The Nehor

That article is conspiracy theory nonsense. In summary: Carbon dating works because of how diamonds work but our theory on how diamonds are created comes from the suspect “they” who lie to us all the time. The way diamonds are formed is just speculation. The cover up to hide this was to make diamonds artificially scarce to make them valuable so no one would find out the truth about them. It is true that diamond supply is curtailed to increase cost but it is not part of a scientific cover up. I am not trained enough to understand the rest of this but since they are lying in the first half and peddling conspiracy I am just going to assume the rest is also delusional insanity.

I brought intersex people up because they disproved what you were saying. I did not imply or outright state that intersex people and transgender people are exactly the same. Not sure why you think I did. Transgender people are not the only people who request the use of pronouns that don’t match their biological sex. They may not even be the majority of them. Non-transgender heterosexual men. I haven’t heard any credible concerns. It is always vague but scary sounding worrymongering about children being corrupted by transgender people somehow and yelling about women’s sports and bathrooms. Somehow this is an existential threat. A mindless comment. No one is innocent. Of course transgender people aren’t all reincarnations of Fred Rogers. They are not, as a group, a greater threat than other demographics. The “he was no angel” argument is often used to deny the rights of individuals and groups. It is a repulsive rhetorical tactic suggesting some people don’t deserve rights. Unfortunately it has caught on in a big way at the moment. Am I supposed to clutch my pearls over how unladylike they supposedly are or what is the point you are trying to make here? Also Alok denied writing the bit you quoted saying it was written by their partner in the Dark Matter group on their shared account. And no, everyone was not at some point “a cishet”. One of the two people you named is a woman. The other appears to identify as non-binary/gender nonconforming. This is not what I was saying at all. I was not saying that trans activists are causing the current culture war. I am saying they have been chosen as an easy target and would prefer to be left out of that. I get what you are doing though. The good gays and the good trans people were okay with not having equal rights and just living their marginalized lives until the big mean scary activists came along and ruined everything. It is a dumb narrative. It is like Southern Whites in the Jim Crow era arguing that the good black people were content until the scary MLK and Malcolm X came along and stirred everything up. You are assuming the narratives of the oppressor are somehow accurate. The Church of England (which is Protestant) wanted to eradicate Protestantism from England? What? No. Just no. So you are saying that liberal democracies tends to allow marginalized people to fight for their rights in a way they cannot in an authoritarian state? If so, I agree in general though I would probably argue against a lot of the examples you are using.

I think you overestimate it when you call it “iron-clad protection”. It is generally protection from discriminatory behavior and there is a pretty high bar to prove it was discrimination. In the “scrutiny” area about laws being discriminatory it is about protecting a group of people so whether a specific individual fits isn’t important. As one federal judge said: “one group [African Americans] is defined by race, another [Hispanics] by culture, another [Asians] by country of origin and another [Native Americans] by blood.” It is not simple at all. It is very much more complicated than that. What if they (as sometimes happens) have ovaries and male genitalia? Many intersex people are speaking up but they are mostly ignored by the news. The main debate is whether they should get treatments to “normalize” them to one gender presentation. Sometimes the parents have to choose which gender to normalize them to. Some intersex people believe there should not be any such treatment until the person is old enough to make a decision. There is also the problem that “no gender affirming care for minors” legislation meant to target transgender children will hurt intersex children. You don’t hear a lot from intersex people because other than having their rights protected they want to be left alone. Just like transgender people. Transgender people have had the misfortune of being picked as a target in the current very stupid culture war. Those targeting transgender people probably aren’t going after intersex people because targeting people who “were born that way” is a bad look and might muddy the narrative of evil transgender people targeting children and yada yada yada. Cishet men are still the biggest sex abusers of children and purveyors of violence in both the absolute and per capita sense but can’t target the powerful. Gotta punch down. One key element of a moral panic is you have to have a target with little means to defend themselves. So you pick on gay people, Jews, racial minorities, and now transgender people. It is the circle of lifehate. The Puritans were persecuted but they didn’t flee to find religious freedom. They set up theocratic colonies where they could be the oppressors. While the Puritans had some great progressive ideas in regards to being opposed to monarchies and a kind of self-determination with individual liberties that did not extend to religious freedom. It was only once the Puritan experiment died out that their ideals could be repurposed and had religious liberty added in to avoid the religious wars of Europe and foster a pluralism the Puritans would have loathed. Also the Puritans and other religious refugees were not the only ones who came to the United States and set up colonies so their descendants were at best among those who founded the nation. Trying to establish a “Christian Nation” is just going back to the failed Puritan experiment. That does not follow. It would depend on what the state religious was and a “Godless state” means what exactly? A secular state? Or is this a state-mandated atheism situation? I do not accept that religious freedom protects transgender people. Being transgender is not a religion. I think the bird flew out the window.

