The Nehor

I am sympathetic to God just leaving people alone. I am very unsympathetic to the idea of generational curses that are passed on via bloodline. Especially since in practice this is ethnicity in any case and is mostly just a carryover from back when Adonai/Jehovah was a tribal storm and war god who went around beating up the neighbors for the glory of Israel and generational cursings were a pretext for coming over and stealing all your neighbor’s stuff.

It is a bit odd to claim that Smith’s and Strang’s witnesses are fundamentally different when all of the living witnesses to the Book of Mormon (except possibly Cowdery) accepted Strang’s plates and his witnesses. One would think that if the witnesses were fundamentally different and Strang’s witnesses were inferior to the Book of Mormon witnesses that the Book of Mormon witnesses would be uniquely capable of seeing that gap.

I learned that Paul’s explanation for why people engage in homosexual behavior is objectively incorrect so we can probably ignore everything he said on the subject since he showed he has no idea what the hell he is talking about.

Joseph Smith was not very good at the whole history thing. The idea that Africans were mostly slaves going back to antiquity is rubbish. The writer(s) in the Old Testament lambasting Ham/Canaan in the story of Noah’s drunkenness was probably more a polemic against people Israelites hated and not some ancestral truth. Why not just not curse anyone at all?

No, it is not. It is a neat find. It is not like the purported plates of the Book of Mormon though. What is the evidence that there are thousands of “known metal documents from antiquity” that are missing today? Do we have names for all these documents? Is that how we know there are thousands of them?

So you are using one source that AI told you is as long as the Book of Mormon. Find a better source for that. 35,000 to 45,000 what? This is all very vague. Also you suggest that many long metal records existed but were lost. That is arguing from a vacuum of evidence.

That epistle is almost certainly a forgery and not written by Paul. All the pastoral epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) were probably written by one person. He was more than a little authoritarian and more than a little misogynistic. Most likely the writer had an agenda for how he wanted the church run and used Paul’s name to push his views.

I think I’d find the witnesses continuing to verify their testimonies of the Book of Mormon more convincing if they had left Restorationist churches generally. As it stands they had a reason to continue to champion the Book of Mormon. Did the more silent Strangite witnesses defect to other restorationist faiths that held Strang’s translations as divinely translated? Nope.

Ensure it? No. You can often guide hallucinations down a desired track if you communicate things to the person. I am not suggesting this is the most likely explanation for the witnesses. I was mostly joking. Mostly.

Viable secular explanation for witnesses seeing the plates: Hallucinogenics. Maybe the same stuff some critics suggest Joseph Smith put in the wine for the Kirtland meeting.

There would be some who would think it doesn’t prove it correct. Just that the plates exist. if they could be translated it would be proof that it was written but no necessarily that it was true. Facts actually matter to a lot of people. And no, confronted with that level of evidence I would put a lot of my doubts aside. I only started seriously doubting when I hit a snag that made me doubt the experiences that gave me a spiritual conviction and realized that similar accounts of religious conviction being granted come to people of any faith that expects those kinds of experiences so I went digging for more objective evidence and found it flimsy for Christianity in general and not much better for my own faith. I am still looking for something to convince me. And no, I don’t believe I can choose to believe anyways. That is not how rationality works. That is why I said it is often projection. And we have basically no evidence for the 36 hours of continuous daylight that was somehow localized to one part of the world. Reminds me of this:

This is how a lot of failed messiahs are rationalized. They are going to come back later and finish it. There wasn’t much of an argument needed to reject Jesus as the messiah. There were expectations that the messiah was expected to accomplish in his lifetime. Jesus did not accomplish them. Therefore failed messiah. There was no tradition of the messiah dying and coming back to life and then millenia later to return and finish off the prophecies. Those weren’t prooftexts. They were mostly verses that had no messianic implications that Christians decided had to mean Jesus. This is easy to do. Islam has its own version where bits of the Hebrew Bible foretell the coming of Mohammed. No, Joseph Smith doesn’t match those either unless you take the expected accomplishments and generalize them to the point that the original authors wouldn’t recognize them. Those aren’t the core roles. The core roles were rebuilding the Jerusalem temple and wage a literal war to defend Israel and die during that war in battle. Literally the land of Israel, not a vague concept of Israel that the early LDS claimed. Not a spiritual war, a literal one.

