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A fact from Ammonihah appeared on Misplaced Pages's Main Page in the Did you know column on 21 December 2022 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows: Did you know... that in the Book of Mormon, the city of Ammonihah kills Christians by fire as a deliberately twisted reference to a warning that spiritual death is like a "lake of fire and brimstone"? A record of the entry may be seen at Misplaced Pages:Recent additions/2022/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Ammonihah.

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Untitled

The story of Alma and Amulek in Ammonihah is more properly told, IMO, in their articles. I'm not sure Ammonihah warrants a separate article. andersonpd 00:45, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Misplaced Pages talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Kingsif (talk) 04:54, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

• Comment or view
• Article history

• ... that in the story of the Book of Mormon, the city of Ammonihah kills Christians by fire (pictured) as a deliberate reference to a prophet's warning that spiritual death is like a "lake of fire and brimstone"? Source: 'the "chief judge of the land" asks… "After what ye have seen, will ye preach again unto this people, that they shall be cast into a lake of fire and brimstone?" (Alma 14:14). The chief judge is obviously equating Alma's doctrinal fire with Ammonihah's literal fire.' From Kylie Nielson Turley, "Alma's Hell: Repentance, Consequence, and the Lake of Fire and Brimstone", Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 28 (2019): 20.
  • ALT1: ... that in the story of the Book of Mormon, the city of Ammonihah kills Christians by fire (pictured) as a deliberately twisted reference to a warning that spiritual death is like a "lake of fire and brimstone"? Source: Identical to ALT0 plus 'they use Alma's "words of God" and twist them into a method of mass killing' from Kylie Nielson Turley, "Alma's Hell: Repentance, Consequence, and the Lake of Fire and Brimstone", Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 28 (2019): 20.
  • ALT2: ... that in the Book of Mormon, after the city of Ammonihah mass kills converts by fire (pictured) , the "lake of fire and brimstone" imagery used earlier in the book to describe spiritual death is never repeated? Source: 'Prior to this event, the "lake of fire and brimstone" imagery is used multiple times… Yet when the chief judge asks if they will teach about burning fires again, the answer is silence not just for Alma and Amulek, but for the entire Book of Mormon. The sudden extinction of this phrase… No one in the Book of Mormon will ever preach of a "lake of fire and brimstone" again.' from Kylie Nielson Turley, "Alma's Hell: Repentance, Consequence, and the Lake of Fire and Brimstone", Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 28 (2019): 38.
  • ALT3: ... that cartoonist John Held Jr.'s father John Held Sr. made woodblock prints depicting Ammonihah (pictured), a city described in the Book of Mormon? Source: 'Held conveys high drama in his woodblock print The Martyrdoms at Ammonihah" and "Held's catastrophic image Deliverance of Alma and Amulek' from Noel A. Carmack, "'A Picturesque and Dramatic History': George Reynolds's Story of the Book of Mormon", BYU Studies 47, no. 2 (2008): 130; and 'John Held married Annie Evans… the couple had six children, the most famous of whom was the eldest, John Held, Jr.' from Gary Topping, "Held, John", in Utah History Encyclopedia (University of Utah Press, 1994), online repr. via Utah Educational Network.
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Elisabeth_Griffith ‎
  • Comment: DYK check tool does not seem to be registering the fivefold expansion as described by RfC. Although the page was longer a bit more than six years ago, that unsourced, non-neutral content was long since been deleted such that "the day before the expander began substantive work on it" (RfC on fivefold expansion) it was a 228-character stub. After expansion, begun November 19, the page is now 11915 characters. Really thought the tool was giving back a negative result, but now when I check it's fine? Which I guess is good.

5x expanded by Hydrangeans (talk). Self-nominated at 02:25, 20 November 2022 (UTC).

