The Nehor

I wouldn’t hold out much hope for an exact location to be identified in some text. Also the ancient world had very few maps. Distances were known primarily by how many days travel it is from A to B. An overhead view of the world was rarely considered or visualized.

In general the advice to transwomen and transmen is not to switch public bathroom usage until you are androgynous or passable. Yes, AFAB people who identify as men. Many take testosterone. Some have masectomies. Relatively few have some form of bottom surgery. Speaking generally they have a higher rate of passing than transwomen and get to that point more quickly. Self-identification and also for law enforcement not to be involved at all. They weren’t before. It is a self-policing situation. How about doing nothing then? The fear seems to be that cishet men will situationally identify as women under false pretenses to go into a women’s bathroom and perv on them. There was nothing legally stopping them from doing this before without having to identify as a woman before and bathrooms were not experiencing mass invasions. This is a solution that doesn’t work looking for a problem that doesn’t exist.

I think you are approaching this entirely from only one end of the equation. Instead I encourage you to do a Google image search for “transmen”. Look at the variety. These are people that you are saying HAVE to use the women’s restroom. Do you think that will make cis (and transwomen) users feel more comfortable? Huge muscled guys. Big bearded guys with potbellies. They are biologically female. AFAB. Should they be in the women’s restroom and the women’s locker room? Is this the lane you want to be in? This is what you are advocating for.

I think it is more likely that attack would have been a slave raid. While some Mesomaerican coronation ceremonies involved human sacrifice of captives all those we know of that followed this practice are after the Book of Mormon would have taken place. It is possible that coronation ceremony goes back further but there are a number of diatribes about the wickedness of the Lamanites and none of them mention human sacrifice until the time of Mormon. I would think that would be a common polemic if it were going on.

That is what I meant when I said many believe it while doing it. Trances or colorful imagination or self-hypnosis and the like. I have had some ecstatic experiences and getting there is doable, at least for some. Yeah, but in many ways this is like praying to God you will find your keys. You often will find them afterwards. When you are looking for tools and livestock there is a good chance you find them eventually and gesturing in a direction might end up being right. When it comes to treasure hunting the success rate appears to be zero. You can say the treasure slipped away and you were super close but no one seems to find a buried treasure with these magical abilities. The cynic in me sees Joseph’s story of being taken to the plates and then trying to get them but being pushed back for his greed for gold as a kind of encounter with a treasure guardian. Joseph is told to come back years later. Yet another failed treasure hunt.

Deacon comes from the Greek diakonos which roughly translated mean servant. Its biblical foundation is the seven men in Acts assigned to take care of funds and feed the hungry so the apostles/disciples would have time to focus on other things. In the Catholic Church after around the 6th century the office of deacon was mostly just a minor stepping stone on the way to being a priest until a few decades back there was an attempt to revitalize the office. There are women who are deacons in the New Testament as well. One use of the term was “Deacons of Defense” which in the 1960s functioned as armed bodyguards for prominent civil rights activists and stood as a check against activities of the Klan. The term we translate as priest comes from the idea of someone who mediates between God (or the gods) and humanity usually through performing rites to placate or intercede with the divine. This sort of fits with the sacrament which is the Church’s form of a sacred rite that mediates between God and humanity. It “absolves” people of sin through the intercession of the priest who is standing in for Jesus who intercedes. Basically a lesser or representative priest. Teacher is kind of a clunky name for an office because it doesn’t match with what most people think of as a teacher. The office fit slightly better into the mold in the earliest days of the Church when Aaronic Priesthood offices were more often held by adult men but it is now kind of awkward to have Teachers who rarely formally teach. Teachers have always been a bit of an awkward office. Preparing the sacrament isn’t in their list of duties in any formal sense but it fit well as a stepping stone.

