JeremyOrbe-Smith

I believe he should be put in jail, not beheaded by a kid listening to the voices in his head telling him to murder the guy in cold blood while he's lying drunk and unconscious in the street. Jesus. Look, here's what gets me about threads like this one. If we're going to go the metaphorical, ahistorical, 'spiritual lessons', demythologizing route, then let's at least take the books seriously enough to actually read what is written in them. What great moral insight do we learn when Jezebel is thrown out the window so that dogs can eat her flesh and her carcass can be as dung upon the face of the field? What deep Spiritual Truth do we get from the Levite cutting up the concubine into 12 pieces? What profound lesson do we learn by considering Lot being roofied and raped by his own daughters, or all the Witches murdered throughout the centuries because God Said So? If these scriptures are merely the best guesses of some ancient tribes, and not Prophetic declarations from people who claim to speak with the Creator of the world, then what is the point of carrying them around as if they contain some great secret? Okay, so they teach us to commune with God. Why would we want to commune with a being that does all the things the scriptures say God does, atrocities that would put Dahmer and Hitler to shame? Psalm 110: Thou art a Priest forever, after the Order of Melchizedek. The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through Kings in the day of His wrath. He shall Judge among the Heathen, He shall fill the places with the dead bodies. God makes it quite clear that He causes all these horrors on purpose, as part of a greater plan. The scriptures are not just descriptive, as if the text is merely recording these horrific events in history without endorsing them, it is explicitly prescriptive; God is not merely warning us about negative consequences which might flow naturally from our own bad behavior, He is not just teaching us the natural blessings that come from obedience to His principles and describing the violence as a natural consequence of our human choices when we disobey. No, He is explicitly taking credit Himself as having done this all deliberately. Bottom line: if there really is some hyper-advanced intelligence which has been watching over us for millennia and murders us from the sky whenever it feels like it, then the Forteans and William Bramley are right, and all of humanity should be banding together to fight this creepy extraterrestrial(s), rather than slaughtering ourselves over the pathetically inconsequential sectarian differences that have provoked so much bloodshed over the centuries.

"So It appears you now believe evil, injustice, alienation and hate win out in the end." If the scriptures are accurate representations of God's character, then God is evil, unjust, and hateful when He promises to force people to eat their own sons and daughters or melt their eyeballs out of their skulls or behead people or hurl javelins through lovers or command the Chosen People to commit genocide and utterly destroy even innocent children, yes.

Is it really, honestly, truly, more likely that the revelation of the Book Of Mormon was specially timed by Angels to coincide with Rosh Hashanah, than that Joseph Smith lived in a farming culture that was steeped in zodiacal lore and attached special significance to the Autumnal Equinox? That last link includes the passage: "No bolder statement could be made about God’s involvement in history than that of an angel delivering a historical record full of interactions with God." Personally, I think God could prove Himself to be a lot bolder if He physically showed up in the White House tomorrow and treated Trump with the same level of civility He showed to, say, Onan. Or is Trump provoking North Korea into a frickin' nuclear war less sinful than not being totally into impregnating your dead brother's wife after a forced marriage? Meanwhile, Cain gets God's sevenfold protection after murdering his own brother, and Elijah gets charioted away to Heaven after hacking 555 guys to death ... (At the very least, wouldn't Moroni have mentioned something to all those Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in New York during Joseph Smith's time?) The Book Of Mormon does not contain a moral message. The "deeper truths", the "spiritual truths I find communicated clearly" in the Book Of Mormon, along with the rest of the scriptures, are completely monstrous. Think of the story in Alma 14, when innocent women and children are being burned alive while people with the power to save them stand by and do nothing. In the very next chapter, those same powerful people, men of God, go to the land of Sidon and heal Zeezrom's FEVER. The author of the Book Of Mormon, who was clearly Joseph Smith (some critics try way too hard to detect elaborately silly conspiracy theories), was perfectly fine with God being willing to let people be burned alive, and beheaded like Laban, and zapped by self-righteous prigs like Nephi, and smitten like Sherem, and slain like the Amlicites, and crushed to death like Korihor, and burned and drowned and buried alive in Zarahemla. And of course there's that beautiful passage in 2 Nephi 6: "I will feed them that oppress thee, with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood as with sweet wine; and all flesh shall know that I the Lord am thy Savior and thy Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob." Of course, in other scriptures, God says He could change us all from mortality to immortality in the twinkling of an eye. Then again, maybe He'll get off on a technicality, since He also promises to punish sinners in such a way that they are left with no eyes to twinkle with. I really love that uplifting, inspirational, spiritually fulfilling Section 29 of the D&C: "I the Lord God will send forth flies upon the face of the earth, which shall take hold of the inhabitants thereof, and shall eat their flesh, and shall cause maggots to come in upon them; and their tongues shall be stayed that they shall not utter against me; and their flesh shall fall from off their bones, and their eyes from their sockets." I suppose it's better than all the cannibalism God commands in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 and Isaiah 49 and Jeremiah 19 and Ezekiel 5 ...