The Nehor

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.

Don’t bring this up. We are trying to play nice with other Christians these days and copy them regularly. Saying they are more satanic than atheists isn’t going to help. Seriously, this is Orson Pratt and his opponent playing with philosophical constructs off of intuitions. Neither are proving anything. It is just pitting one construct of God against another construct and pretending one is somehow obviously correct.

So anyone who is not an Abrahamic monotheist is an atheist? Everyone was an atheist until YHWH ascended to become a cosmic deity?

It is worth noting that the pre-exile prophets were not what we think of as prophets. In the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament we generally get two kinds of prophets. The ecstatic prophets would put themselves into ecstatic states to prophesy. They would act out dramas and put themselves into trances with things like self-cutting and (in some cases) hallucinogenics. Ezekiel probably falls into this camp. Elijah is more ecstatic. You also have the prophet groups like the one Saul joined. Then there are the apostolic prophets. This doesn’t mean apostle in the LDS sense, it means apostle in the “messenger” sense. These are prophets that get a message and deliver it. This is people like Jeremiah. Prophets generally deliver bad news. They are telling people what is wrong. Prophets are curmudgeons and doomsayers. They function because they have political backing. Once they lost political backing there wasn’t much of a niche for prophets to fill. Generally the prophets are not leaders. They are consultants. The equivalent of modern Church leader prophets isn’t there in the prophets of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel or any of the post-exile prophets. As to why they vanished most of those with a prophetic cast to them in early New Testament times were apocalyptic. In other words they were preaching a coming end of the world or transition to a messianic age. John the Baptist and Jesus fit into this mold as did many others. The Essenes who left the Dead Sea Scrolls were a group dedicated to apocalypticism. After the series of revolts against Rome that wiped out multiple rebel groups who were expecting a literal deus ex machina to save them from Roman power the Jewish leadership was sick of apocalypticism. It was getting lots of people killed. Expecting the messiah to come down and save you was turning a lot of these groups into what amounted to death cults. Read what the Essenes wrote that they expected to happen when they went to war and it is pretty easy to guess what happened to them. So the Jews largely abandoned that kind of apocalyptic fervor. There were resurgences of it within Judaism. Sabbatai Zevi in the 1600s is probably the most prominent. When he abandoned his faith when threatened with death and then died some of his followers created a movement somewhat similar to what happened with Jesus where they insisted he would return and fulfill the Messianic promises but so far that hasn’t happened. There was a lot of pushback against that kind of messianic fervor again and some restrictions and warnings were put in place around the study of Kaballah to try to restrain this kind of apocalyptic fervor. There are groups and leaders within the modern state of Israel fulfilling the mandate of the ancient prophets. They tend to be more like teachers. They call for ethical conduct in the mold of prophets like Isaiah and social justice in the mold of prophets like Amos and ‘speak unpleasant truths to power’ in the mold of Elijah. They aren’t state-backed though.

Got five New Year’s Eve kisses. Not a record but still respectable. It was a good evening. Now should go sleep. It is almost 2:30.

One more Doctrine and Covenants section we ignore.

And thus transgender people should be denied rights. Welp, I’m convinced. No idea what the article said. The link was broken. Seeing someone twerking is “sexualizing/grooming children”? What do these terms even mean to you? Do you have any concept of them beyond you personally not liking them and interpreting that to mean that they will transform children into lust-crazed queers? That is not how kids work. In Florida being queer in public is sexually explicit. Books that mention queer people existing is sexually explicit. It is Florida. They’re insane. Of course the parade is nervous. They have an authoritarian governor targeting queer people because he is a bigot. Keeping their heads down makes sense and counting on the courts and law enforcement to be fair and balanced to queer people is a sucker’s game. They weren’t arrested because *checks notes* Seattle doesn’t have anti-nudity laws. Womp, womp, waaaahhhh. This is outrage porn. I mean the reporting on it. Not the original incident. It is “sexualizing/grooming” children to hate and should not be tolerated. That is assuming it happened. If the only sources are Breitbart and noted liar Libs of TikTok I am dubious. For those unfamiliar with Libs of TikTok they have become particularly famous for stating that mass shooters are transgender when they aren’t. They have occasionally acknowledged the errors but doesn’t take the posts down and keeps doing it. They are a transphobic bigot.

And fiddle faddle and rot. I don’t think you know what perversion is. You should take my course. And the impact appears to be negligible. You’re uncomfortable with it. Don’t project that on some kids. Yet you only obsess about queer “sexualization and grooming” which is a vague and meaningless phrase that seems to encompass things that make you uncomfortable. As a pervert I don’t believe you.

That is not documentation. It is propaganda. Also even if it were accurate that is not what sexualization and grooming even mean as I have explained to you before ad infinitum. You aren’t nearly as worried about kids being exposed to sexuality as you are queer sexuality because kids drown in heterosexual sex material and demonstrations yet the rare pride parade in a city with especially loose laws on public decency that usually have limited numbers of children attending that show some skin is somehow a great offense. You’re straining at gnats while swallowing camels. If you actually cared about this you would be targeting the real dangers. You don’t, so you aren’t. Unless you are willing to condemn all real dangers to children instead of fixating on the small amount coming from the people that your puppetmasters are pointing you at I refuse to take this seriously. Show some substantive and reasoned opposition to the general sexualization of culture and maybe I will bother to engage with you. Until then you are clearly just picking on the marginalized because you are afraid to call out the powerful. And that is cowardly, pathetic, and sad.

Yet you back the policies of a perv who brags about walking in on underage girls changing rooms. I doubt your sincerity.