2 Nephi 26

2 Neohi 26:11 For the spirit of the lord will not always strive with man. And when the spirit ceaseth to strive with man then comets speedy destruction and this grieveth my soul. This passage fits in with what I have been thinking about lately: is it possible to be a good person who does bad things? At what point do you become a bad person? And can a bad person do good things? Christ said in Matthew, A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. But in real life, it is possible for a generally healthy tree to have some bad fruit on a branch or two, I.e. a good tree can bring forth some bad fruit. Once it crosses the line of mostly bad fruit it becomes a bad tree, but you get a bad piece of fruit off most trees. (To be fair, some of that is definitely related to things like worms or birds.) maybe he's speaking in terms of general quality of the fruit, and a tree known for bringing forth good fruit is a good tree, even if it has a few bad apples, but a tree that is known for bad fruit is a bad tree, even if it produces an edible apricot once in a while. This verse in Nephi makes me think that there are good people who just do bad things sometimes and that the spirit will continue trying to tell them to repent until they cross the line that God alone recognizes where there is not a chance they will turn from their choices and be wholly good.

26:16 And their voice shall be as one that hath a familiar spirit. Nephi assumes here that we know what the voice of a person with a familiar spirit sounds like, and the casual assumption implies that he believes that people sometimes have them in truth. Clarke's commentary on the Bible says that necromancers would ventriloquize their voices as though coming from within their chest cavity, giving the impression that the ghost's voice was weak. Now, Clark clearly has an agenda limited to the version of reality defined by his christianity, and is surmising that those people did not in actual fact have a ghost or spirit speaking through them, but to me, this scripture is one that supports the idea that "there are more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of in your philosophy."