The Nehor

Young radical and chic? With an antifa outfit? What in the world is an antifa outfit? And you can read her mind too. Amazing. I mean, a sample size of one isn’t that impressive but we should look at this. Go ahead and post it or put up a link and we can have a look at this video!

No, that was before I came out of the closet. You are in a really weird media bubble where incompatible ideologies are seen as natural allies. Your propagandists are doing a very good job.

*stares* Wait…..someone is telling me that I am being too serious? This has never happened before. *I start crying* Mom will be so proud.

Your counter is a 13 second Facebook video that just makes an assertion that Communism and Islam are the most destructive things in history and that somehow “the Left” has fully embraced both of them when they have clearly not done that? Without any evidence to back up how these ideologies won the most death and suffering trophy? And with a #MAGA hashtag on it? Okay, I’m gonna go ahead and declare victory at this point and go out and find some cute guy or girl to give me a victory kiss and call it a day. Have a good night.

I just clicked on the first one and boy, that was definitely something. Brigham Young laying down the law on the seed of Cain and simultaneously claiming that he is as opposed to slavery as any man alive while also claiming abolitionists are out to destroy society via miscegenation and/or letting a black person hold any kind of public office. Yikes on Bikes! Then more humdrum stuff like a cornerstone dedication. Then Brigham Young talking about some pricing decisions and endorsing them while talking about how much he doesn’t care what people think of him and insisting he never overcharged for anything. Wow, this is a pain to puzzle out. I think there was some kind of price fixing or something and people didn’t like it. Maybe. I dunno.

Nice try. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a British ally until he revolted against their rule to try to liberate Palestine. Then he fled to Lebanon and later to Europe and pleaded his case to fascist leaders for Palestinian independence. That doesn’t make him a true fascist any more than Finland allying with the Nazis was a support of their ideology. They saw fascists as a tool to get what they wanted. They (and many other) failed at getting what they want. If this is how you try to argue that Islam is aligned with fascists you are just being silly. There are plenty today who still think it is a good idea to put fascists in power thinking they can be controlled to achieve their own ends. I would say this about them: And no, Muslims don’t love Mein Kampf. It doesn’t mention Arabs at all and only mentions Islam once. There is a market in some areas for translations of excerpts from Mein Kampf (focused on anti-Semitic quotes) in the same places you can get quotes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the like. Mein Kampf is a dull read. Hitler was a terrible writer. There are some cultures where a copy of Mein Kampf (often not in a language the owner can even read) being a kind of totem for anti-Semitism or nationalism or whatever has caught on in that area. You see a weird subset of this in India is well. But no, there aren’t hordes of Muslims who love reading Mein Kampf. Sharia Law does not exist to impose systemic tyranny any more than the Torah exists to impose systemic tyranny. You don’t even know what Sharia Law is or what it involves. It is like “wokeness” or “DEI” or “Critical Race Theory”. These are undefined buzzwords where the people using them have no idea what they mean. They’re like Mein Kampf is in the hands of Muslims and Indians and others that have a weird Hitler thing. They all have no idea what is in the book or what the word means but they use them as identity markers. Dimwits often need such petty totems as symbols of a group identity. Understanding what the totem is actually meant for would require too much work. So……any more irrelevant lies you have cribbed from dimwit propagandists you want me to shoot down for you? Or are you actually going to defend your assertions instead of running off to find more this time? Seriously, this is like slow pitch softball.

Not islamo-fascist. Muslim authoritarian fundamentalist theocrats. Also the valiant demonstrators hate the US President now. When the protests began the President verbally made grand claims about having the protestors backs which led to more extreme protests where lots of people were killed by government security forces. Making false promises to protestors and resistors got a lot of people killed and that will not be forgotten. Even if they do somehow topple the regime it will likely be far less friendly with the US than it might have been otherwise. Downside of having a blowhard idiot trying to do diplomacy via social media.