Messiah ben Joseph was one of four expected messianic figures. The problem with this take on it is Joseph Smith didn’t fulfill the prophesied role of Messiah ben Joseph. This messiah was supposed to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem which didn’t happen. He is supposed to wage war with the enemies of Israel and die in battle. Not a metaphorical spiritual battle. Die fighting in an actual battle in an actual war. You also have the question of which Messiah ben Joseph was Joseph Smith supposed to be. The one in the Talmud? The one that is (sort of) in the Book of Zechariah? The one that is Metatron? The one from Luranic Kabbalah where Messiah ben Joseph was a shared soul that was once incarnated as Cain, the killer of Abel? The one that was destined to kill the anti-Messiah that would be born of a virgin and a devil? What is the connection supposed to be? Joseph Smith doesn’t neatly fit into any of these versions. There seems to be an idea that these are all corruptions and they originally had a true prophecy which would have matched up but was corrupted but that is just pushing the prophecy back to something that was lost so there is no evidence for it at all. It is mythmaking. Same way Jesus didn’t fulfill the role of Messiah ben David. Hence why Jesus had to return to finish his work. The other two Messiahs are Elijah and the Righteous Priest. Who is the Righteous Priest?

And the persecution narrative about how everyone will gladly deceive and lie to people in the face of evidence. I suspect this is mostly projection.

Yep.

Gotta love the embedded idea that “civilization” had to come from somewhere and isn’t just something humans do. And of course “western civilization” as something special and unique was at the core of scientific racism.

Tinplate is mostly iron with a thin coating of tin over it to prevent rust. It wouldn’t be particularly expensive as metals go. Tin was pretty cheap in the 19th century. I have no idea how common tinplate roofing in particular was in that area in that time period. Not having domestic tin mining was the norm in the world at that time. Tin deposits are relatively rare. In the Bronze Age it was a highly sought after commodity and was one of the reasons long distance trading took place since it made copper much more durable (bronze is mostly copper with some tin alloyed in).

I mean the obvious reason it was never finished is that the evidence to support it didn’t work out.

The Book of Mormon is fake. So is the Bible. God created the world on April 19th, 1867. Everything before that was implanted memories created with the humans that were created on that date and God created a world whose history validated a lot of the history. Prove me wrong!

But were they asked about it? As far as I know we don’t have independent accounts of the witnesses describing the experience beyond affirming that what they said was true. I used to find the fact that some of the 8 witnesses left the Church but stood by their testimony to be evidence that it had to be real as they at that point would have no reason to continue to affirm their statement. Then I learned that they belonged to other “Mormon” churches that didn’t go to Utah and it makes a lot more sense. I don’t entirely trust the Stephen Burnett letter but it casts some shade on the 8 witnesses if it is an accurate account of what Martin Harris said and Martin was telling the truth. Dubious chain of evidence but it is not out of the realm of possibility.

Yep. In addition there are misreadings of the Septuagint that lead to some weird episodes where prophecy was supposed to be being fulfilled where the words of Zechariah suggested a person would ride on a donkey and a colt at the same time somehow which Matthew says happened. In the Hebrew it is poetry and it is talking about the same animal twice. If Matthew wrote it in Hebrew or Aramaic originally it is much more likely he would have used a Hebrew language version of the Hebrew bible and not made that error. The biggest evidence (to me anyways) that Matthew didn’t write the Gospel of Matthew is that the Gospel of Mark records Jesus calling Matthew to follow him. The Gospel of Matthew just copies that part verbatim. No switch to the first person. No addendum sharing more of how Matthew felt about being called. I find it incredibly unlikely that someone wouldn’t editorialize or add details if you were there for the actual events especially when it is literally about a life changing moment in your own life.

The general scholarly consensus is that Matthew was not written in Hebrew or Aramaic first. Eusebius quotes Papias as saying that Matthew wrote a “sayings” of Jesus in Hebrew but Eusebius also didn’t trust Papias much. It is also unlikely that the writer of Matthew was Matthew the apostle/disciple. The names ascribed to be the writers of the gospels came later.

The standard position of Newcomb’s problem is the predictor has nearly perfect accuracy, not 100% accuracy. If the predictor is 100% accurate the situation changes.

The human being hunts are mostly old legends and beliefs in weird movies and TV shows. I haven’t seen anything credible backing this up.

But if the predictor knows what you will do then doing the opposite is the better choice as your choice somehow semi-retroactively changes the predictor’s decision. That is why the problem is so vague. Unless you define how this predictor is operating and how it is reaching conclusions the problem is too vague to be answered.