The Nehor

The “heroes” in those books were selfish and sorely lacking in virtue. They are what you get when someone lacking any understanding of what virtue is tries to write a heroic character.

This would go beyond what we would call translation errors. It is saying Mormon’s theological understanding was limited in some ways. While almost certainly true it isn’t a very hopeful conclusion. It means you have to read the Book of Mormon in as critical a way as you would any other historical or religious text. Mormon’s conclusions may be flawed or outright wrong. So every time Mormon says something along the lines of ‘and thus we see that’ we should be thinking: “But do we though?” It does make it hard to swallow the idea that the Book of Mormon is written as a plain warning to our day. One idea I have heard bandied about is that the Book of Mormon works on multiple levels and engages the reader at the level they are at. Does it follow there is a level at which the Book of Mormon is less helpful? I won’t hold my breath waiting for an apostle to make that declaration in General Conference.

All those bother me to some degree. I know I don’t emotionally feel it each time but that is because I am used to it. When it hits closer to home I feel it a lot more. You are now echoing some of the arguments of Job’s “friends”. God is so far above us that no matter what happens we should trust God. How do you have trust in such a God? The only difference between that God and an amoral and capricious one is the first God might feel bad about it but still do it. By this standard it would be fair to pit all of humanity against the trials of Hercules because someone with divine parentage could win those trials. That is not very encouraging. Fortunately that is not how the Atonement is taught or we would be the most depressed people on Earth and only the most deluded of us that could imagine ourselves as nearly equal to God would have any hope at all. Their hopes would eventually be dashed.

Batman doesn’t see the end from the beginning. Batman also does not have power over all of creation. Batman also should really use his wealth to revitalize Gotham so that the people thrive and are not desperate enough to fall into criminality instead of running around dressed like a bat punching people. Also if Bruce Wayne’s parents had died in the events of 3 Nephi 8-10 he would have started a grand crusade to defeat God to make sure something like this never happens again. Who is going to stop him? Bibleman?

I would find this explanation more convincing if God used it. Instead in the text God says he does it because the slain prophets and saints were calling for blood vengeance and God was presumably tired of hearing it and seems glad that their complaints cease.

Once you reach a certain level of power and knowledge I think the distinction between “God acted to make it happen” and “God allowed it to happen” stops mattering that much. Does it matter morally if God flipped the switch to kill them all or just deliberately chose not to keep the switch from flipping and letting them all die? It would matter to a mortal since one is malice and the other is negligence but when you have omniscience and stopping the switch from flipping costs God nothing is there a difference? It is the same choice.

How many apostles are currently in prison? How many have been murdered in the last 50 years? Are the Saints actively being persecuted right now to the point where many fear for their lives?

Netanyahu has taken credit for it. He is massively exaggerating his own importance and Israel’s importance in the process of Syria’s fall. He is not some macchiavelian mastermind who orchestrated all these events to defeat Syria. He is just claiming he was critical because he is a politician and that is what politicians do. Okay, that quote is wrong. Acting shocked that the Jews would somehow regather to Israel after the holocaust is just blatant historical ignorance. After betraying their Arab allies at the end of the First World War (Britain promised them independence from the Ottoman Empire but instead kept them under British control) the British in 1917 they issued the Balfour Declaration saying they were making Palestine a refuge for Jews and encourage migration. The League of Nations backed this in 1922 with a mandate to the British to develop the area as a Jewish homeland. The existing Muslim and Christian populations in the area were not excited about this development. Then in 1936 the British Peel Commission recommended dividing the mandate into a Jewish state and an Arab state. There were protests and anger and a lot of domestic conflict over this. Following the Second World War the British withdrew and the land carved up. So no, it wasn’t surprising that this happened after the Second World War. After being wrong about that the eschatological reading of the modern state of Israel being somehow critical to Christian eschatology is a pretty recent invention. These shift regularly. End of Days types will always be seeing every event in the news somehow means the Second Coming is imminent. LDS tend to become jaded about this as groups both within and outside our ranks cry out that the Second Coming is at the doors……again.

That is true of almost everything. If we find a T-Rex bone dated to the same period we’d have to question a lot of our currently accepted theories.

Suspect they were meant to be ritual magic users or astrologers that legitimize the birth of Jesus as a “big event”. Later Christianity pushed away from magic use to legitimize the miracles of Jesus and the apostles as divine and not just supernatural. This leaves the magi in an odd space. Also the story with Herod doesn’t make much sense. One take that makes me giggle is the Jehovah’s Witness reading that sees the magi as servants of Satan sent to get Jesus killed. I don’t know of any texts close enough in time to the events to have any realistic chance of being an authentic record of the number or names of the magi.

One other problem is that the economic model of the Plains Indians don’t make sense. It wasn’t in any kind of long-term equilibrium. If they had been hunting on horseback for centuries they likely would have killed off the buffalo themselves or switched to some kind of herding model instead of hunting. This heavily suggests that the horse was a relatively recent addition. If they had had horses centuries before Columbus things would almost certainly look differently. I also don’t trust oral stories of how far back customs and laws and traditions go. If any culture holds up some part of their culture and tells you it goes back to time immemorial they are almost always wrong. Sparta receiving their laws from Lycurgus is one of my favorite examples. Even if you take their own chronology as true (which it wasn’t) the laws Lycurgus supposedly gave them covered things that wouldn’t have made any sense at the time. Also Lycurgus is almost certainly mythical himself. He is exactly the kind of figure you would make up if you had nothing to tie him to actual history.

The reality is that public bathrooms aren’t segregated by gender or sex as a matter of law. It is custom. Tradition. Unwritten order of things. So legislating about them isn’t fixing existing laws. It is just government regulation reaching into areas it was not in before. There are exceptions in some areas and states but generally speaking there aren’t laws about this. Most of these bathroom bills are about government and government owned spaces only. Much sound and fury, signifying nothing….. The general result so far has been laws that impact almost no one with limited impact and are designed primarily as virtue signaling and have resulted in trans and cis women being harassed for not being feminine enough. If insufficiently masculine looking men were being harassed I suspect men wouldn’t suddenly be so concerned about the ‘integrity of women’s spaces’ or whatever. Any man who wants to harass women in the women’s restroom does not have to transition to do it and they don’t. When smac shows videos of men invading women’s bathrooms they all appear to be cis men. But a child might think a drag queen looks pretty or funny so gotta terrorize women in unrelated ways!

Doesn’t actually believe themself to be six. It is a roleplay thing. Probably a kink. An interviewer assumed the absolute worst and ran with it. It is now gospel of course.

We don’t disagree. You’re wrong. Transgender people have been around for many decades. They only recently got thrust into the public eye by people opposed to them. They don’t really want the spotlight. They got it anyways.

This still regularly happens. I see a lot of stories of bisexual people telling people they are bisexual and being told “I don’t think so, you don’t seem bisexual”. The irony of course is that there is really no standard bisexual stereotype so what standard do they think they are comparing them to? There is an assumption that these things must be obvious somehow. I admit my absolute favorites are when a parent deals with a coming out saying something like, “Look, it is normal. Lots of women find other women sexually attractive. I do and I’m straight.” Yeah……about that.