There are but those are examples of the system working. In the aggregate they eventually follow the data. When something new like continental drift shows up that would upend a long held consensus the general response is skepiticism. That is good and healthy. You don’t overturn things on a whim. You go out and get more data. There is a danger in these stories which seems to suggest that people who upend the consensus are morally good fighting the hidebound skeptical consensus. I suspect this is part of the reason why a lot of theoretical ideas that show up in fields like physics and astrophysics pick up a bunch of adherents right off the bat when adherents don’t have any grasp of why they should or should not accept it. They aren’t really qualified to have an opinion on the matter that means anything at all. There is some classicsim but there is also an understanding that most people without those kinds of qualifications aren’t trained in textual criticism. They are usually right. The Book of Tobit is generally dated to the 2nd or 3rd century BCE. A supposition that the Book of Mormon writers referenced old material written in the Brass Plates that was later referenced in the Apocrypha is a serious stretch and the correlation would have to be VERY strong to support the idea. It would be harder to prove direct textual links with the language jump. If it is just the ideas that carried over then a stronger argument would be that the Protestant tradition Joseph Smith was raised in included some ideas from the Apocrypha. Are we talking about the Apocrypha itself or other apocryphal texts. The foreword is a polemic implying the writer isn’t some high falutin academic while also putting up a shield admitting the writer isn’t actually engaging the texts in older languages and insists this is just a high-level bird’s eye view. This assures the reader that even if parts are disproved on “technical” grounds or whatever the overall idea is still there. A clever sleight of hand common to many kinds of apologetics. I doubt there is much to engage. I think it would be hard since I can’t tell from that foreword if the argument is that there were lost Jewish teachings that made it into apocryphal books and the brass plates or if both were ‘revealed’ to both groups later. What is the argument? The Nag Hammadi library and the Book of Mormon? Very unlikely. Most of the ways that the esoteric teachings of the gnostics match up with Mormon beliefs are Mormon beliefs that aren’t referenced in the Book of Mormon in any case. I don’t think the Watchers are going to make a comeback in LDS thought. The idea that the Nag Hammadi library matches up to LDS beliefs is an old one. There were talk tapes about it being copied around in my mission. When I got home I looked them up and the mischaracterizations were either naive or dishonest. These aren’t unique to the Church. I don’t think it will be engaged much since these kinds of books are a dime a dozen. It sounds like the book will be too high-level to be engaged so why bother? Because it will trick people? Again, a dime a dozen. A researcher dedicated to discrediting this would probably succeed (assuming it is false) but it would take a lot longer to refute than it would to propose. If there was something to it it needs someone willing to get into the weeds and present an actual argument.

Definitely, which is why you go to the experts who have spent their lives studying that field. They are biased too but they are trained to scrutinize for factual errors and in the aggregate they usually do a good job. To be honest I am dubious of the premise of the book. Correlations between the Book of Mormon and the Apocrypha don’t seem that likely. The bulk of the apocrypha was written over two and a half centuries after Lehi left and a lot of those books came even later and the ones that flipped the script a lot were pretty new notions. I am just not sure what this would be indicative of. A connection?

