The Nehor

Depends on the context. I agree with you on changing age of consent but leaving in room for not being a criminal or sex offender if the two minors are close in age. In a clinical context the terms have a split meaning and the distinction can be valuable there. I think the best response I have ever seen to someone trying to ‘defend’ someone abusing a minor by pointing out that they were not technically a pedophile was someone else saying something along the lines of: “Oh? So they are not stuck with a sexual fetish or attraction that is repugnant. Their sexuality is normal but they choose to seek out minors deliberately because they are easier to victimize? Well, that makes things better.” There has been a push to lower age of consent laws generally pushed quietly by (mostly) oddball religious groups and some of the more vile takes on libertarianism.

I don’t have a problem with people having authority to speak and act on God’s behalf. I just don’t accept that there is ALWAYS someone between us and God. There is a danger of preferring a kind of private devotional life to concrete knowledge of God’s will but it is not because the prophet’s voice is the core of religion. I have been breaking out the Lewis quotes regularly. This is a response to a man who said that religion was a distraction and that communing with God alone is more real. In many ways it, of course, is. Except replace theologians with prophets.

It is a good ‘shibboleth’. Anyone who corrects the term pedophile with ephebophile will know a disturbing amount of information about age of consent laws, probably opposes them, and should probably be on a government watchlist.

Put in an elderly missionary couple in this position as independent investigator and you will get fewer elder missionary couples. Honestly the people you need in a position to do this would be some grizzled veteran social worker or family court lawyer or other people who deal with the muck and broken lives. I have seen cases where stake presidencies tend to side with members routinely over bishops when complained to and it is not a good situation either. Ward leadership lives like they are under perpetual threat of a veto killing any activity or program and no one is motivated to do much of anything. People refuse to accept callings or ask for releases. It is a mess.

If you say the word ephebophile I will start screaming. Continually and irrelevantly.

Why?

He was stepping down because of what he did to her. He characterized it as adultery so she corrected him by pointing out she was underage. He was downplaying what he did. Someone then said she was 14 and he corrected it saying that she was 16 as if that is a mitigating factor. That is basically a confession. Why are you defending the self-confessed pedophile?

Another one from The Screwtape Letters: “But of course the Enemy will not meantime be idle. Wherever there is prayer, there is danger of His own immediate action. He is cynically indifferent to the dignity of His position, and ours, as pure spirits, and to human animals on their knees He pours out self-knowledge in a quite shameless fashion. But even if He defeats your first attempt at misdirection, we have a subtler weapon. The humans do not start from that direct perception of Him which we, unhappily, cannot avoid. They have never known that ghastly luminosity, that stabbing and searing glare which makes the background of permanent pain to our lives. If you look into your patient's mind when he is praying, you will not find that. If you examine the object to which he is attending, you will find that it is a composite object containing many quite ridiculous ingredients. There will be images derived from pictures of the Enemy as He appeared during the discreditable episode known as the Incarnation: there will be vaguer-perhaps quite savage and puerile-images associated with the other two Persons. There will even be some of his own reverence (and of bodily sensations accompanying it) objectified and attributed to the object revered. I have known cases where what the patient called his "God" was actually located-up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall. But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it-to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him. You may even encourage him to attach great importance to the correction and improvement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily before his imagination during the whole prayer. For if he ever comes to make the distinction, if ever he consciously directs his prayers "Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be", our situation is, for the moment, desperate. Once all his thoughts and images have been flung aside or, if retained, retained with a full recognition of their merely subjective nature, and the man trusts himself to the completely real, external, invisible Presence, there with him in the room and never knowable by him as he is known by it-why, then it is that the incalculable may occur. In avoiding this situation-this real nakedness of the soul in prayer-you will be helped by the fact that the humans themselves do not desire it as much as they suppose. There's such a thing as getting more than they bargained for!” And to prove God has a sense of irony while putting this in I felt the Holy Ghost coursing through my body in that awe-filled way it sometimes does. A quick thump on the back of the head to say: “Still here” and I find myself hoping it is nothing urgent I need to do. Looks like not. Going to sleep before God changes His mind.

Another article: https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2022/may-web-only/southern-baptist-abuse-apocalypse-russell-moore.html Yikes.

“Supposing We Really Found Him? It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. ‘Look out!’ we cry, ‘it’s alive’. And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God!’) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?” -C.S. Lewis

Every generation were morons when they were children. Older people’s memory just gets selective. Also if alien killer crabs land from space and try to conquer the earth we should probably dodge the draft. Better psych ourselves up in advance just in case.

