The Nehor

Most human trafficking doesn’t involve child abductees. That is mischaracterizing how human trafficking works. I remember when I was a teenager adults confidently talking about how (white) children were being abducted and trafficked by sexual predators. That is just not how it works in practice and casting this as a threat scares people unnecessarily and leads people to look for the wrong solutions to the problem.

It is not false though. The child abduction and satanic panic (with the fear of child sacrifice or sex slavery) were blown out of all proportion by bad actors. The solution isn’t to indulge those who fell for it. It is to correct the misperceptions. Law enforcement is not lax. It is incredibly overfunded. Its competence can be questioned but there is no lack of funding. Better mental health access would be helpful. We don’t need a bunch of pseudoprisons though. We are already over incarcerated. What do replacement birth rates have to do with this?

The Nephites and Lamanites had baptism for their whole history. That could provide an innumberable….ummmmm….number. That sounds pretty horrible to me honestly. So regimented and orderly. I want some chaos! I think this is one reason we are told not to take Spirit World visions as indicative of truths. They may be real but they are calculated to appeal to the person having them. I know most will never hear of it. It does make me wonder why the world was designed to give so few that chance when the gospel is given as the reason the world exists. Yeah, I read about them. My not very educated guess is that it was a status symbol or proof of a level of mastery in metalsmithing for a guild member or something along those lines. Yep. I don’t really trust God. I am not convinced that the whole “God would cease to be God” phrase was intended to be taken literally. I don’t know. I have a much darker potential interpretation of why the atonement was required but I am not at all certain of it and it makes me feel like a gnostic to recast the whole story in a new light. I don’t intend that as a compliment to myself. This makes me dubious of it. If it is eternal why does it only appear in dispensations that were also revealed in this dispensation. Seems kind of important. Thanks though.

Accurate, the stranger danger panic combined with the Satanic panic and the Gay panic to spread a generalized fear about children and that fear never went away. Just the targets. Now you have to protect your kids from the evil queers who are “grooming” them or the immigrants or some other group that is out to get them. I am among the youngest Gen Xers and we went out and played on our own and we had places to go and experience things. We had hills to explore and treasures to find and rode refrigerator boxes down slopes into brick walls. We usually jumped off before hitting the wall. My youngest siblings didn’t fully get that childhood. My nieces and nephews couldn’t have that if their parents tried to give it to them. Except for when one of my brothers lived in pretty rural Alaska for a while. Then the kids roamed a lot. I was talking to a 20 year old whose parents panic if he turns tracking off on his phone. He is planning to bolt economically and socially from them soon. That sounds exhausting.

I love this. A bishop once said I would be good in the Young Men’s program. He said the boys would look up to me. I replied that I am at best a cautionary tale of some sort that I can’t figure out. No one should aspire to be me.

I didn’t learn it until I was in seminary. I was given a scripture chain “proving” it at some point but I don’t remember it. I have also twice heard apostles say that is how it works but it is hard to use that as evidence since they weren’t public recorded meetings and we are told not to use quotes from that type of meeting. I know it was taught in the Gospel Principles manual we used for Gospel Essentials. Every time I have heard it brought up it almost always ends up with discussions of degrees of spirit prison but that just seems to be a reasoned out thing and not something I can substantiate. I am not sure they can. The Book of Mormon talks though about the Lamanites being baptized by the Holy Ghost and not realizing it. I have no idea how that ordinance worked. I have heard it as a theory but I am not convinced either way. I suspect it wasn’t practiced and was developed later. I am not sure how much I believe the Church’s back-dating baptism back to the beginning of the world. Then it vanishes and suddenly reappears? Why? I don’t know either. I don’t think most people deserve that but the gospel seems to suggest most do. I don’t really like this aspect of the gospel much. I am not even sure what that means. It doesn’t sound like the God I want to worship though. At the mercy of laws that seem unfair to us (and Him?) and stuck with following them whether He likes them or not? True, but God also knows us humans and should be able to work around that to a degree. I have a hard time dealing with the idea that an essentially omniscient being can’t get His point across because His servants muck it up so much. I wouldn’t do it the way God does. I am not arguing for it because i like the idea. It is just what has been taught to me by those I am supposed to believe have authority. Maybe they are wrong. Unless it doesn’t work out and someone ends up in hell. In my experience being in torment doesn’t get that much easier just through knowing that it will end eventually.