I prefer to judge based on whether it is accurate.

This. Any idiot can write a book about anything.

Note this protection is primarily about striking down laws that place an undue burden on transgender people in the aggregate. It is not giving individual transgender people anything. It is just that laws have to avoid specifically targeting them unless certain other standards are met. Eh, sort of. Lots of gay and lesbian people experimented when they were young or got married for various reasons in a heterosexual union. It is also becoming moderately more acceptable to be some flavor of bi/pan and I see some gay guys in particular being open to sex with women. Not many. But some. Sometimes it is curiosity. Sometimes it is just sexual fluidity shifting a bit over time. Sometimes they were always somewhat bisexual and just identified as gay since most of their attraction was to men. I am not connected to lesbian and sapphic groups but there is some of that going on there too. Less so though because identifying as a bisexual woman comes with some serious and potentially dangerous drawbacks. To be clear I am not saying bisexual people are accepted everywhere. They are not. My attempts to date women in the church since accepting my sexuality have shown that it is a poison pill in most relationships in this demographic so I stopped trying.

The place they were born can often be verified but how do you verify race. If both parents are white then you are white? But how do you know both parents are white? What determines this? You can often get away with broad generalizations but race is a human construct. There isn’t some level of scrutiny that determines it. Many segregationist groups tried long and hard to find a way to quantify ‘blackness’ so they could maintain segregation. It didn’t work. There was no test that worked. If two black parents have a child that can ‘pass’ as white what does that mean? How do you test that? Mixed race children fit where? I would be laughed at if I tried to claim I was Asian or Hispanic but if your division can’t handle edge cases then there is no level of scrutiny that can make a positive determination. Racists desperately want there to be one but they can’t find it or demonstrate it. There are still eugenicist organizations (some going back to the Nazis) out there using pseudoscience to try to cook up some standards. You mentioned Native Americans and tribal politics are often downright brutal over who they exclude and include (especially when money is involved). Some try to have standards. Some determinations are much more arbitrary. That just means you can cheat the system. You can do that with stuff that could be empirically falsified if you know the right people. What if they appear female but they don’t have the equipment to make a baby or it doesn’t function. What if they are intersex with ambiguous genitalia? You have edge cases. Yes, in a lot of cases you can look at someone and determine their race. You can often determine biological sex by looking at someone especially if they aren’t wearing clothing but even there there are cases that don’t follow a binary. Race is much more complicated since mixed race people are fairly common. You are comparing it to religion which you state is about their beliefs without demonstrable proof. Yet religion IS an even more protected class. If these are all potentially delusions why do religious delusions get even more protection? Nope, didn’t read you that way. You’re good.

