The Nehor

I am going to assume that I can cut the hair off again if it is annoying.

In my Mission passports were stored in a safe at the Mission Office. There is a risk of losing it. I had the place I was living burgled and tossed several times while I was out. Could I see a Mission President refusing to give back a passport? Yes. I don’t think either of mine would have but I could see a Mission President refusing until after some cooling off period or something like that but I would hope they have schooled Mission Presidents to realize what kind of legal liability that is exposing them and the church to.

I’m not convinced there are three separate degrees with the Celestial and the one revelatory statement about three degrees probably just refers to the three general kingdoms.

In some cases it avoids weird constructions. The LDS church sat on the mat. LDS church sat on the mat. Still, even if it is grammatically correct avoiding putting “the” in front of their name if they request it is common courtesy so cool. *insert joke about respecting the chosen name and pronouns of churches here*

I have had several Jehovah’s Witnesses tell me that Jesus is a “little g god”. It is colloquial but fits the theology they are trying to get out of the Bible.

In my experience most Christian faiths don’t regularly use it with the exception of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They use it as a term for the Father. Then Jesus is a god with a little ‘g’ to them. Something like the “little Jehovah” from the Book of Enoch which was popular but also pretty blasphemous to the Jews who read it. From a historical standpoint the tetragrammaton (Jehovah is a loosely anglicized of it) didn’t refer to the Trinity or a part of it. The concept of the Trinity wasn’t ever a thing in Judaism and it wasn’t part of Christianity for some time. The philosophical framework for it didn’t exist when the books of the New Testament was written. You can argue that the Trinity is a correct conception of God but it is very difficult to argue that New Testament writers were consciously aware of it. The Christologies of the books in the New Testament vary. The Trinity is an attempt to smoosh them all together. A pretty impressive one. I don’t believe it but it is pretty clever.

Apologetics in general is weird.

Okay, I have seen some good criticisms of the concept of the Trinity. This is not one of them. Yes, it is very easy to assert that. No, he’d be a demigod. Or maybe a fully God fully human being. Or maybe something else. This is still not what a transhuman is. ????????????

No one knows just like no one knows what happens during the gender interregnum that some intersex people experience. Possibly transgender and non-binary people have it suspended and/or swapped too.

So….if declaring your convictions or beliefs is a bizarre psychopathological obsession to combat incessant nagging fears I have bad news about Fast & Testimony meetings. Seriously, we religious people spend far more time endlessly declaring things as a show of piety and conviction than atheists and agnostics do. I think you’re projecting again. Well, after the thousand years of burning in hell I’ll probably be even more insane than I am now so the laughter might be a more deranged thing. Thanks, did that this afternoon. Then did a Friendsgiving this evening with sinners and infidels.

So when the early Christians are talking about how virtuous and good they are compared to everyone else this guy just accepts that it is an objective fact? That is really credulous and naive. Then he talks about a lack of violence within Christianity and says that changed after Nicea. Well…….DUH. Once the Christians were put in power they stopped keeping their heads down. Then they started causing violence because they were part of the elite and part of the state. Then laments that Constantine brought in a bunch of former pagans. Whereas before that Christian converts were coming from where exactly? Then a bit about how not everyone is getting “born again” like they used to. It is that weird way of assuming that everything was going perfect until someone screwed it up. Yeah, reading the Pauline epistles it is clear that the Christians were all getting along perfectly. C’mon, this is ridiculous.

I am going to withhold judgement on that one until the events prophesied actually happen.

Which of the two creation stories in Genesis were they describing this way? Transhuman is a word that already has a meaning. That is not it. Also presumably these people will be abominations that must be destroyed. That is the usual approach to people that don’t fit neatly into a good place in the arbitrarily created theological classifications of humans.