Overall: @Hydrangeans: Good expansion! Will have to AGF on the sources I can't access and approve. Onegreatjoke (talk) 02:50, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks very much for the review! Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 20:22, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

Sidebar

@P-Makoto: what does WP:CLN have to do with this? The quoted bit of CLN ("The collection of articles in a sidebar template should be fairly tightly related,") appears to be talking about the articles within the navbox not the placement of the navbox on articles. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:19, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

It makes sense to centralize this conversation at Template talk:Book of Mormon#Content in this template that is redundant with other templates. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 18:24, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Why? They're entirely different discussions on equal level talk pages and this one was opened first... So if we're even considering centralizing its here, not there. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:28, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Cleanup tags

I tagged the article with a number of tags because the structure is greatly lacking here. It is not at all clear what we are supposed to be learning from this article. It's a city mentioned in the Book of Mormon. It apparently features in some Mormon art and literature. Is that important or noticed. I think a complete restructuring/reframing of this article is in order. jps (talk) 10:53, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Acknowledging my past connection to BYU as a student employee, I think it's appropriate to answer in this thread since I significantly contributed to this page (it having spent years before that as a primary source POV stub narrated in the past tense initially added by unrelated editors (who I would guess may have been Mormons back in the early 2000s).

The structure of this article is like those of GAs about topics that appear in literature, like Pippin Took (permanent link), The Shire (permanent link), and The Scouring of the Shire (permanent link): a synopsis, a setting geography, and a summary of secondary source analysis. I added a Background section to explain elements of the Book of Mormon plot relevant to making sense of the synopsis and summarized analysis (like the Nephites and Lamanites, the Alma/Nehor plot, the meta-plot about the principal narrator, etc.).

By way of aside, while I can understand why you deleted the reference to a date, my understanding was that it was neutral because it was like saying that Jean Valjean was born in 1769, even though there's obviously no academic consensus such a thing ever happened: it's referring to the time period of the setting, rather than making a claim about external reality. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 20:35, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

This is not an article about a literary work. This is an article about a city that is mentioned in a sacred text. As such, it holds specific meaning for a believer and that is its primary notability if it has any. The question is, what meaning do believers give to this city and how widespread is that understanding? That's the first question to answer because there is not any real city of Ammonihah to discuss and given that this was probably made up it is worth exploring how and why such things were made up. What was the context in nineteenth century upstate New York that would have inspired this particular set of stories to be told? All of that is absolutely missing from the article and, as such, makes the thing entirely incomplete. jps (talk) 00:29, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, the Book of Mormon is a sacred text of a multi-denominational religious movement. Simultaneously, it's also a book, a narrative with a plot, subplots, and meta-plot. The current state of Book of Mormon studies emphasizes literary analysis. For a summary of that trend, see this article by literary critic Grant Shreve (who is not a Mormon) for Religion & Politics, "The Book of Mormon Gets the Literary Treatment" (Religion & Politics is an online news journal published by Washington University in St. Louis's John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics]]).

Asking what meaning do believers give to this city and how widespread is that understanding is an interesting question about reception history, a kind of media/social history, different from the very textually-focused literary approach apparently more common in the last decade of Book of Mormon studies. Since Misplaced Pages summarizes what's in secondary sources, if we find reception history in secondary sources, then that'd be something to summarize. If we find literary-narrative approaches instead, then I'm not so clear on why that shouldn't be something to summarize. If academics like Shreve, Elizabeth Fenton, and Seth Perry (all non-Mormons) assess the book as literature, then it seems natural for Misplaced Pages to summarize assessments in that vein. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 06:19, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

You don't get to make declarations about "current trends" in Mormon studies by quoting an OpEd piece in Deseret.com We are here to provide people with information. Articles on the Book of Mormon as literature really ought to be separate from articles on the subjects of the Book of Mormon because "treatment as literature" is a choice that essentially refuses to engage with wider context. I have absolutely no issue with including such analysis as a section of this article, but as the only approach it cannot be. The attempted rehabilitation by, let's be honest, almost all believing Mormons to this effect functions as a way to sidestep the obviously thorny issue that dealing with the history/archaeology/etc. of any of this leads to the obvious conclusion that it did not happen. Not that we have to beat the reader over the head with that, but Misplaced Pages is not a literary criticism journal. We are here to do the best we can to talk about what is known about a subject and how it is couched by scholars. I see here no attempt at contextualization and if that's because the literature in Mormon Studies is avoiding the same (much the same as how, for example, cold fusion papers avoid discussing the obvious pathological science nature fo the subject), then it's not ready for Misplaced Pages. jps (talk) 11:27, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

I linked to an article in Religion & Politics written by a non-Mormon with a PhD in American literature. The Deseret News link was only to verify that Grant Shreve isn't a Mormon. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 17:24, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

And I'm perplexed by you saying that this effort is led by "believing Mormons" when I just told you that the scholars mentioned in the Religion & Politics article aren't Mormons.

