The Nehor

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?

It is more that I am saying that I don’t trust the sublime times or the down times any more and decided to try to figure out God or the lack thereof by other means becuase, as you said, good times and bad times both come and go. The quantity of bad times presents problems for an especially benevolent God existing but by itself it isn’t that conclusive.

Ummmm…..no. I doubt because I deeply examined the evidence and saw a lot of reasons to doubt. If I thought objective reality could be amended to what I want it to be by beliefs then I would choose differently but that is not the Universe I live in.

Are they though? I don’t have the mental ability to convince myself of things that I am convinced are untrue or the ability to doubt things that have repeatedly been proven to be true. Maybe in some cases it is a choice I don’t think that is always or even usually the case.

Most of my friends think I am pretty optimistic. Also what is an “unending rupture of victim classes”? The idea that mortal experiences are awful and unjust is weird? Has your life truly been that great? Warning: Vulgar language around one of the most empathetic things I have heard directed at those who are tired of living and want to give up. I send this to people who are struggling with their life and it usually makes them feel seen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh7QWBb2U2A And yeah, while my life is not particularly good I know a lot of people who have it much much worse and have endured things that probably would have broken me completely. So yeah, I question why God decided to give them these horrific scars that may never heal. It is called empathy. Then again I heard that got reclassified as sin in large parts of our culture. When Dante went down into hell his humanity led him to feel empathy and pity for those being tormented. Then he corrected himself when his guide Virgil told him that his pity and empathy were misplaced as showing empathy was sin because the damned deserved that punishment and wishing it was not this way was questioning the judgement of God. Really really messed up stuff and it is still amongst us and not just towards the dead. Also to the “unending rupture of victim classes” which I assume means…..victims?

Yes, and this is why a lot of people leave. It doesn’t seem to be working and they are told the problem is really with them. But really, I am not upset over my life and that is not why I am doubting. My life has never been that great. i am used to a degree of misery and frustration and having to fight my own brain chemistry and deal with feeling like an outsider looking in. I have become less convinced that the gospel is suddenly going to reverse that either before or after death or that this process was somehow “refining” me. I have felt a sublime connection to God in the past. I even have experiences where I feel that sublime euphoria and connection sometimes now. I am just not convinced it is from God and I have read up on enough mystical experiences from all kinds of cultures and faiths that sound similar that I have a hard time accepting that these are an indicator of some eternal objective truth.

I now have a mental image of an apostle speaking in General Conference and an angel with a flaming sword appearing in the congregation and pointing at his eyes and then pointing at the speaker. Now I can’t stop giggling.

There are other ways God could communicate with us. I have a hard time believing God went with this option because it was the best of a lot of bad choices. He could have an angel show up every General Conference to give us more direct communication. He could have an angel visit each of us individually a few times a year to update us on what we need to work on and what we need to do. There are plenty of other options. God chose not to use them so the message getting through clearly just doesn’t seem that important to God for whatever reason.

It doesn’t seem like whomever is running this show knows me very well. You can argue that God does know me super well and is playing some kind of long game but I like to think that an omniscient and omnipotent God that wanted to communicate that He knows me well would find a way to do it so that I would recognize since He, you know, knows me better than I do. If I don’t recognize it is that really some kind of defect in me?

The wrong Kennedy survived.

Yeah, that is more than a little callous to the guy who thought he was damned and was clearly distressed. I mean, that was back when the CHI was still held close to the chest so it is not like he could have checked the rulebook. And for this latest pushback that counsel doesn’t help anyways. So is the general rule about who is to be the primary or sole breadwinner still in effect or not? People are still out there teaching it. Should they be? I see apostles complaining about people not listening to the things they teach but a lot of the time it is because they don’t acknowledge changes they have subtly made without telling anyone. If you communicate vaguely and cagily you can expect misunderstandings.

Or even basic health stuff like dead body disposal. He left that dead bear cub in Central Park.

I should support him because he was related to someone? That is just stupid. Also the idea that the Democratic party is full of people I should deeply trust and respect due to affiliation? What? Why would I do that? That is cult leader type thinking. Also he is a lawyer, not an expert in medicine. And his stance on vaccines is contributing to all the lovely measles outbreaks my state is experiencing. I guess we are too stupid to look at history and see how bad diseases can be. We forgot they were bad and have to try them again just to see what happens.

