The Nehor

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.

I don’t think they are comparable and I don’t think the Resurrection being preached requires a conspiracy theory or any kind of deception or malicious manipulation. It requires someone (probably Peter) to have a kind of post-death experience with Jesus. A vision, seeing him, or whatever. Seeing a dead person who is not actually there is not rare. It is a psychological phenomena we don’t understand very well but it is well attested. Having a mystical experience regarding a dead person isn’t rare either. It is much more difficult to believe this was ‘faked’ without conspiracy if you have to believe the post-Resurrection accounts in some of the gospels or the experiences in Acts with multiple witnesses. The problem is that these were first written much later. Peter was almost certainly dead by this point and even if he wasn’t he had no realistic way to police the accounts and issue corrections. The rest of the Twelve vanish from the historical record or quickly die with the partial exception of John and we don’t know much about what he got up to. The accounts of the other disciples/apostles all being martyred in various ways come much much later and some are so fantastical almost no one takes them seriously. You see a progression in the gospels as they involve more explicit supernatural elements as time went on and many of the gospels written after John are really trippy. I just don’t see a need for a conspiracy to pull this off. Peter could be completely sincere and wrong but he had no real control of the story outside of maybe the local story. Christianity wouldn’t be comprehensively systematized for a long time and the Gnostics were (as far as we know) the first to try. Pulling off the moon landing hoax would require a massive conspiracy involving hundreds of people who all kept quiet. Even more difficult to deal with would be the physical evidence. They brought back moon rocks and hundreds of people not involved with the space program studied them extensively.

No really good book recommendations and no formal training. I kind of did this review of scripture on my own and turned to the opinion of experts on matters of translation and some other questions. And yeah, it is painful. Mostly internal. I haven’t made any major public shifts in my life. Only a few close friends know what I am doing and trying to figure out.

That was what the writer hoped would happen and it didn’t.

That is similar to a C.S. Lewis apologetic and I have grown dubious of the argument. C.S. Lewis believed that Jesus went around claiming to be God and says that would make Him insane. That depends on which gospel you are reading. In some of the others it is more like Jesus claimed He carried the name of God or God’s authority which is not quite as insane. It ignores that in the ancient world there were a lot more shades between being mortal and divine that don’t survive in our own culture. I would say that without the Resurrection Jesus was another failed messiah. For comparison we have Sabbatai Zevi who many Jews throughout the world thought was the messiah. Then he was threatened with death and converted to Islam. Some suggested it was a false conversion as part of his path to fulfilling prophecy and he would recant it later. Then Sabbatai Zevi died and there were still some believers who thought that he would come back to life and fulfill the prophecies and complete his messianic mission. Some believers survived (mostly covertly) with Judaism until at least the late 19th century. When it ended isn’t clear since his followers were within mainstream Judaism. It is possible that some survived and kept that belief alive longer and that the holocaust ended the movement. It is also possible some are quietly continuing this belief to this day. I doubt it but possible. The parallels are pretty obvious. When the messiah fails by dying followers can come up with ways that the messiah can still succeed and/or renegotiate the messianic mission to fit what the person did even if that doesn’t include the main messianic promises. Then a belief that they will come back and fulfill the rest.

Please don’t take my views as typical of LDS. They are not. Most LDS accept the historicity of pretty much all of the New Testament. I am dubious of pretty much all of the Book of Acts and most of what is in the gospels. The letters that most scholars believe are genuinely from Paul I accept as legitimate. I do believe that Paul had some kind of conversion experience as he describes. The cynic in me sees the Book of Acts as an attempt to bridge Peter and Paul and put them on the same side. In Paul’s description of his meeting with Peter I get the impression from Paul’s description of the encounter that the two of them didn’t agree on much and Peter was content to let Paul do his own thing and vice versa.

I am guessing that middle part might be the real issue and she is worried that someone saw you buying it.

Grok got several things wrong but the argument that they support other conservative causes is exactly what I said was going on. They aren’t just supporting anti-transgender organizations. They are funding all kinds of right-wing causes and more extreme Christian religious groups. Also a lol at the idea that you would need to have a peer-reviewed study on basic reporting on funding sources. Whatever you say Grok.

Not until it stops. So……no. And that wasn’t a vent as your tone seems to imply. I have vented here before. I am much more caustic and biting when I am venting. Edit: If you would like I suppose I could write up a version of that where I am venting but it would probably get me thread banned and possibly the whole thread shut down.