• Grant Shreve writes, I did not, in other words, become a Latter-day Saint. Mine was an aesthetic experience, not a religious one; For someone like me, whose interest in the Book of Mormon is entirely removed from any church affiliation (in I fell hard for the Book of Mormon but did not convert to the LDS Church Deseret News, May 30, 2017. Again, this is cited only to have a source written by the person self-indicating not being Mormon)
• Seth Perry says, I should be clear that I am writing as a non-Mormon in his review of The Book of Mormon: Brief Theological Introductions, in the Mormon Studies Review 10 (2023): 70–74, here 71.
• Elizabeth Fenton says, I was raised Catholic in an interfaith household in rural Vermont, a state with a Congregational church on every corner that doesn’t have a Baptist church and I wanted to enter this conversation as a scholar of early US literature and as someone who loved the book immediately upon reading it but did not believe it to be a sacred text, in her article "Understanding the Book of Mormon", Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 25 (2016): 37–51, here 38.

In any case, no, Misplaced Pages is not a literary criticism journal, no. It's not any particular kind of journal. It's an encyclopedia that summarizes secondary sources. If the academic approach to a topic is literary then it makes sense to cite and summarize that. If the academic approach to a topic is bioengineering, then it makes sense to cite that. if the academic approach to a topic is anthropological then it makes sense to cite that. Etc. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 17:41, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

No... you are absolutely missuing the R&P piece to make a sweeping claim that does not appear there. That piece is not arguing that the "primary treatment" for the Book of Mormon is literary. It's just arguing that literary analysis of the Book of Mormon is happening. jps (talk) 19:21, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

I think we both know the primary treatment of the Book of Mormon is uncritically devotional, in Sunday School manuals directly published by the LDS Church written by Mormons who believe it all happened. That's not NPOV, so we don't cite or summarize it. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 05:09, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Oh no! We absolutely should cite and summarize that if it is documented by third-party independent sources coming from, say, the sociology of religion. jps (talk) 05:52, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, a good distinction to point out. Then it's not devotional coverage; it's sociological/anthropological coverage of devotionalism, in which we are certainly interested. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 06:01, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm glad we agree on that! This is, in fact, one of my primary concerns going through all the Book of Mormon articles. I really want to know how Mormons think about these stories and that kind of analysis is missing. It may be because not enough research has been done on each and every detail, but without this kind of context it becomes harder to understand exactly why a certain detail from the Book of Mormon deserves a standalone article. At some point, we are going to have to look at how to establish notability for the massive number of forked articles and I don't think mere mention in a more extensive source is good enough. I will be looking for entire works or at least sections of works that deal substantively with the subject of the article. So far, that has been really scant which is concerning, but one thing at a time. Even if a lot of these articles are not notable enough for standalone articles, the content can be merged upstream to articles which are inarguably notable. But I'll stop getting ahead of myself now. jps (talk) 12:48, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Note too that Joseph Smith's disdain for judges and lawyers was pretty well known even at the point that he authored the Book of Mormon. Pillorying a city filled with them? There are definitely some interesting points to be made about that kind of literary dramaturgy. :) jps (talk) 00:39, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Also, because this is not a literary work, it's hard to know how to handle specific dates. If the text mentions such dates, sure. If there are believers who associate such dates strongly and with purpose, then we should explain that if not here then on some page that details why dates are so important to people who believe in the Book of Mormon. But putting in a date without that needed context is dressing it up as a history that it is not and that serves a particular exegetical purpose which is best left to other venues. jps (talk) 00:59, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