They were not “gifted” Gaza. The Israelis pulled out because of threats to their illegal (under international law) settlements. In the West Bank there was less terrorist activity so the illegal settlers have multiplied. Quite a perverse incentive structure. Cooperate and we’ll steal your land. Fight back and we will leave. Either way you don’t get rights. A very one-sided perspective. They did not. Their government exists only at the sufferance of the Israeli government and cannot protect its own people from the Israeli government. It is still an occupied territory. They could be autonomous. Just grant them independence. I’m not going to argue with unsourced AI that is biased to agree with the questioner. I have gotten AI to agree with me about blatant falsehoods and then to reverse itself when I seemed to support the other side. It is not something anyone should be relying on and using AI as a source in an argument is basically outsourcing your own thinking. Don’t do that. It is lazy and not healthy. Also the king-men comparison is inane. The king-men were a privileged class in Nephite society seeking to centralize power to themselves. The Palestinians are an occupied enemy people with no citizenship at the bottom of society’s ladder. Captain Moroni was courageous enough to punch up at entrenched powerful interests. Punching down at relatively powerless Palestinians is craven by comparison.

Oh boy. This is true as long as you don’t count non Israeli citizens in the occupied territories. If you do it gets much murkier. They don’t get represented in the Knesset or the IDF. They are under the political, economic, and social control of the Israeli government. Basically they are trapped as militarily occupied territories that should have long ago been either granted autonomy and independence or annexed. Pick a lane. Keeping them in limbo is ridiculous. It would be nearly the equivalent of the US still holding occupied territories occupied in the Second World War under military jurisdiction. That people use this justification to say Israel is a benevolent overlord is a deflection. A lame one Wrong. Wrong. And wrong. You seem to want to believe that so you can feel justified in hating them and grouping everything you don’t like together. It is adorable though how you imagine that your ardent communists are somehow supporters of Hamas. They have no ideals or motivations in common. You just imagine all the people you think are ‘bad’ are somehow buddies. Your perspective on geopolitics and ideological conflict is incredibly juvenile. Christian nationalists have more in common with Hamas than any flavor of communist. So, what is your next irrelevant tangent? That anarcho-syndicalists are secretly allied to megacorporations in order to bring down Christianity?

I don’t know if the video I went to is the same one but I found someone trying to justify this and it was ridiculous. They speak confidently and have an air of professionalism while spewing total nonsense.

Wait, he argued that Willard Richards deliberately killed Hyrum?

Oh goodie, another collection of irrelevant tangents. Might as well have some fun with it. Islamofascism is a loaded term that took off after 9/11. It conflates religious fundamentalism with a European-centered nationalist ideology. The two don’t have a lot of overlap. This isn’t a moral comparison. Religious fundamentalists can be as dangerous, less dangerous, or more dangerous than fascists depending on ideology and the situation they are in. Fascism does not just mean “bad”. There is no such alliance. On the genocide in Gaza they happen to agree that killing a lot of Palestinian civilians in a genocide is morally bad. Some of those religious fundamentalists would believe that a genocide of the people of Israel would be good. The Left on the whole takes the weirdly controversial stance that genocide in general is bad. There is no alliance there. Islamic fundamentalists and liberal groups disagree on virtually everything. “From the river to the sea” has been a Zionist phrase signifying what it believes is the rightful territory of Israel and is still used in forms by Israel’s political far right. It has also been used by Palestinian militants to call for the destruction of Israel. It has also been used by moderates of many stripes to call for peace and justice and equality throughout the region. Which one do you think idealistic college students meant? Again you seem to present a false dichotomy. You must either accept the Israeli far right position or the palestinian militants position. No other is possible? that is a sad way of viewing the situation. And the KKK and Christian Nationalists go around committing hate crimes while calling out “deus vult”. Oh by Zeus’s Beard…….you can’t be this naive. Have you read the Old Testament? The Bible has more calls for violence and genocide than the Koran. One pretty surface analysis shows double the violence. Christians who call for genocide of foreigners in their midst are “dangerously observant” of the Old Testament. You can play this game with all flavors of Abrahamic monotheism. Some Christians no deemphasize those passages. Many in Islam do too. You are cutting your own throat with this argument. If Muslims killing lots of people is observation of their religion then it follows that Christians that aren’t killing lots of people aren’t observant of their own religion. Or, as many have said, you cannot follow the Bible or the Koran or any scripture in any absolute sense. Instead you pick and choose and interpret. Insisting that Islam is inherently violent is just another flavor of Islamophobia. The advent of religious fundamentalism which appears to stem primarily from stuff like Darwin and other alternate theories of how things came to be is a pretty recent event. Through a lot of unlucky events and some really really poor geopolitical decisions (looking at you Britain and France) the more fundamentalist forms of Islam won out over way too much of the world. Christian fundamentalists mostly cropped up in nations where rationalism was a strong force so they had a hard time getting power. Those Christian fundamentalists are trying very hard to tear down the tenets of the Enlightenment and take us back to the good old days of theocratic power and authoritarianism. Okay, so are you going to respond to this? Or just pop out some new random bigoted conspiracist talking points? Oh, can we do the one about how the Covid lockdowns were a secret plot to seize power in some way that is never actually explained? I always liked that one.