And everyone else including yourself was laser focused on the original topic until I blundered in and went on a tangent!!!! How will I live with the shame?!?!?!?!

This comic is what happens when a parent sees a child as an extension of themselves.

John needs to stop seeing Bill as an extension of himself such that he is planning his child’s future based on what John thinks would be best. I’ve known parents that give gifts primarily to try to steer their children into some expected career path. They often end up estranged. Yeah, sometimes people give clueless gifts but those are easy to laugh off. The ones that are designed to press a specific outcome that the gift giver wants to steer the gift receiver towards are manipulative. You can’t just toss the gift aside. There is an implication that if you don’t accept the path the giver wants that you have failed them. Coming from a stranger it is easy to ignore. Coming from a family member or friend it estranges you.

Lazarus was likely very young. He lived with his sisters yet it is not referred to as his house and this was a patriarchal society so he was probably not yet of age. I think it is more likely Jesus used his name for a character because it would make the kid feel amazing to be in one of the parables.

Joseph Smith was wrong in a linguistic sense. The word translated as paradise refers to a kind of garden. It is a reference to Eden. In other words, a kind of paradise. Hades is in the Bible but not in that passage. Sheol is the final fate of the dead in earlier Judaism. It is not a nice place but there was no divide between paradise and prison. Everyone went there. There are hints of some having it slightly better there but it is not a happy afterlife. Sheol and Hades usually just mean where the dead go but neither of those are used when Jesus speaks to the thief. “This day shalt thou be with me in Hades” would convey what Joseph Smith suggests but it’s not the word used. Did Joseph have revelatory power to understand what Jesus actually meant in this specific instance? Maybe, but you won’t get it by learning Greek or Hebrew and reading the New Testament.

I am not sure if it is correct but it is definitely taught in scripture and in church materials. Generally it gets soft-pedaled when taught in Church classes and a lot of people start talking about degrees of Spirit Prison and the like. I have heard apostles and other church leaders teach this repeatedly. It is not a one-off thing in an online article. It is possible other ordinances filled this gap. LDS theology doesn’t really give an explanation for how baptism existed in the beginning and then appears to have been lost and only relatively recently been brought back. Doesn’t sound like just generic good people though. No idea. It seems like there really needs to be a space between the two extremes but we don’t get one. Augustine wasn’t gleeful at the thought of unbaptized babies being damned. He just couldn’t find a way around it. I can’t find another way around this. Be careful. Next you might wonder why God condemns queer people or argue that God’s justice is incompatible with all kinds of things. I don’t accept that the Bible was somehow pure when first recorded and then corrupted. We have to keep moving the goal posts to some brilliant moments during and after the life of Jesus where the pure gospel was present and then quickly lost. Compare to our dispensation with its “line upon line” reasoning and figuring it out as we go. Whole concepts have been tossed. Dynastic sealings, rebaptism, all kinds of stuff was found wanting and left behind. Yet we want to push some perfection on past dispensations from the start. Seems a huge stretch. I’ve read too much of the early Christians trying to figure out what Jesus meant to think that at one point everyone agreed on one understanding. It instead has the feverish feeling of a group of people following a messiah who seemed to fail on most of the required messianic promises so they were forced to move their fulfillment to some future date and trying to figure out what the messiah accomplished. It is messy.

That is still living rent-free in your head and annoying you?

You can borrow some of my clothes if you need some. 😉

Doesn’t have to. You can punch gracefully. Yeah, but some are obvious. I would if it came from someone close to me.

I believe you didn’t mean to say that but it probably comes across that way. And actions can convey things we secretly feel but would never say. I got called out on this once. It wasn’t pleasant when I realized why I was acting the way I was.

Or as a group of my friends used to joke: “Gift giving is an act of aggression” I mean it was half-jokingly. Some gifts we knew of were clearly outright attacks.

If you assume it is true that doesn’t make the approach effective.

My advice is to punch the bully. They might be genuine but the receiver has every reason to doubt it when it comes packaged like this. Imagine if someone sent you a gift that clearly demonstrated they are atheist and it included a handwritten letter bearing testimony that your religion is false. It also included a bit about how you are a good person somehow in spite of your faith and they respect you even if you stay with your faith. Which would mean what exactly?

