Laman was short

It's been a while since I wrote here. I think I have said that I mostly use my blogs as a way to clear my head, and I got stuck on a concept that I couldn't "clear out" usually when that happens I just have a half-done draft and I can forget about it... but instead it sort-of just drove me away. Anyway, I was talking to a new friend and I remembered one of my long lost thoughts.

Sometimes Laman in Nephi's story seems so unreasonable, it is hard to come to any kind of an understanding. I wonder if that might be because we want to idealize anything in the scriptures. here's my theory.

First, Nephi was big. I think he was really big. He seems to throw in how big he is at unusual times in his narrative. "I, Nephi, being exceedingly young, nevertheless I was HUGE, and also having great desires to know the mysteries of God..." (Ok, a little artistic license) "And now I, Nephi, being a man large in stature, and also having received much strength of the Lord, therefore I did seize upon the servant of Laban" --I was really big, oh... and the lord helped me... tackle Zoram.

Now that seems to fit with our common conception of Book of Mormon heroes. Some of the most popular depictions of them show these strapping, clean shaven, tan, muscular, tall, archetypes of heroes. And I don't necessarily doubt that, but what if Laman was really short? Short enough to develop the so-called "short man syndrome"?

To me, that explains a lot about Laman's behavior. If the size difference between him and Nephi was enough to constitute a complex, it would make sense why he was always so defensive about Nephi taking any kind of leadership roles, why he just couldn't accept any criticism from Nephi, and even why he may have needed to use a stick to beat Nephi.

Think of how much we have learned (recently) about how the mind works. If you didn't know about schizophrenia, Tourette's syndrome, Alzheimer's, multiple personality disorder, clinical depression... how would you describe the symptoms? It would seem that these people were possessed. I think that King Saul had bipolar disorder... that is the only thing to me that makes sense. So maybe sometimes when the scriptures say that someone cast out a devil, it could more appropriately say that they healed a schizophrenic?

I wonder how many of our demons will turn out to be something that can be easily treated in the future? Maybe the "addictive personality" eventually will turn out to be an imbalance of dopamine in the amigdala or something.

Anyway, worth a thought no?