The Nehor

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.

LOL!

The same people who bought into the doomerism about gay marriage, the Civil Rights Movement, desgregation, the Satanic panic, the abortion panic, the racially charged drug panic, and the transgender “ideology” panic never learn. They are doomed to fall for each new moral panic because the people behind these panics are telling them what they want to hear. They are shameless about being wrong and just move on without guilt at any damage their support of these movements cause when it goes out of fashion or becomes impossible to defend and then jump through the next hoop they are pointed at. I can’t understand how they don’t get suspicious that this is a vicious cycle and they keep falling for it every time.

Talking about whether my friends deserve basic human rights is not something I can politely sit back and debate in my tweed jacket in my armchair in the Ivory Tower as if it is an abstract philosophical discussion. WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Trans people were generally flying under the radar contentedly until the Right saw it as a great issue to distract their witless followers with. A bright shining moral panic just waiting to be unleashed. I watched it happen. Trans people saw the signs and knew it was coming. They didn’t want it. They knew it would put many of them physically in danger. No laws were compelling speech. You were lied to. No children were being groomed. It was all a big chunk of lies and you swallowed it all. How have transgender people actually impacted your life? How? Did one of them steal your lunch money or something? Instead you are running around like a headless chicken repeating scripted hypotheticals about the damage they might be DOING THIS VERY MOMENT….. Just like every other moral panic. That doesn’t make you a good person or your views healthy or inoffensive. By that you mean you know some queer people? And this is why substantive reasoning would be pointless if it were needed to rebut you. Which it isn’t. You can’t even decide if this topic is “supposedly” important to me or if I am “in thrall” to the ideology. Pick a lane. I have every reason not to defend “trans ideology”. My life would be simpler if I didn’t. Like my other disagreements with the Church I would probably be better off socially if I would just shut up and toe the party line. The idea that I did this out of some warped self-interest is deeply weird and smells of projection. My accepting transgender people as worthy of support hurt. It took painful steps to get to. Just like accepting the rights of other queer people did. It was unpleasant. It involved self-loathing. It wasn’t fun. If anyone has a vested interest in their position it is you. You would have to say the apostles are wrong to change course. That is hard. The idea that the person turning against their background is the easy path is a lie many in in-groups tell themselves to cast themselves as the strong and stalwart ones. Most religions use this kind of rhetoric against dissidents. So do many political groups. Families sometimes do it.

It is an expression. What the writer thinks constitutes an epidemic are the numbers you see in that very report. You’re nitpicking verbiage. Doesn’t matter. If you are rhetorically providing cover for those who use violence that fig leaf is about as effective as Pilate’s hand washing. You’ve basically just slipped into tone policing. The number of trans people murdered doubles over four years when rhetoric demonizing trans people is used as a tool by bigots and you are trying to pretend that it might be a coincidence because the perpetrators aren’t loudly saying they are bigots doing it for bigoted reasons? Do you consistently apply this standard of evidence? No. I have seen you react to crimes against LDS people and you assume bigotry played a role until proven otherwise. You’re being ridiculous. In 1930s Germany would you have been demanding evidence that the increased violence against Jewish people had nothing to do with Nazi rhetoric because it might just be a coincidence? Yes, we know. Every time a marginalized group wants rights it is part of a larger conspiracy. Aboltiionist only want the slaves freed because they would make money due to having investments in other industries that would benefit from slavery ending. The Civil Rights movement was a Communist plot. The Gay Rights movement was actually trying to turn children (and the frogs) gay. Everything has to be a conspiracy. March of Dimes Syndrome is ridiculous and you are ridiculous for believing it. If anyone seriously comes to this message board specifically to get informed about transgender issues I suspect they aren’t the brightest bulbs. That would be like going to a Catholic message board to learn about the Pro-Choice position. Awww…..thanks. And no, I am not really an advocate. More of a defender. You love to share your toxic tales of their depravity. I push back. I am defending my friends. If that means making transgender rights deniers look ridiculous I do that. If that means sharing some statistics I sometimes do that. I am not looking to build the ultimate case against the anti-transgender weirdos. Much better informed people have already done that elsewhere. You aren’t looking to be convinced or informed. You have your dogma to defend. You just like to fight.

I mean, that is what God supposedly taught back in the days of Jesus. Sort of. Except that hell came in later. And back in the days before the Babylonian exile the righteous and the wicked were both consigned to Sheol so God isn’t that interested in sharing details about the afterlife with us. Who knows? Next dispensation heaven might be Valhalla where we get to murder our enemies for all eternity. WOOHOO!

You are whining because I won’t provide evidence for an “epidemic” of violence when there is no evidential standard for what constitutes an “epidemic” of violence. Am I supposed to pull out a peer-reviewed study that quantifies that it is an epidemic? Do you realize how abstract and stupid your supposed “substantive” argument is? I can (and have) shown that violence against transgender people has been steadily increasing along with the rhetoric and demonization that you are rhetorically supporting. You are just upset that you think the word “epidemic” is too strong because it doesn’t serve your interests for it to be characterized like that. The actual increase in violence is, of course, unimportant. You just don’t want people calling attention to it or being hyperbolic about it? And you think you are being serious and scholarly? Wow….just wow.

Decorum is overrated and no, no gravity. I care about the issue. I have transgender friends who have been assaulted because they are transgender. You are playing with abstract concepts that have no meaning to you beyond church dogma and the stupid culture war authoritarians use as a destraction. I had an envoy of magical cookie making elves visit me and give me the Keebler Peace Prize for my efforts. Nope, it is the same. All religions regularly set aside things or come up with “clarifications” about things. Catholicism for example has not been static in its beliefs or practices for over a millenium. This is what they provide to transgender people? Generic quotes that have no special bearing or focus on transgender people? Wow, how uninspiring. Yeah you do. You’ll make every imaginable excuse for the church and if even a smidgen of doubt exists hold onto that as a victory. What is probable or likely, even overwhelmingly probable, can be dismissed by the small possibility it is wrong. If I wanted such a debate I definitely wouldn’t have it with you. Your approach primarily involves opinion pieces and scare articles. It would be like arguing in Congress. And you say that whether it is true or not so what does it matter what I say.