I think you’re approaching it wrong. In this theoretical case what is the advantage this person is claiming out of the temporary claiming to be trans? There aren’t super secret awesome privileges you suddenly gain. How are you hacking the system by doing this? You gain a protection from discrimination and possibly laws that impact you as a class specifically have to pass a higher standard of judicial review. What is the advantage? There is this hidden belief among some that declaring you are transgender opens all kinds of doors in terms of education and employment. It doesn’t. It doesn’t get you social prestige. The idea that the marginalized are actually the privileged is a lie that propagandists love to spew. In 1930s Germany the Jews were not given all kinds of special advantages. In 1940s USA despite claims by racists the interned Japanese Americans were not living well off the government’s money. In the pre-Civil War American South the enslaved people were not living a life of contentment and ease compared to impoverished white people. The demonization of the marginalized by those in power to reinforce the necessity of keeping them marginalized because they get some special advantage or are somehow coddled is an old strategy and it is happening with transgender people now. Also the comparison to race is a pretty ironic one. One of the primary reasons that ‘scientific racism’ failed is there were no boundary lines that could be scientifically set. You can’t run a test and determine conclusively if someone is black or hispanic. So how do you enforce a law that treats these categories differently? You can’t. This is probably where the fight to insist that people’s gender identity should match their biological sex will fail. You can’t identify anyone with certainty. Biological sex isn’t a binary. There is a lot of ambiguity. You can say it is based on chromosomes but most people are never tested. There are men out there who have male genitalia and never doubted their gender identity who have XX chromosomes. There are women with female genitalia who never doubted their gender identity with XY chromosomes. There are intersex people. If we enforced testing we would have to shift people to another sex. There is no firm boundary line. The weirdos who think they are dumbfounding people by asking “what is a woman” think they are showcasing how ignorant and ridiculous the people being questioned are because they think there is an easy answer and the person being asked won’t just say it. Instead they are showing that they are idiots because their easy answer either doesn’t work or they don’t realize they don’t have an answer either. They insist it is obvious. It isn’t. They insist they can always tell if someone is transgender when they can’t. They are falsely calling out cis women and girls as transgender as part of their deranged crusade. It is the same with race. They think they can identify black or Hispanic people by sight. They often can in a general sense in the same way people can tell men and women apart but in many specific cases they cannot. So no, being of a specific race isn’t “immutable” or “easily certifiable”. It is what box you tick on the census or some other form. Also, no. ADHD and depression are not something that can only be identified due to a person believing and insisting they have the condition. There are tests. There are fuzzy boundaries. But no, you can’t walk into a doctor’s office or a pharmacy and say you have ADHD or depression and demand prescription medication. So your examples of identities that are (mostly) immutable just aren’t and your claims about identities that are completely arbitrary are also not arbitrary. We are left with the uncomfortable uncertainty.

Trans people existing and having equal protection doesn’t put a church out of business. Westboro Baptist has been pumping out antisemitic hate speech for decades and Jewish people have more protections than transgender people would if they win this case. They are still there and haven’t changed their doctrine or violated their (theoretical) conscience.

Okay, who performed the summoning ritual to bring smac back? I’m not mad, I just want to know. Also, does it work like the bat-signal? Because that would be pretty neat. Grok doesn’t assess or summarize from a complete whole. It parrots based on probability. You could cut out a few words and replace them and it would also work to argue for keeping in place school segregation or to defend the constitutionality of anti-sodomy laws or to argue against giving women the right to vote or to allow black people to serve in the military. This is all fear-mongering of potential ramifications and is a well-worn trope where the horrible fantasies of the doomsayer never happen. Based on rubbish though. The idea that sex and gender being inseparable are somehow millennia old religious teachings is silly. First off sex and gender are words that were repurposed. This isn’t a linguistics issue. If we made up a new word and assigned it the meaning we now give to “gender” it wouldn’t satisfy people that they weren’t defying some ancient church teachings. There are lots of linguistic issues the openness of transgender people create (amab and afab are clunky and misleading terms but we don’t have anything better yet) but they can be figured out. I am reminded of someone who was ostensibly serious arguing that a child being adopted by two fathers or two mothers would lead to confusion because there would be two people with the same title. I can personally attest that there are solutions to these pressing problems. As to the idea in the abstract the whole idea was rarely challenged in the environment in which Abrahamic monotheistic religions grew up in and when Christianity encountered groups that had more nuanced ideas of what we would now call gender colonialism dealt with them swiftly and decisively. And Christianity in particular has a strange history with gender and sex. The gnostics had some fun ideas in this realm. I giggle at the bit at stuff like this from the gospel of Thomas: Simon Peter said to him, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life." Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven." You heard it here first folks. Transmasc guys enter the kingdom of heaven! Also the idea that something is old makes it worth keeping around is one of the reasons it took us so long to get rid of slavery. The Christian slaveholders had a better biblical argument than the Christian abolitionists. Also did we just abandon the teaching about the Great Apostasy at some point. We are seriously pointing to how old the teachings of apostate Christendom are as a kind of proof of their validity? Really? This kind of tension is the price of living in a pluralistic society. I think the Church is unwise to back Christians in power who want to give their religion unique privileges as a kind of national religion. That isn’t likely to end well for religious minorities like the Church. So churches want to be authentic to themselves and share what they really believe to be true and to represent themselves as they see themselves despite outward governmentally-sanctioned pressures to conform to a more socially acceptable presentation? Huh….that sounds vaguely familiar. So it isn’t about transgender people? It is just about queer people in general? This doesn’t actually prevent a conflict from existing. It just means a few more people will be involved in these questions when they come up? Hardly a compelling argument that this will help in any way. I disagree. I agree. This is the likely result. Sadly.

