Alma 30

My Creative Writing teacher, Josh Allen, was teaching us that as writers we need to use more than one sense to describe something. "The moist-earth colored brownie tasted like the desert sand." This covers sight and taste, two of our senses. However, this description only works if the reader has seen the color of moist earth and if they have tasted sand or something simular.

In Alma 30, Korihor is leading the people away by his words using arguments that still face us today. One such example is that he says, "How do ye know of their surety? Behold, ye cannot know of the things which ye do not see; therefore ye cannot know that there shall be a Christ" (15). Korihor's saying you can't prove what you know, thus it must not be true. It's an argument that faces us all the time.


Boyd K. Packer shared an experience in his talk "The Candle of the Lord". He was once on an airplane sitting next to a professed atheist. He shared his testimony with the man, and the man ridiculed it. The man said that since Elder Packer knew it was true, he could explain how he knew it. Elder Packer was stumped for a little bit, but was then inspired in what to say. He asked the man if he's tasted salt before. The man said of course. Elder Packer asked how recently. He had it in his dinner the night before. Then Elder Packer asked the man to explain the taste of salt to him as if he had never tasted it. The man then said that it wasn't sweet and wasn't sour. Elder Packer said that the man only explain what it isn't, not what it was. Then Elder Packer said:

“After several attempts, of course, he could not do it. He could not convey, in words alone, so ordinary an experience as tasting salt. I bore testimony to him once again and said, ‘I know there is a God. You ridiculed that testimony and said that if I did know, I would be able to tell you exactly how I know. My friend, spiritually speaking, I have tasted salt. I am no more able to convey to you in words how this knowledge has come than you are to tell me what salt tastes like. But I say to you again, there is a God! He does live! And just because you don’t know, don’t try to tell me that I don’t know, for I do!’"

To understand things spiritually you have to have something to base such information on. It's builds on each other. You have to have seen moist earth before in order to understand the description of the brownies. You have to have tasted salt to understand when someone says, "The meal was extremely salty."