The Nehor

I am not sure why Ten Commandments memorials are so beloved. Acting like they are some kind of brilliant advance in law is just silly. Four of the commandments are specifically religious. One is about family relationships and the five that could be considered secular are freakishly obvious and have been a part of virtually every culture in history. Are we really that proud of them? They aren’t groundbreaking or even enlightened. It is clearly an attempt to privilege the Bible and not some memorialization of the advancement of law.

And wokeness! And bees!

I am not sure if God having what looks a lot like a colonialist harem makes this more palatable.

That is now how genetics works. At all. You can’t pack one human with every ethnic group’s DNA. You also can’t expect one person to have children and have all the ethnic groups from their ancestry just pop out eventually.

“Agree to disagree” is also often used with a dose of passive aggressive intent.

In the early revelations the Quorum of the Twelve was seen as equal to the Standing High Council which was over the stakes and their councils. The Standing High Council was equal or even higher than the apostles at first (at least in some ways). The standing high council worked with the church where it was established and the Apostles built it where it wasn’t. The Standing High Council was around in Missouri and Illinois. During the succession crisis some pushed the head of the Standing Council to make a case that he was the trustee of the Church and its new leader but he threw his support behind Sidney Rigdon. When the church got to Utah the Standing High Council was reestablished but in a lesser capacity and now subordinate to the apostles. Mostly they dealt with things like church court appeals and distributing information to stake presidencies. The council was quietly dissolved afterwards and the apostles took over virtually all of their functions. In any case the apostles continued to travel and do overseas work and some were serving as mission presidents or regional leaders overseas at times. I don’t know the exact time that all of the apostles started staying permanently in Salt Lake but I believe it was in the 1970s. Before then you often had an apostle in Europe and others overseas doing things. Ezra Taft Benson spent a period of time in Europe running elements of the church there for example. Easy access to air travel is probably the primary reason for the shift.

That is not how genetics or ethnic groups work.

Your lust for vengeance is showing again.

So they divorce and remarry in exalted glory? Guess Jesus didn’t get the memo. 😜

Then the father bit would also be plural because it would apply equally.

Technically no. If a religion is apostate and a member of that faith never belonged to a non-apostate version they wouldn’t be apostates, just heathens or non-believers or wrong or whatever. We have stopped calling all other churches apostate though for reasons that aren’t clear to me. The optimist in me thinks it is a good sign of goodwill. The cynic in me thinks that we like being at the “big boy” table with the other churches and stopped saying unpleasant things because we sometimes get invited to their parties and want them to keep inviting us.

Good, being a half-sibling of some of the other people on this Earth is still hard to swallow. Convincing myself we are full siblings…..yeah right. Now can we find out we have multiple fathers too?

Like “bless your heart” this statement is basically a euphemism for “**** you, you’re wrong!”

No, South Park went much further in mocking Islam than most are willing to do. They got death threats over it. Their parent company censored at least one episode to try to prevent the possibility of violence over it. The show’s creators wanted to leave it in. Presenting them as cowards unwilling to mock Islam because they are afraid and they only choose “safe” targets is just wrong. Now I need to go take a shower. I feel dirty for defending South Park.

Even if you take that part literally Wisdom is a divine being and not a mortal person. Divine beings existing before humanity exists is pretty normal in mythology and not evidence people existed before their mortal existence.

Some tech was provided but the big aid was logistical support. The ability to support military forces deployed far from home has been the most exceptional element of the United States military since the Second World War. The British were hard pressed to operate in the South Atlantic. Even today we see Russia struggling to maintain supplies to their troops in Ukraine which is on their border. Meanwhile the United States can launch an operation against landlocked Afghanistan and get the people and stuff they need to the site. It is sometimes overlooked how exceptional that is. And it is not just Argentina that feels that way. A lot of South American nations grew even more suspicious of the US after the Falklands conflict and we didn’t have a great reputation before that.

I don’t find this reading progression from statements in the Bible concept to be convincing. There is no evidence the writers believed it. When people go into the weeds of a General Conference talk and try to intuit stuff out of metaphors or take ambiguous language to support heterodox positions they are often told to knock it off. Not sure what about the source being the Bible changes that. One of the most obnoxious to me is pulling a doctrine of premortality out of Jeremiah. It is just a huge stretch on what was said and there isn’t any support for the idea that Judaism had such a doctrine.

It has been done before with lower caps. During Covid there was a temporary one in 2020 I think. It was also tried in the 80s for a while. Might have the year wrong. In general though yeah, it is new. The idea is that upping the standard deduction had a negative effect on charitable giving and this may alleviate it. I doubt it. It didn’t help much before. On the positive side this is theoretically permanent so there is more time to publicize and get people used to it. On the downside this is a very easy cheat on taxes to claim you donated when you didn’t and with the IRS being defunded lying on taxation is pretty low risk. Even if the IRS were well-funded this would still be pretty easy to cheat on. It is probably not worth pursuing for the IRS when someone takes the standard deduction and cheats on this. There is also a change for those who itemize and you have to meet a minimum of giving to itemize. Same with corporations. I am a bit more concerned at the changes in education taxation. They are raising the taxes on endowment funds. This obviously targets Ivy League schools but also smaller schools funded by investments. There is also a pretty vague tax deduction for private school scholarships for K-12 education which I don’t understand but I am cynical about.

Or just evidence that Joseph Smith used chiastic structures without recognizing it. Not sure why God would feel the need to seed ancient structures into revelations given in a different language and culture. Why? Maybe we should start looking for modern grammatical structures in the Bible that are completely out of place. I would find that more convincing.

It means you can deduct up to $1000 in charitable giving ($2000 for a couple) if you take the standard deduction. If you do not take the standard deduction and itemize nothing changes. Disclaimer: Not a lawyer or tax expert. Following my advice has been known to cause chronic head pain, seizures, coma, death, and halitosis. Nehor advice is not for everyone. Consult with a doctor before use.

True, but I see them trying to counter it by limiting marketing of unhealthy foods to kids, creating access to exercise spaces, and trying to fight poverty. Americans are really good at looking at a problem and saying “nothing we can do about it” and calling it a day.

Maybe we should create and enforce food health standards much of the rest of the world have adopted.

And not being able to afford the cost of living, feeling trapped in a system where ownership of a home seems impossible, having to give up dreams of parenthood due to financial realities, paranoia that every health concern could turn into financial ruin, and the like. Add in being chastised by others that you are all a bunch of lazy layabouts who have had it easy for way too long and people wonder why everyone is lonely and depressed. It never ceases to be funny to me that people who think we are in the last days when troubles are supposed to abound everywhere will ignore all that because their favored diet of propaganda tells them it is more fun to punch down and insist that all the suffering of others is due to laziness and sloth and not being challenged enough by life.

The fact that they keep talking about it and telling leaders and people not to do it suggests that it happens. It is like the biblical prohibition on necromancy. From it you can deduce that there were people practicing necromancy. Unlike necromancers though we tend to honor those who make sacrifices for church service including the excessive ones.

What’s changed that made all of us so soft and having it too easy? Subsistence farming is hard work. Taking a wagon trip on the way only makes it marginally more difficult. There were lots of other people making similar trips throughout history. It is not some unique experience.