Probably. It is pleasurable and reinforces emotional bonds. Even if it doesn’t lead to reproduction why end it? Because Plato thinks it will distract us from philosophy?

If the Christian Nationalists that are influential in the Evangelical movement win out and manage to hold onto their political power and seize more of it as they make the United States into a “Christian nation” they will start to target religious groups who were former allies. It is mostly a question of whether they go after the Mormons or the Catholics first. I don’t think they will succeed in the first place but if they do they will narrow down what it means to be Christian. This is an alliance of convenience and I am disappointed in how many church members think it is genuine friendship and tolerance on the macro level. There is a reason the founders didn’t want religious tests for government office and didn’t make it a “Christian nation”. They wanted to avoid having the Wars of Religion that had caused a lot of death and persecution and hatred in Europe. Those can happen here too. Whatever they want to do? You want to let the Woke mindvirus destroy western civilization? That is their goal you know! /s The religious and those who feign religion are wielding the power of government to further marginalize an already marginalized group. There is a good faith argument to be had about transgender people in professional sports but that is for professional sports leagues to figure out. At schools just let the kids play. Also one side is stirring up hatred. I have transgender friends who have been attacked by horrible people who these high-minded church leaders are providing rhetorical cover to. If you are a Christian siding with the powerful against the marginalized doesn’t that seem off somehow? No, they shouldn’t and no one is asking them to or compelling them to. They can kick transgender people out of their churches. I think what churches want is protection from social scorn for doing this. That is not something the government can or should legislate though many are trying to. They are hard at work butchering part of the First Amendment while claiming to save another part that was never in any real danger. If they want to function without federal funding they can. This may end up being like desegregating schools again. On one side you have people afraid for their lives and safety. On the other hand you have people worried about not getting federal funding and wanting to avoid social scorn. I am going to favor the former until they no longer have to be afraid for their lives and safety.

I’d walk if this happens. Not necessarily because I liked the old conception of the Second Coming better. I think I might like this new version better…..maybe. I would just lose trust that any of the leaders have any idea what they are talking about. If they can flipflop on that much revelation in the canon and in repeated apostolic teaching then nothing is sure.

True, but I don’t think that will always universally work.

“Dozens of people were crushed by prayers this morning……”

So when I idly came up with a sophisticated plan for world domination before laughing it off I was moved to the same tier as this guy. I like him now and want to be his friend.

The false dichotomy. You either follow the divine laws on sex or you end up having nightly orgies. There is no middle ground. This goes all the way back to the Bible.

There is probably something behind this. Reportedly sometime in 2026 or 2027 the Church has to renew their trademark. They may have a bit of a problem since they have actively been renaming or retiring a lot of the initiatives and uses of the word “Mormon” they used in previous renewals. You can’t claim copyright if you aren’t actively using the trademark. Another bit of evidence is that you are actively protecting your trademark. My guess is that this is why the Church is doing this. To prove they are defending it.

If it was written during the Maccabean Revolt as many believe I expect the best identification would be the successor kingdoms. At this point the Seleucids were the ones doing a lot of the stuff in the book of Daniel like violating the temple and dedicating it to Zeus.

Thank you for asking. It was excruciatingly painful.

Dan McClellan ticks off just about everybody.

Potato, potahto.

Is posting one word per line some kind of Nazi identifier thing?