The Nehor

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.

So thank Irenaus for the big steps he took to basically begin to pick which books would make it into the New Testament.

Valentinus preserved the true core of Christianity. *ducks and runs*

I could very much see this happening to me. Try to open, realize I can’t without risking damage, think I will take it to an expert or friend later, and then promptly forget about it.

You can’t inhale outer space and you don’t even try unless something has gone horribly wrong and you are probably about to die. How do you imagine they are smelling ‘space’ and not the atmosphere that they brought with them?

The Electric Universe theory is pseudoscience. There is nothing backing it up at all.