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***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A new article went up today in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship<\/em>:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cVerbal Punctuation in the Book of Mormon I: (And) Now,\u201d<\/a> by John Gee<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Abstract:\u00a0<\/strong>The Book\u00a0of\u00a0Mormon, being an ancient book, was originally written without typographic punctuation and employs verbal punctuation instead. This article looks at the use of \u201cand now\u201d as verbal punctuation in the Book\u00a0of\u00a0Mormon. The phrase is used to mark major breaks in the text, not only for chapters but also within chapters of the text. The Book\u00a0of\u00a0Mormon usage is borrowed from Classical Biblical Hebrew (the Hebrew used before the exile) and follows the pattern set by pre-exilic Hebrew scribes. While in the Old World, this usage dropped after the Babylonian exile, as Aramaic replaced Hebrew as the major language spoken. The Book\u00a0of\u00a0Mormon preserved the usage until the end of Nephite civilization.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Among the elements of genuine religiosity, I believe, are humility and a sense of awe.\u00a0 So, in that spirit and as we enter into a weekend, I offer a few humbled and awed thoughts derived from a reading, some time ago, of\u00a0Richard Panek, The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality<\/em>:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cSaying that all the billions of stars we see are part of our galaxy and that billions of galaxies lie beyond our own doesn\u2019t do justice to the scale of the universe. \u00a0Just as our eyes didn\u2019t need to evolve to see radio waves in order for us to survive, maybe our minds didn\u2019t need to evolve to understand the numbers that astronomers were now trying to incorporate into their thinking. \u00a0Like cultures that count \u2018One, two, three, more,\u2019 we tend to regard the scale of the universe \u2014 to the extent that we regard it at all \u2014 as \u2018Earth, planets, Sun, far.'\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0 (28)<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n To help us picture the magnitudes, Panek uses the \u201cone Mississippi\u201d method of counting. \u00a0(If you say \u201cone Mississippi,\u201d \u201ctwo Mississippi,\u201d and so forth, you\u2019re giving each number approximately a second.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n At the \u201cone Mississippi\u201d rate, it would take you 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes, and 40 seconds to count to a million.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n To count to one billion \u2014 that\u2019s a thousand millions \u2014 it would, obviously, take you a thousand times as long as counting to a million. \u00a0That is, it would require 31 years and 8.5 months.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n To reach a trillion, you would be obliged to count one thousand times to a billion \u2014 which would occupy about 32,000 years of your life.\u00a0 It would leave little time for vacations, let alone for retirement in St. George.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n (Try not to think, in this context, of the federal government deficit in Gree . . . er, in the United States, which, at the end of 2012, stood at roughly thirty trillion dollars \u2014 although that figure apparently doesn\u2019t include unfunded Social Security and Medicare commitments. \u00a0If you simply counted those thirty trillion dollars individually, taking a second for each, doing so would require approximately 960,000 years. \u00a0No, let\u2019s stick with Richard Panek and astronomy.\u00a0 They\u2019re much less depressing.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A light-year \u2014 the distance that light travels in twelve earthly months \u2014 comes to about six trillion miles. \u00a0To count that high would take you 6 x 31,000 or 186,000 years.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n (Sorry. \u00a0I can\u2019t resist pointing out that it would take you far<\/em> less time to count the miles in a light-year than to count the number of dollars in the federal debt. \u00a0But back to the much\u00a0more humble\u00a0figures involved in astronomy.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The Sun is 93 million miles from Earth. \u00a0Otherwise, the nearest star is 4.3 light-years, or 25 trillion miles. \u00a0(If you would like to count those miles, block out 800,000 years in your calendar. \u00a0Maybe you can get to it this weekend.\u00a0 After all, Monday is a holiday.)<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Our galaxy, the Milky Way, from the edge of one of its spirals over to the edge of the one opposite, is about 100,000 light-years in diameter. \u00a0That would take you eighteen billion years of counting. \u00a0You\u2019ll probably need to wait until your next time in a COVID-testing line before tackling that number, of course, and then you face the fact that there are estimated to be at least<\/em> 100,000,000,000 \u2014 one hundred billion \u2014 galaxies in the observable universe.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In other words, the thing is pretty big.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n And yet, curiously, it may not be big \u2014 or, perhaps more accurately, old \u2014 enough<\/em>.\u00a0 Consider this statement, attributed to the late biophysicist Harold J. Morowitz (1927-2016), who, after teaching for thirty-two years in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University, finished up as Robinson Professor of Biology and Natural Philosophy at George Mason University, in Virginia:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The probability for the chance of formation of the smallest, simplest form of living organism known is 1 to 10,340,000,000. . . .\u00a0 The size of this figure is truly staggering, since there are only supposed to be approximately 10^81 electrons in the whole [visible] universe!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Finally, just in case some of you have been lulled into comfortable complacency now that the horrors of the Christmas season are receding into the scarcely remembered past, I want to remind you that theism and religious belief still wreak enormous harm upon the world and that they continue to do massive evil.\u00a0 So here is an appalling item from the apparently inexhaustible Christopher Hitchens Memorial \u201cHow Religion Poisons Everything\u201d File<\/em>\u00a9 that you\u2019ll surely want to contemplate in solitude, away from the tender eyes and ears of impressionable children:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n