The Nehor

No, it takes a lot to prosecute someone from profiting off actual abuse or tragedy. Alex Jones spent years actively encouraging his followers to harass the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook shootings as crisis actors and frauds before they could organize a civil case and it still isn’t over yet years late as he tries to hide money, delay the payout, and dodge responsibility. That was causing active harm. This is just trying to threaten based off of probably imaginary evidence of imaginary abuse cases Ballard hopes will garner sympathy for him as he spins a web of conspiracies supposedly closing in on him. Those still supporting him are too stupid to connect basic dots and realize that he is claiming he is sitting on evidence of active and potentially ongoing abuse and holding it close to protect himself. If he was the hero he plays in his really bad movie he would release that data to try to save the children instead of leaving them in peril to protect themselves. Assuming they actually care about abuse victims at all.

Correction: Clearly it also really annoys you so it accomplishes more. I suspect the Church left it out because the Church knows that acknowledging climate change is real irks a disturbingly large portion of their membership and forces them to choose between two things they have made a large part of their identity and it hurts to deal with that kind of thing. So publishing it that way could have pushed people towards a decision point. I have no idea how you imagine Cato’s comments were worthless. Keeping Carthage in the public’s mind was part of the reason the Third Punic War happened. I am not saying Cato’s comments were vital to that happening but it was part of a larger effort to keep that potential threat in mind. And Billie Eilish? The conservative callout of quasi-legitimate hypocrisy to discredit her and ignore the more important “F—- ICE!” element of her message as Native Americans are being swept up and detained in ICE raids because ICE goons are so stupid and badly trained that they don’t know what tribal IDs are or they are so racist they just don’t care. ‘This person isn’t perfectly consistent in everything and is therefore bad’ while you are an apologist for government goons rounding people up without due process. Oh, and F—- ICE. May they all end up in the gulags they built for others. Reprehensible trash humans led by reprehensible trash humans and supported and cheered on by reprehensible trash humans.

Whataboutism about how childish you are? Le sigh.

Same reason those grifters who recently announced they had comprehensive and definitive proof that they had found Noah’s ark (again) but somehow never get around to actually releasing the data. He’s got nothing. This whole demon woman persecuting me and everyone turned against me and I tried to hold off on incriminating/beating the Church/woman I love thing is standard narcissist and/or abuser behavior and pretty standard mentality. I didn’t want to do it but she left me no choice but to hurt her. On some level he probably even believes it.

If the physical city is going to be returned it will require a lot of miracles not to destroy everything in a large radius. If, as some suggest, it was the whole Gulf of Mexico and the land is coming back soon it would wipe out all life on Earth absent multiple miracles. Just like it would have required a miracle for it being pulled up in the first place to not leave devastation in its wake and large scale evidence of what happened unless that evidence was also miraculously removed. Because I was carried away to a black sabbat and danced and copulated with demons and was inducted into the horde of Satan and now I must obey the Dark Master or I will lose all the benefits of membership and I really need that 5% discount on Amazon.

Proverbs 8 is a personification of wisdom speaking. Saying that Yahweh possessed wisdom before the earth was doesn’t say anything about premortality or the relationship between Yahweh and humans. Are you imagining that the writer of this section of Proverbs was, despite making it clear that he is personifying wisdom, is secretly claiming that he had a premortal existence. Wholesale inventing the idea and then hiding it behind metaphor…..why?

The Bible absolutely does not clearly say that humans are the same species as God.

I don’t think it works theologically or philosophically either.