I have not. I just challenge the idea that the minority LGBTQ community is the primary force behind the disintegration of the family. It is scapegoating something we have a lot of lately. Blood libel is coming back with a vengeance. It is always the “other” group destroying the family and if we could just contain/exile/liquidate them things would be good again. The cleansers are coming back and of course like always they are more vile and corrupt and degraded than those they insist must be removed.

You do know that we have seen monkeypox outbreaks before right? And that we already have a vaccine that works pretty well on it? And there is no indication of mutation?

Yeah, it is kind of weird. Why are you reading the online equivalents of the Weekly World News?

The other should follow suit and run away screaming too. That way no possibility of grooming. I am sure it will be fine.

I believe God aided the American Revolutionaries because the Book of Mormon says so and I believe that the Constitution was inspired to provide an “alpha build” for liberal democracy to spread around the world. I am not so convinced that the American Revolution was fought for a righteous cause. The Americans fought over economic concerns mostly. The British government was trying to recoup their financial losses in the French and Indian War by taxing those who benefitted from the victory and the Americans didn’t like it. The Americans were also pretty lawless by nature. They had been ignoring British laws for over a century and when the laws began to be enforced they got angry. The British viewed the colonists as whiny children who got their victory and the French and Indian threat removed but then wanted to shift the cost entirely to the homeland. I sympathize more with the colonists than the British but saying it was an inherently righteous cause that all should be in awe of? Nah, I don’t buy it. It did further God’s cause in the same way Isaiah saw the Assyrian conquest as furthering God’s cause though the colonists had a better cause than the Assyrians too. God did put some brilliant minds together in the colonies to get a radical new kind of government implemented which has spread with mixed success all over the world. I am not convinced Jehovah did any such thing. There was probably a conflict but the Torah is filled with contrasting commands. In one passage their orders are to come in and subjugate cities. If they surrender, integrate. Then there are certain groups of people who must be killed completely but those made up much of the population so why the integration bits? Different sources? Then you have the history in the Old Testament which is full of Israelites falling in with the preexisting wickedness. Would later writers think it might have been better to have just killed them all? Surely their God told them to kill them all since that would have solved the problem. Well, the story isn’t clear so I will just add it in. There, now all this wickedness is the fault of our fathers for not genociding harder! Jesus had some kind of command to only preach to some people but it was less along racial and more along religious lines. Oddly the Woman at the Well story suggests this group was a bit broader than just those practicing Judaism. In any case I have no idea what your post was even about. I talked about orphans and inequality and being kind to the stranger in the land which the scriptures are clear on. Why are you using the old Soviet ‘Whataboutism’ tactic and thinking that “What about the racism in the Bible” is a counter-argument?

Oh no, the world is teaching something opposed to the gospel? This has never happened before and is definitely not the routine. Don’t worry, we’ll have a lot more unwanted children soon if current trends continue.

I admit I find the idea that gay marriage amongst a few nations on Earth being the sing that portends the equivalent of the Great Flood kind of silly. The old Jewish texts that talk of Sodom and Gomorrah talk about the acquisitive and paranoid and greedy natures of the inhabitants being the primary cause of their fall. The pansexual rape gang in the Old Testament was just one element. I see God burning us more for us grinding the faces of the poor, ignoring the orphans, turning away the distressed and forsaken as “not out problem”, and our self-destructive rush to massive wealth inequality catapulting a few to the top but pushing millions more into poverty.

Unless something weird happens like a mutation increasing transmission rates this is actually pretty normal stuff. The news is just more sensitive to disease stories since Covid which is both good and bad I suppose.

Ideally it keeps the bishop from doing anything that would compromise or interfere with any legal investigation and keep the bishop from doing anything that would taint a case. It is not to minister to the abused. Ideally it is to make sure the abuse is more likely to stop and the bishop doesn’t accidentally ruin a prosecution due to well-meaning but legally ignorant attempts to help. If it was primarily to protect the church we would have everyone call the hotline first and run risk assessments or whatever.

It is this. Having a church hotline for members to report abuse by leadership would (possibly correctly) be viewed as an attempt to cover up or control it. The hotline is to make sure the local leaders don’t foul up on privilege law. The protection training is clear on this. If abuse is witnessed or suspected call the police or a government line for it. The only exception is the Bishop who should call the church hotline first to get advice on how to proceed.

That is not a general lockdown. It is a mandatory quarantine for those who have the disease in order to contain it.

Unless they win. Then they will look around and realize:

Are you some kind of serial killer?

His dad is a terrible writer.