So he spent 16 years focused on understanding one book and at the end determines it is one of the “plainest books” and now he is going to reveal new ideas about this book that no one caught until now from this ultra-plain book? What? Clicked on one of the guy’s videos to listen to while doing something else and within two minutes he is talking about Kolob. Oh boy. Now he says this entire 45 minute video is about one-third of one verse. Wait, you spent 16 years trying to do a deep dive into this one book and you didn’t even learn Greek? Is this entirely based on the KJV? That is all I have seen so far. Yeah, I’m done.

I am a conservative on the Book of Revelation. I don’t think it should have been canonized.

And as the people of Sodom learned trying to rape angels gets you blasted.

Yes. Virtually no one is following Paul’s counsel on apparel in church. No one is practicing the exact forms of chattel and debt slavery the Bible prescribes. Very few people take Paul seriously when he prescribes chastity as the best form of living. We make up divisions in the Torah to decide which laws or concepts there still have value. We decided usury isn’t a horrible sin. Everyone love “the man”? What planet are you living on? The chanting of “free Luigi” are somehow servile? What? Yeah, no. “Biblical values” is a nebulous phrase that can mean almost anything. Also most of the people who don’t like Christianity much don’t care about it as much as many people seem to wish they did. They just don’t think about it that often in general. Most of that over plural marriage which was abandoned in order to “get along”. The Church had its rebellious teenager phase and then moved on in favor of conformity to the larger culture. I think you and I have vastly different ideas of what living a “Godly life” means if you think it was pervasive in the past. It really wasn’t. The Christian world wasn’t some utopian bastion of peace, good will, and wisdom compared to the rest of the world. No, it isn’t. Religious people just like to pretend that you cannot be moral without a belief in a divine judgement. We are far enough along with the cognitive sciences to have a pretty good idea of how morality works and where it comes from. The Atlantic Slave Trade was designed to be as dehumanizing, degrading, and soul-crushing as possible. This wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. Suicide amongst enslaved people was high. Also infanticide. It was much more pervasive. Through most of human history 80%+ of people were working as subsistence farmers with a tough extraction rate. You’re romanticizing the past. The Enlightenment, classical liberalism, medicine, and industrialization were big improvements to human society. There are some ugly dark sides to industrialization but I drive around in a car with enough metal in it to bankrupt all but the richest nobles in the ancient world. We should try to improve society but pretending things aren’t better now is just silly.

And yet we’ve explained away a significant portion of the laws God gives. Yet Christianity in general and the LDS Church have historically “gone along to get along”. They aren’t, in general, moral pioneers going against the grain. I think you look at the past with rose-colored glasses if you believe this. We have problems but we also have freedoms that would be unthinkable to people just a few centuries back. Some of them never got to make a big life decision ever. They were plugged into their role and lived it. No. Just no. While the conditions for many people are miserable chattel slavery was almost always worse. I don’t hold humanity in general in particularly high esteem but we are largely making people more free. This isn’t happening equally everywhere and there is a long ways to go and there are a lot of horrible people that need to be brought down for cruelly exploiting people but the exploitation in the past was generally worse and more pervasive. We also have a better chance of fighting it since a lot more people actually believe that slavery and these kinds of exploitation are wrong compared to the past. The Bible supported slavery. We (mostly) decided we weren’t going to let the Bible’s endorsement count anymore.

