 Thanks, Carl. I do appreciate the help from MTA members in not losing my manuscript, and I Today's the thesis of today's talk will be Thank you Theses of today's talk will basically be that it's possible for a human being to survive without sleep And Or you could call it an experiment That's Maybe maybe that's not really the thesis, but it's it is an object lesson perhaps that you can draw from the experience as you'll notice I Only just remembered to print my paper and couldn't at that point in about 30 AD Jesus warned that when a man puts wine into New wine into old bottles The new wine will burst the bottles and be spilled and the bottles shall perish So fast-forwarding 2,000 years many of Jesus's followers feel no irony in funneling all of human experience Into simple frameworks of faith Established in the early Roman Empire as soon as Christianity started to circulate Christians began creating terse statements of belief Creeds basically and we've even got some rudimentary creeds that are in the New Testament Mormonism begins at that's partly because people were primarily illiterate then Mormon begin Mormonism begins at a very different point in human history the post-enlightenment early American Republic and When it's founding scripture the Book of Mormon appeared it didn't provide creeds with permanently fixed beliefs But something more like meta beliefs processes by which beliefs could be formed and transformed and that's what I'll talk about with Alma 32 today The Book of Mormon I'll argue Critiques and reformulates The traditional Christian and even biblical construct of faith The book addresses itself not to the ancient world where its narrators live But to the modern world in which its audiences live Drawing on the Bible and on a worldview that can only be called scientific it functions as post-biblical post-enlightenment Scripture organically Blending the Bible in the scientific worldview to create a new vision of faith By the way, how am I gonna know how much time I've got? Oh, it's right. Oh Okay, thank you The I was gonna add this great quote from Adam Miller before I go on but I don't have time on About how the Book of Mormon has an acronyms And how he thinks that's actually not a problem, but we're gonna take that for granted because you'll see that there are New Testament distinct New Testament phrases in the text that we're going to go through the Book of Mormon does Includes these without apology or any attempt to hide or or even to explain what it's doing You have these pages and pages strewn with purposeful New Testament Illusions that the reader supposed to recognize and supposed to understand as part of its message I'm a 32 presents a particularly strong Strong example of that almost parable the seed occurs in the Book of Mormon narrative long before the rise of the newborn Christ star But it functions for the reader as a mid-rash On the adult Christ parables and sayings about faith True to its own analogy of the sacred word as the seed the Book of Mormon refuses to leave Christ's words as dead letters on the biblical page Instead drawing on the themes images and phrases of Jesus's teachings about faith It plants those seeds in novel environments and this Recontextualization brings out a multiplicity of meanings some of which were actually implicit in Jesus's original sayings and some that are entirely new emergent meanings in Alma 32 the words and symbols from Jesus's parables on faith are also allowed to intertwine and grow new meanings Alma's analogy of the seed is probably familiar to most of you. I will touch on it really quick It starts with an exhortation to the audience awake and Arouse your faculties even to an experiment upon my words and exercise a particle of faith So comparing the word to a seed Alma invites his audience to give place The seed can be planted in their heart if the seeds good it will sprout and begin to grow Expanding the person's mind and heart and then by continuing to test and nourish the seed But continuing to nourish that they can test its property to see what happens to it when he uses the phrase good seed By the way, it's not saying actually that the seed is a like a good plant It's actually in context of agriculture Good seed is a seed that grows a bad seed is one that doesn't grow And that may come up later if I have time to get there So if the recipient of the word takes no thought Neglects to tend and water the plant then even a good seed will wither and die Where its plant will wither and die in Mormonism's Bible plus canon faith is related to a seed on only two occasions The first in Jesus's mustard seed analogy and the second in Alma's seed analogy and Alma 32 That was it Yeah, Christ meaning here As he compares he says if you had faith as a grain of a mustard seed you can pluck up a Command a tree and it will be plucked up It's somewhat obscure the mustard seed is something he probably chose in part because it's so tiny So recognizing this people have generally interpreted this passage to mean that if you just have this small quantity of Properly directed faith it will give you tremendous power Why does Jesus compare faith to a small seed? Why doesn't he compare it to a nat or? to Dustmote both of which he uses as examples of something small in other teachings and the So Alma 32's discussion actually gives explicit meaning to the analogy that's only implicit in the New Testament text itself and There we go So here you've got Jesus talking on another occasion about the grain of a mustard seed and in this case He talks about it actually growing up into a plant Which of course is what a seed is supposed to do in Alma's analogy he showed that faith was active and not passive and a process rather than a possession so Here we've got him talking about Exercising faith to plant the seed So the seed will seed will grow Alma's parable connecting faith with a seed draws out a natural but generally ignored implication of Jesus's comparison of faith to a mustard seed By having us in the analogy plant the seed in actualizing the potentials that are inherent in the text from Jesus by terminating those inherent in This idea of the seed Alma's parable transforms faith from strongly held belief and certainty to a process of action Then next we've got the parable of the sower Which Alma 32 also evokes and in this case very very clearly So you see especially down at the bottom When the heat of the Sun cometh and scorcheth it because I have no root it withers away meant to actually include the mark for text I don't know how that shoot Okay, well, here's the comparison table. So in mark for You've got it had no depth of earth Alma 32 will not get any root Mark for when the Sun was up Etc. Etc. Down at the end mark for because it had no root it withered away in Alma 32 because it had no half No root it withers away So you just got the same words there at the end only in different tenses So I wasn't kidding about this being an experiment and sleep deprivation by the way With all of these differences between the parables what if