The Nehor

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.

I just don’t think that being in a place that is called Spirit Prison would be indicative of a loving God. You could still potentially reason your way to one but I don’t think it would be intuitive. Jesus did not minister in person and being clothed with power and authority may be just as visible there as it is here. In other words most people can’t tell. We clothe our missionaries with power and authority but most don’t notice. Possible it is different there. Just not much information. I am not really looking forward to it when it comes. Assuming it is how we describe it. Could be better. Could be worse. Could be nothing. Maybe. I am cynical and pessimistic though. Maybe death makes people think more clearly? I have to talk to people I don’t know? I really am in hell! Kidding…..mostly. I got the idea from the apostles. I don’t particularly like this teaching. Here is the church’s gospel topic bit on paradise: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/paradise?lang=eng It is short. I will just copy it here: Bolding mine. Also Joseph Smith’s claim that that is a mistranslation doesn’t make any linguistic sense. It might be a more accurate description but the Greek doesn’t refer to a world of spirit. The word is almost certainly used to compare it to Eden. Did every dispensation know of resurrection and redemption? Even if they did I am constantly being taught about redemption and resurrection even though I have heard it before. Also if somehow the unbaptized are in paradise surely the faithful saints would have tried to teach them? Maybe. I suspect it was a small crowd compared to the volume of people in the spirit world. It is even possible that some of them were morose or unmotivated. It talks about them seeing their lack of a resurrection as a form of bondage. Maybe they weren’t well organized or weren’t sure what they should be doing. Joseph Smith taught that John the Baptist went there as a forerunner for Jesus again. No idea what that means. I am going off what the Church teaches. I would like to think the unbaptized can go to paradise. I’d kind of like everyone to go there. Except Frank. That guy can burn for eternity. Mostly because the three kingdoms didn’t make it into the Bible. Hard to blame them for not knowing. I hope what I suspect about how things work is wrong. Nope, no problem with the names themselves. Just seems an odd grab bag of people to choose across various elements of society when the Founders were said to have impressed their names specifically. And yes, everyone does need to be baptized. I was taught it was urgent because it allows these people to escape prison. Like, when you did it they could opt to get out. Again, I don’t like this teaching. I just don’t see a way around it. Most attempts to reason around it are appeals to compassion and the love of God and ‘God wouldn’t do that’ reasoning. It is also offered as a kind of comfort to grieving families and to avoid people worrying about people they love being in unhappy circumstances. I am sympathetic to those arguments but the teachings don’t seem to back up this soft-pedaling.

I am not convinced that the existence of an afterlife is proof that there is a God. Unless something changes I am not sure that this will make preaching the gospel easier. Claiming that Jesus lived is not likely to be that convincing. Others can testify of any number of deities. I expect new religions will pop up and flourish there. Also I don’t see how a knowledge of life continuing after death lessens agency somehow. So kind of alone. That assumes there is some divide between the two that is locational and not a divide of some kind of status. John Adams didn’t get baptized. That is the requirement. Catholics went through some contortions to explain how the thief didn’t need baptism. Then again our own church did some cute dodges. When I was younger there were quotes from conference speakers about the word Jesus used for paradise in that verse meaning ‘world of spirits’ which is just wrong. It is easy to see why they did it. They had to explain how the thief got in without baptism. If it was just the world of spirits that works. The word used means an enclosed garden. It is also used to describe Eden. I don’t think you can get in without baptism. Also we have the story from Wilford Woodruff when he was President of the St. George Temple reporting that the signers of the Declaration of Independence came to him and asked him to do their temple work and he did the work for them and all the dead U.S. presidents (with a few exceptions such as still perhaps being annoyed at Martin Van Buren blowing off Joseph Smith’s request for help to recover property in Missouri). They also picked a bunch of notables. The list of those baptized is interesting. Napoleon III? Marie Antoinette? Stonewall Jackson? Frederick the Great? Jane Austen? Okay, what is the rhyme or reason here? Here is the list: https://josephsmithfoundation.org/wiki/eminent-spirits-appear-to-wilford-woodruff/

You got enough xp to level up beyond mortality.

