The Nehor

The explanation I sometimes hear is that God changed His mind but that has its own problems. And yeah, identifying the serpent with Satan came later and is probably extrabiblical. They call Satan “the snake” in the Apocalypse but that is probably a reference to Leviathan and not the snake in the Garden. One theory I had was that humanity was supposed to progress normally in a Terrestrial environment and then partake of the fruit when they were ready. The equivalent of the end of the Millenium when those born during it are tested. This time the plan failed or was ‘hacked’ deliberately as a rescue mission for fallen spirits (i.e. us). I don’t really hold to it anymore. Now I see the story as a story about a snake that thought it was clever and a God who needs better agricultural planning. Don’t put the stuff you don’t want the kids to eat in the middle of all the stuff you do want them to eat. Idiot. That and a metaphor. It has certainly impacted mine.

I read the scriptures and God is not the kind of boss I like to work for.

This is just speculation. Also, it sounds awful. You must serve the same person and only act with their approval…….forever. The only possible balm being that eventually someone will have to get your approval to do anything….though do you have to pass that up the chain too? Yuck.

That is easy. Universalism doesn’t give you anyone to hate, exclude, and other. Also if people were choosing a faith based primarily on how nice God is and how everyone goes onto eternal joy there are other faiths that promise this to a much greater degree than the LDS Church does.

Making and keeping covenants under false pretenses. If those don’t count as God lying then I don’t think there is any plausible way in general to show that God lied. I use eternal to talk about the duration of it and conscious to separate it from places like the old Sheol of Judaism which sounds hellish but you go there and aren’t in a state to feel it is good or bad. Conscious means you know it is bad. Admittedly the Church walked back a lot of the doctrine of hell taught in the Book of Mormon and made it eternal for only a few but for some it is eternal or maybe there is some end that God can’t or won’t share. Yet when I go with the “trust nothing” approach other members look at me oddly and back away slowly. I have been in the Church for a long time and I have almost no idea what the afterlife involves. We know almost nothing about it and have a few barebones statements about it that came by revelation that are often ambiguous or unclear. Then we have heaps and heaps of speculation about it. Some of it ‘feels’ good but that is a horrible indicator of truth.

D&C 131 comes from a summary of the teachings of Joseph Smith written by William Clayton about a series of meetings. He put some things in quotes suggesting they were direct quotes and other things not in quotes suggesting they are summaries. The bit about their being three subdivisions in the Celestial Kingdom is not in quotes. Also their being three glories or degrees kind of suggests that Joseph was talking about the Celestial, Terrestrial, and Telestial divisions and not some further subdivision. Also no one took up the idea that there were subdivisions in the Celestial kingdom from the text until much later. This leaves me a little dubious of everything in this section. Particularly stuff that isn’t said anywhere else.

There are plenty of other religions that it is “okay” to make fun of and mock.

Okay, but did Jesus preach to the Watchers or not?

i am not particularly comfortable with this. If you want to take the “ostensibly” part out God lies throughout the Old Testament. Starting with the “surely die” one the day you eat of it since they both lived for over 24 hours. You have God sending forth lying spirits. You have prophets prophesying military victory and then being defeated when the rival king sacrifices his son to call on the power of their own god. The hellenization was an eternal conscious hell existing at all yet we still have it in our theology. At which point why feel comfortable with any element of our theology as it doesn’t really matter if it is correct or not. You could even argue that teaching false doctrine that convinces people to make and keep covenants is holier than teaching truth that might be less convincing.

By this standard any reasoning that gets people to make and keep covenants is good even if the premises of the reasoning are false. You hit the problem of God ostensibly being a God of Truth who cannot lie. Then again, on the other hand, there are plenty of times in the Old Testament where God specifically lies or instructs others to lie on His behalf. Even in the Doctrine & Covenants the rationale for describing hell as endless as a scare tactic is acknowledged as being misleading by God but was allowed to stand because it worked on our minds to produce a good result even though it was supposedly a misunderstanding. And to make things more confusing the concept of hell wasn’t around in early Christianity. In the gospels and early Pauline stuff the relatively rare cases where the result of disobedience are discussed the fate of the ‘wicked’ is annihilation and not ongoing conscious torment. The only book of the New Testament that provides a lot of the current stuff Christianity in general believes about hell is Revelation. And those portions read more like the revenge fantasies of the writer who is understandably very upset about all the Christians being killed and wants God to dish out some suffering. It reads like the lament in Psalms that blesses the person who kills Babylonian infants by smashing them against stones. I get that the writer is angry but I am not sure the punishment they want to dish out is somehow good or holy or should be taken as commentaries on eternity. The modern versions of hell seem to owe more to stories of the afterlife coming from other parts of the Greco-Roman world than to early Christianity (or Judaism).

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.