This. In 2023 journalists found that the UAE hired a Swiss private intelligence agency to spread rumors and allegations about Islamic Relief being affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. This smear campaign worked and convinced the German government to stop working with them and the Dutch cut back on working with them. GB News (a British news organization roughly equivalent to Fox News) was heavily involved in the smear campaign and ended up having to make a public apology and pay Islamic Relief damages This is Islamophobic propaganda.

Yeah, the law was designed primarily to protect Jewish people who were being harassed or blocked from going to places of worship.

I think it is more that any God that didn’t create all of reality doesn’t really count. It is basically limiting who can be a deity to the God of Abrahamic monotheists and maybe some primordial deities in some polytheist pantheons. The rest of the deities don’t count of course.

My reading is that this was designed to protect Jewish groups from anti-Semitic attacks. There have been some attempts to intimidate Jewish groups using Nazi symbols. Also some harassment by Christian and Muslim groups. A belief in Jesus does not inherently mean that. At all. Ever. Westboro Baptist believes in Jesus. It is also ridiculous to imagine that the words “Jesus Christ” will be a hate crime where Christianity is LITERALLY the most pervasive religious affiliation. This is paranoia. No one thinks like this. You mean they are encouraging and supporting things that you think are dumb. If they were encouraging and supporting everything then…… ……how are they saying some people are judgemental and bigoted? I thought they were celebrating everything people do. And if you think there is anyone out there that doesn’t believe they are evil people in the world then……LOL. this is insane. There is an uptick in disapproval and disdain for Christianity. I ascribe a lot of this to Christian leaders defending, supporting, and backing horrible things. This isn’t just propaganda convincing people the poor innocent harmless Christians are haters. They are being called haters because they are out there hating. Many Christians scare me because they actively want bad things to happen to many of my friends. The speech that this bill criminalizes is actively calling for harm to groups. I have seen Christian leaders bravely proclaiming that this will not change what they say in their sermons and I wonder what the hell they are preaching in these sermons that this is some kind of brave risk?

