The Nehor

No, I don’t think it helps. I prefer the Homer Simpson one: Could Jesus microwave so hot that he himself could not eat it? That is just playing with language. The thing is if God speaking through his prophet says it is infinite but only infinite in a limited sense that is not an atheist trying to trip up a theist. That is God deliberately walking into the trap. I admit that could be a good analogy to what Jesus did in many ways I don’t think that is what the writer of the Book of Mormon was angling fo. I admit I have trouble with most of the interpretations. The big problem I have is the way the ancient world worked. Day laborers were the lowest of the low outside of actual slaves. They were necessary to an extent but they lived on the edge of subsistence. The daily pay rate was sufficient to keep someone alive for a few days but the work wasn’t consistent. Working for a wage was generally seen as a kind of degradation. It was mitigated a bit by the social status of the work you were doing but these were at the bottom. If it is meant as an analogy for the rewards for those who are exalted or going to heaven then getting paid that scant wage just seems really off. If they were paid ten or a hundred times the normal daily wage and the early laborers were resentful of the latecomers getting the same inflated wage it would fit more like the prodigal son. Also the whole interaction at the end makes the landowner look like a preening showoff. I can be generous to them if I want to. Also calling the day laborer “friend” comes across more as insulting. No landowner was an actual friend of a day laborer. So yeah, I have no idea what to do with this parable. It sounds like the kind of thing a wealthy or powerful person would write to make themselves sound generous. I remember one story I read where a man (who was telling the story) went to a very high end restaurant and the waiter did a great job. At the end of the meal the man demanded to speak to the manager. The waiter was visibly distressed and asked what he had done wrong. The man kept a stony face and insisted he had to speak to the manager. The waiter grew more nervous and was graciously but desperately wondering what was wrong and kept trying to find out how he had displeased the customer but the man just reiterated that he had to speak to the manager. The waiter fearfully got the manager and brought the manager out and the customer revealed that he just had to tell the manager what a wonderful job the waiter did. See, it is funny. The man scared the waiter he was in danger of losing his job which reinforced that the customer had a lot of power over the waiter’s future and gratified his own ego. Only to have a laugh later as the man showed what a fair person he is by not destroying the waiter’s life and was actually generously doing the waiter a favor by talking him up. So all that unnecessary stress and fear? Hilarious! Really the story was that the teller is a huge jerk who loves lording his power over other people and ten convinces himself he is good for not using it to abuse others on at at least some occasions. So part of me hopes the whole parable was made up somewhere along the way by some well educated rich guy who wrote Matthew or Q or wherever it came from and Jesus didn’t say anything like it. The whole thing just feels distasteful. The infinite (but actually infinite only in the finite constraints of what it actually covers) atonement you mean? God did consult with me. I am being flippant in response to your sarcasm in one way but in another I am being very serious. God knows the end from the beginning meaning at the creation of the world he saw this interaction and even more how I would be confused by this description when some would posit an infinite number of infinite atonements, each covering a finite world or ‘round of creation’ or whatever. God knew how I would take this and went ahead with it anyways. So…….God is okay with the misunderstanding I guess. I mean, really this is kind of an indictment of the whole concept of scripture more than anything and I do often wonder why God would choose this incredibly weird and very limited method of communication knowing how badly humans would mangle it. I suppose it could be argued that that is just how humans are but that in itself makes it even more God’s fault as He claims to have designed us. So when God complains about people misusing scripture as if it is the fault of the humans I have to ask in response: “What did you think was going to happen?” I was terrified of it whenever I thought of it for decades. Now I am not convinced it even exists. You are arguing that you should be scared therefore the deception God deliberately used is okay. That is just the thing. The Lord wasn’t careful to say that until that revelation came and he doesn’t say it was wrong. The Lord justifies using misleading language because the emotional impact would be better for His purposes. In other words God will deceive us if He thinks it is the best thing for us. That might not be as scary as an endless hell but it is pretty scary. I would hope that was true but I had no reason to believe or disbelieve it. If God is willing to deceive in order to scare us I suspect that means such progression is possible. If that progression is possible I imagine revealing that would allow many to ‘rest on their laurels’ so keeping it ambiguous might be to God’s benefit to stimulate people to action out of fear of missing out. If that progression is not possible then sharing that information would stimulate those same people to action and probably even more so as they can’t hope for that progression. So it seems like it is more advantageous to God to keep it ambiguous if that progression is possible. Since God is willing to be unclear in order to trick us into doing ‘the right thing’ it seems more likely that the progression is possible as that gains a larger advantage in ambiguity and the alternative seems it would give an advantage via revealing it. You can continue this to comedic levels: So therefore it is likely that this theory is true. Or did God know I would figure this out and did this to throw me off? So it isn’t true. But then I know God might do that so what if I see through it. But by definition God knows I would see through that via His omniscience and therefore it will always be the opposite of what I deduce it to be. So the only way to figure it out is to follow the rabbit hole until I am satisfied I am correct and then believe the opposite. Unfortunately God would know I would do that so I have to do the opposite of that opposite. Then continue until brain melts. I have a shirt that reads “Can’t think straight” in bright rainbow pride and bisexual pride flag colors. Expecting me to think straight is not being respectful of my culture.

