TG Dreams 34 - Alma 30

In Alma 30, Korihor takes up a position quite familiar to a modern reader.  But its like can be traced back before Lucretius.  Korihor, in contrast to Jacob, emphasizes the unreal, dreamlike character of spirituality and forcefully contrasts it with what he considers to be true reality - the cold, hard facts revealed by limiting our information to our senses. 

He paints religious tradition and religious experience with a very unforgiving brush.  His words attempt to portray it as

• "ignorance" (v. 23)
• "foolish and vain hope" (v. 13)
• "foolish traditions" (v. 14, 23), the "traditions of your fathers" (v. 16), or the even "silly traditions of their fathers" (v. 31).
• "the effects of a frenzied mind" or "this derangement of your minds" (v. 16)
• this frenzy and derangement specifically includes all spiritual experiences, from the sense of guilt attached to our moral sense, the experience of divine forgiveness, and any supposed revelation in the form of dreams and visions (v. 28)
• especially singled out for ridicule among spiritual experiences and traditions is the concept of "prophecies" (v. 6, 14), a belief that through God men could be shown the future.  And among prophecies, he is particularly critical of those that speak of the coming of a Messiah and an atonement.
• not content to style spiritual experiences as mental derangements, he suggests that some of them are deceptions - pretended mysteries and whims (v. 28) of those who want to control others.

From his point of view, this nonsensical approach to life gives believers the following characteristics:

• they end up with a belief in things they "cannot know" (v.15) and "which are not so" (v. 16)
• these are "foolish things" (v. 13), which "keep them in ignorance" (v. 23)
• they believe things about the future (which is really completely unknown)- specifically about the coming of a messiah or "Christ" (v. 6) who should "be slain for the sins of the world" (v. 26)
• they have a mistaken notion that mankind is "guilty and fallen" (v. 25),
• They thus believe in a need for a "remission of sins" (v. 16)
• these things they believe limit their freedom - they "yoke" them (v. 13), deceived people "bind themselves down under foolish ordinances and performances" (v. 23), in a position where they "durst not enjoy their rights and privileges" (v. 27), because they fear to "offend some unknown being, who they say is God" (v. 28)
• In fact religion is a tool of priests "to usurp power and authority over them" and to bring them down (v. 23).  Religious leaders purposefully keep people in ignorance (v. 23), to "keep them down, even as it were in bondage" (v. 27) that they "durst not look up with boldness"
• The motives of these leaders is to get "according to your own desires" and to "glut yourselves with the labors of their hands" (v. 27).

Reality, on the other hand, must be approached with the following assumptions:

• no man can know anything which is to come (v. 13)
• what you know is only what you perceive, what you see (v. 15)
• therefore God is out!  He is "a being who never has been seen or known" (v. 28)
• The only way a person might accept the existence of God would be the evidence of one's physical senses - the reception of some kind of a physical "sign" (v. 43).

The characteristics of the reality he perceives in this way are as follows:

• "Ye cannot know of things which ye do not see" (v. 15)
• "Therefore ye cannot know that there shall  be a Christ (v. 15)
• In fact, there will be no messiah, no "Christ" (v. 12)
• "there could no atonement be made for the sins of men" (v. 17)
• "when a man was dead, that was the end thereof" (v. 18)
• In the cold hard light of the senses it was obvious that life was structured in a Darwinian manner (v. 17)

                    "every man fared in this life according to the management of the creature"
                    "every man prospered according to his genius"
                    "every man conquered according to his strength"     
                    "whatsoever a man did was no crime"
                    you don't have to be ashamed of anything really,
                    men can "lift up their heads in their wickedness"
                    specifically in pursuing sexual desires - "committing whoredoms" (v. 18).