The Nehor

It wasn’t 200 years later. There were all kinds of strains of Christianity virtually from the start. Figuring out what the death and resurrection of Jesus meant wasn’t an immediate thing for Christianity as a whole. Throwing verbal shade at other Christians for being heretics was a common passtime very early in Christianity. Orthodoxy came later.

To make him look less gay.

They don’t reject virtually all Christian teachings. Also this is like claiming that Christianity didn’t come from Judaism because Christianity rejected the Torah as the law of God and picked a messiah that didn’t meet the specified requirements to be the messiah. They rejected virtually all Jewish teachings. I would argue that Islam and Christianity have more in common than either of them have with Judaism.

SHOCKING? YES, TRULY SHOCKING!!!! NOT CLICK BAIT!!!! VERY SHOCKING!!!!!!!!!

The idea that Muhammed wasn’t a historical person is a very minority position. The ‘Petra was the original Mecca’ thing is also a fringe position. Islam accepts Jesus as a prophet born of a virgin. Islam believes Jesus will have a Second Coming. Nothing Christian? That is a ridiculous take. As we know Christians have never done pilgrimages. This is silly. This is a bunch of silly parallelisms. One group prays five times every day! The other prays fives times a day on one specific day of the year. These are the same thing! Really? Seriously, did an AI chatbot put this together? It has that confidently espousing rubbish vibe you get from an AI.

Closer in religious practice? Possibly. Closer in theology? That depends on how you weight the value of doctrinal similarity.

Not really a relevant comparison but execution for adultery is very rare in Saudi Arabia. I have heard there is an average of about one execution a decade for it. Also Islam is a break off of Christianity, not Judaism. Christianity is a break off of Judaism so you can maybe call Judaism a grandparent.

Solomonic magic involves the binding and use of supernatural entities. Might want to start there.

They weren’t going to stone the woman they brought to Jesus. It was a trick. If Jesus said she should be killed it would mean he was advocating for an obsolete law. If he refused he would be seen as arguing against the Torah. Jesus threaded the needle like he usually did with these tricksy gambits.

Was enjoying one of my favorite YouTube channels and found a breakdown of how magic was used to aid in the search for buried treasure. I kept wondering if Joseph Smith was going to pop up and he did briefly towards the end. This is good background for understanding the history of magical treasure hunting, how it worked in practice, and can possibly shed some light on Joseph Smith’s treasure hunting and also the treasure hunting bands that tried to acquire the gold plates and how they might have functioned. It also sheds some potential light on why buried treasure in the Book of Mormon was described as slippery. The treasure was often believed to be opposed to being found and there was a kind of magical duel fought to defeat it. Warning for some dry sarcasm about the LDS faith but it is just the creator’s normal wit that he aims at every faith including his own. Also a warning for a few really nerdy references.

One oddity is that I have heard the same sentiment from ostensibly straight people engaged in “humorous” wife bashing. A common joke in online queer communities is that it seems like a lot of straight men don’t like women at all so why are they so upset at queer men?

There were executions for the normal stuff societies at the time killed people but not for many of the Torah laws. No mention of stoning children for disodedience or for picking up sticks on the Sabbath or killing adulterers.

Corianton is a weird situation. Somehow there is a really famous sex worker that Corianton hears about and so he travels to see her? Was she Helen of Troy or something? Alma talks about how many were seduced by her. How? It can’t be her looks since Corianton had to travel to seek her out. Was it some kind of sex cult that she was seducing people to? Word of mouth? What was going on here? Also Alma seems to think the worst consequence was that the people saw Corianton doing this and it impacted the missionary work. Was that the sin next to murder? Or was it the fornicating? Or was this adultery? Or was adultery still considered to be a thing for men only if the woman was married and seeking out a sex worker would be fornication at worst for the man? I don’t see any indication that Nephite society was somehow less patriarchal than what they left behind. Jacob suggested that they should be different from that culture but they clearly were not or Jacob wouldn’t have been castigating them for it.

There is little evidence that the Torah’s extensive list of ‘criminals’ that should be killed was ever used in practice in the Kingdom of Judah or during the exile.

What if I leave the Church due to intellectual convictions and then have a threesome the next day since I don’t think the covenants apply? Will everyone assume it was for the threesome? It could be a coincidence.

The Book of Daniel made a lot more sense once someone pointed out to me that the prophecy stuff fits the Maccabean Revolt and that a lot of it functions as a “prophecy” of it. It was too dangerous to write a book about Antiochus so you write one about Babylon and Persia and put the story there to veil it a bit. This is a standard trope in apocalyptic literature. You have the Book of Revelation warning about Babylon when the symbolism all screams it is Rome. You see the same thing in literature today where you take a commentary on a current conflict and cast it in history or in a fantasy or sci-fi context to provide some distance. The TV show MASH was often a critique of the Vietnam War but that was too politically charged to set the show there so they set it in the Korean war to provide distance. Daniel makes a disturbing amount of sense when you see it as being about the Maccabean revolt if it was written during it. Of course its happy ending doesn’t happen. Same thing with the apocalyptic Essene group that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. Prophesied victory and they went out and fought expecting divine intervention and lost. Apocalyptic fervor tends to get a lot of people killed. I kind of get why the rabbis got sick of apocalyptic literature.

It is mostly in gnostic books.

I also have ADHD. So still comes back to God designing me wrong.

People who can’t imagine that anyone would leave except to have a bunch of orgies are really telling on themselves.

I have been told the Second Coming is imminent my whole life. If God wanted the human psyche to be in a state of perpetual urgency then God designed us wrong.

There was a whole genre in the early Church where people showed up teaching the ‘secret wisdom’ taught during the 40 days.

So the question is if you are a wise virgin or a foolish virgin. If you aren’t a virgin at all presumably the parable doesn’t apply and you are DOOMED!!!!!!

One could also ask why if this was so important it only made it into one gospel. Also no one witnessed this to describe it first hand and record it so it would have had to be related by Jesus telling someone or a vision. Or it was supposition or a later embellishment. The apostles were sleeping. Who saw this?

Sweat dries while blood stains. Being soaked in sweat was also much more common in the ancient world and is less likely to have been commented on. Edited to add: On the other hand if it were blood this whole sequence occurs at night and modern people often forget how dark the night was compared to today. Torchlight does not reveal as much as you might think. Also contrary to many movie and media portrayals the ancients did not all go around dressed in white, brown, and beige clothing. They loved their colorful clothing so Jesus might have been wearing darker clothing where blood would not be as apparent….especially in the dark. I personally suspect the passage meant to describe sweat and not blood but who knows for sure?

Seems like a good call.