I believe the prophecy in Daniel is ex evintu prophecy about the successor states of Alexander’s empire and were written during the Maccabean Revolt with hopes that the stone cut out would be the new reborn nation of Israel. Then they coded the participants behind imagery and backdated the writing by a few centuries to give plausible deniability about this being in any way treasonous. Just in case. For the same reason Rome became Babylon in the Book of Revelation. The hopes in the prophecy did not come to pass. I find it very clumsy to try to fit the prophecy into a structure where the early parts happened relatively close together and then suddenly the last bit is over two millenia later.

The real nihilists are the ones burning up the world and defending the ones doing it. I also only practice ethical hedonism.

I realize I have been a bit unfair. I keep referring to propagandists fighting against queer and specifically transgender causes without identifying them. So I figured I would share. Around 80% of anti-transgender groups get a large portion of their money from fossil fuel executives and companies. Transgender people did not seek out the spotlight. Someone saw them as a target. So why would fossil fuel groups be pushing this along with other anti-intellectual causes like climate change denialism, white supremacist causes, Evangelical Christian prosperity gospel stuff, and anti-abortion groups and the like. Well, when you are doing things that are likely to cause huge damage to the biosphere of the planet it makes sense to make people look anywhere but at you. So creating cultural rifts and finding minority groups to scapegoat works at keeping all the little people fighting each other so you can do whatever you want. This is a tried and true strategy as any deep student of history knows. In the late 1940s and 1950s big businesses HATED the New Deal and other policies that hampered their profits. So they funded a big Christian revival movement that tried to make Christianity (and by that I mean Protestant Christianity) into a force opposed to things like social safety nets for the poor, government initiatives to help people in general, and the like. So they hired some preachers and got to it. From that spawned “one nation under God” being added to the pledge of allegiance, “In God We Trust” being a national motto and somewhat laughably being printed on our money, and the idea that America was a Christian nation. This was also tied quite a bit to the last version of the KKK that would fight the Civil Rights Movment. It also called any kind of help for the poor a kind of “pagan statism” and a godless form of socialism. Sounds familiar right? Well, it worked pretty well. Church attendance went up and many of the preachers were saying the things the wealthy wanted and some of the others were picking up the talking points via osmosis. Then in the 1980s things were going better but they needed more. More money was spent hiring and training preachers and this time the cause was abortion which most of Protestant Christianity was previously indifferent to. Suddenly it was the vilest form of murder. The real cause behind a lot of that was government pressure to desegregate some of the religious schools but you couldn’t get the same enthusiasm about racism as you used to so abortion was a nice wedge issue. Throw in gay people as well of course because why not? AIDS you know. The prosperity gospel appeared and it tied neatly into a simplistic Christianity. If you are good you go to heaven and get rich. If you are bad or just aren’t trying hard enough you go to hell and you stay poor. It was a divine order and “socialism” was a satanic attempt to give the rewards of heaven to the unworthy. Yuck. So full court press on this. Again anything that helped promote any kind of equality was socialism. The religious revival worked. Church attendance went up. Then we come to the late 2010s. A lot of the people from the last movement are old or are dead. So lets start another revival and that is what they did. This time transgender.people were thrown into the mix along with a lot of the old classics. There was always more than a bit of misogyny in the older movements but now being insufficiently feminine or masculine could also be policed and you could terrorize cis women who appeared or acted too masculine. Turning Point USA was supposed to be the big religious revival along with a bunch of other movements. The culture war was a perfect cover to teach people to be skeptical of the intellectuals who often know what they are talking about and to pit people along lines that didn’t threaten business interests. Of course this most recent movement has a flaw in it. It is not working. Church attendance isn’t shooting up like last time. The “Gen Z Revival” that was recently pushed is laughably non-existent. If you trace the origin of this myth to the data that is supposed to back it up it is ridiculous to suggest it is a revival of any kind. I suspect the myth isn’t for regular people. I suspect it is the grifters who spent all this money they were given and the results are pretty underwhelming. Far from falling into line the younger generations are getting more skeptical of all the anti-intellectualism and the witch hunting for queers, commies, and non-conformists. So they need to hide their failure and stall for time. Anyways, this is where the “drag queens and transgender people” are the scourge of modern society is coming from. The fossil fuel industry is running a distraction campaign and the blood and pain they inflict is irrelevant as long as the goal of letting them do whatever they like is achieved. And as to what their achievement is well, as Bill Nye said: “The world is on f&%!ing fire!” I for one am tired of many of my friends facing all kinds of humiliation and danger because we have a bunch of dupes in love with this propaganda.