The Profession of Nehor did Not Believe in the Repentance of Their Sins

"For they were of the profession of Nehor, and did not believe in the repentance of their sins. The seductive appeal of Nehorism was that it promised a prize without price; a victory without effort; an eternal glory without goodness. It ignored the eternally present fact of cause and effect in spiritual phenomena. By holding that a man's misuse of his free agency was but an inconsequential element in his qualifying for exaltation, Nehor was inferentially questioning the very existence of that Free Agency. The tragedy that besets those nations who repudiate responsibility for their evil conduct, and the moral decadence which inevitably follows such repudiation, are unforgettably portrayed in chapters 14 through 16 of this great Book of Alma.

"Nehor is dead, but Nehorism lives on. Dressed in a variety of philosophical habiliments and religious disguises, its influence is found almost everywhere. It can be felt, for example, in the current mechanistic philosophies of the day, according to whose teachings man consists in nothing more than an amazingly complex biological mechanism.

"'You don't punish or condemn a broken machine'; it is argued, 'you fix it.'

"With this easy, and dangerously superficial analysis of the whole problem of human sin, they absolve mankind from any moral culpability for individual wrongdoing, and thus pave the way to spiritual corruption and death." (Reynolds and Sjodahl, Commentary on the Book of Mormon, vol. 3, p. 229-30)