The scriptures respectfully disagree: “And I said unto them that it was a representation of that awful hell, which the angel said unto me was prepared for the wicked.” “…and they who are filthy shall be filthy still; wherefore, they who are filthy are the devil and his angels; and they shall go away into everlasting fire, prepared for them; and their torment is as a lake of fire and brimstone, whose flame ascendeth up forever and ever and has no end.” That is a modern negotiation with scripture to try to make hell more palatable but the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants suggest it is a place God prepared. It can be both but the idea that it is primarily a state of mind isn’t scripturally supported. Wait, hold on. First you said God didn’t create hell and it is just a natural consequence of fundamental laws of the Universe that even God cannot change. Now you are saying that the existence of hell is evidence of God’s love for us. What? How? Whuh? So God couldn’t change it even if they wanted to but we should also see its existence as proof of God’s love? So you want to give God credit for something God didn’t do? Why? PICK A LANE! I find Lehi’s reasoning eloquent but also naive and pretty nonsensical. Lehi doesn’t define at all what “all things” mean and that vagueness makes it useless for figuring out anything. There must be an opposition to what? All moral acts? All physical acts? All emotions? All reason? All the natural forces of the Universe? Opposition to God? So when I wrote an email this morning to a friend who just lost his dream job due to something incredibly unfair why did I not feel or experience any opposition to that act? What was supposed to be opposing it? And since there was no opposition does it not count as a moral decision? If I joyfully signed up for this I am an idiot. Then again if it turns out there is some spirit being inhabiting my body that leaves at death I am less and less convinced that entity is me. With memory lost and the fundamental differences in nature I think when I die I die and am gone. That entity might go on but I doubt it is me even if it somehow carries my memories. Also I question the validity of enforcing a contract that one party has no knowledge of. Seems a little unfair. It does make people arguing that Spirit Prison is somehow a place of learning or waiting seem a bit silly. Sure sounds like ongoing torment. I do find this whole idea disturbing. Apparently on death you suddenly know exactly how vile virtually everything you have done in life is. Then you immediately feel guilt that you didn’t feel before or at least not with the same acuteness you did in life and get to suffer by a standard you didn’t know existed and in some cases didn’t know about at all. Yikes! And this is happening to the bulk of humanity because they never got the gospel. Also does this mean that those with emotional conditions or disabilities who feel intense guilt about everything are actually what we should aspire to be? Are they the ones that see reality more clearly than the rest of us who are oblivious to how horrible we all are? And Alma got this realization in life and most people won’t so that doesn’t seem like it is much of an applicable message. It is a kind of cautionary tale in a “The Christmas Carol” sense but it isn’t going to happen to most humans and the only people getting this warning through the text are the ones least likely to actually need it. Also as soon as he turned to Jesus everything turned to joy and happiness. That was easy. I have tried to do some repenting in my life and it doesn’t work like that. What is this story supposed to be teaching?

An inevitable rebellion against truth that we cannot escape. There is no way to not rebel. Setting up a standard where someone is inevitably doomed to fail is not good. Creating an escape hatch isn’t proof of any deep and abiding love. It is common decency. You also present a false dichotomy. Either people roast in hell for a long time until they beg God for forgiveness for doing something they could not avoid doing (which is still all kinds of screwed up) or there is no way and they are there forever. Those are the only two options. An omniscient being sat down to figure things out and this is what they came up with? Really? Behold the mercy of our God. He pushed us into a well….or if you want we agreed to be pushed into the well because it was the only way to progress I guess. Then God wants praise and thanks and abject humility and deference because God was nice enough to lower a rope for us to climb out with? I mean, the Book of Mormon calls humans wretched and all that but God designed us and designed the world we live in so if it went wrong is it really not on God? These don’t follow each other naturally. Broken down this is saying if there is no objective morality or maybe a subjective morality that God imposes the Universe wouldn’t exist. This whole sequence is filled with so many baked in presuppositions required for this to work that it is virtually meaningless.

Yeah, but the new model is just the old ‘vending machine’ model with extra steps. You may not get blessings in this life but, trust us bro, you are scoring all kinds of brownie points in the next. When you test God’s promises and they fail does it really make sense to rationalize that the promises work but just work in an untestable way? Maybe….kind of….I dunno, I don’t find it that comforting or helpful.

I agree with the scholars. That doesn’t mean it is not about the end times. It is just that the writer of Revelation thought the end times were going to hit very very soon.

Cataclysmically

The general scholarly consensus is that the early Christians didn’t have hell (eternal conscious torment) for a long while. Then the lurid revenge fantasy that is the Book of Revelation snuck its way into the canon and here we are.

The problem is it is very hard to get rid of the ‘vending machine’ approach because the scriptures are full of it. The Old Testament is overflowing with it. The New Testament is a little better but it is still there. The Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants are more like the Old Testament than the New in terms of promising fairly specific blessings.

The abuse metaphors write themselves. One day the wrath of God will abate but only after God torments them until they break and are rendered malleable and subservient. They ate dealt a heavy blow by the hand of God and eventually rush to His knees to apologize for somehow forcing God to do this to them and promise to never do anything to make God lose His temper ever again.

I’ve been told that too but I’ve also been told it makes things worse if you end up not accepting it. It is a fuzzy subject.

I’ve been told they aren’t useless but will actively condemn you as you under covenants you aren’t following so something changes and happens. Unless you cast the counter spell/get excommunicated.

The same reason that Christians in general think ‘good’ people go to hell. They were wrong. Also add in not having performed certain ordinances or sacraments or whatever depending on the branch of Christianity in general. A better question is why does God have a hell at all?