I would have thought she had aged out of being a Messenger of Hope but:

A bit tenuous. There were probably a couple of treasure hunting magic users in the area Joseph could have learned from. While this is the tail end of the treasure hunting expedition craze that started in the Early Modern Period that just means the way it works is pretty well established. There is no need for mentor/apprentice relationships. Seriously I read a few articles on it and I can do treasure hunting sorcery. You just guide the diggers to the spot, talk about your metaphysical battle with the treasure guardian while they are digging, mention that the treasure is slippery or is sinking and try to compel the guardian to relinquish the treasure. Call on God, use some angelic names, throw in a few polytheistic deities and/or demonic names to try to compel the guardian away and then declare that the effort failed. Maybe say that you can see it and reach into the hole and then be struck back by some supernatural power. A bit of a theater, a bit of dramatics, someone with a vibrant enough imagination could even believe it is real while doing it.

Also if they were going for the whole triad thing from the Bible and Book of Mormon shouldn’t it be Faith, Hope, and Charity instead of putting Light at the end?

Too long. Putting the same on Young Men? Deacons of Faith, Teachers of Hope, and Priests of Light? Yuck. I thought leaving them nameless was a bad idea but make it succinct. Also if Gatherers means Gleaners they are talking about hose who followed the harvesters and picked up the bits of grain the harvesters missed. In Israel it was something only the impoverished would do and was a form of welfare. Making young women gleaning the light from the remains of what the harvesters already got in abundance can make for some unflattering chauvinist symbolism. A kind of: You can laboriously collect and treasure the Light the harvesters (usually men) leave for you after they get the bulk of it. Not exactly a good bit to symbolism in that sense. I would leave it as Gatherers which still has the weird Hunter Gatherer bit hinted at. Tender entreaties? What book were you reading? The only steamier Bible stories I can think of are the Song of Solomon/Songs and Esther. Ruth is a story of erotic seduction and two desperate women plotting said seduction. Ruth and Naomi are impoverished and come home during the harvest. Ruth goes out to glean and luckily ends up with Naomi’s close relative. Boaz shows some interest and tells the young men working his field to leave her alone (she was at serious risk of sexual assault) and that she can drink from their water instead of fetching her own. Ruth plays it coy and insists she is a stranger and doesn’t deserve this. Clever girl. Boaz says he knows her story and asks God to shelter her beneath his wings/robes. Ruth abases herself as a slave and praises Boaz for treating her so well even though she is not even his slave. Boaz then instructs the workers to subtly give her extra food. She brings back an impressive haul and has to thresh it. There is a euphemism in there but I won’t elaborate. Naomi sees this as a big chance for both of them and gets Ruth ready for the seduction in her best clothes and instructs him to wait for Boaz to get drunk and tired and pass out on the floor and to uncover his “feet”. The feet are a common euphemism in the Bible for genitalia. So Ruth waits till Boaz is done threshing out the harvest for the day and he drinks a lot and passes out on the floor. She sneaks in and “uncovers” him. Suddenly he wakes up afraid. Why afraid? What else was going on that would make him afraid? Fill in your own reason here. He looks at his “feet” and sees a beautiful woman there. Shocked he asks who she is and she coyly gives her name, calls herself his slave, reminds him of his relation to Naomi and that he has an obligation to marry her under levirate law and then teases him about his earlier comment asking God to cover her in his wings/robes now asking him to cover her in his skirt which very much has more than one meaning. I think you can draw your own picture here. ‘Come on big boy, you know you want to’. So it is an erotic enticement and a marriage proposal and a reminder of his duty to raise children in her deceased husband’s name. Ruth put herself in an incredibly vulnerable situation. She gave him every opportunity at this point to throw her to the social wolves and discredit her as a loose woman. Ruth (and Naomi) aren’t