SeekingUnderstanding

Not much of a spoiler tag.

Are you aware that your church publicly denounced him and excommunicated him?

“not known or seen or not meant to be known or seen by others.” I am not allowed to go into the temple. I cannot witness the changes to the ceremony or the oaths. It is disengenious and dishonest to state that the ritual is not secret when I am forbidden from ever seeing it or witnessing it. That the information might be available through other means doesn’t circumvent the idea that I am not “meant” to know. The line that you want everyone to witness rings really flat to me. I can no more express belief in church leaders and your church than I can stand outside at noon on a sunny day and say the sun isn’t shining. Your church forbids me entry and knowledge. That’s fine. But that is textbook secrecy.

Respectfully, from where I sit, the conversation is about whether refusing to discuss something makes it secret regardless of whether or not it is sacred. Refusing to discuss details about what happens in the temple makes it secret. Restricting access and refusing to discuss with the uninitiated by definition makes something secret.

Further, my wife and I have sex. It’s not sacred. It’s not a secret. It is private. Not seeing the relationship here. People committing adultery in the other hand? Private and secret.

So some are secret and some are not.

Is the rite of baptism sacred? Is your home a sacred place of refuge from the world? Is the sacrament sacred? Is your marriage sacred? Your marriage vows? Why are these not taboo / secret?

Respectfully, TikTok videos aren’t where Dan does his academic work. It’s where he makes academia accessible to a general audience. In that context, it’s completely fine usage in my opinion. obviously. That doesn’t make an unsupported assertion that goes against everything we *do know any less nonsense. Um, are you sure? I could not disagree more. Academia is full of jargon, it’s stuffy and boring. Dan brings the right amount of facts, sass and attitude to make academia accessible and entertaining.

So Hebrew is written with no vowels. If I picked a Hebrew word at random, proclaimed that anciently (with absolutely no supporting evidence) a certain word was pronounced without the vowels, you would object to a Hebrew scholar calling that nonsense? We are working with very different definitions of the word. When is it okay to use the word? If you disagree with Dan’s assessment, do you have any evidence that any words are pronounced without vowels in Hebrew? Please show your work.

Ah! Will link YouTube in future. ETA: I just tried and I got it to work in a mobile browser, but I had to request desktop site. It’s on me to make it more accessible or provide a summary though so thanks.

You don't need TikTok. Just a web browser You have this backwards I think. It's a common mistake people make when they are into apologetics. Dan's page is not about his personal beliefs. He rarely goes into them aside from issues of social justice. It's about what the data can support by taking the text as it is. Without presupposing any of our dogma or ideology onto the text. It isn't the only way to approach scripture. It may not provide the most meaning in your life, but that is what his page is about. And the data says that the video shown in the OP is completely unsupported by the historical record and contradicted by everything we know about how the Adonai was pronounced anciently.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTNEW3VvN/

My post here is pedantic especially because I may be misreading your second statement. Women get exactly 50 percent of their dna from each parent. Men get slightly more from their mothers due to the size difference in the XY chromosome pair. Your main point is spot on though. Siblings typically share between 40 and 60ish percent of their DNA due to random recombination. Likewise it’s possible to get much more of one grandparents dna than the other. And it’s definitely possible to lose specific ancestral dna markers after several generations.

This always makes me laugh. You will supposedly have the power to create worlds with a command, but you need servants? For what? Status? Now that’s the church I know. 😜

Oh sorry, I missed your analogy. I thought the one broken stoplight was the idea of Modern Day prophets. Not this particular case of modern prophets failing. Well, sure. Every single instance of a miracle or prophesy that I have been able to dig into has been exactly the same as this one. Each one that is actually available for examination has been better explained naturally. Brigham Young's transformation into Joseph? Not mentioned in our earliest records. Wait a few decades and people who weren't even there witnessed it! Joseph Smith's civil war prophecy? Not impressive when you actually read the actual text of the revelation. Ancient Old Testaments prophesying about Jesus? Misreadings, mistranslations, and propaganda. There is a reason why it was non-Jews who converted to the early Church. Growing up, I was always impressed by my mom's miracle stories. As she told it, she'd pray and someone would be healed. She'd be prompted to make a call at the right time. As an adult, however, I got to witness some of these stories in the making. As an example, one of my children had pretty severe jaundice. She'd call and tell me she had a prompting that the kid would be better that day. The kid actually got worse. This happened several different times with her promptings turning out to be wrong. Turns out the miracles she told were just the hits leaving out the misses. My Dad too. He was in the stake presidency and upon reorganization felt prompted that he was going to be the new stake president. Didn't happen. A few months later he was called as Stake Patriarch and it turns out *that, was what his earlier prompting was about. Everything I have seen that is proclaimed as evidence of the divine can be better explained by naturalism. YMMV. So yes, in your analogy, none of the stop lights are working.