I don’t believe rape culture where men excuse each other of rape and present it as tacitly acceptable by defending rapist is a thing. *Proceeds to defend rapists and insists that anything that indicates a rape occurred should be read with nuance and anything that is even vaguely exculpatory must be treated as completely factual* The rape culture is coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE!!!!!!

That works for some religious acts but there are others in the LDS faith that we are told just work. It is not whether it is God’s will or our will. It just happens. Baptism does something. Confirmation does something. Temple ordinances do things. Some of what it does is contingent but other stuff is just supposed to happen regardless. And some of our covenantal language has quasi-magical language. ‘I the Lord am bound when you do what I say’ suggests that this overrides even God’s will and the language of binding sounds like some ritual magic where you would try to bind angels and/or demons to do your will. Then you have D&C 130: “There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated— And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.” A law God either cannot or will not revoke and a bunch of if you do A you get B. Of course we don’t have access to what those laws are but if this is a true and you had that knowledge you could fine-tune your acts to get specific blessings. This does sound like the ‘vending machine’ would work if we knew enough. We don’t though. Outside of the LDS faith in Christianity the prosperity gospel borders on a form of magic sometimes. Particularly as some of the megapastor churches that show up on TV teach it where they are basically selling financial miracles. A kind of magic.

Oh, I apologize. I did not meant to apply that the use of ritual magic contained in those books was in any way licit within the Church. It was considered to be a sin. One historian has called it the “clerical necromantic underground” which would make a great band name. Nor is it unique to Christianity. Judaism had similar magic texts at the time. In the early centuries BCE and CE there was a kind of underground amongst the Rabbis practicing stuff like Merkabah mysticism which was condemned by the majority but practiced semi-secretly amongst some. Based on some things Paul says he might have been a practitioner. Christianity went harder on anti-magic sentiment than Judaism. Many polytheists were willing to allow Jesus and other Christian figures to work miracles since it fit in with the trope of magic using wise men. Christians wanted to sharpen the distinction and tried to create a harder line between approved ritual and iillicit magic. Despite that magic was around amongst Christians even though it wasn’t approved. A common slur against Christians that didn’t follow the proto-orthodox Christianity that would develop and win out was that the heretics were using magic. The ‘heretics’ said the same about the proto-orthodox. The shade these groups threw at each other DID NOT hold back. Vicious. Note that magic disapproval was more along the lines of it being a conventional sin like gluttony or fornication. Something that was disapproved of but a regular sin. You had the University of Paris leadership trying to get the students to stop messing around with magic a few times for example. It was almost treated like a prank or adolescent type of being naughty. Later magic got promoted from sin to heresy. Mostly in the early modern period. Magic was moved from a sin that was largely assumed to not work and to be silly and a waste of time to apostate as the moral panic over witches started up and magic was taken from prankish silliness to consorting with Satanic forces. This was tied to the Protestant Reformation, a bit of end-times hysteria, and some misogyny. The Protestants also got in on the witch hunting thing and took it to a whole new level way beyond what the Catholics were doing. King James went nuts with the stuff. Anyways, sorry if I implied that the Catholic clergy was deep in magic with Church leadership approving it. There was magic going around but it was something that was kept on the down low and was not approved.

If you can find a dividing line between religious ordinances and ritual magic you will probably be the first to do so. I’ve read translations of a few medieval grimoires and they invoke God and/or angels to make the magic work and have precise steps that must be followed as part of the ritual to achieve the desired results. It was almost entirely Catholic clerics passing these spellbooks around too.

Are they considered scholarly? The linguistic evidence for it being later than the 6th century are overwhelming. The Hebrew and Aramaic are all wrong for it being written that early. It uses loanwords from other cultures that don’t show up in that early period. It references specifics when talking about the period it is written in and gets vague when it goes back in time. No one else is quoting it in that earlier period. The only real evidence for it being 6th century is that the text puts the events in the book that early and that is not much of anything. There is a theological need from some to date it early because the prophecy becomes much less impressive if all the fulfilled stuff is after the fact but that is not evidence. That argument only stretches so far. It also sneaks in the idea that the Book of Mormon is a pretty bad translation. You can argue that it was translated by the power of God and God allowed it to be that rough but…..why?

Sleeping through it until someone I lived with woke me up. Seeing the paranoia and backlash made me wish I could go back to sleep. College class turned into a discussion of 9/11. Work was paranoid about a potential attack when we would be just about the stupidest possible target for terrorists. I remember turning on our own and throwing power to government agencies in the interest of safety. It was later recast as some kind of unifying event. Ugh, now I want to go back to sleep again.