Your sources don’t back up some of what you wrote. Was this AI? I question the “miracle” bit. That is a description given by his dad and I can definitely see the relief that his son survived feeling like a miracle. He fell three stories but hit an awning on the way done which potentially slowed the fall and made the final impact less severe. He still has a severe concussion and a lacerated foot and ongoing persistent back pain. Some sources are playing up it is miraculous that no bones were broken but I think I would rather have a few broken bones than potentially ongoing back problems. I hope the kid recovers completely. Also the anti LDS motive with the paper around the rock and the calculated plan to harm the missionary aren’t supported by the source articles. Do those come from other sources? This is one reason I am concerned that this is AI generated. There are other potential motives for an attack. There is strong anti-imperialist sentiment in Tahiti that leads to distrust and/or hatred of American and Europeans and Mormon missionaries are a relatively easy target for this motive. And yeah, being held at gunpoint or robbed is not uncommon. At least it happened quite a bit when I was out and I was in England. Had a shotgun pointed at me once. Got threatened with death a few times. Had a slingshot shoot a rock at high speed that missed me and my companion’s heads by a few inches (it went between us) and shattered a bus stop glass thingamajig enclosure. I don’t know if they actually use glass for those. It was transparent but not sure of the material really. Also got to go to court for my companion to testify against a guy that robbed him at knife point. He later ran into the thief in the town center and ended up punching the thief out and calling over a cop afterwards. The guy pled out at the last minute so we sadly didn’t get to go into the courtroom. I kind of wanted to see the British court system in action a little bit out of curiosity. We also had several months where we had to be in before nightfall due to perceived danger in areas with a heavy Muslim presence. This was right after Clinton ordered Operation Infinite Reach which launched US attacks on alleged terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. There was concern about people targeting anything American in response. We were also told to avoid McDonald’s and other businesses that were prominently associated with the US. Nothing came of it. This lasted into winter which in England which meant a fair amount of time in which “night” fell around 4:00 in the afternoon. We played a lot of Risk and Monopoly that winter. I also got surprise attacked once by a guy. Might have been a skinhead. 90% sure he was on some kind of drugs. Took three punches if I remember correctly. Cut my lip bad on my teeth. Not my finest hour. My companion ran after the first punch. Companionship unity didn’t flourish from this experience. Once had a drunk guy who claimed to be part of the IRA threaten me. Pretty sure he was lying about being part of the IRA but maybe not. I have some reservations about an obsession with safety for missionaries. While obviously deliberately putting missionaries in danger is bad missions have always been somewhat dangerous. It is just part of the experience. I didn’t enjoy my mission in the aggregate but I am appreciative of some of the danger I faced. Taught me a bit about the world.

I was obviously talking about the contrast of the Jewish physical resurrection to a millenial reign with the more common interpretations of Christian heaven (and hell) that developed. LDS theology is a grab bag of the physical resurrection to a millenial reign, a quasi-heaven and hell in the Spirit World that loosely mirrors the traditional Christian interpretation of the afterlife, and then finally we capped it off with combining the two into an even more exalted spiritual and physical state and introducing a much more expansive form of theosis than the rest of Christianity had and also replacing the Platonic conception of deity that Judaism and Christianity adopted with a form of henotheism. It is kind of annoying how you seem to endlessly think you are teaching me LDS doctrines as if I am completely ignorant of them. I guess any excuse to condescend will do when you want to break out your prophet-teacher voice where you do your angelic/prophetic drag act and give us vainglorious pronouncements about the fate of the poor deceived fools who don’t accept the gospel. The prophecy of a limited resurrection at the time of the Messiah’s resurrection came from Joseph Smith. That is not exactly impressive prophecy. Like most prophecy ours tends to be very good right up until it actually has to predict the future and then we have to reinterpret to keep making the prophecies work.

Another exciting version of the Prosperity Gospel?

