Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Warmest Stories podcast. I'm your host John DeLin. It is May 31st,

2022. I am here in studio with my partner in righteousness, Harado. Hey, Harado. Hey John. Thanks for

Being with us and arranging this today. Yeah. Yeah. Really excited to get into part two. Yeah

Yeah, so we just spent a good three and a half hours interviewing Dr. Thomas Murphy about the second half of kind of his

life and career both as an anthropologist and within the realm of Mormon studies. I won't take the time to recap what we've covered in what six seven hours of interviews or more between. I guess those first two parts and then today.

Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot, but it's all really good. We are now going to kind of pivot a little bit and we are going to be covering a really cool topic.

That is titled Race and Gender in the Book of Mormon and it's based on maybe a few articles that Thomas has written, but the one that caught my eye that I noticed from some engagements offline with Thomas is an article called Sin,

Skin and Seed, Mistakes of Men in the Book of Mormon, but there are a couple other ones as well, imagining Lamanites, Native Americans in the Book of Mormon and other scriptures restoring voices of the Ganto. I can't even pronounce that.

Gantoesis, Gantoesis to an open kin. So basically we're going to be talking about the Book of Mormon, Race, Gender, Dark Skin, Curses, Seed, Genetics, Rodney, Melgium. It's all going to be in this multi hour dive into Race and the Book of Mormon. And we have back Dr. Thomas Murphy, a Thomas.

Great to be back, John. And thanks for this invitation. And it was kind of your invitation to discuss this that got Harado and I talking in this together. So that Sin, Skin and Seed article, it's an old article now. So it was published in 2005, but I had written portions of it at least very early right after my

Near Excommunication over DNA. It was kind of my next article following up on the DNA. I did this one. And then I also did one called Simply Implausible DNA and a Mesoamerican Setting for the Book of Mormon. And this one I presented at Edmonds College and those that are big YouTube fans can find it by that name. Sin, Skin and Seed, my old 2000 and three presentation. I had a lot less gray.

And I didn't have a beard and I wore contacts. So you might not recognize me. But that's out there an early version of this. I presented a later version that would get published at the community of Christ has an annual conference just like the Eldiest Church. They have a general conference. And the John Whitmer Historical Association hosts a spring banquet before their spring general conference.

And in 2004, they invited me to be the keynote speaker at that spring banquet. And this presentation, I delivered to an audience of John Whitmer Historical members and the church authorities for the community of Christ, the general authorities were in the audience and it was actually quite well received.

Well, fun. Well, let's dive in, shall we? If you wanted to give an introduction or an overview of what we're going to be covering, how would you frame it?

I would frame it as an argument. And the argument is this, the concepts of race and gender that appear in the Book of Mormon reflect a 19th century mistakes of men.

So key parts of that is that really the concepts, the racial and gender based concepts that appear in the Book of Mormon give us actually really useful tools in timing when was the Book of Mormon written.

Because the concepts of race and gender change over time. And so we can actually pinpoint them very clearly to the 1820s, basically by history, by the history of ideas.

Okay, there also a mistake of men in the sense that they're not true. Okay, the concepts of race and gender as presented in the in in the Book of Mormon do not match what we know today from biological sciences.

So that means that whether whether you believe those ideas are originated with Joseph Smith, like I think, or if you believe they originated with Mormon or Nephi, I regardless their mistakes of men, they're not true.

And that's how you have today some Paul just saying, well, the Book of Mormon is not racist, but Nephi might have been racist.

Definitely was. Yeah, we can agree there. We can agree there. And I'm going to explain why, basically.

And the term mistakes of men, you may, you may be referencing this later, but that comes from the Book of Mormon, the text book of Mormon itself, which says what?

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