anything is different Well Alma's analogy clearly evokes the diseases parable of the sower in Alma's version We have we as his extended audience aren't supposed to identify with the ground We're not supposed to identify with the seed rather in his version of the parable of the sower. You are the sower I'm the sower and When the seed fails to grow in Alma 32, it's because we haven't properly cultivated it He says we neglect the tree and take no thought for its nourishment So Alma's parable of the seed in the sower Makes us responsible to sow the seed in ourselves so We saw earlier how Alma disclosed a fuller meaning of Jesus's mustard seed by planting it now by changing Us from the stories this story's plants and minerals back into people and Casting us each in the lead role of the sower He communicates something else about faith faith this change implies isn't exclusively receptive It's also proactive The domain of faith isn't one where we have to merely wait for God or someone else to do something We can initiate our own experiments of faith In the wording of the last verse that we talked about from Alma 28. There's a Really fascinating engagement with Jesus's New Testament sayings about faith So Alma I talked about if you neglect the tree and take no thought for its nourishment Jesus uses this in multiple teachings most particularly the Sermon on the Mount that same phrase take no thought And it's only used in these teachings in the scriptures LDS cannon and these teachings by Jesus about faith and in Alma 32 and Here Jesus says you know take no thought for your life and basically says like God God will take care of you like the grass of the field Alma 32 Really radically reformulates this idea because in Alma 32 it's Taking no thought Is it's not a good thing. This is not an act of faith. This is an act of unfaith if you take no thought Instead of exercising one's faith by taking no thought like the grasses of the field and Alma 32's vision of faith One exercises faith by taking thought like the farmer or the gardener who cultivates the grasses So I'm a 32 shifts Jesus's metaphor from one about nature to one about agriculture the same praise in a different tense here Took no thought is used in the Book of Mormon and a negative example in the war chapters It's used in DNC 9 when Oliver Cowdery misunderstands the translation process and fails to translate because he took no thought So where the phrasing about taking no thought occurs in the New Testament, it's viewed favorably This is an expression of full and fixed faith in God But where the phrase is deployed in LDS scripture It becomes primarily negative a failure to think wisely and take the personal initiative that God expects of us So the the Book of Mormon is using the same words here, but they're radically Repurposed what the Book of Mormon does here with the sayings of Jesus is it puts them in dialogue with one another and With the post-enlightenment worldview of the book's audience It's the people in the 19th century in us And repurposing the phrase take no thought and framing it negatively instead of positively It's as if LDS scripture is saying Show me your faith without thought and I will show you my faith by my thought The role of this idea of taking thought in the process of faith can be seen even better when we look more closely at Alma 32 And I'm gonna have to go through this really quick So it's the analogy the seed starts out awake and arouse your faculties So the year before the Book of Mormon is published fortune or Dictated fortunately, no Webster does the first American dictionary the English language This word arouse to excite into action that which is at rest to stir put in motion or exertion etc Dormant which he uses and is used later in Alma 32 in sleeping at rest not in action faculty the powers of the mind or intellect so When he says awake and arouse your faculties even to an experiment on my word We can sum that up with these definitions. He's saying wake up your sleeping mind and put it to work That's how we begin to exercise faith Intellect during the exercise of faith isn't supposed to be turned off. It's supposed to become more active So how do we put our minds to work in faith? And here It's we arouse our faculties to an experiment. So there's an experimental method by which we put our faith into action We also got In Alma 32 we've got this language right experiment dormant particle Now I had meant to leave the title off of that and ask Like what is this the language of you know, is this the language of traditional religion? experiment particle Dormant this no, obviously this is this is the language of science And I'm gonna need to skip ahead a little Actually checked and there's another word in there that was very interesting discernible Which at the time meant discoverable and I did a search on Google books up to 1830 For those terms that I just had up there and discernible and two books came up and the two books are a scientific and medical dictionary and John Locke's an essay concerning human understanding so what What's a Dipperly quickly back in Alma 32 and ask what is faith? I think a good clue is right here where it's It says that when you have reached a certain point in your experiment Your knowledge is perfect in that thing that the seed is good in other words that it grows and your faith is dormant in that thing right So something can only be Dormant if it can be active something can only be asleep if it can be awake And so faith on this understanding is not a passive something that's there. It's not just holding a belief faith is an active process so an implication that I Draw from this basically is that all faith is what I would call transfaith it all aims at something beyond itself Once faith reaches what lies beyond it or what the thing that it aims at It ceases to be faith and to continue the process the faith then needs to be aimed at a new horizon and Going over Alma 32 a bunch of times and trying to figure out, you know, like close reading what what is faith? This is the definition that I've come up with Working definition faith is experimental hope that initiates and sustains the processes of discovery Achievement and growth for Presses Latter-day Saints those of us who are Experimentation then isn't just a scientific concept or practice. It's also a religious concept in practice Faith as presented in Alma 32 isn't the passive reception of belief It's not the active attempt either to force oneself to believe the unbelievable It's kind of experimental science in the spiritual domain In Closing This paper really made me think that doing this that as Mormons we need to learn to do midrash We need to learn to I don't know how many are familiar with this Jewish tradition of really like engaging the texts and basically writing a kind of new narrative that Deals with the problems that are in the text and applies them more to our lives I think we see something like that in Alma 32 and I hope that We will try experiments like that and others and use our Practical faith. Thank you