The Nehor

I don’t generally buy the delayed blessing thing. Firstly because King Benjamin says that blessings for righteousness are immediate and partially because too often it means in some other life or other world and then it becomes untestable. Or at least untestable in the sense that you can’t report back on it to others.

I wasn’t attempting to discredit your experiences which part of me envies. I am just being my cynical self.

So I’m an honor student at St Brutus’s Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys? Yeah, the Primary and Youth lessons about being part of a chosen generation left that bit out for some reason. Yet more undeserved hype. I am really hoping that the real purpose of life is to develop a deep sense of cynicism. If not, I’m in trouble.

If we consistently taught this resignation to what you endure in mortality and were told to expect little of God in terms of intervention I would probably trust things more. It just doesn’t seem consistent with scripture to me where at times it is almost embarrassing all the things God promises to do. I find I can’t be both resigned and stoic when facing trials while also following President Nelson’s teaching to “expect miracles”. Instead we seem to play games where we jump back and forth. We have people promising that if you do A and B that God will pour blessings upon you and preach patience when someone does A and B and said blessings aren’t there. One can say it varies by circumstance but then it is not really a promise at all.

At least we could get rid of that chosen generation and saving the best spirits for the last days thing. The best amongst us are the stillborn and those who die young. We are all the failures who barely qualified to come at all.

Yeah, from what I have read it would be about 45-50%. It wasn’t until the 18th century that anything made a meaningful dent in those numbers and even then it was a lot longer before those practices were widespread.

No. I mean the idea that Jesus’s ‘harrowing of hell’ was definitely around and was tied to baptism for the dead but this rewrote the whole thing. We find out that Jesus didn’t go to hell at all.

I find it more convincing the way I read it. I see it as “express” meaning that it is direct to scare people but isn’t the whole story. Also the part that works on the hearts of the children of the men is the term at the start where it is “everlasting”. If you are right I would argue that this scripture explaining about how “express” this scripture is definitely not itself “express”.

I don’t think you realize how many Christians both now and back then would answer “yes” to that question. Gnostics often (but not always) portray Peter as a bit of a simpleton who didn’t “get” Christianity. Scholars debate whether Peter was the sole leader of the church or whether it was a kind of collegial leadership. The Catholics portray Peter as the sole leader but that was mostly to bolster the position of the pope. Protestants would generally insist that Jesus is the only head of the Church. Yet despite your declaration that God couldn’t possibly do it any other way neither the early Church or the centuries of Christendom ever discovered this self-evident fact and imagined all kinds of other ways God could do it. In fact not even Joseph Smith saw this self-evident truth. It took decades into the Restoration to figure it out. And the account says that Joseph F. Smith believed in a God of true love, justice, and mercy and only discovered this after he had a vision. Why did it take God so long to reveal this?

Joseph Smith getting shocked by the plates when he tries to take them is consistent with the whole dueling with a treasure guardian trope.

No, the whole treasure hunting motif with a magical duel with slippery treasure was a common motif before the Book of Mormon was published. The Book of Mormon didn’t create it. I am not sure which is the chicken or the egg in this metaphor but whichever of them is the Book of Mormon came second. True. Yes, and that is why you would hire a magician like Joseph Smith. He was supposed to battle the guardian in a magical duel to uncover the treasure. It wouldn’t be something people would realistically observe. If it were the correct response would be to dig deeper. The magicians tended to not find the treasure and the treasure being slippery is a good explanation. Whether the magician believed the treasure or treasure guardians thwarted them or were just frauds playing up the guardians to explain their failure probably varied. The general consensus at the time of Joseph Smith was that they were frauds. Some still tried it of course.

Good info though I think the insistence in the first account that it was all devil worship is ridiculous and is just a bunch of leftover Puritan witch-hunter style nonsense where fools believed in an international cabal of devil worshipping witches out to overthrow Christianity because the End of Days was imminent. The spells and the magical battles associated with treasure hunting in New England (and in European descended cultures generally) involved calling on God and angels. Occasionally they mixed in some older pagan deities. In practice it appears no one or almost no one was calling on the devil for magical effects. This was true more generally. We have magical grimoires and spellbooks or necromancy and the like from this period and they almost always called on God or angels or saints or old pagan deities or even what to us would seem like an irrational mixture of religious traditions. You can call it blasphemous or say that magic is sinful or whatever but that doesn’t make it devil worship.