idiots. They are hoping he will do the right thing on one hand but they are also making this as erotic and sexy as possible. Vulnerability is incredibly erotic. She give him absolute control of her destiny and basically dares him to discredit her but with the caveat that if he does they won’t be together. Ruth is GOOD at this. Boaz then says everyone knows she is a virtuous woman. No, Ruth showed up at the beginning of the harvest and no one knows her but this is really a promise not to expose her. He says there is one kinsman closer that must forfeit his right before he can marry her but he will seek to remove this obstacle and swears an oath by Adonai that if the kinsman relents he will marry her. Then she spends the whole night at his “feet”. Maybe they talked. Maybe they discussed the harvest. Maybe they talked about the difficulties inherent in interracial marriage. Maybe they got an early start and got some extra threshing 😘done. Then she lets her sneak out to avoid a scandal and gives her a large supply of food. A gift? Payment? Kind of vague. Ruth goes back to Naomi with her prize and Naomi assures her Boaz will not be able to rest until he resolves this matter. Good girl Ruth. You got him desperate for more to the point he can’t do or think of anything or rest until he works this out. Ruth has game. Boaz then gets together a group of witnesses and meets with the nearer kinsman and asks him to redeem the property of Naomi. The guy jumps at this offer. FREE LAND!!!!! If Naomi and Ruth were there (probably) this would have been a bit of a downer but also might have been part of the plan. By forcing Boaz into action they were bound to end up with someone who could support them. They would probably prefer Boaz but the other guy was at least a meal ticket. Then Boaz pulls the rug out from under this guy and says that if he claims the land he also has to marry Ruth and give their relative children. This other guy then panics. When it was free land that was great. When it comes with a wife that would seriously complicate his inheritance. He probably already has sons and if Ruth bears him another one they have to split the land even more. Plus would his wife be happy if he brought home another wife. Also Ruth was a Moabite, a filthy foreigner born of that dirty incest story about Lot. That might lower his prestige. So he begs off and Boaz marries her. Then everyone rejoices and praises Ruth and compares her to Leah and Rachel bearing the children of Israel. And then, just in case you start wondering if you were just reading all this sexy stuff into what was actually an entirely prim and proper story they compare Ruth to Tamar. Yeah, that Tamar. Tamar the daughter-in-law of Judah who disguised herself as a prostitute and seduced her father-in-law and got pregnant with his child in order to manipulate him into giving her what she rightfully deserved. Yeah, the parallels are pretty obvious. It is women using forbidden seduction to get what they are entitled to but the men who are responsible for it are slow in delivering. Then Ruth has a son who becomes the grandfather of King David which means his great grandmother was a Moabite….oh no…… WAIT!!!!!! HOLD EVERYTHING!!!! THE LAW IS CLEAR!!!!! "No Ammonite or Moabite shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. Even to the tenth generation, none of their descendants shall be admitted..." (Deuteronomy 23:3) Uh-oh, David is seven generations too early to be allowed to join the people of Israel. Oh wait, the sages have convened and decided that prohibition only to descendants of Moabite men. Moabite women and other women of prohibited ethnicities are now fine. The day is saved! HOORAY!!! And no, this reading of the Book of Ruth is not eccentric at all. Oh, and want to know the more modern queer reading of the Book of Ruth. Well, you see, Ruth liked Israel’s god but she was really into Naomi. They used her husband as a beard to hide their relationship. When he died Naomi begged her sapphic lover to return to her people but Ruth loved her too much to leave her. In some versions Orpah was part of their polycule too but she chose the route of safety rather than devotion to Sapphos…cough…I mean Adonai, definitely Adonai. Then they hatched a plan to get the younger half of the couple married to Boaz so they could survive and stay together so they could thresh grain together and ((((((((CENSORED))))))))))))) This reading of Ruth is eccentric. VERY eccentric. But it makes me laugh.

