The Nehor

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.

Yes, that follows. Where it gets evidentially weak is when you go with the reverse and say that the Gospel of John and the Book of Acts are evidence of the Resurrection.

Hey! Unfair! That only happened three or maybe four times.

The problem is that the Book of Acts and the Gospel of John came very late so their historicity is questionable at best. Acts is probably more a collection of legends rather than an eye witness account.

Yeah, when I first saw that I rolled my eyes at how the divine instruments of God’s will are trying to figure out who is gay and seem open to the idea that all of journalism is somehow covering up whether people are gay if it would look bad in any way. It is gross. I wanted to believe the leaders weren’t falling for this conspiracy nonsense and it was just many of the members but nope, they will dig right in. I am assured though that the Church has always treated gay people with kindness and a desire to help though so…..ummmm……what?

Without the resurrection Jesus (and possibly John the Baptist too) was just one more failed Jewish messiah. There are quite a few of them. Without the Book of Mormon being historical it is a lot like Kaballah. The Sefer Zohar that really got Kaballah started was purported to be a translation of an ancient text but was definitely not. Even some who knew that it was not a translated ancient text still accepted it as important. The Book of Mormon probably wouldn’t survive that treatment though. It would be like Lord of the Rings which is (with tongue firmly in cheek) purported to be a translation of ancient documents Tolkien found. Except the Book of Mormon is nowhere near as good a story.

Only because those evil bisexuals transmitted it to the poor unsuspecting and godly straight people having their divine affairs and holy one night stands.

I think you’ll find that the Church and its members have always treated gay and other queer people with nothing but love and concern for their wellbeing. Also respect. Lots of respect. Oodles of respect. And that AIDS was deserved for their sinful lifestyle and that they chose to be perverts of their own accord. And respect. Did I mention respect?

I don’t believe you. Henry was never right. Edit: Also, who is Henry?