As for dates, the text mentions the Babylonian Captivity, which happens in the Bible circa 600 B. C. E.. I don't know whether the year "600 B. C. E." is fixed in Mormon brains; I cited the number from secondary sources that use the "600 B. /600 B. C. E." to describe the temporal setting of the Book of Mormon narrative. This article cites the historian Richard Bushman, who makes the statement about the described departure of Lehi. Religious studies scholar Laurie Maffly-Kipp (who is not a Latter-day Saint) uses dates in a similar way in her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the Book of Mormon while summarizing the meta-plot about recordkeeping: Along with the brass plates, the plates of Nephi consist of gathered records from many of the prophets and leaders of the Nephite people between approximately 600 BCE and the appearance of Jesus in the early first century CE. (page x). P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 06:09, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Richard Bushman is not a reliable source for dates associated with the Book of Mormon. He thinks the stuff obviously happened. jps (talk) 11:27, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

This strikes me as an unworkable standard. Bushman is published by Oxford University Press, which is clearly independent of the church, and their Very Short Introductions are targeted to non-specialists. I understand the concerns about "walled garden" scholarship on LDS topics, but this seems like the exact kind of source that breaks down those walls.

Would you apply this criteria to all religious scholarship? Are Catholic authors inherently unreliable when discussing the Bible or Popes, even if Oxford or Cambridge publishes them? Ghosts of Europa (talk) 17:35, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

That's my sense too. It is one thing to object to a denominationally associated publisher, even if we disagree about the extents of doing so, but to insist that an author published by a major press, like a university press or Penguin or Alfred A. Knopf seems like an overreaching standard that somehow implies the publisher doesn't play any role at all, which seems entirely untrue. To publish a book with a press requires submitting a manuscript and the publisher reviewing that manuscript and providing feedback, or even a rejection. University presses often even send the book out for a peer review. If Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction were some screed about how the ruins of Zarahemla are totally in Iowa or whatever, Oxford wouldn't have published it. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 17:50, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Certain Catholic scholars aren't reliable for discussing, for example, the Shroud of Turin, absolutely. That's just how it goes. It so happens that the main dispute is that this book is an entire fabrication so someone who is writing as though it is not is not reliable. It's not as though Bushman is saying something along the lines of "for the sake of argument... let's try to figure out how this lines up." No: Bushman is aiming to set a date for the Book of Mormon events because he wants people to believe they actually happened. I don't care who the publisher is. Publishers will publish anything if they think enough people will by it. That goes especially for OUP which is kinda notorious for just putting any old drivel out there. jps (talk) 19:17, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

I find "approximately 600 BCE" to be a slightly better indicator, but is there any discussion of whether and how that particular timeframe was on the mind of the author of the text? I get the distinct impression that rather than specific dates, the author was trying to tie the story to the biblical story of the captivity and didn't much care when exactly it happened. It's not as though Joseph Smith (or his co-conspirators) included dates in the text, right? jps (talk) 11:34, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

We are both free to pursue this interesting original research question about what may or may not have been in the heads of the book's makers. I think Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Richard Bushman say 'approximately/around 600 B. C. E. ' because that tells the reader more about how long ago the Book's setting supposedly is than a phrase like "ahead of the Babylonian Captivity", which I wouldn't have known the approximate time frame of unless I looked it up.

The Book contains internal references to years passing. Maffly-Kipp's sums it up in stating that the effect is that the plot happens across more than a thousand years within the story. Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman summarize similarly in their introduction to Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon (Oxford University Press, 2019), 1–18, here 2: narrating, in the main, the 1,000-year history of a group of Israelites who, in advance of the diaspora forced by the Babylonian invasion, escaped to the Americas around 600 BCE. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 18:09, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

I wouldn't have known the approximate time frame of unless I looked it up But that's the beauty of Misplaced Pages. You can wikilink to the article and if someone wants to know more about it, they can look there. This has the added benefit of not importing the not-insignificant disputes that go on over the historicity of that Biblical account. jps (talk) 19:17, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

I guess I question why the 1000 years is at all relevant to our task here. What does the reader gain from knowing that it is 1000 years versus some other number? Unless there is some reason to add up all the years, I guess I don't understand the point of doing so and it brings up more questions than it resolves. jps (talk) 19:17, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm not a Christian. I'm pretty familiar with the Bible, but not the Book of Mormon. I haven't read it, and I hadn't heard of Ammonihah before yesterday. I'm generally interested in religious stories. Hopefully my perspective is useful.

