The Nehor

Sounds like their gun control laws work. I wish more of our mass shootings in the US were launched using squirt guns filled with mildly caustic substances.

Does existential dread count as dirty?

I mean to the Essenes intermarrying with the non-believers is probably almost as bad as not dying horribly in a failed revolt against Rome hoping for a deus ex machina to save them

And God considers an accidental abortion *checks notes* a property crime so not sure how that constitutes human sacrifice.. Then again God doesn’t care that much about small children post-birth either. "Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks!" -Psalm 137:9

I think they did think the writer of Esther had a dirty mind. He married off the Jewish heroine to a filthy Gentile. What a disgusting pervert!

Saying a text is clear only when a divine entity fills in the blanks means the text isn’t that clear. It is not like the supposedly hidden truth is super complex. Just slap in two or three more verses and you have it covered. I don’t think I am resistant. I am pretty carnal though. Peace and happiness are elusive things.

Just a lot of other reasons the Essenes were killjoys.

Put this on my tombstone please.

Typical. I suppose Adam wants us to use they/them pronouns for them now. Woke mind-virus run amok! Or Adam was Legion and it was actually a horde of demons. It doesn’t make it clear at all and if God wanted to say that God could have just (you know) said that the other worlds were doing the same thing. The text doesn’t say that. That is an assumption and an extrapolation and not ‘clearly taught’.

So it didn’t actually fall yet? Click bait!

God basically assured all this speculation when He was so vague on so much in the D&C.

I suspect this dirty mind is part of why the Book of Esther was so controversial. Hence why the Book of Esther was not found in the Dead Sea Scrolls because they were a bunch of apocalyptic killjoys.

Ezekiel 32 and Jeremiah 32 where God talks about the old days when he commanded Israel to sacrifice their firstborn children to Him. You can argue about whether that was God commanding it or bad leadership but if these prophets are speaking for God then yeah, it seems God gave them the human sacrifice bit as a punishment. Eventually they came up with the idea of paying a religious tax to redeem the firstborn so you didn’t have to do the human sacrifice thing. If human sacrifice isn’t going astray I am not sure what is. Maybe commanding and condoning slavery? Divine commands for genocide? Oh wait, those are in there too. Oh boy. Read about this and more in Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway? (This is a Douglas Adams joke).