They should punch the bullies instead. True, there are parents who can never be satisfied.

It is strange how victims are often given this advice but it is rarely given to bullies. Not saying that dynamic maps neatly onto this specific situation but the person doing the hurtful thing should be the one getting the correction. The reality is only the victim will ever take the advice. Oh, come on. No one would write that ‘I respect your choices BUT’ suggestion into a gift to a ‘faithful’ child. If that truly is our language of love we have much bigger problems. They often do this by disconnecting and getting some distance and then get to deal with complaints about not ever showing up. This reinforces the idea that the reason for the chasm is their disaffection from religion. The being if they weren’t disaffected they would be around more. Quite possibly true but the disaffection isn’t the reason they are withdrawing.

Okay, I had to ruminate a bit on this before I could respond intelligently as to why it came across badly to me. I am not trying to be mean but trying to deconstruct some of the likely emotions. When you put caveats and compliments around something while hinting that you want something more for someone it comes across as insincere. Stating that you love them for being “good” but implying they need more undercuts the compliment. Then you felt the need to say that you would respect them no matter if they went along with it or not. In other words you knew that there was a message that could offend and tried to acknowledge it to try to disarm it. It would be hard for many to feel good about this gift. It is laced with an appeal for them to change. That might be needed in many contexts but it is not a gift. It is a hook. It is hard to believe the compliments. They sound like you are buttering them up or preemptively using them so they will feel bad if they respond negatively. It is hard to take compliments that come that way as sincere. “You are good people living good lives and I have nothing but respect for you BUT………” That kind of appeal is emotionally exhausting when you are the target. You end up annoyed but it is hard to articulate exactly why. There are landmines throughout that the giver can use to try to rebut any expressions of frustration. Your wife is hurt and sad that they feel this way after giving them a gift that made them feel hurt and sad. She fired the shot and her daughters feel like they have been under fire for a long time. They are probably minimizing time around you if that is how they feel. People don’t react well to people trying to change them. It also means they are less likely to confide their problems or seek help or emotional support when things go wrong. I hope that wasn’t just a dodge to avoid having an awkward conversation. I would ask yourself how deliberately you are doing this. Is it something that just pops out or are you looking for opportunities to give backhanded appeals to their seeking out God for help. 1. This is impossible for anyone to answer who is not around the interactions. I don’t know if they are jumping at shadows assuming things that aren’t there or if they genuinely feel like they are being regularly judged or are under siege. 2. Definitely stop attaching proclamations of love or support to appeals to get them to change something. It makes them duck and cover when you want to express love. 3. It is not wrong but I would weigh the costs of the rule. If this is primarily a way of planting the religious ‘flag’ when they are present I would consider dumping this rule. 4. Probably has to do with how we socialize men to just ignore stuff like this that might offend them and socialize women to express feelings more openly. Could also be the way you approach religious topics with them. You might be showing more respect to the sons in a way they understand but not to the daughters. Is there a difference in your approach? In how you bring it up? It is also possible your sons are irked at this too and just don’t consider it worth discussing so just accepted it and processed their emotions about it in some other way. I think you are trying to help but I think the way you are going about it is alienating at least some of your children. The ‘playbook’ LDS use on disaffected family members isn’t nearly as subtle as many members believe.

This teaching has been partially repudiated. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/liahona/2014/03/faithful-parents-and-wayward-children-sustaining-hope-while-overcoming-misunderstanding?lang=eng I think it is a bit disingenuous for Elder Bednar to suggest that “some” have “misconstrued” the doctrine. The Church leadership were the ones pushing the teaching. Same thing they did by trying to make everyone think it was self-evident that women exercise priesthood power and suggesting it should have been known by all. This kind of revisionism annoys me.

That question was designed to catch people practicing plural marriage or some form of spiritual wifery or some other variant. The question originally included the full name of the Church to make it explicit that you were lying if you claimed to follow it and adhered to the beliefs of a different restorationist faith. The description in practice is so broad that taken literally it keeps you from doing anything with almost everybody. Even joining a political party would be verboten. Some book clubs would be forbidden.

Generalizing a specific case to everyone alive? Sounds fun. Why are you hiding your bisexuality from the world? You should get that ADHD treated. Also learn to pay attention in church meetings you easily distracted weirdo. I love this. I talked to irony and he said he just can’t engage with this. It is just too blatant.