The Nehor

Rich people tend to commit very different kinds of crimes. Still, should probably get rid of richness while we get rid of poverty too. LOL, no. Just no. Governments for virtually all of human history have not been trying to end poverty. The idea that governments exist to help all the people they rule over is a very recent idea. Also for most of recorded history even if you had somehow equally distributed wealth that equal distribution would have been above but not that high above subsistence levels. In a bad year it would have been below subsistence levels. It lead to inaccuracies to take the kinds of governments that exist today with their priorities and push them on pre-modern societies. Governments exist primarily to inflict violence on enemies and control or channel or mitigate internal violence (usually by inflicting violence).

I don’t believe that part of the Matthew account at all. That is bigger than any miracle or even the resurrection of Jesus and it doesn’t show up in the first gospel? Nah, that is a legend that was added later.

I wouldn’t cast it as Persians vs. Iranians. I would like to see the regime in Iran fall but the current US talk about intervention isn’t helping and I wish we would butt out. Few things give a faltering regime legitimacy than opposing an intrusive foreign power. I worry intervention even if in support of the protests may doom the protests. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” - Stephen Miller "These are the iron laws of the world. We're a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.” - Stephen Miller This kind of rhetoric has me worried about what they will do next. The United States largely prospered under the status quo system of restraining aggression. Now we are the aggressors and think the law of the jungle is our guide. Our position on the world stage as a leader and defender has been lost, possibly forever.

Minneapolis doesn’t have all of those. Or is this a non sequiter about the alleged fraud in Minneapolis suggesting that if fraud is possible in regards to a program that having such a program is fruitless and shouldn’t exist. If so, we should really disband the military. And the government in general. If it is about Minneapolis’s alleged fraud I am pretty sure the solution is not to send in ICE agents to stop the fraud but that is what the government is doing suggesting that the supposed fraud is just a pretext to harass immigrants and political enemies. You know, like authoritarian governments do to rally support.

This sounds way too much like a modern General Conference. Also worried that he is going to hurt his jaw doing that.

I’ve heard this song and dance before. The people of Iraq yearn for freedom. If we eliminate Saddam it will usher in a golden age. The people of Afghanistan all hate the Taliban If we take out their government they will build a brighter tomorrow as a US ally. The people of Vietnam dislike communism. If we help them defeat communism they will remain staunch allies against communist states. Add in rosy predictions for what toppling leftist leaning regimes all over the world during the Cold War would accomplish. Many of the same politicians that justified Iraq in these same terms are using the same explanations. WHY DO WE KEEP BELIEVING THEM? I’m sure many Venezuelans are hopeful. Will it be enough so that this violation of all of the norms of international law and looting the nation of Venezuela will go well? And why are we saber rattling with Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, and (sigh) Greenland at the same time? All this from a President who ran on not getting us into quagmires and burned allies and wrecked things trying to pull out. Also pulled out a lot of the benign stuff like all those US aid programs saving tens of thousands of lives. Why does the one intervention he really wants have to be in a resource rich nation while his public remarks are salivating over all that oil? At least in Iraq we pretended oil wasn’t one of the main factors. The talk of liberation rings through all forms of imperialism. The British and the French loved these narratives. The United States really drank in all this “enlightened” interventionist rhetoric from the worst president in US history. Yeah, I am still mad at you Woodrow Wilson! Your fault! Your condescending desire to be the messiah of world piece. You racist segregationist halfwit! You delusional wackjob! You primed the pump for over a century of “enlightened” interventionism! Without you probably no authoritarian communism. No Nazis, no fascists, no Soviets. YOU FOOL!!!!!!!!!! Yes, I am saying Teddy Roosevelt should have gotten a third term. Edit: To be clear I hope I am wrong. I hope that despite all the incompetence involved in this endeavor that somehow the regime is put down and a democratic government installed that will avoid being looted by US oil companies and navigate a course leading to a brighter future for the people of Venezuela. I just think the odds of this happening are incredibly low.

Sounds like a trauma response. That kind of response is (sort of partially) genetic. The currently prevailing paradigm is that our brains have trauma response mechanisms but until trauma happens they are dormant. If a response is needed with any regularity it can become a coping mechanism and a response in situations that are not truly traumatic. The brain just thinks it might be traumatic. A kind of defense reaction.

Universal healthcare including greater access to contraception and reproductive health care, subsidized or free childcare, democratization and overhaul of our education system, and real social safety nets. That would make a good start.

It is poverty. It is all the poverty. We should work on fixing that.

This assumes that God is speaking directly through Paul and Joseph Smith and doesn’t show that Paul was preaching about salvation for the dead. If showing that this specifically was being taught requires a book of scripture that wouldn’t exist until over 1,000 years later then it wasn’t being taught in Paul’s letter by itself. If Paul was trying to teach that he was incompetent.

Nobody said that it was the “only” reason. You are misrepresenting in order to be hypbolic. The people you are backing, hope this helps. See, I can do misrepresentative hyperbole too!

The French weren’t morally pristine. They were playing power politics. They supported the underdog to destabilize their enemy. The decapitation strike at Venezuela seems to have the objective of looting the nation because that is what the guy who ordered it done talks about the most. There was no group of rebels seeking help from the United States and unlike the French intervention in that case the French were not seeking to control the United States as a puppet, weren’t looking to loot the USA’s natural resources, and weren’t doing it primarily due to naked imperialism. Also we are supposed to be moving beyond imperialism. And the United States likes to position itself as morally and fundamentally different than other nations. We fail in that aspiration regularly but we at least pretend we believe in it. Is that being abandoned? I admit I will weep if it is but it might be for the best to give up the pretense if it is no longer even aspirational. If leadership does decide to occupy Caracas and they resist the attack will we massacre the population and enslave the survivors and point to Roman’s policy when capturing a city that resists as justification?