Mormon’s epistle wasn’t filled with innuendo. Esther is. I mean it starts with the Persian King starting a 180 day party for the nobility. The place is decorated and they break out the gold stuff. And it spends time focusing on how well appointed the beds are. This isn’t some courtly rarefied setup. It is a sex party. And the King orders that nothing is off limits. Do what you want! Orgy time! Then presumably while drunk the king calls for his queen to parade herself before this frat boy like party wearing only her crown. Queen Vashti was not into this so she refuses. The king holds a council on what to do about this and a big hubbub takes place about sexual politics. It is suggested that if the Queen gets away with it women will all despise their husbands everywhere and the entire social order will be overturned. Fragile masculinity and the attendant paranoia oozing out of these frat boys. So the Queen is either banished or killed. Then they send a decree reinforcing feminine subservience throughout the land! Huzzah! Then we get the Cinderella story where somehow every virgin everywhere is supposed to be evaluated so the best could be chosen as queen. Okay, that is not historical. We know that at that time Persian law was a little more restrictive than that on who the King could marry. Mordecai could have kept his cousin Esther out of this but didn’t. Mordecai comes across as a bit of a pimp honestly. Then Esther is taken into the harem. She wins favor with the chief eunuch and gets the best in cosmetics and beauty treatments and a bunch of attendants who were also almost certainly tutors teaching her the arts of the harem and the eunuch himself probably tutored her as well. Yes, this tutoring would be primarily in seduction and sex. Then we have an improbable year long purification. She learned well and seduces the king and is chosen as queen. Presumably at some point she does for the King what the previous Queen would not. Then some background stuff happens and another huge feast is started (does anyone in this administration actually do anything except these half year feasts?) and Mordecai stops a conspiracy. Then Haman gets his promotion and Mordecai refuses to reverence him. Mordecai was hanging out outside the harem and the king’s gate being a pest so his refusal to bow is noted. Haman’s people are (coincidentally if you think the account is historical) enemies of the Jews so Haman decides to take out his wrath on both Mordecai and all the Jews. Good going Mordecai. Being a weird pest hanging out outside the harem every day (do you even have a job?) threw his whole people under the bus. Honestly Mordecai comes across as someone seeking royal favor. A kind of toady hangin out outside the palace hoping his cousin’s marriage will benefit him somehow. Also Haman wasn’t a deity Mordecai. Just do the respectful reverence thing you obstinate idiot. Then Haman and the king are drinking at one of their parties and the king goes along with this hare-brained scheme to mass murder all the Jews on a specific day and it is published abroad and everyone is confused by the king’s idiocy. Way to stabilize your kingdom you drunken idiot. Seriously, if you want to kill some people off you don’t give them advance warning you moron. You buffoon. You sex-addled drunkard. So Mordecai starts another fun little demonstration with sackcloth. Way to draw even more attention to yourself Mordecai. You don’t think you have done enough damage? So Esther sends out a eunuch to talk to Mordecai and he tells her not to think she can escape this. Nice, Mordecai. You marry your cousin to the King and then you don’t trust her to do anything but says salvation may come to the Jews from somewhere else but her house will be destroyed. Then a weirdly defensive bit about maybe she was put in this position to save the Jews. You literally put her there Mordecai. What was your plan? Sheesh. So Esther decides to go in to the king to plead for mercy. He has to hold up the sceptre or she dies. There is no other record of this practice and I suspect it is there primarily for the phallic imagery. So Esther turns on the charm and the sceptre rises to attention at her approach and Esther touches the tip of the sceptre as she arrives. They are not talking about a sceptre at this point. The King offers her up to half the kingdom but she demurs. Esther knows that the key to seduction is to keep him wanting more. Then she invites the King and Haman specifically to a private party with only the three of them there. Presumably the kind of party they love. Threesome action! Esther is good at this. They get together and whatever happens happened (use your imagination) and the King again asks what she wants. She offers yet another party for the next day. She is drawing him in. At this point he is a dog on her leash. Esther has game. Then the King is so wound up after that night that he needs something to calm him down so he picks the most boring thing he could think of and has the chronicles of the kingdom read to him to hopefully bore him to sleep. Then he realizes Mordecai needs a reward and in a comedy of errors Haman ends up having to parade Mordecai through the streets while seeting in impotent rage. It is not clear if this is done in the middle of the night. Funnier if it was. So the private party of three takes place again the next night. Haman is pulled out of his griping session with his friends and wife to go to the hot threesome party mark two. The King has been pulled in by the seduction and Esther reveals Haman’s treachery and the King’s naivete in throwing out the stupid “kill the Jews” order. The King is angry at Haman for this tricker. Haman realizes his life is in danger and runs to the queen and begs before her for mercy and the King returns and catches Haman on the Queen’s bed begging for mercy but looking like he is defiling the Queen. The King was okay with this threesome stuff but not okay with the two having a one on one meetup plus the King is probably not up for the threesome anymore at all so he has Haman killed. Oh threesomes, you destroy so many lives. Then Mordecai is put in charge of Haman’s house which is not a thing that would happen. The Queen goes in unto the King again and the sceptre dutifully rises (she has still got it) and the Queen begs the King to not massacre her people. Then the King gives a stupid line about the King’s decrees being irrevocable (I call bovine excrement on that). So instead the King instead gives the Jews the right to self-defense so they can kill people and prevent the massacre. So this brain genius King is starting riots in the streets throughout the empire. Good governing you stupid and horny dope. They also gave the Jews the right to plunder their attackers. Woohoo, the Purge is ON!!!!!! And the Jews were eager to get on with the murdering and plundering. Some were so afraid of the Jews or wanted in on the looting so much that they converted and became Jews. Mass circumcisions throughout the land!!!! Hooray! Then the Jews killed 75,000 people and the Queen told the King to make sure all of Haman’s sons were hanged. And there was much rejoicing. (Monty Python cheering) Then they declared a new holy day (probably why this story was written) and Mordecai was a kind of Neo-Joseph to that horny drunken King. And there was much rejoicing. And if you doubt this story you just have to check the chronicles of the Persian-Median empire (yeah, no one could realistically do that). That is the expurgated version anyways. Remember that the Jews have a long storied history of ascribing all kinds of sexual deviancy and hedonism to non-Jews. It goes back to the earliest written parts of the Old Testament all the way to Romans Chapter One where Paul explains that these sexual urges occur because the sinners have rejected God and led to a justification for homophobia many venerate to this day. The Christians took up that torch very well. Without God everyone becomes a rampant hedonist. There are a lot more innuendos that these pious Jews could mentally play with to come up with all kinds of sordid fan fiction that is just implied.