• I think this article does a good job providing context. I understand where it falls in the overall Book of Mormon narrative and its relevance to the LDS church, and I appreciate the reference points to more familiar Biblical stories (like comparing Alma's repentance to Paul's).
  • That said, I would appreciate more info on what it means to be Christian before Jesus' birth.
• I'm not sure what the "excessive examples" tag refers to.
• I agree that the article is way too detailed and gets lost in the weeds. I think the narrative section could be 50% shorter without losing much. I'd be happy to take an editing pass and try to streamline it.
• I'm not sure what undue weight this lends. It's clearly contextualized as a religious narrative, and the article doesn't claim the city was historical. The article could be improved with some material explicitly about its historicity or Joseph Smith's own view of lawyers, but it doesn't feel biased.

As for what I'm supposed to be learning, I found the Intertextuality and Interpretation sections interesting! I learned about a religious narrative from a religion that's clearly important, how people interpret it, and how it's related to more well-known narratives from the Bible. I do think the lede could make a better case for notability; the woodblock prints aren't much of a hook. But I didn't find this proselytizing and it didn't feel like a Fandom article.

Any objection to me splitting off these different concerns into separate threads? I think that will make this easier to follow and discuss. Ghosts of Europa (talk) 18:53, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

The excessive examples refers to the laundry list of sources that have mentioned Ammonihah for various purposes. It is possible that there may be a way to more fluidly incorporate this into article text, but right now it reads to me like a long list of examples. Sometimes tags are hard to get exactly right, sorry. I think I don't disagree with anything you are saying here, but I think we really need to do some hard work to get this to a point where someone might be able to come to this article and really understand what about this subject deserves discussing and why. jps (talk) 19:08, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Should have mentioned, the article is primarily a literary analysis of the use of this city in the Book of Mormon. That is undue weight to a particular approach to studying the Book of Mormon which is not the primary approach that people who, y'know, actually read the Book of Mormon have with the text. Literary analysis and criticism can be part of this article but to make the entire article about it is overdone to say the least. And we're left with a buncha unanswered questions as to, for example, why the hell did Joseph Smith bother to make up this silly story? Y'know? jps (talk) 20:33, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

why the hell did Joseph Smith bother to make up this silly story?

William L. Davis, Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), page 160: a careful review of historical claims favors the idea that Joseph Smith himself sincerely believed, to one degree or another, that his epic work contained an authentic historical account of ancient American civilizations. Whether the process was as conscious yet credulous as Davis argues, or as subconscious yet credulous as Ann Taves argues (in her Revelatory Events ), the "make up" description doesn't really capture the sociocultural experience under study. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 21:00, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

What does that have to do with Ammonihah? I want to know why this particular city was invented. What is the purpose? What is the context? What is the goal of telling this story? jps (talk) 21:02, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

According to Dan Vogel (Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet pages 219-20) Smith may have been pushing back on Unitarian-Universalism, which his father was courting at the time. And maybe the imprisonment and lawyers part was influenced by Smith's legal troubles in 1826. And in my opinion (I don't have a source on had to back this bit up) Smith was taking a stab at the age-old question of why a good God would let bad things happen to good people. ~Awilley (talk) 21:53, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

How does Ammonihah push against unitarians? Were the judges and lawyers in the area unitarians or something? I'm also baffled by how this story says anything about theodicy. Still, that's much closer to the sort of analysis that would make a good article about these subjects than what I currently see. jps (talk) 22:07, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Awilley: According to Dan Vogel (Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet pages 219-20)