Like Bart Ehrman. And Jesus was expected to be a messiah. What happens when you put your life aside to follow a messiah and it doesn’t work out? A modern equivalent would be these people who come along every few years and give an exact date for the end of the world or Second Coming. When it fails some people leave but most stick around and start reframing things. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had important prophecy dates in 1874, 1878, 1914, 1918, 1925, and 1975. They reframed them each time. 1914 was originally the end of all earthly governments and was reframed as the beginning of the invisible reign of Christ while the generation living in 1914 was reframed as seeing Jesus’s glorious return. Later they had to reinterpret what a generation meant. The LDS Church has also stretched out what a generation means in order to save some D&C prophecies. The Christians of the ancient world expected Jesus to return very soon and within the lifetime of those living and Paul supported this belief. That didn’t work out either. Then those expectations were reinterpreted. When Sabbatai Zevi was expected to be the Jewish messiah and then died before he could fulfill the prophecies the belief sprang up that he would come back to life to make those prophecies be fulfilled. Jesus is similar except the teaching was that Jesus had come back to life and then there was a huge theological scramble to figure out what that meant.

144,000 appears to be a symbolic number in the Book of Revelation. 12 * 12 * 1,000 = 144,000. Most likely 12 apostles/disciples multiplied by the 12 tribes multiplied by a thousand probably representing completeness or a totality of people or something along those lines.

Yeah, but you can’t claim God is indifferent to death and yet wants it strictly regulated.

I have personal knowledge of an attempted trademark take down. A relative of a friend created a “Mormon” dating site and got hit by a threat of a lawsuit for using the term Mormon and possibly other trademark infringements. I am not certain of how good the Church’s case was. On the other hand the guy was very sleazy and ran a lot of scams targeting Church members so I suspect this site also was scummy as hell. From what I heard he sold the site before the case went anywhere so no idea if it went anywhere. The Church does target other sites but no idea how credible their claims usually are.

If it doesn’t matter to God whether people live or die why would he give commands not to murder except when God thought a bit of genocide would be cool and good? Saying God doesn’t care isn’t supported by the Bible in any way. God cares a lot and just wants control of it. Also if mortals fearing death is some kind of bug that is also God’s fault since God put it there. Whoopsie.

YIKES ON BIKES! I am so sorry you are going through this and no, that kind of abuse isn’t normal.

That would mean it really wouldn’t be much like the original artifact. Adding the entire Torah and the prophets would mean the original had a lot of spare room or it had to be massively expanded. Probably easier to copy it onto a new object or rebuild it. Jeremiah had just been cast into prison for his treasonous talk about capitulating to Babylon. So was it Pharoah or Laban that added them in this theory. The whole theory is very fiddly and seems to try to fit the record into a bunch of biblical events with no evidence. This is how you would do it if you were making it into a novel or a movie but is very unlikely.

State schools have government funding but they don’t need the government to write rules for them. In fact they would do better to fund state schools so they are more affordable. That is one of the reasons tuition has gotten so high. Instead universities being supportive of transgender students is being used as a wedge issue to further decrease funding because that is just where we are as a people right now.

*spit take* Say what? It is important to note that previous to transgender issues steaming to the forefront that there weren’t any laws about being in the wrong gendered bathroom. There were even reasons to ignore those rules like the men’s bathroom not having a changing table. There wasn’t a rash of perverts rushing into women’s bathrooms. Weirdos spinning tales of how they would have claimed they “felt like a woman” in High School in order to change in the girl’s locker room are just weirdos outing themselves. Transgender people rarely switch which restrooms they use until they are passable or androgynous at least and many actually plan around not having to use public restrooms out of fear. They just want to pee. They aren’t excited to use them or anything. Sports organizations are working on rules to govern this stuff. It is not an insurmountable problem and doesn’t need government intervention from mindless zealots wanting a say. The only decent studies I know of about the effects of hormone replacement therapy on sports performance have been done by transgender researchers. As a practical matter most transgender people on HRT have more estrogen or testosterone than a cis gendered person. In other words ironically the biggest unfairness might be AFAB transmen competing in men’s sports. All this varies of course on how long and how consistently you are on HRT. I can say anecdotally that having done wrestling with a lot of queer people that transwomen rapidly lose a lot of upper body strength. One transwoman friend is five inches taller than me, ten years younger than me, and was well muscled before hormone therapy. She is still big and looks swole but after two years of HRT I can wrestle her down. After six months on T a really twinky and small transguy I know just about matches my strength. This doesn’t need to be a controversy. It can be figured out and no one really needs to advocate while the pros figure out how to tackle this and amateur level stuff it just doesn’t matter that much. It is about participation so let them play.