I liked my branch president in the MTC. One of his counselors though was a racist weirdo.

For almost all.

That is true of this world as well yet God doesn’t tell the people here how to be there when someone dies or is born. Maybe God communicates more in the Spirit World. But maybe He doesn’t. So some will die and just be alone? Wouldn’t John Adams go to Spirit Prison? That story seems to imply otherwise.

A lot of this assumes that time functions in the Spirit World the same way as it does here. Also they may not know it is coming.

To avoid the punishment of God we must compel righteousness on others? Huh, sounds like a good idea. It is actually a bit mindboggling that no one in mortality or premortality ever advanced a plan like this before. If they had we could look at history and see how it worked out for them.

Not really. It is a microstate. No one is born a citizen of Vatican City (they don’t have a hospital to be born in) and you only live there by invitation. The whole nation is less than half of a square kilometer in size. Last I heard about 800 people lived there. That is actually a lot for such a small space but they are all church officials and their staff.

The Electric Universe can’t just ‘fill in the gaps’. It wants to take whole sections of physics out and replace them. It has to account for all the data. It doesn’t. Saying it works in the spaces we can’t see means it is meaningless. This isn’t an elementary school science project. We already have the data to compare to the EU model. It doesn’t work. It is settled for the Electric Universe theory. It doesn’t work. Pretending there is some ongoing tension as to which model will be shown to be right is ridiculous. The Electric Universe has crossover with the Flat Earthers. It is conspiracy theory drivel. It suggests that the ‘hidebound mainstream science’ is hiding things. All of them. Across multiple nations, languages, and institutions. It is a big conspiracy in service to some nefarious purpose. They aren’t scientifically minded. They are theorycrafters. They don’t go to the data. They look for plausible sounding gobbledygook that sounds scientific. Yes, you have people with degrees that chime in but no one is publishing any of it because no one can make it work with the data. That is why you can’t get it published. However internet blogs and YouTube videos aren’t fact checked so you can say whatever you want. WHY? Why are these scientists conspiring? Why are they all so invested in the current model that they have all collectively agreed to dismiss the TRUTH? And the appeal to pity. Why can’t they just be NICE and try to gently correct while not making people feel bad? They don’t because it doesn’t work. You don’t reason people out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. Also believing in pseudoscience has real world consequences. See anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. With pseudoscience about repressed memories we got things like the satanic panic. A grand conspiracy theory of witches got a lot of people killed in the pre-modern period. Blood libel got Jews killed. Also pseudoscience undermines the credibility of experts so when we have situations where we need expert advice people start out poisoned against it. This gets people hurt and/or killed. It is not innocent. And yeah, pseudoscience doesn’t add value to society. Those who distribute it are doing harm. It has to be fought against. If that hurts the feelings of the people doing the lying I won’t lose any sleep over it. Why do they do it? The thrill of being in on the secrets of reality? Burning resentment that they aren’t scientific luminaries? Just wanting to be contrarian? Probably a mix for most people. Not innocent motives. Yeah, sometimes someone gets taken in innocently but unless they live in a bubble they don’t innocently stay there. It doesn’t though.