Yeah, it is a kind of afterlife. I wrote poorly but I was focusing on Pharisees not viewing themselves as saved by anything specific like a Christian would talk about Jesus. I might have even gone too far here. We don’t know a lot about the Pharisees. The closest thing we have to the writings of a self-identified Pharisee is Paul and he was obviously mixing in Christian ideas. Josephus describes them a bit in the abstract but he never describes himself as a pharisee though he might have aligned with them. The whole of Judea in the 1st century CE is a bit of a black hole of historical writings. We have the New Testament, Josephus, and Philo of Alexandria who lived in Egypt though he wrote that he visited the temple. Philo also mostly wrote up philosophical works harmonizing Judaism with Greco-Roman philosophy and not a lot about what was going on. There are fragments around and we have stuff written about some other political figures especially all the Herods (there were WAY too many Herods). What I am saying is it can be hard to be sure exactly what the Pharisees believed and taught and what was needed to get into the resurrected messianic ‘heaven’. Definitely following the Law and oral traditions. Later when the other major Jewish sects were gone (Sadducees lost all credibility when the temple was gone, the Zealots and probably the Essenes died in the revolts) so the Pharisees were in charge of the religion but not the territory anymore. This is the transition to rabbinic Judaism but we don’t have much from them either until the late second century so while they quote people from the first century it is hard to establish authenticity. The second century saw the Bar Kochba revolt and after that the one thing it seemed every rabbi agreed on was that they were SO DONE with apocalypticism since its primary function for the last few centuries seemed to be getting lots of Jews killed. It also led to a big emphasis on writing everything down going forward. A lot of teachings were passed on orally before but all the death had them justifiably paranoid that a lot could be lost so the Mishnah started getting composed to preserve it and over the following centuries the Talmuds were composed. And I am wandering off the point and rambling so will stop now. Basically it is hard to know what preparation for the resurrection required and meant in 1st century Pharisee thought.

There was a belief amongst many of the Pharisees of a coming physical resurrection but it wasn’t a heavenly afterlife as most Christians would view it. It was a resurrection during the messianic age. This can count as an afterlife of sorts but not one that most Christians would envision. Attempts to mesh the Christian afterlife with the scriptures talking about the Jewish one sometimes leads to a sometimes clumsy melding of the millenium with another more spiritual afterlife afterwards. A lot of versions of Christianity dispensed with the millenium idea. The Sadducees were more conservative and often treated any idea not taught in the Torah to be suspect and the resurrection isn’t in there. The Essenes were an apocalyptic cult. They saw the messianic age as imminent and probably died trying to make it happen. John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul were all apocalyptic preachers saying the messianic age was near but they don’t appear to be as strict as the Essenes. The Essenes were (by all indications we have) not out preaching to get converts. They gathered to prepare for the apocalyptic battle and live VERY strictly by the law of the Torah with some loophole exceptions created to get out of some requirements like not having to pay the temple tax. This is the Essenes as they were when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written. It is probably unfair to assume they were following everything that was written in the Dead Sea Scrolls as written at the time of Jesus since the scrolls were written earlier. The Essenes were still around but many of the scrolls were a century or two old at that point and beliefs and practices can shift a lot in that time. Generally apocalyptic cults tend to loosen up some when they find the end does not happen immediately but who knows what happened. It is still likely John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul were not as strict as the Essenes. Well, unless you favor the gospel of Matthew’s reading of Jesus where you have to follow the Torah even more strictly than the Pharisees AND also here are some new even stricter laws to follow about not even looking upon someone with lust and the rest of the add ons. Also that following the Law will be required until the heavens and the earth pass away which virtually no Christian group today does. I don’t think the writer of the gospel of Matthew was a big fan of Paul letting in Gentiles who didn’t submit to the Law.

This is often interpreted as what happened during the Great Apostasy. You know, the time where everyone was completely depraved and evil. *checks history books* Hey, wait a minute……..

They did pretty different things and Judaism at the time didn’t really have a blissful afterlife to be saved into. This is just projecting Christianity onto ancient Jews and acting like they thought just like us. They did not.

Playing parsing games with a (bad) English translation won’t show anything. You would have to establish that this is a viable reading of the Greek original.

I was talking about the resurrected beings visiting people personally. Enoch gave a prophecy about a resurrection but didn’t specify that many mortals in the vicinity would be visited by those beings. If I prophesied that a thousand people will be resurrected on Sunday it wouldn’t be verifiable. If I said they would also visit people and be seen by many it would be much more verifiable. If no one says they saw anyone I am probably a false prophet and need to be stoned.