Vogel says some interesting things about the Book of Mormon, but I've been reluctant to cite them beyond his observations about biblical intertextuality because of Ann Taves's criticism of Vogel's approach in her "History and the Claims of Revelation: Joseph Smith and the Materialization of the Golden Plates", Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 61, no. 2–3 (Brill, 2014): 182–207. The difficulty is that Vogel attributes to Smith conscious misdirection/deception, something both Ann Taves and William L. Davis (both publishing in more rigorous venues than Signature Books) thoroughly disagree with. Vogel's interpretation that Smith was intentionally trying to get Smith Sr. to drop Universalism makes less sense in light of Taves & Davis's more current consensus that Smith believed in the Book of Mormon and was (according to Taves) dictating it from a subconscious/sort of automatic state (and therefore wasn't writing things with intent) or was (according to Davis) dictating it with the intent to narrate a history he believed was real (and therefore wasn't writing as a reaction to Smith Sr; Davis holds that Smith Jr. had mentally mapped the book for years).

JPS: I'm also baffled by how this story says anything about theodicy.

Mea culpa if the summarization currently in the article doesn't clearly explain what the secondary sources say. The point I tried to get across is that the literary/theological assessment is that the Ammonihah plot calls theodicy into question: a very unconvincing explanation for why God lets bad things happen to the converts in Ammonihah is put into the mouth of Alma, while he's supposedly watching people get burned alive, and that explanation, that theodicy, falls flat. That's from Salleh & Olsen Hemming (2022) and Hardy (2023) assessments. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 22:42, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

I think the problem here is that the people you are citing actually believe the truth of this story so they struggle with theodicy because they are "rooting for the good guys". But is there any evidence whatsoever that this was the motivation of the author? Theodicy was not the concern in 1830 Americas which were still in the thrall of Calvinism and predestination (one of Weber's three forms of resolution to the trilemma) and it beggars belief to think that the fabulists of the Book of Mormon were trying to come up with a story that would push their followers into consternation as though the story is a new Job or something. I do not begrudge these threetwo-and-a-half Mormons their struggles with theodicy vis-a-vis this story, but that's surely irrelevant to our encyclopedic charge. This is all just small group sharing among obscure scholars. This isn't what the city of Ammonihah is about. jps (talk) 00:01, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

If there was evidence that this story was a major bone of contention among Mormons due to the theodicy concerns, I would be delighted. But this is just random thoughts of obscure academics... unnoticed by the larger scholarship that, you know, actually studies theodicy. People like Mark Larrimore at the New School, for example. jps (talk) 00:04, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

You sound very invested in either an authorial reading (presuming that an author must somehow intend a meaning for it to be "real") or a reception history (presuming that a mass audience must believe the author intends a meaning for it to be "real"). Some forms of literary criticism are interested in authorial intent. But it's also possible for books to mean things their authors don't intend. Tolkien swore up and down that "The Scouring of the Shire" wasn't an allegory for postwar Britain—and since he'd been writing and planning the story since 1939, that makes sense; how could he have planned to write an allegory about something that happened yet?—yet literary critics still read it as such.

As for reception, the first readers of The Lord of the Rings in the 1940s and 1950s didn't consider the "The Scouring of the Shire" an environmental treatise, yet since the 1970s eco-literary criticism has read it as a call to environmentalism.

This isn't what the city of Ammonihah is about. (italics original to the post)

This is a thesis that could guide interesting original research. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 00:21, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Nah, I'm not particularly invested in the authorial reading, but I am absolutely interested in reception history because, ultimately, that's all Misplaced Pages ever cares about. Unlike the Tolkein example, these theodicy claims are so obscure that there is no dialogue to be had about it even. My conclusion: remove that discussion entirely. It's not encyclopedic as it has been noticed by essentially no one. jps (talk) 00:29, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I do not begrudge these three Mormons By way of aside, it'd been my impression that Fatimah Salleh is a Protestant minister—hence she is called the Reverend Fatimah Salleh, a title not used in Mormonism. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 06:15, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

It's possible, surely. But why are you hung up on who is or isn't Mormon? Whether Mormon or someone who wants/is paid to help Mormons deal with their incredible racism, it's all the same in the context of our work here. The real question is, who other than Mormons cares? jps (talk) 07:15, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

But why are you hung up on who is or isn't Mormon?