Many of them did get bullied and harassed.

You seriously used those as your Google search terms? “‘President Brimhall, these children are now at play, making mud worlds, the time will come when some of these boys, through their faithfulness to the gospel, will progress and develop in knowledge, intelligence and power, in future eternities, until they shall be able to go out into space where there is unorganized matter and call together the necessary elements, and through their knowledge of and control over the laws and powers of nature, to organize matter into worlds on which their posterity may dwell, and over which they shall rule as gods’” -Lorenzo Snow

I would argue that the depravity in the story of the Institute were the murderous book-burning Nazis and not the tiny marginalized population trying to quietly examine themselves and find a way to coexist peacefully with the rest of society. Just like today. One of my favorite historians likes to say that if your side is censoring, restricting, banning, or burning books you are on the wrong side of history.

I don’t appealing to some non-mathetmatical definition of “infinite” explains anything. This seems like a lot of words trying to make the infinite finite. There are a lot of ways that could have been expressed without using the word “infinite” in the Book of Mormon yet the word was used anyways. Is this one of those cases where God uses a ‘scare word’ like when He called hell endless in order to scare people but it was only true in a limited way so God was being sneaky and deceptive for rhetorical effect?

Counterpoint: All the stuff Lorenzo Snow said about it. Of course no one claimed to fully understand it. That is moving the goalposts. Many, especially Lorenzo Snow, talked about planetary construction and ruling over them.

You realize you just set yourself up for a “and don’t call me Shirley” line.

That is finite though. It is an infinite atonement within finite constraints which doesn’t really work. I mean, it kind of does but then you would think scripture would specify and it does not. Seems like an ad hoc rationalization.

It is not my definition that is the problem. What is the Book of Mormon’s definition?

Oops, I blame lack of sleep for my error.

If an atonement is infinite you would never need another one.

The big problem with this is it makes the atonement not infinite.

You say you are only intending this for use in personal study but then you start talking about how CES should use it. I don’t think this classification system works in practice. Any time a prophet claims to be speaking for God in the first person is assumed to be more pure? That is a pretty arbitrary standard and prioritizes a lot of the Old Testament.

Uh, the working class keeps cities like those running. It is quite possible Jesus and/or his father and/or other family got work building there. Entirely insulated? That is not how culture works. Also no. The general consensus was that Qumran was started by renegade/exiled priests. The Dead Sea Scrolls bear this out. The Halakhic letter shows some of their disputes with the temple priests. It wasn’t grass roots. There is no indication they were proselyting…..especially that they were proselyting the uneducated. Populist movements champion the “common people”. That is not what Qumran was doing based on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was a religious dispute.

In any sane world it would be.