I can’t come up with a better explanation for verse 7. I admit I find verse 5 kind of funny right before that. ”I will NEVER revoke the judgements.” ”I am however willing however to exaggerate them so they sound worse than they are in a bit of rhetorical trickery to work on your hearts for my greater glory. For I am a God of Truth and cannot lie.” It is basically an endorsement of deception for someone else’s good as long as what you say isn’t technically a lie but just phrased in a way to lead all listeners to an incorrect conclusion. What other scriptures get the same treatment? When it promises that God will wipe away every tear from our eyes does it really mean that they will actually suffer forever but that God will soak them up with a rag? When God promises that we will inherit the blessings of Abraham does that mean we will have to sacrifice our own children forever in perpetuity?

The Nephites seemed to believe it for their entire history without God correcting it. Also God seems to indicate in the D&C that He allowed this misinterpretation to stand in order to ‘scare people straight’.

Otherwise respectable people were engaged in treasure hunting but treasure hunting as a phenomenon was dying out at the time and was seen as charlatanism or a waste of time and resources because it really never worked. Was Joseph scamming people? Maybe, but in general when it came to treasure hunting you hired a magician (the role Joseph played) when you were already looking. The magician didn’t usually organize the treasure hunt. The only time I can think of that we know Joseph did organize a treasure hunt is in the D&C when they heard rumors of buried treasure they thought would alleviate the debts of Joseph and/or the Church and they didn’t find anything.

Must have had too much desperation and panic and that is why the divine hand reached out to me when I was drowning and shoved my head back under the water.

So the Christians closer to Jesus had no idea what Jesus descending to hell and preaching to those imprisoned there since the flood meant. Then suddenly about 2000 years later the truth is revealed. When they said Jesus preached to the Watchers they actually meant he preached to dead mortals but didn’t actually do it Himself. He was actually setting up a program for others to do the teaching. I hate these kinds of explanations. They rely on prophets speaking in a kind of weird code so that those listening get it wrong but somehow people in the far future will understand it. It is “Left Behind”-esque reasoning where everything is only clear now and the prophets at the time were either unintentionally or deliberately being deceptive and leading the actual people listening to them to get it wrong. Imagine someone saying that everyone’s interpretation of President Nelson’s conference talk is wrong but don’t worry, in 200 years it will all be revealed that President Nelson deliberately hid his message in the talk and now it is shown that we all got it wrong but now it is understood. It makes prophets and Jesus Himself into morons who are incredibly bad at communicating.

I think it is more that the risk to reward ratio has skewed. In the past you could have children early and have an expectation that income would likely rise over time to match your needs even if you were struggling at the time. That is less likely to be the case now. They aren’t narcissists. They are nihilists. I don’t blame them.

Yeah, that sounds like a rubber stamp thing. You propose first and then get the approval and the marriage or even you just marry and get the sign-off to ‘validate’ it.

I think in this case it had a specifically big impact to practitioners of plural marriage. Being told it was vital to get the highest degree of glory and so you do it and have a really rough time with a mostly absentee husband and father and then yoink…..you didn’t actually have to do it and would have been fine marrying someone with only one wife. I imagine it hurts much more if what you thought was hardship and suffering that God specifically asked of you suddenly became optional. Removing the priesthood ban may have tried people’s faith but it didn’t ask you to do anything specifically. There is a weird element at play in which people can become perversely proud of rejecting elements of academic scientific and historic consensus as a badge of loyalty. I also find it deeply weird how Joseph Smith seemed to “test” people along these lines. A cynical person might think that he called it a test when he changed his mind on something. I don’t know that I would go that far but I try to imagine apostles today throwing out tests like these and can’t see it.

Yes, but does it clarify if that was before or after he ministered to the Watchers that died in Noah’s flood?

You should have been one of Job’s ‘comforters’. You would have fit in perfectly. Well, not perfectly. They were a little more capable of eloquence and thought and nuance but the sentiment is definitely the same.

Well, it is clearly God’s plan. I remember when that plan was presented.…..wait, what? Sorry, I have just been informed that plan got shot down at some point by some overzealous liberal weirdo talking about agency or some such nonsense.

The critique of gay and lesbian couples for so long was that they are promiscuous and won’t form stable partnerships. Then when they try to form stable partnerships the same complainers try to stop them. It just shows that most of the excuses for the bigotry are rhetorical propaganda. They don’t want to “fix” the problem. They just want validation for pushing queer people back into the closet and/or into hiding. This sums it up pretty well: https://gethelphomework.laravel.cloud/question/tf-during-reconstruction-black-politicians-held-upwards-of-2000-office-of3rhdzs And yeah, the URL is intentionally misleading.

I have toyed with that idea but at that point I might respect God but I couldn’t and shouldn’t trust God absolutely. Laman and Lemuel were then right to doubt whether God could/would deal with Laban and Nephi’s lines about God being able to turn the seas to sand is just ignorant boasting.