“Conclusively”? Ummmmm…..no. There were scholars who thought it might have been Electra. All this researcher has reportedly done is found out that Eclecte is a real name and theorized that some of the letters were lost. That is not conclusive. They also face another problem. The last verse talks about her “elect sister”. Is that also a woman name Eclecte? Or is that Electra? So did the scribes lose some letters in both places? This is bad sensationalist reporting.

Anyone know the maximum number of times you can use the words pimp, threesome, *******, *****, ****boy, **** toys, and orgy without getting banned?

I think such a post would violate board rules.

Which is how I recognize the writer of Esther did. Game recognizes game.

I would say yes. It is also worth noting that the two books in the Bible that are named after women (Ruch and Esther) both involve the women using their beauty and seduction to win the day. Seriously if you read all the innuendos and sex party antics of the book of Esther with any imagination it makes the Song of Songs look chaste and demure by comparison. That theme of women using their sexuality in a kind of sacred seduction runs through most of the Old Testament. Tamar, Rahab, Queen of Sheba, and a lot more. You also have the more infernal seductresses like Delilah and Jezebel (the one with all the priests to Yahweh’s wife Asherah). It largely reduces women to these roles. There are exceptions but not a lot of them. Devorah/Deborah is probably one of the standouts here.

The name was altered to make it masculine in the Medieval Period despite a long history of the name being feminine. I can’t tell if you are being ridiculous deliberately or naively. We are literally talking about one passage in one of Paul’s epistles. That is the only possible source for this and you are acting like it is some great mystery where this information comes from. Also you are abusing formatting at this point. Why the random all caps, bolding, underlining, and italics? There is not consistency? Just…….why?

The scholars are not discussing whether Junia had Priesthood Keys. That is an LDS concept that doesn’t appear in the New Testament or the early Christian Church in any equivalent sense.

If it was a clear-cut case on Junia just being a regular messenger then why did those who transcribed the Bible butcher her name to be masculine? You don’t try to cover something up if you think it is innocuous.

Saying Junia was prominent amongst the messengers doesn’t fit that alternate context. Edit: Dan McClellan said it better.

If you want some divine feminine poetry from Nag Hammadi I recommend “Thunder, Perfect Mind” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/maps/primary/thunder.html It is not clear if it is gnostic or not but was found with a bunch of gnostic texts. The speaker appears to be a divine feminine being but is also androgynous. I have shared it with some non-binary friends and they tend to love it. Weirdly, Jordan Scott and her father Ridley Scott made a short film/ad for Prada using the poem. It is one of the better dramatic poetry readings though iirc it only does part of the poem: https://www.prada.com/us/en/pradasphere/films/2005/thunder-perfect-mind.html#component_static_gal (Content Warning: While not obscene or lewd it does have what many would consider to be suggestive imagery). For a bit of a scholarly breakdown I recommend this video:

The Junia debacle was very silly where they altered the name to a masculine form to try to avoid the existence of a female apostle. You also have the Acts of Paul and Thecla which has a platonic quasi-romance between the two but it doesn’t go anywhere since it sticks to their mutual devotion to asceticism. I think it is pretty obvious what happened. In the early days women and slaves held church offices. Then when Christianity got going those with power (free men) stepped in to take control and ended all this nonsense about women having power. The bit where Paul commanded silence from women in the Church is likely an interpolation added later according to the general scholarly consensus. A lot of this also probably had to do with much higher levels of literacy amongst men. The gospels and other books that put women on a more equal playing field were winnowed out long before Nicea and the first attempts at a canonized list. It wasn’t entirely due to the Council itself. The individual churches were choosing which books were authoritative. It is important to remember that what we now call the proto-orthodox (the Christians that won out) were only a subset of early Christians and possibly not even the majority. You had the various gnostic groups. Marcionites (pretty gnostic) actually had the first canon and thus the first “New Testament” but it didn’t win out. It was gnostic and had a different version of the Gospel of Luke. There are a few scholars arguing that the Gospel of Marcion is from an older version of Luke (or even Mark) and would make the Gospels cousins. The general consensus though is that Marcion trimmed Luke. The Gospel of Mary wasn’t found until the 1890s and it is incomplete. It is sometimes called the Gospel of Mary Magdalene but there is no indication of which Mary is in the text. If she was identified it was probably in the missing beginning. Some think it is Mary Magdalene, some Mary (mother of Jesus), and a smaller group argue it might be Jesus’s sister Mary mentioned in the Gospel of Philip. It is also worth noting that the Gospel of Mary isn’t really a Gospel in the strict sense. It is not a story of the life of Jesus. Despite the LDS Church’s insistence on an apostasy they tend to mostly line up theologically with the proto-orthodox group that won out. Quite odd that.