History is bizarre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_für_Sexualwissenschaft https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/magnus-hirschfeld-and-the-institute-for-sexual-science/ During the Weimar Republic this institute was studying gender and sexuality. They had a good working relationship with the Berlin police to help transgender people avoid legal harassment for “crossdressing” with medical certificates. They pioneered and adapted some basic gender-affirming treatments and surgeries (not the first such treatments, they go back to at least ancient Egypt). They had quite a few surgical techniques, treatments, and provided estrogen. Testosterone wasn’t synthesized until 1935 so wasn’t available but they did provide ftm treatments and surgeries. The Nazis came to power in January 1933. Nazis attacked the institute in May. They burned the entire library that month. Some of the work was disseminated but a lot of it was lost. The Nazis started with vulnerable groups that almost no one would go to bat for. Plus the guy running it was a Jew. That makes it easier. Once you decide someone’s rights are actually privileges it is easy to move that line so that more and more people don’t deserve rights. Scattering that institute and destroying most of its research pushed back research on gender by decades. All of this has happened before…… The Nazis came for the Jewish doctors, the trangender people, the gays, and the queers first because they judged (correctly) that almost no one would speak for them. Then they moved on to other groups. Remember kids, it is always morally correct to punch a fascist. Edit: One other thought. I think another reason the Nazis were so quick to hit the institute is that as fascism is primarily an emotional reaction to the Enlightenment and (classical) Liberalism its enemies and justifications are not rationally arrived at. Fascism is historically a philosophy for mediocre men who feel anxious or inferior about meeting the standards of masculinity and feel they have failed in some way. It tries to tell them that their failure is due to some other (Jews, Gays, immigrants, black people, some version of the deep state, etc.) Then it tries to tell these men they are great. Since homosexuality is usually on the list of enemies and exalting men is part of the supposed goal you end up with a very homophobic but also deeply homoerotic political movement. This meant getting rid of any people associated with any kind of queerness was a top priority. If you are going to exalt men as uber-men and shoot for hypermasculinity it is easy to look very gay and being gay is bad. When you publish this you don’t want anyone to think anything queer is going on: And when Rohm is training men like this: It is homoerotic and homosocial all the way down. Women were there primarily there to create more men. Heterosexual activity is encouraged but homosocial relationships make the nation strong. Being friendly with women is often weakness. You can see this in MAGA propaganda and rallies and right-wing influencers peddling. Here is Tucker Carlson reaching out to men with anxiety about not measuring up with a few additions.Just watching the first few minutes should make it obvious what I am talking about. This eyecandy is on a level with Heated Rivalry. The same obsession with physical fitness the Nazis had repackaged. You get this with Pete Hegseth’s pathetic address to the military commanders about how important physical fitness is in the military as if it is the great strength of the US military. It is not. The US military’s superpower is its unparalleled logistical skills and decentralized command structure that works amazingly well in conventional conflicts but the current leader is worried more about how many pushups everyone can do. That is classic ‘illusion of strength’ propaganda. It is the kind of stuff Putin and other strongman leaders use. Oh, and to be clear pretty much everything Tucker says in that video is ahistorical garbage. If you prefer a more fun and hilarious version here you go. Note that no clips were added that are not in the real thing. Oh, and that ridiculous device in the preview. Tucker sells those as a way to stimulate the testicles to produce more testoseterone. They aren’t even subtle about appealing to male insecurity. Wow, I went on a for a while there. In short, punch fascists. Testicle tanning will not make you manly and I need to take a cold shower. To get rid of the fashy ideas. Get your mind out of the gutter.

They were an apocalypse cult. The War Scroll that contained their battle plan wasn’t a good plan. Most likely the community died out during one of the revolts. As one Jewish scholar I follow a lot says: “If your military plan is for God to save you, stay home.”

The estimates on that vary wildly. Some problems we encounter are having a small sample size of stars where we can detect planets and the dangers of generalizing that data to other parts of a galaxy or to other galaxies. The downside is that most of those planets are not useful for most purposes we can envision. A joke about the exoplanets: Even if the planet is sort of right the star may not be in a phase conducive to life. Yellow dwaves like Sol, out own sun, are pretty good for life development. The main criteria are how long the star will burn for since life tends to take time to show up. Orange dwarves would actually be better as they can last about three to four times as long as a yellow dwarf (depending primarily on size). So a lot of planets won’t be inhabited and we have no idea how common habitable planets are as we have exactly one. The number is also skewed since moons might potentially be more likely to develop life than planets in the right conditions and there are more moons….probably. God might have a purpose for planets that don’t seem to have direct value to us. Or God might just like making neat stuff.

Yeah, and in case God is reading this I think Calm deserves the being able to sleep through the night thing now and not in some future state so it would be nice if you could take care of that.

I want my early to mid 20s twink form please.

