The Nehor

Scholars don’t “consider” that at all. It was common for Jewish girls at the time to be betrothed between the ages of 12 and 16. That is not some determination in a specific case. That is a wild guess saying it wouldn’t be strange if this happened. Jumping from that to scholars having reached a conclusion is silly. King Josiah reportedly did have a child abnormally young. That was fairly normal for aristocratic families. Producing heirs young was important. Throughout most of recorded history aristocrats have generally married younger than the bulk of the population. The ‘value’ of a woman in particular diminished with age if she was unmarried as it had commercial and alliance value. They had different incentives from commoners. It would have been more odd for a commoner to marry that young. Not unheard of but not super common. We let our understanding of marriage practices in history be governed by the age of elite marriages because those are the ones we tend to have records of. Extrapolating that to peasant families is unwise. They had very different incentives. Juliet was a member of an elite family. She was intended to be married young. The reason elite families tended to marry their girls young was to keep lustful Romeos from spoiling the marriage value of their daughters. The play was a tragedy. The age of first marriage varies a lot by culture in the ancient world. Greeks had a higher age for male marriage and a low one for female marriage. It was common there for men to have to wait to inherit before marrying. Higher ages of women marrying correlates with women having more rights in that society. Women had virtually no rights in Greek society. In Roman society, while still having abysmally less rights than today, were better off than the Greeks. The woman had to consent to the marriage though there were all kinds of reasons that consent was coerced both directly and indirectly. There women married older. Also neither Joseph Smith nor his quasi-bride of a non-legal marriage were nobility so that doesn’t really track. Comparing Joseph Smith to Victorian elites or ancient elites isn’t that helpful. The median age for a first marriage for women in the US in the 19th century was in her early 20s. It is not presentism to see that marriage as unusual. It would have been unusual then if it were an actual legal marriage (which it wasn’t). Treating the beginning of the modern period of history like it is the ancient world is just not helpful. There is a reason women married younger in the distant past. Suggesting that we should do the same when the entire incentive structure has changed is deeply flawed. It was weird. Joseph Smith’s critics knew it was weird. They thought it was disgusting back then. Crying presentism suggests they shouldn’t have thought it was that bad.

I call it the “Utah accent”.

Like there being more support for polyandry than polygyny in the D&C.

So it counts as taught in the correlated curriculum if it: - is taught in a Primary lesson - the Church embarrassingly has to admit something most adult members know because they are caught not teaching plural marriage specifics to literal children so they publish an essay about it. It does not count as part of the correlated curriculum if it: - is taught in the scriptural canon - is taught in any class other than Primary. - is extensively taught in seminary and institute classes. Your standards for this “gotcha” are incredibly weird. I mean, I guess by your rules you made up you win (if you squint carefully at all the right places) but I don’t expect anyone to be impressed by this absurd take down of the Church. Wouldn’t it be easier just to claim that plural marriage is evil or something? Or to point out more obvious and more extensive coverups in church history? Why make up this unconvincing one?

The best response is to refuse to answer the question unless it is reframed into something more positive.

That wouldn’t have proved him right.

This.

I doubt it. They generally said it very sarcastically.

The Bible has the advantage of being from an archaeologically examined and proven millieu. They have the disadvantage that their stories from about the 6th or 7th century going backwards doesn’t have a lot of support for their story. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Yahweh was originally a storm deity of a local pantheon whose supporters vied with another storm deity (Baal) and Yahweh’s followers won. Then a hard turn to henotheism with a deity that basically had an intricate vassal contract with his people. Then dealing with the confusion of what a vassal contract means when the promised granted lands aren’t there anymore. It is really hard to credit the idea that something like henotheism or monotheism existed and then became polytheistic before going back which is what the stories of Moses and the patriarchs would require. Or, as a history professor in college told me, any culture claiming its traditions have continued unchanged for centuries or millennia should be doubted. It rarely works that way.

I had people on my mission tell me the Holy Ghost told them no about the Book of Mormon. They told it to me right after I suggested it was a way to find out the truth so they were either very spiritually attuned and got a very fast answer or they were trying to wind me up. Knowing the people in my mission I favor it being the latter.

I think a more common scenario is not getting any answer at all. Or at least not one the person perceives which amounts to the same thing.

Much more interesting then copying “gotcha” takes from others on the internet but it also requires effort and intellect so I understand your reluctance.

This is actually a credible charge against many Church leaders. It is a pity you debase it and make it facile and cheap with your weird “gotcha” approach to using it.

One of the secrets to critically reading documents is that some information can be credible while other information is not. Read a polemic against Cleopatra or the strange and somewhat undeserved praise for the Gracchi brothers. Or read the sources in Britain during the First World War describing the rape of Belgium. Many of the details in that case were blown up or made hyperbolic but the death and suffering was very real.

Yeah, it is true of most. I am more concerned about how gated a lot of the information they create is to non-academics more than the rigor before it is published.

And then realistically no one outside of academia can even read it because generally no one except a university pays for subscriptions to academic journals because it is expensive. I wanted to get access to someone’s paper for something I was looking into but couldn’t find a way to get it. Finally I emailed the author and she just sent me a copy and lamented about how no one gets to read what she writes.

A lot of this research that requires a lot of funding uses federal grants. A lot of it was disrupted in the recent federal grant freeze and lots of projects shut down and previous work was wasted. Federal grant funding going forward will likely be seen as much more tentative so expect less research to be done in the coming years.

I know you are mostly joking but academic publishing is a horrible mess that virtually all academics hate.

There is a lot of crossover between ivy league and conventional education. Ivy League tends to be more competitive to get into the faculty and also has a huge advantage in terms of networking but similar stuff is taught. However that is not an equivalent of someone untrained in academics trying to do academic research. The second part where you say amateurs are as good at research as anyone else is usually not true. Yes, an amateur could learn how to do real academic research but most don’t. They have a vague idea of how it works and go off of that. They are not accustomed to the rigorous grilling and critiques academic discourse involves. They usually don’t present their points with academic rigor. Most amateurs are terrible at it or are producing stuff that wouldn’t pass any kind of academic muster. Even if they do know what they are doing academics have access to a lot of information amateurs do not. Expensive books, rare books, access to academic journals, and the like. There are some skilled amateur researchers but most of them have some connection to the world of academia to get access to resources. Then again academic study and research is being slowly murdered in the US at the moment as we boil universities down to short-term contract teaching for starvation wages and fewer people doing real research. We are all going to be intellectually poorer for it so we may be on the verge of amateur research being the only thing out there. I suspect this will be very bad.

He was using Soviet rhetorical techniques. It has been a dumpster fire but hey, if people you don’t like are suffering it is worth it to many.

Laos would like to have a word.

True, it is not that difficult to circumvent it but it is a hassle.

More likely they spent time in society and then spent some time reading some history and found it self-evident that there isn’t a loving God in charge. Funny, people say the same thing about LDS people.

There is the fact that Project 2025 explicitly wants to hurt me and many of my friends.

It wasn’t just a vague Heritage plan. It was a plan for a specific time implemented by a specific candidate in an anticipated position of power. And there is no one who can get into power to make the UN plan happen because there is no office you can hold that would make that possible. The UN just doesn’t work that way.