The Nehor

I think an acknowledgement that the Church (through BYU) practiced conversion therapy and then stopped would make this seem more honest as opposed to ‘continuing’ to oppose conversion therapy suggesting it was always that way. As to the ruling the net effect will probably be limited. The only shift is that conversion talk therapy can be offered by those operating in a professional setting. It was already legal (and often abusive) in a church environment. This will mostly impact minors. Queer kids will suffer but they were already suffering. I don’t like it but this is the demented world we live in I guess.

Another explanation is that Peter and Mary both had such an experience. Then Paul had another one of a different kind. I can take or leave Mary though. It is possible her role was hyped up later. We know Peter believed there was something to the whole resurrection thing from Paul’s visit.

I love these kinds of experiences and accounts of these kinds of experiences but they just aren’t that unique. Other faiths have them. Depending on the study somewhere around 15% of the population have seen dead people. It is not a strange occurrence. The most convincing naturalistic explanation of Christianity in my opinion is that Peter had this kind of experience and shared it and bam, Christianity is born.

Heresy or hearsay? Or is that a combo of both?

I saw Jesus once while in an ecstatic state. Also several times in dreams. They were incredible experiences. I am just no longer convinced they were divine.

I mean, who hasn’t?

The traditional dating put the flood at somewhere around 2700 to 2300 BCE. Even if you move the date we have enough achaeological data on many sites to show there was no gap where large areas were depopulated like we would see in a global flood or an extended local one in the middle of the 3rd millenium BCE or any time after that. Plus even when the flood story popped up it was presented as something that had happened ‘a long time ago’. The story was formed as a story about the distant past.

Mormon also boasted about being a pure descendant of Nephi. Probably not accurate but it shows that most of those around him weren’t.

The biggest problem with a cataclysmic flood (global or regional) having happened at all is that it shows up in the records of several civilizations in the beginning of the second millenium BCE but is supposed to have happened (according to Genesis) in the middle of the third millenium BCE. So this big flood event happens and only shows up in the records over 500 years after it happened. That is a sign that it was invented. If it happened it would be all over the records right after it happened.

That is not the etymological root of the Chaldean word for Egypt. Also if there was a global flood where did the Chaldeans who presumably used this language come from to have a name for someone only two generations from Noah. Also according to the Bible Canaan the son of Ham was the one cursed. Now Ham’s daughter Egyptus was somehow also cursed? What?

Yeah, and yet somehow Christians and Jews have realized they were gay or queer and that Paul’s explanation is complete rubbish. It was probably around in the Jewish community at the time and probably a lot of other communities. So Paul wasn’t inspired while he was spouting this off. So why do some people think the rest of his discussion about homosexual behavior comes from God when it was *checks notes* also just the current Jewish take on it.

True. I haven’t found a reliable source of it.

I don’t think it is “plain and precious things taken away”. More like worst impulses of humanity injected throughout. I don’t think the hedges and guardrails work that well. Too often we spend our time justifying evil and that is not a good habit to get into.

Bad news everyone. ABC cancelled us. https://theonion.com/abc-cancels-mormonism/

I think the post-hoc rationalizations are more pronounced when we try to explain away the things we are uncomfortable about in the OT. Yeah, I believe that the powerful in Israel used the commands of their God/gods to justify things they wanted to do. I think it is kind of silly for us to look back at their polemics and propaganda and try to sanitize it so the commands did actually come from God but the people at the time all misunderstood the reasons. At that point we can’t learn much of anything from the Bible. We aren’t trying to understand what the writer believed and thought. We are just rewriting the whole thing to something we can live with.

According to scripture almost never after it was put in Solomon’s temple but since a lot of the history of the ark was written right before or after the defeat by Babylon where the temple was destroyed I am a bit dubious. It is easy to make something more sacred and magical when it isn’t around any more. Most likely the ark was destroyed by the Babylonians. Destroying it would be a potent symbol of their victory.

I find the divide between human dignity and human rights as kind of silly. Yeah, a lot of people throughout history have put human dignity on a pedestal. The problem is that when we read that from them it sounds very nice until you realize that it is a bunch of the elites writing to other literate people (other elites) about how their dignity matters. The subsistence farmers…..meh, not so much. Most cultures that hold up human dignity are also parochial about it. Those jerks over the hill that steal our sheep don’t get human dignity acknowledged. Give me human rights with laws and norms that defend them over a more idealistic belief in dignity any day. That sounds nice but taken too far and it is a call for the victim to put up with the bully to ensure peace. It can be the kind of ‘negative peace’ that MLK described: We are living in a unique time. International warfare has ceased to be economically productive. We live in a time called “the long peace”. We haven’t seen a serious war between major peer powers since World War 2. When we fight now it is because we choose to. It is no longer for gain. It might be for national pride or revanchism or the even more vile attempts to distract a populace from the actions of a failing regime and using conflict to silence dissent. I don’t believe that leaders are worse people than those that vote for them. When those who vote for them tolerate evil and justify it and defend it they aren’t any better than the leader directing it. I want to believe the solution to a lot of conflict is education. A real understanding of history and how nations and politics and economics work. I regularly see people being cheered for spewing total nonsense. Reminds me of the scriptural warnings about how many people will love a false prophet who will tell people what they want to hear. People can’t crave to be lied to and then expect competent leadership.

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.