Give it a few more decades. We might have been there or at least be much closer by now if the Nazis hadn’t destroyed most transgender research as one of their first acts in power. You are just wrong about the evidence. No you wouldn’t. You would dismiss it or pull a quote from the Cass Report and declare victory. I am operating on an abundance of evidence. You have to cherry-pick. But fine, her is a 40 year follow-up study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36149983/ Sweden reportedly made some conclusions based on this study which had to issue a correction: https://segm.org/ajp_correction_2020 And have a systematic review of all peer-reviewed studies in English to pull out a larger picture: https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/ I could post dozens more if I thought it would help but a simple Google search would get you a lot of the same data. And the data shows that it is. Wrong. Just wrong. Totally wrong. A simple Google search would verify that. Even most AI is smart enough to answer that. You don’t judge them by any standard of evidence. You have just decided it has a negative effect. None of those are known to be a cause of gender dysphoria. You’re just making things up. To what model? What are you even talking about? What nations have abandoned medical transition entirely in favor of talk therapy? You are taking mostly minor changes in how some nations deal with pediatric cases and generalizing to an absurd degree. I posted a bunch above. You can find more with a simple Google search. Go nuts. Fine, look at the studies. No, they didn’t and you asserting it isn’t making it so. No. Why is it that changes you like are automatically free of political bias while those you disagree with are monstrous perversions of the system? It is almost as if you make that decision based entirely on whether it agrees with you. Repeating the same thing over and over is so pathetic. Nope. But not enough to Google them? Vain repetitions. I am not saying most transphobia is religiously motivated in Europe. I said your transphobia is religiously motivated. I don’t think in general it is religiously motivated. I think people are just uncomfortable with transgender people so they find justifications to back up their bigotry. For some that will be religion. You are absolutely and utterly wrong. Segregation was rooted in biology and trying to find a fundamental difference in races to justify its existence. The reason segregation began to fall legally was not primarily due to any moral advances. Part of it was that judges couldn’t find a key element to definitively differentiate between white and black people. When the binary was found wanting to thread that divide it became unenforceable. Another part was legislation and a lot of that legislation came because the Civil Right Movement was making life intolerable for the segregationist and (more importantly) costing the elite a lot of money. You are a broken record. ROGD is junk science. It is a non-clinical diagnosis. It is not supported by evidence. Here is a good article examining why it is unproven, where it came from, why the initial data that led to the hypothesis doesn’t work as evidence (which I have shared with you multiple times but you ignore it): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11876199/ And a bunch more repetition of the same things over and over again because you do the line by line thing instead of discussing things holistically. So………boring.

I know and I admit that I dislike most of it. In it the prophets present God as a pretty horrible husband with lots of humiliating the wife and publicly scorning her until she comes back repentant and desperate and things of that nature. Reads way too much like an abuser’s handbook. I find it to be a bit horrifying that the Prophets considered this to be a good God implying that that was a good husband so that was their idea of a good husband. Just…….yuck. Quite honestly it often isn’t sweet. I have gotten emotionally tired of having to blame myself for everything in my relationship with God. I grow sympathetic to the old Jewish idea that the angels argued to God that making humanity was a big mistake. This is back when angels really didn’t like humanity. I kind of get the point. If you are going to make humans so flawed from the start and set goals so unattainable why bother? I know the standard answer (Spoilers: it is Jesus) but it is tiring. Also the “Not if He can help it” bit is confusing. If God wants to not punish then maybe just don’t? I like this aspiration.