It is important to note that the “firstfruits” was believed to be proof of an imminent return of Jesus setting off mass resurrection very soon. The Resurrection had begun and it was expected it would continue immediately. Neither Paul nor his followers thought the general Resurrection was a distant event. That idea came up later when the messiah did not quickly return to fulfill the messianic expectations and the general resurrection did not continue to accelerate quickly.

You are seriously trying to compare the current situation to French intervention in the American Revolutionary War? That is a stretch that would rip Plastic Man in half.

Glad the guy escaped. Not sure I like the bit at the end about this potentially leading to a temple. There is possibly going to be a lot of bloodshed on the way to that happening. I hope not. The US’s history of implementing regime changes is abysmal. I had hoped the days of this kind of gunboat diplomacy and topping foreign governments through military coercion were over.

The great absurdity is assuming everyone else trying to figure out what Paul meant are choosing a belief based on what they want to be true (as you seem to be) when they are actually trying to puzzle out what the most probable reality is. You spend way too much time concocting weird and irrational reasons for why people who disagree with you are really just malicious and depraved and want people to suffer. This is just xenophobia run crazy. It is “othering” and imagining people are inhuman. This kind of reasoning leads to all kinds of conspiracy nonsense that ends up hurting a lot of people.

Wanting to believe the church is doomed. Also I wouldn’t throw out the racism card. I mean if they ask why it took the Church so long to get started in Africa it becomes kind of silly to gloat over the Church’s supposed relative lack of racism.

That analogy only works if it is well to do church members looking down on the impoverished ones.

Because that is where the Church was established and that, in general, increased religiousity is found in less politically and socially stable and more impoverished countries. Relying on less developed countries as a source for new members is seen as a kind of last-ditch effort. This shouldn’t be a surprise. The Book of Mormon supports this kind of thinking. Whenever God wants to gin up some conversions and get people religious again God breaks out the wars, famines, and natural disasters to scare the people back to needing God. The Bible suggests the same in places where God punishes his people with everything from unjust divine laws to defeat in battle to other myriad disasters. The Book of Mormon is just much more explicit in describing it. There is enough racism and explicit racist dogwhistling that it is probably a waste of time to spend time imagining critics of the Church are secretly racists. It is more likely to be wishful thinking that the Church is stagnating or is doomed. The prognosis doesn’t look great at the moment but things can always change. We appear to be in an incredibly stupid timeline where the stupidest possible things happen so something stupid could easily hurt or help the Church in some way and change trends.

When talking about leaving a faith that you have believed since you were young or that you believed for an extended period of time the process of separation often involves a process of figuring out who you are without that faith. This is sometimes called “deconstruction”. The process is probably never fully complete but most reach a point where it is not something that involves much time or attention. I don’t see how Dehlin is particularly good at helping in this process but perhaps for some he does. It is my mostly unsubstantiated opinion that some who leave the faith become the equivalent of a ‘sober alcoholic’ where they have made the separation but still resent the loss of community or sense of belonging. I think finding a community/tribe is one of the main means of moving on but being in a community where the main element is having previously been LDS might stymie the process. If that community is the only community you are involved in the effect is probably worse.

No idea. An extension of Jewish prayers for the Dead? Maybe something the followers of John the Baptist came up with or some offshoot group of them?

I have no idea who it was. I just find the theoretical that they were practicing an equivalent to what LDS do today unconvincing.

I agree with you. I was working more with the theoretical that it is a Christian ordinance similar to what LDS use. If that were the case it would be the Christians doing it so would they be doubting the resurrection.

That was an impressively long sentence. This assume Peter wrote 1 Peter which is dubious. Also the most probable reading isn’t “spirits of the dead” because it doesn’t mention the spirits being preached to as being dead. This is probably a reference to the book of Enoch where it is described how the “Watchers” left heaven due to lust and came down to mate with human women. In the Enoch literature they taught forbidden secrets and God sent the flood to drown the people. The Watchers didn’t die but were imprisoned in the Earth. This is tying Jesus to Enoch and giving Jesus a higher role in dealing with these imprisoned spirits/“heroes”/angels/whatever. Doubt Paul was talking about a graded resurrection here. Paul wasn’t testifying about baptism for the dead. At best he mentioned it as a point of inconsistency of people baptizing for the dead if the dead have no resurrection. You hit a problem here though. If they had something akin to the LDS view of baptism for the dead and were practicing it then why would they be doubting the resurrection? No idea what Paul meant there really. Why did Peter and Paul have to know all these unique LDS doctrines? Other dispensations almost certainly didn’t. The idea that to be true Peter and Paul had to leave cryptic hints about them is silly. It is repurposing scripture that was probably never intended to be scripture. If Paul knew his epistles were going to be passed on for millenia I doubt he would have included so many minor details. Would the writer of 2 Timothy have included a warning about wicked coppersmith Alexander if the writer knew the epistle would be read for so long? Doubt it. That Jesus would know of them seems fine and good but why did Peter and Paul have to know? The Doctrine and Covenants talks about how some truths have been held back for the last dispensation. Assuming Peter and Paul knew everything Joseph Smith did is kind of silly. Saying they had to know D&C 138 is very funny. There is no indication Joseph Smith knew that. Why would Peter and Paul have to know them?

Instead we wrest and twist the Bible to match our own prophet-informed beliefs despite the historical probability that the biblical writers were secretly sneaking in our modern doctrines in a kind of code into the text being pretty close to zero.