The books of the minim were the books of Jewish heretics. Mostly those who denied the oral Torah (what would be the Mishnah and the Talmud) and the resurrection. This would be the Sadducees and other sects like them. The Sadducees were (I am generalizing a bit here) Torah only zealots. They denied the existence of spirits. They didn’t like 1 Enoch or messianism in general. Taking this to mean the Jews were purging their libraries of stuff about the Watchers by targeting the Sadducees just doesn’t make sense. The Sadducees also really didn’t like the Essenes. The ideas of the Mishnah were mostly transmitted orally and again you can’t take the rabbinical opinions as authoritative even then. The Mishnah was only written down because the temple was lost and the Roman purge of a lot of the Jewish religious leadership and there was a fear of a kind of religious genocide if they didn’t start writing this stuff down. They are trying to survive, not doing mass redactions of their existing writings. Edit: Also, Enoch wasn’t particularly well loved or accepted and there is a much more obvious reason the Jewish leadership liked it less at the time. The wars against the Romans had an apocalyptic character. You had people marching to war thinking that God and/or the messiah would save them and it was getting people killed en masse. Is it any wonder the Rabbis were fed up with apocalyptic literature watching the results of it? Why worry about the Christians when there is a more obvious reason to be cool towards these kinds of texts? A similar thing happened with Jewish Kabbalah after Sabbatai Zevi had his big messianic moment in the 17th century with some of the Jewish leadership trying to restrict study of the Kabbalah to prevent this kind of dangerous messianic fervor.

The danger of quoting the Mishnah and the Talmud is that they are a bunch of Jewish authorities arguing throughout it. Saying the Mishnah says or the Talmud says with one quote can lead to all kinds of aberrant takes on Judaism. A special credit to one of my college professors who taught me that anyone using a Mishnah or Talmud quote to bash Jews is treating it like a scriptural proof-text which is not how the Jews used them. The Mishnah Sanhedrin quote is attributed to a specific rabbi (Akiva) and is not in any way binding. The Talmud quote is from an argument primarily on whether you can use copies of the Torah created by a Gentile or heretic or that was owned by a either at some point. I don’t have access to the other texts but considering the bad faith approach about the Mishnah and the Talmud I am not inclined to trust other sources that you probably got from the same place. It also doesn’t sound like Origen to me but it has been a long time since I read any of him (and only in translation).

That didn’t happen. Also the Jews were not anti-messiah at the time. They just didn’t think Jesus was the messiah because Jesus didn’t fulfill the expected signs. The Christians accepted this too. Hence the whole Second Coming thing.

Those evil “scholars”!

You are trying to use the Book of Mormon to argue about what happened in the Old World? That is a bold move.

Needs to either be true or have a more believable protagonist.

Hello Darkness my old friend. Sounds a little like me about a decade ago. I could get dates and attention. Just not from women in the church. When I did get a date I had a poison pill that would kill off that relationship every time.

“He had a good heart and loved those around him.” Me thinking: “Am I the only one here who ever met him?”

They did consider it. Since it has no explanatory power and its predictions fail it is useless. There is no value in considering it. Hard science like physics doesn’t operate on vibes or whether the model is appealing or a favorite. It matters whether it works. They would be shut down unless they could show that there is a better explanation of how measles works. Postulating that something else is involved is useless. You have to show it. Electricity does do things in the Universe. That is another myth of the whole electric universe theory. That scientists are somehow ignoring electricity. This theory is pushed by people making videos and using the internet which is all powered by electricity. Stars have electromagnetic fields (though more magnetic than electro). They cause solar storms and sunspots. Planets have magnetic fields. The idea that electricity is being ignored is silly. The science is settled on the Electric Universe theory. It is false. It is conspiracy theory nonsense that “mainstream science” is somehow heavily invested in teaching a false theory while suppressing the truth since it is all, you know, testable. Yeah, I would need to see evidence instead of vague anecdotal accounts that are usually coopted by the Electric Universe theory people as if it is evidence for their theory that explains nothing and doesn’t work. Science doesn’t operate on “it smelled weird”. That might provoke some inquiry but an anecdote alone is evidence for nothing.

I prefer fiction that is more entertaining.

Or you could just Google it. Some versions of early Christianity did reject the Torah (and/or the entire Hebrew Bible). See gnosticism in particular though there are other Christian groups that reject the Old Testament. Expectations of a Jewish messiah do pre-date Christianity but Jesus did not meet the requirements to be that messiah. This is of course was explained as Jesus eventually returning to do the rest. And again, Islam also expects Jesus to return. That is not how it happened. They are nearly universal. It is not a parallel that shows a connection. It is just how lots of cultures of all types do prayer. Ummm….okay.