To maintain the species without modern healthcare and maintain positive growth you need each woman to have about 3 children each that make it to adulthood. Just under half of children don’t make it to sexual maturity. So you need to have about six children each. Add in a few miscarriages and stillbirths and you need a woman to get pregnant almost ten times. So societies put rules in place to keep that kind of population growth. Women are seen as valuable/sacred in a way but are also infantilized due to this requirement and to make sure it happens. Then you have resources. When you are hunter/gatherer tribes you want the best territory so you have a steady food supply. That means driving out or killing the people who have the best land if you don’t or defending it if you do. Hunter/gatherer tribes tend to be xenophobic and insular for a reason. Then the agricultural revolution hits. It starts in floodplain areas where you don’t need as much agricultural knowledge and can get huge yields. This was probably as much a defensive move as anything else. The best farming regions are also mostly the best hunter/gatherer regions. Agriculture lets you increase your population density so you can defend those lands. The first real states are formed primarily to constrain internal violence and inflict external violence. So the floodplains start everything. Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China rise up. Other states form to challenge these states and use agricultural knowledge to increase their own population density. Then everything is about the polity surviving. You get an anarchic international system. By that I don’t mean that the polities are anarchic. They are usually very authoritarian. It is that there aren’t any rules governing how polities interact and the primary goal of each is survival. Every move to increase your military power is a threat to neighbors who have to react or risk being outmatched. Occasionally you have a hegemonic power rise up to keep the peace (and usually the tribute flowing) but these break down. The quickest way to acquire power and wealth is warfare. Warfare is very profitable as long as you win. Cooperation is rare unless you are cooperating against a common enemy. Everything revolves around this violence. You either play the game or you lose. So people are lashed to the system with generally few rights because freedom would mean less resources thrown at defending or expanding power and that risks the polity failing. In theory you can opt out of the game but then you get conquered and you are back in. How did God expect anything good to come of this? I don’t get it. Our current era is very different. For the first time war is generally a losing proposition for both sides. In pre-modern societies you would occupy the land, siege the administrative center and, if you won, occupy it. You will probably enslave some people and the rest just keep doing their thing with a new boss wanting a cut of it and the war doesn’t damage that much so the land is still workable. Industrialized societies rely on so much infrastructure that conquering land means destroying it so you get refugees. You don’t get the people who immediately start producing stuff. This is why there are few state on state wars and most are started by revanchist powers using an old playbook or failing leaders trying to use conflict to stay in power and the like. They would get more wealth and power by putting the stuff into their own economy rather then putting it into a military campaign. So we can finally have a period of peace. And the Bible is full of this. It doesn’t much question generational grudges and feuds. Nothing in it suggests slavery is evil. At best you get people thinking slavery is bad when it happens to us but not questioning the institution as a whole. Even the Book of Mormon doesn’t question slavery as an institution. Suffering and victory going to those who execute violence most effectively. It is just such a mess. What were the virtuous supposed to do to opt out of the crazy?

Problem is I don’t see it as just an option. It is set up so that oppression is almost a necessity. Even if you despise you generally have to go along with a lot of it. And if you don’t resort to violence then violence comes to you. Things have changed to a degree in the last few hundred years where violence is less profitable but other forms of oppression and extraction still thrive.

I would probably say that God ‘chose’ to have women be subjugated since we’re dealing with omniscience. I think the subjugation was inevitable based on these biological differences since virtually every human culture includes it. I would add that gender equality seems to have gotten worse following the agricultural revolution. There are of course degrees of inequality that vary by culture. For example the Greek city-states had more gender inequality than ancient Rome. This does not mean Rome was close to what we would call equality. It was not. In the European world the Early Modern period saw a large curtailing of women’s rights compared to the Medieval period until industrialization and the Enlightenment started to reverse the trend. I just have a hard time seeing why a good God would go with this setup. It seems setup to oppress. The same way resource scarcity and vast resource inequality between regions seems designed to provoke lots of violent conflict.

That and he made children physically dependent on the mother (breastfeeding) for an extended period and there are a bunch of other factors.

I disagree that this is a communication that this domination is described as something to avoid. It may not be prescriptive but it is what we would call license. It is hard to even say that God dislikes it. God created the imbalanced conditions in which it flourished.

Pedantic correction: There doesn’t have to be. The word “the” does not have to be part of the name to fit in that sentence.

I would be curious to know if these assertions existed prior to it being seen as a problem. Also it wouldn’t even be needed. The way the tribes of Israel are interrelated he could just as easily have said Sariah was of Ephraim. Or Lehi’s mother. Or anyone in their ancestry.