How did we go from a discussion of laws mandating that mandatory reporters now be required to report all incidents of gender non-conforming behavior to parents worrying about spurious abuse and neglect charges. And worried about “Missiion creep” in that direction and not at how vague “gender non-conforming behaviour” is and the potential for a lot of “mission creep” there? Climate change denialism with a new coat of paint. Yes, and there is. A huge difference. It is also important to note that the vast majority of “gender affirming care” surgeries given to minors is gynecomastia (breast reduction surgery) for cisgendered boys who have large breasts because those breasts cause them emotional and psychological distress. This is also an irreversible procedure and poses significant health risks but the controversy never was and never will be about the actual surgery. It is about the person being transgender. If it were about cosmetic surgery on minors in general or even gender affirming surgery on minors most of those surgeries are on cis-gendered minors whose body appearance doesn’t match their preferred gender and it causes distress. There is no outcry about this or warnings about how it can’t be reversed and how minors aren’t ready to ‘choose’ this yet.

That is not how probability works. The odds of my being dealt a specific poker hand (including the exact value and suit of each individual card) in 5 card draw is astronomically low for every possible hand but I will be dealt one of those astronomically unlikely hands every time. Take those statistics you are using and find a statistically likely result. You can’t. In addition you are assuming that these choices are all made in a vacuum. If Joseph Smith was just making it up his writing/dictation style could easily shift as he went. He used one grammatical construction for a while and then changed it one time and carried on mostly or exclusively using the new structure. It may not even be a conscious choice. You tried it once and it just seemed to flow so you keep using it. You see this all the time with writers. Especially new writers where the way they write changes partway through a novel.

I am curious as to why the prophecies of Jeremiah would be in it. They were pretty pro-surrender to Babylon. Why would Pharoah want those around? All kinds of dating problems with that and why it would contain more modern things like Jeremiah. I would also argue that something that old and prestigious wouldn’t be something that Lehi’s wealth could realistically be traded for.

Being inconsistent in how you write is proof it is an authentic ancient text?

I have no idea. That is what I am trying to figure out. I admit that it is unsettling not to have solid answers to questions like this but not having something to fill a void in my understanding if I discard something doesn’t mean that what was there was accurate. It is unfortunate not to know it. The LDS faith posits that a long extinct belief was correct and had to come back. Virtually all Christian faiths accept a time before their faith arrived. Judaism wasn’t really proto-Christianity and Judaism as we understand it doesn’t really go back that far. So if some variant of the Christian faith is correct then it wasn’t around for a time and was openly ridiculed by the Greco-Roman world it appeared in for many reasons but one of the main reasons was how new it was. They saw antiquity as proof that their gods were strong. I don’t share their conviction that that is correct. I am not sure what I think God expects or whether God expects anything of us or if God exists at all. This goes back to Christianity not always being on the Earth. In the LDS faith I heard the idea that God wouldn’t let the truth lose was false since the Jews (to some degree) lost the truth why couldn’t Christianity? I am admittedly less convinced that Judaism had some ‘truth’ that Christianity recovered from Judaism but that is a common narrative. Oh, I definitely expect change over time. That is a given. One of the things my best history professor taught was that any time a culture claims that their practices (relgious, cultural, economic, etc) extend unchanged back to time immemorial get very very skeptical. We have lots of cultures that have made those claims and every time we can check it turns out not to be true. I have joked that the LDS Church should be approaching its Councils phase soon. Starts in a burst of revelation and miracles and goes on like that for a while and then slowly becomes more institutional and operating more and more out of practicality slowly changing in ways that many won’t notice. There have been three eras of different conceptions of sealing practices in the Church and I bet less than 5% of members know much of anything about the previous models. My understanding is that there was a time where the gnostics likely outnumbered the proto-orthodox and a gnostic version of Christianity was the first to attempt a systemic doctrinal structure. I don’t find it terribly convincing but it was clever and interesting. Also I have to admit I have a secret love for the shade that the gnostics and proto-orthodox were throwing at each other. Wow, those guys were good at character assassination.

That is not what I said but if you want to take offense at the imagined thing you think I said you do you. So was it a choice to believe that was what I said?