It's hard to treat this question credulously when it seems patently obvious you are the one, between the two of us, who is hung up on who is or isn't Mormon. You explicitly described the authors as these three Mormons, said immediately thereafter the material is surely irrelevant to our encyclopedic charge (because, it seems, they're Mormons writing about a Mormon thing), and it was you who brought up the apparent unacceptability of this being as you describe it a Mormon discourse that has been noticed by essentially no one (italics original to jps). If I mention that an author isn't a Latter-day Saint, it's to remind us that those statements aren't accurate. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 07:41, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I think you have greatly misunderstood my evaluation so let me try to explain: The religious identities of the authors hardly matters. After all, people could publish things anonymously or cynically or from some sort of "thought exercise" approach. What matters is the reception and seriousness of how the source was received by others. That means citations. This is the problem. In many of these cases we have sources which adopt a faith-based POV that lacks any context. Because these sources are not cited by others, we can't really contextualize them for what they are. That's why they typically need to be excised. The reason is that such sources radically violate WP:WEIGHT clause of NPOV. All we can go on in the talkpage is an attempt to try to understnd what the source is doing and as an aid to article writing, I think it is worthwhile to point out what is going on in the sources as a practical matter (for example, both sources you are using for the theodicy ideas are 100% uncritically starting from the perspective of a Mormon believer whether the authors are believers or not -- that's the ideological ground of being that these sources occupy and we ought to be honest about that). jps (talk) 12:54, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Alternate Interpretation

Psychiatrist and Mormon scholar Robert D. Anderson considers this story a violent revenge fantasy written by Joseph Smith, whom he diagnoses with both narcissistic and anti-social personality disorder. Anderson notes that the Ammonihah narrative, unlike most of the Book of Mormon, emphasizes the specific dates of its events. He notes that these events parallel an episode of Smith's life, with Alma corresponding to Smith, Amulek to Joseph Stoal, and Ammonihah to the town of South Bainbridge, where Smith was briefly imprisoned. In Anderson's reading, the violent destruction of Ammonihah is Smith's revenge for the "humiliation" of this imprisonment.

1. Anderson, Robert D. (2013). "The Conquest of Humiliation: A Psychobiographical Inquiry into the Book of Mormon—Characters and Chronology". The John Whitmer Historical Association Journal. 33 (1): 154–169. ISSN 0739-7852.

• Should we add this as a subsection? Is it reliable? Neutral?
• Does this count as an "LDS Source"? Remarkably, the author self identifies as a Mormon(!), but this is clearly not the official view of the church.

Ghosts of Europa (talk) 00:14, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I remember reading that article, but I didn't summarize the interpretation because I'm persuaded by Hugh Trevor-Roper that pyschobiography/psychohistory (permanent link) rests on a "defective philosophy" and entails a "defective method". Anderson's argument involves Smith's subconscious doing some remarkable calendrical maths to convert Gregorian years to Nephite ones. It'd be like summarizing claims about finding the ruins of Ammonihah. P-Makoto (she/her) (talk) 00:24, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

I think I agree with that psychobiography is not worthy of inclusion here unless noticed by others. Who cites that account? jps (talk) 05:23, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

To answer my own question since I just went through a source culling: the answer is no one. A shame. It's a cool idea. But it needs to be noticed first. jps (talk) 14:22, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

Removing sources with 0 citations

I just went through and removed all sources with 0 citations as a means to start to deal with the WP:FRINGE WP:OR walled garden in this website. It was really concerning to me how many sources were being used that had 0 citations in Google Scholar. However, there were some good sources being used that I have kept. Even if there was 1 citation, I kept the source, but I think the threshold probably ought to be at a number higher than 1 citation due to issues of citogenesis. I am very concerned that sources have been used which essentially have no citation from anyone else. This is exactly the sort of problem I'm seeing in most Book of Mormon articles.

jps (talk) 13:42, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

• Misplaced Pages Did you know articles
• Start-Class Latter Day Saint movement articles
• Low-importance Latter Day Saint movement articles
• WikiProject Latter Day Saint movement articles
• Start-Class Literature articles
• Unknown-importance Literature articles