NOM

I was thinking about the crickets and seagulls myth that we all grew up with and how it's a classic tale of getting physical rewards by coloring inside the lines of the follow-the-prophet model. But did you know there was another invasion even more dire, when grasshoppers came and ate all of the crops? The grasshoppers were so thick visitors mistook them at first for a ground fog. No seagulls miracle was attached to that event, so we never hear about it.

While I was thinking about this it occurred to me what a different story this is if viewed from a different perspective. The pioneers were agriculturists, so their survival depended on planting and harvesting a successful crop of cereal grain. BUT the local Native Americans were hunter-gatherers. It just so happens that grasshoppers were a nutritious and tasty part of their diet. So this event, that to the pioneers probably looked like God was punishing them for not paying enough tithing, or whatever, from the Indian perspective might have looked like the Great Spirit was rewarding them with a bounty of protein-rich grasshoppers. One man's ceiling is another man's floor.

Surely had God been blessing them, he would have also provided chocolate!

I wonder if there is a repository anywhere of traditional LDS stories subjected to historical investigation. I remember reading that even with the seagulls, the damage was already done to the crops, on top of those other lost harvests. And that the seagulls weren't described as miraculous at the time but only in later retellings.

There's also the story of President Snow promising rain if people would pay their tithing as depicted in the short film. But apparently the rain didn't come for some time, making it sound as if it would have been seen as a miracle as long as it ever rained again. And on top of that, President Snow likely didn't mention rain in his talk in the first place.

Any story suggesting divine intervention seems to unravel when you think about it at anything but a superficial level. In a car accident, one person miraculously survives while another dies. One person miraculously overcomes an illness that takes the lives of another in similar circumstances. Or even something as simple as crediting God with providing food for a meal while others elsewhere are starving. Your perspective on how God operates can be quite different depending on which side of these situations you happen to be on.

Red Ryder wrote: ↑Fri Mar 31, 2017 4:08 pm Surely had God been blessing them, he would have also provided chocolate!

Well, the cocoa bean is a new world item and apparently, it was highly regarded by ancient Native Americans. No mention of it however in the Book of Mormon, but it was there and so popular that the bean was used as a common currency throughout Mesoamerica.


I like to be in America!
O.K. by me in America!
Ev'rything kosher in America
Cocoa beans here in America!

This is a great companion article for this thread.

http://m.cityweekly.net/utah/a-seagull- ... id=3613991

Highlight:

But maybe the most bizarre and off-putting artifact is a joke. There are 15 variations of this joke included in the collection, but it basically goes like this:

Setup: Why are crows black?

Punchline: Because they wouldn't help the seagulls eat the crickets.

Occurrences of this racist wisecrack seem to come almost entirely from the 1970s, which is right around the time the LDS church ended a longtime ban on people of color entering the priesthood.