There is a survivorship bias here. While it was based to a degree on the church fathers there were lots of Christianities around that made similar claims. The proto-orthodox movement won out so it is easy to see it as a continuous tradition yet plenty of other versions of Christianity could have won out. Then add the differences that have slowly slipped in over time while others have slipped out. The Church Fathers would be confused or bewildered by quite a bit of what there is in Catholicism. Probably even more by Protestantism (and Mormonism) that claim to be a restoration in some sense of what the Church Fathers believed.

Sugat and caffeine soothe my ADHD but it is probably not worth it. Then again, almost everything that ameliorates the symptoms has drawbacks.

It is about becoming perfect. Just that we won’t get that close to it. I do wonder if people in the past had an elevated view of virtue to the point that they throught they were closer to perfections than they were. God doesn’t need signals. He knows what we want and what our motivations are. Also in situations like the one described I wonder if this is some kind of sacrifice for God or just doing what you want to do anyways and thinking God is pleased at it for some reason and that ‘waving the flag’ in itself is a virtue. The Word of Wisdom as written is okay with beer. I agree that beer can get people into trouble. Lots of things get people into trouble. Hooray……. No problem here. I hear this a lot but experience hasn’t borne this out in my experience. Ugh, no. MAHA is gross. I prefer my medical and public health initiatives to be grounded in experimentation and understanding and not pseudoscience.

How? I wouldn’t think you can do it from the text? Admittedly the text of D&C 89 and the Word of Wisdom as it is practiced don’t share much in common and there probably is an argument that the Word of Wisdom as practiced suggests it would be against a lot of sugar consumption. I have a private suspicion that some of the craziness in the US is due to our lax food regulations giving us a pretty horrific amount of sugar. There’s that one rat study where they fed the rats the equivalent of a North American diet in terms of sugar and fat and they got really stupid and confused.

I don’t think this has anything to do with discipleship. I don’t think any real form of purity is even possible for humans. Some elements of what we call purity or aspirational but the nature of our being makes it impossible to achieve. That seem like it is just worrying about what the neighbors will think with extra steps. Jesus wasn’t big on that kind of thinking. Which is odd since the Word of Wisdom as written endorses beer drinking and doesn’t mention any of those reasons for the things it does disapprove of. God doesn’t need us to do virtue signaling to figure out where someone stands. No, I would not give my child (even if they are an adult) pornography or a lurid item (I assume you mean sex toys here). That would be deeply weird. It would be weird with any family member really. I don’t know of any scripture that makes the “hot drinks” bit less important than the “strong drink” bit. I know that culturally they are treated differently on separate tiers but I have no reason to believe God makes any such distinction.

The joke about that comic is that someone then told Kennedy that the Soviets had already eaten a third of their bag of pinecones and Kennedy immediately started chowing down. The space race was funny. The Soviets got a lot of the firsts like first satellite and first human in orbit. Then the USA got to the moon and declared it over and that we won. It was probably something of a relief to the Soviets who really couldn’t afford to keep going.

I think this is purity culture gone nuts. Financing a lifestyle choice? It is a gift. This seems to be more about signaling to everyone else as opposed to focusing on the relationship the gift is a part of. I mean don’t do it if you don’t want to but making not giving certain gifts to people a virtue is making virtue itself cheap and petty.

Oh definitely. Many from those generations raised kids and passed on those beliefs. I wish leadership would be more direct when things shift rather than trying to let cultural osmosis and a slow shift in emphasis take care of everything. It is like they took Screwtape’s advice and just reversed it: "The safest road to hellheaven is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

I’m not surprised. Imagine if this was in a church magazine back in the 80s or 90s. There is less of a furor now but those people that would have gotten upset over this back then are still around. I have some British church magazines from the later 70s. The stuff in there would cause a furor for the traditional gender roles and anti-feminist messages. The Church is still trying to straddle the line on this and is going to keep offending if they start advocating more for either side of the divide.

I think the weirdest situation I heard of was Tala the storyteller. A library in the UK got a new mascot. A gender neutral alien designed to appeal to small children. They ended up with angry parents thinking this literal alien was destroying gender norms. There were people (purportedly adults) demanding to know how this alien species that is designed to be cute and relatable to small children reproduces. These people somehow think they are the well-adjusted normal ones.

Yes, we did. Hiding it would involve a conspiracy of silence of hundreds of people. The most damning evidence against it being a hoax was the moon rocks that were brought back. These were not jealously horded and kept from the public eye. Universities and research groups studied them extensively.