The Nehor

I would say it is pro-Christian and not pro-religion in general and Mormons are currently useful even if there is little love there so yeah, no real desire to open this up. Also would open up a can of worms if other Christians thought they could get donations back if they find out the gospels are likely not written by the named authors or something along those lines.

I don’t even think this Supreme Court is dumb enough to take this up.

What if they had exercised faith that this was the right road despite all indications to the contrary? Maybe with faith you can drive on water?

ChatGPT told me the Book of Mormon was originally written in Reformed English by Simon Spaulding (Solomon’s cousin) and then Sidney Rigdon found the manuscript, cleaned up the text, and buried it. Later Joseph Smith found it on a treasure hunting expedition.

I am not sure which outcome I am rooting for. You can do whatever you want. That is the joy of agency. God might not honor it but that is kind of His problem. If the Spirit that made the promise was unreliable then I am not inclined to trust any other promises from the same source. Most promises are subjective and/or they await the next life for their fulfillment. In either case they are not particularly testable. And yes, you can find scores of people from every Abrahamic monotheistic faith that will talk about getting promised blessings. You can also find legions of people that have left their faith over what they felt were broken promises or insufficient blessings or lack of evidence the faith works or whatever. I am not an exception. I am just being more blatant about it than most.

That letter wasn’t written by Peter and from the one interaction we know they had Peter and Paul did not get along according to the only first-hand account of it we have.

I was hoping AI would do menial jobs for me so I didn’t have to clean, cook, and run errands and would have more time to study and learn and talk to interesting people. Instead everyone wants to talk to AI and I still have to clean and cook for myself.

We have gone from banning bots to just posting the words of bots verbatim.

There is a fragmentary inscription called the Deir Alla inscription that tells the story of Balaam the son of Beor from the 9th century BCE.The inscription was found in pieces but parts of it were reconstructed. In it Balaam is a seer of the god (they use the term eloiheim) and predicts the fate of nations but serves a bunch of deities including El who was the head of the pantheon in the area at the time. El and YHWH combined into one deity later on and became the deity Jews worship. The most likely explanation is that a story about Balaam was melded into the texts that became the Torah. They turn him into a kind of anti-Moses who worships YHWH and uses divination and prophecy and has these gifts despite being a greedy jerk. Kind of an equivalent of Simon Magus being a kind of anti-Peter.

All this is after the fact rationalizations coming from societies that culturally and religiously practiced monogamy. They needed a system where monogamy is the religious norm while having exceptions that made it so you didn’t have to condemn the patrirarchs. It lets them off the hook while allows the reader to assume the patriarchs would have preferred monogamy. It is comically similar to the way current LDS rationalize plural marriage.

I really don’t want to live to be 100 let alone try to raise a child at that point. At over 100 years old climbing to the top of the mountain to sacrifice that child was probably harder than actually sacrificing him.

Probably lots of carnal, sensual, and devilish sinning. No, it is a systemic problem at this point. It didn’t start with LGBT issues. It started with a promise from God that failed. Then I realized that the same spirit of revelation that gave that promise is what convinced me the gospel was true. So all that is unreliable. So I started a deep dive into scripture without making excuses for God to see what was there. And realized how silly a lot of the justifications were that I used to say God was good when God wasn’t being good. I mean, you can do the whole God is working towards some unseen greater good rationale but the scriptures sometimes give reasons for why God acts and that isn’t the reason. So when God has his followers writing his supposedly inspired scriptures and can’t put His best foot forward even there it gets really silly. So now I am waiting for something more from God. I’ve got a clock on this so will find out if God is gonna come up with a method to convince me.

K

If I show up to the Final Judgement and find myself using the Nuremberg Defense that might be a cause for some self-reflection.

I don’t buy it. If God’s primary concern was that unpopular teachings could destroy the Church either from within or without why bring in plural marriage? Also why wait until the world was morally further along then the church to rescind it? Doesn’t add up. Also I was taught all through my youth that we had to stand up for what is right and not for what is popular. Yet God doesn’t do that….really?

That is way too optimistic. When the venture capitalists take over they don’t rebuild from the ground up. They typically burn everything down for short-term gains, cannibalize the acquisition for parts, and then move on to the next acquisition. “…sustainable way for long term gains….” Yeah, that is naive.

That is still God’s fault. God could act whether their hearts were hardened or not.

By judging what they say the same way you would judge what anyone else says.

90%+ of the content out there isn’t there to persuade the unconvinced or help people with genuine doubts. Most of it is there to reinforce the convictions of those that already agree with them and give them a dopamine hit. Then it becomes less about being convincing on any kind of academic or intellectual level and more about emotion and conveying a strong sense of conviction and reassurance.

