The Nehor

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.

I don’t know and thus I don’t know what to expect. I don’t think what I want factors into it. God is unlikely to change based on my wishes.

They’re getting away with it! They shouldn’t be! That is the impression I get when I look at laments about it. They hold up the heteronormative style of marriage as an ideal but also make it a duty and many marry out of that sense of duty or of it being an expected requirement. Then you have queer people marrying because they genuinely like each other without it being some sort of civic duty. The undercurrent of a lot of the complaints seem to be that queer people are cheating somehow and there is a strange envy mixed in when they complain about how they can’t have children (not always true) or that it somehow misses some perfect balance of gender roles or something. I have also discovered that straight people dating is weird. Seriously. A lot of crazy rules and expectations that don’t serve anyone involved and that just create discord.

I can’t decide whether God wants to be a distant figure assisting from afar as we stretch ourselves and develop or if he is a helicopter parent that wants to be involved in everything. The metaphor of a child going off to school or employment or whatever alone and being distant from parents doesn’t make as much sense when the metaphorical (and literal) parent wants the child to be in contact multiple times every day, warns/comforts with the promise that the Parent will always be watching, and insists that to succeed the child must look to the parent in every thought. If this were a mortal parent we would call it codependency. Also the end game is to go home again. So it is stretch your wings and fly and oh, then you have to account for everything. I am finding more and more metaphors break or are self-contradictory when I look at them too hard.

I don’t trust God either. I don’t see why God would stop. Trust has been trending downwards for the last few years. I had what I was sure were promises from God that came to nothing. The quality of those experiences matches those that gave me a testimony and led me to make a lot of decisions in my life. Finding out that kind of communication is unreliable was a kick in the teeth.

And probably a painful future. I haven’t seen anything that convinces me that death will stop the pain.

So why don’t we call it the Plan of Suffering?

Because God has given up on them changing so what is the point of suffering that won’t “help”?

God likes suffering. It seems to be His favorite tool.

If I end up coming down on that side I am more likely to just not care much about moving towards God or His plan in general. If religion has to be watered down to this extent to be drinkable I think I would rather just drink water.

While Joseph did mostly drink wine and beer (and beer is actively approved as good to drink in the Word of Wisdom) this scripture still makes drinking wine “not good” so Joseph was still doing it wrong. The bit about water being unsafe to drink throughout history is mostly a myth. It was true in some areas but most of those are cities with polluted water supplies. They drank cider, beer, and wine because it tasted good and made you feel good. I imagine a day of repetitive agricultural labor was probably easier to tolerate if you were mildly buzzed the whole time. The Word of Wisdom is mostly pulled from the temperance movement’s standards complete with the paranoid fear that “evil and designing men” were adulterating or poisoning wine and other alcoholic beverages for nebulous reasons.

If I had to guess I would go with Joseph was afraid they might encounter complications and decide to amputate his leg if he were unconscious and unable to stop them. It is possible his mom was very worried this might happen and it rubbed off on him as well.

I doubt this is the explanation. Joseph drank alcohol throughout his life.

It resolves some but creates some other pitfalls. For one it sounds way too much like how Catholics and Protestants say their church is guided which makes the necessity for a restoration more dubious.

Wasn’t the Dan Vogel theory more that it was a more direct rebuke of his father and kind of saying ‘I can do this surgery without alcohol so you should be able to go through your regular life without it’ kind of thing? Or am I misremembering? I think Vogel is also the one who said Joseph’s mother’s story where she insisted that the doctors not amputate when they wanted to was likely a later reworking of the story in her mind since the doctor who performed the surgery was pretty rare at the time in regularly not suggesting amputations in this sort of case and probably wouldn’t have shown up for a (relatively) simple amputation.

Is the whole thing about it being a gentle rebuke of his dad based on anything Joseph said or is it intuited into the whole thing?

Maybe they hadn’t quite figured it out yet.