Mormon... is, um...
Megan: [chuckles] Careful.
Randy: It's John. He doesn't know the meaning of the word.
Megan: I have not seen a single dollar going into that swear jar! You owe—
John: I put them in at the end!—Okay, go ahead.
Audience Member 2: You ask why it's in there... as a cynical atheist, I think religion tries to control the people. And we grow up with these stories thinking they're beautiful stories and they tell us how great God is, but, as an atheist, now, I see these as ways to show members of the Church and believers that God is way ahead of you. Way above you. You're nothing. And if you ever have any doubts or any questions, well, I mean, I talked to my family, my friends and they all tell me, well, you know, God's ways are higher than our ways. These kinds of stories are in there for a reason, to keep us in control, I think.
John: I think so, and they were stories kind of—as was hinted—aimed at ignorant people. And I don't mean that as an insult. They just didn't know any better. We live in an era where you can sit down as a 10 year old in front of your computer and literally look up everything you need to know about shipbuilding. You can follow the links and find out everything you want to know. You type in "How did Phoenicians bind their keels?" and you'll hit an article somewhere on the Internet! And this scripture is from a time and place that is no longer relevant. So what the Church has now—go ahead.
Audience Member 3: I can say, well, these are the same reasons that we have things like science fiction stories. Why do we really love watching Iron Man and Tony Stark building his crazy Iron Man suit? Because it seems like something that we could almost actually do! But no, this person is elevated. It makes a good story. This is the equivalent of building the Iron Man armor for 1830.
John: Using science fiction is a great analogy, because science fiction works for such a small window. When you watch Star Trek, the original one, there are some interesting things in there, but you're going to be taken aback by the technology things that they missed. And you're going to be saying, oh, why are you doing that with this?
Randy: Why does the bridge have 4,000 switches and buttons on it, right?
John: Yeah. Like they have a telecom, you know, things that can go trans-space? Why aren't they using that all the time?
John: What's the second one? Picard? Next Generation. They have two things on that ship—this is just as bad—all right, I'm going to go off on Next Generation! You have two things on that ship. One is the Holodeck, right? They can create material. And the other thing that they have, well, they have this thing where they make food out of energy...
Randy: The replicator.
John: They have a replicator. They also have a beaming device, right? With those two devices alone... game over! Right!? You can just beam the replicator stuff into space! You can have whatever you want! Everything else in that show is irrelevant if you have those two devices! What can't you do? If you can beam matter, you can move matter, and then you can make energy into anything you want...
John: It's the same thing in this book, right? If you can do all of this stuff, if 10 people or 20 people or 50 people or 100 people can go and make a vessel, then the rest of the book becomes ridiculous. And the Book of Mormon, over and over and over again, has problems like this.
Randy: Well, a lot of it had to do, I think, with honestly ignorance just of Joseph Smith at the time. Because it's not too far after this where they talk about building an exact replica of Solomon's Temple in the New World... which took hundreds of years and millions of man hours to build in Jerusalem, but they build it with a couple hundred people in like a year, no biggie.
John: Right. And it speaks to Joseph that it keeps talking about timber working, which again is what he would have been thinking about when he saw a ship, not knowing all this other stuff that was actually more important.
John: For the last word tonight. We actually have a celebrity with us tonight. Jim? Come up to the mic! [Rustling] If you push that—you can actually lift that—squeeze. Squeeze the—or that works.
Jim: Hello John.
John: Good to see you, brother!
Jim: Good to see you.
John: Jim is one of the original founders of Mormon Expression podcast. Welcome back! Welcome home.
Jim: Did a little bit.
John: So if you all remember from the early episodes, there was Jim, and there was George, and there was Tom, and... me! There were four of us. Right. And you were one of those.
Jim: Niel, too.
John: Oh yeah, Niel! How could I forget Niel? he's over squatting in Oslo or whatever the hell he's doing these days. Yeah. How are you?
Jim: I'm doing okay!
John: So where have you been? What's been going on in your life?
Jim: Oh man. Um, let's see... uh, moved back to Las Vegas. I'm divorced.
John: All the cool kids are doing it these days.
Jim: Yeah... pretty much. Same old, same old. Really just fucking around in Vegas I guess.
John: Excellent. So, last word. Nephi and the boat. Go.
Jim: He did this twice. Joseph Smith did this twice! This isn't... it wasn't that the joke wasn't funny the first time, it's just that he kept repeating himself.
John: And he one-upped it. You're talking about the Jaredites now.
Jim: Yeah! Of course! Now the boat's a fuckin' submarine! And stooones! And it spins in the water! It's magic and it's bullshit. And it speaks to the grandioseness, the grandiose nature of Joseph Smith. Like, if he believes it, and if he comes up with it, and people would be gullible enough to grab it and say, yes, this is true, then he's won, you know?
John: And to be clear, we were all gullible enough to grab it for awhile. Right?
Jim: Yeah. Very true.
John: And, I think to the point I was making about the 10 year old and the Internet, the problem Mormonism has run into is this is no longer appealing to people outside of the Church. If you've been hammered in this your whole life, you're going to accept it because you were told this from time you were a wee shaver.
Jim: Right.
John: But if you're an average 22 year old college student, you're like, "Wait, wait what?" Because you can just Google that shit and you can learn that no, this can't be done.
Jim: Yeah. I mean we have the sum total of human knowledge at our fingertips at pretty much all times right now.
John: Yep. I carry around a computer that has everything mankind has ever learned, and I use it to play Farmville 2.
Jim: You need better taste in gameplay.
Megan: Yes, you do.
Jim: You should play Kerbal Space Program.
John: It's good to see you, brother. We'll catch up after. And, thanks to our wonderful panel, and the studio audience! Goodnight everybody.