Listen. Flying chariots buzzing around distributing cloaks is no basis for a system of prophetic authority. Supreme religious power derives from a mandate from the divine, not from some farcical mountaintop ceremony. Elisha can’t expect to wield supreme prophetic power just ’cause some steampunk-style crop duster threw a mantle at him! I mean, if I went around saying I was conveying the word of God just because some burning cart had lobbed a rag at me, they’d put me away! Shame about how often they got it wrong. Ezekiel getting the whole Tyre thing wrong was particularly embarrassing. Yeah, I find that metaphor more and more disturbing the more I read. When Jeremiah uses it he talks about how God will yank up his wife’s skirts to expose her to the world to make sure she is sufficiently humiliated. Then after tormenting her enough and humiliating her and breaking her he will ‘lovingly’ take her back. God comes across as a pretty abusive husband. I also find it scary that this metaphor worked so well at the time as if yeah, this kind of breaking of a wife is something they would nod along with. I am even more worried that some think it is an appropriate metaphor for God’s love now. And gloat over the prophesied destruction of everyone else of course. Don’t forget. God was perfectly willing to torture his bride. But her false lovers of all those other nations. Oh, God is gonna make sure they learn how the alpha male is in this neighborhood. He is gonna punish everyone who crossed him. EVERYONE is gonna get it in His merciful loving kindness of course. To quote Peter Venkman: “He slimed me.” ”That’s great! Actual physical contact! Can you move?” No, the prophets usually needed an institution to support them which was the monarchy or the local government or whatever. Once the Kingdom of Judah fell prophets and prophecy began to taper off. There were still some but within a few centuries it stopped. There wasn’t “diminishing” support from government. The government was just gone. The monarchy fell when Babylon moved in. Kaput. Gone. Vanished. Buh-bye. If you are trying to pull in one of your political hobbyhorses in to beat to death please don’t. Also the reported wickedness was amongst the elite. The subsistence farmers that made up about 85% of the populace didn’t have much of a chance to do any of the crimes or sins that the prophets were constantly lamenting about.

It is unclear. We know there were “schools of the prophets”. There were likely prophets that worked for the monarch and some who were rogue. Someone like Elijah would probably count as a rogue prophet. In what we have in the story of Jeremiah he seems to have been somehow beholden to the King. He was out of favor with the court though and got thrown in prison. The King would still visit him secretly though. Ezekiel and Zechariah are probably the best examples of ecstatic prophecy. Very poetic and quite bizarre. If Ezekiel was actually laying immobile for months on end to represent prophecy there is a good chance he was also neurodivergent in some way. Also Hosea marrying prostitutes is kind of odd. These weren’t prim and proper people who delivered clear messages like how we expect prophets to act. They are more like what Plato exalted in the divine madness that could reveal secret truths or his belief that poets could utter deep and sublime things that the poet didn’t even understand. During and perhaps after the reign of King Josiah it is likely they centered the prophets in Jerusalem to at least some extent the same way they centralized religious sacrifice. Before that communities might have had a local prophet that would explain why things were going wrong. What sins against the Lord or the gods caused the substandard harvest or that sudden hail storm or whatever. Functioning as a kind of shamanistic intermediary to help keep the cosmic order correct to prevent disasters. After the monarchy failed prophets would likely be much more independent and it faded away. The institution probably needed government support to flourish widely. Later prophets slipped more and more into apocalypticism. John the Baptist and Jesus and Paul could be categorized as being apocalyptic. The Preacher of Righteousness as Qumran taught apocalypticism. By the time of the last major Jewish revolt against Rome the rabbis were sick and tired of apocalypticism. It seemed to get a lot of people killed. Or as one of my favorite Jewish academics said (paraphrasing) “If your military plan relies on a deus ex machina to win, stay home.”

Ah, the quad I was in back in my days of sin and vice. Good times.

If I leave it won’t be primarily for that. It is also not limited to the Old Testament. You can find some weird stuff God does in the New Testament, Book of Mormon, and the D&C.

Also there can be many different ways to “win”. Producing the best arguments is one and I try to make that one my favorite. Convincing those on the sidelines or converting people on the other side is another. Reinforcing the convictions of those that already agree with you is probably what everyone involved is most successful at.

There is no evidence to suggest that prophets were called exclusively from the Levite tribe. Also the prophets of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah were conduits for God’s word. They were not leaders in the sense that modern prophets are nor did they preside over things. Prophets were usually supported by the state and were usually not liked. Prophets tended to have bad news. Plus they were weird. They went into ecstatic states, inflicted pain on themselves, did weird performative things, and probably used hallucinogenics. Not much like what we think of as a prophet.