Uhhh no, the reason you develop those gametes is due to hormones when young. Also it is probably only a matter of time before we can change that as well. So it is more of a skill issue. Variations within a strict binary system means it is not a strict binary. You continue to deliberately ignore this. The difference is whether the treatment WORKS!!!!! The objective of medicine is to reduce suffering and increase human flourishing and all that. That is the question. You are trying to make it about everything sticking to your idea of a sexual binary. The fact that someone is happier can be sacrificed to the idea of you holding on to a strict binary shows that your approach isn’t ethical. The increased quality of life is the data. Except that medical (and other forms of transitioning) does often relieve the symptoms. You continue to ignore this. That is the point. When it relieves the symptoms it means the treatment is working. Starvation doesn’t help with anorexia. Transitioning works very well in most cases. It helps. Talk therapy has minimal benefits. You want to get rid of the treatment that seems to be the most successful in favor of the one that doesn’t. You are the joke in a lot of transgender memes that go along the lines of: ”Wow, I am happier now and more comfortable in my own skin. I hope this lasts forever.” ”But aren’t you worried this might be irreversible?” That is all nonsense. The relief is usually not short term and doesn’t introduce serious medical harms. Reality-based care is the care that works the best at treating the symptoms. You just don’t think it is real. You aren’t basing this on data. It is a religious dogma that the Church came up with a few decades ago. Yes, the distress is sustainably reduced. That is the overwhelming evidence. One heavily politicized review making recommendations on TERF island does not refute the consensus of the rest of the developed world. Oh for the Love of Zeus. You are arguing we shouldn’t use an effective treatment because we don’t use the same treatment in analogous situations and that this is somehow based on ethics? What? Ethics in medicine isn’t scripture where there is some divine imperative we have to be consistent about. It is decided based on a cost/benefit analysis of potential benefits and harms. It is contested because people hate transgender people. That is like arguing that segregation must be necessary because if getting rid of it was so good it wouldn’t be contested. Plus I have seen a lot of the stuff contesting it and it often comes down to nothing. I favor bodily autonomy in general. I also do not concede that identity is subjective. They aren’t performed lightly. The medicine behind it was built up slowly over decades. You are still trying to catch up because propagandists told you it was bad and you ignored it until they did. Yep, meets that criteria. Wrong. Rapid onset cases are pseudoscience. Stop pretending you are discussing medicine and then drag in discredited theories with no evidential backing. Nope. It is not rushed medicalization. Again, that you just recently found out about this does not mean there isn’t data about it. And yes, you are infantilizing them. And no, data on interventions is not weak no matter how regularly you hold to that evidenceless dogma. So we can’t do anything until we can “cure” autism. Yeah, no, that is not how anything works. You are just looking for any roadblock that sounds plausible. The evidence is that therapy DOES NOT provide more than a minimal benefit. Evidence-based care based on evidence that it doesn’t work. Smac Medicine: Using Leeches Since 861! Nope. Wrong. It is you meddling in things you don’t understand and showing a lack of compassion by doing so. You peddle pseudoscience and fringe theories. You are not good at this. That is exactly what it makes it. Otherwise why have the surgery. To conform to gender norms even though the person getting the surgery doesn’t care if they match those norms? That would be pretty horrific. It is not corrective in a way your religious views allow. Nope. It does actually. You have repeatedly insisted that there isn’t enough data on long-term harm (so sayeth the HOLY CASS REPORT). Now it is suddenly enough to draw conclusions from. You don’t have any consistent positions. You just throw everything at the wall in any combination you think might be plausible without any notion of consistency and just hope it sticks. One moment data on long term effect are insufficient so we shouldn’t act. In another moment it shows consistent long term harm. Which is it? You want to argue that you are compassionate but you want to reject a treatment that improves quality of life for one that provides minimal or no benefit. I’ve seen this before. During the days when conversion therapy for gay people consistently didn’t work but some groups wanted to keep trying because the alternative of accepting that it was largely immutable was abhorrent so instead of allowing them to exist and do their own thing they pushed for even more conversion therapy hoping it would eventually work or they could keep pretending it might because the alternative is unpleasant. The desperate attempts to find some fundamental and clear difference in race to justify segregation went down the same road with the endless repetition of pseudoscience and discredited theories to try to provide a rational basis for what was an emotionally driven distaste. That is the problem. You are defending an emotional position and not a rational one. All of this has happened before….and it will all happen again.

“Biological reality” is determined by the presence of hormones. We can change that. The reality is much more malleable than you want it to be. I don’t think you have a good grasp of the ethics behind all of this. You are putting the ethical line where your religion sets it, not based on medical ethics. Also someone starving themselves doesn’t relieve the symptoms of anorexia. It doesn’t help with the problem. Gender affirming treatments DO help with body dysphoria. BIID is much more complicated than you are making it sound and some people who have an affiliation with another animal DO pursue elective cosmetic surgeries to alleviate their symptoms. A lot of treatments are irreversible. You are drawing a really weird ethical line. So people who experience trauma or suffer from autism need to be infantilized and don’t deserve bodily autonomy? Yikes. Exploratory therapy? LOL. Do you think this hasn’t been tried over and over again? If therapy could cure or heavily alleviate gender dysphoria the transphobes would be screaming this from the mountaintops. They don’t because it doesn’t work. Therapy helps with transitioning or determining the extent of a transition or whether the person wants to medically transition and lots of nuances and some therapy is sometimes required to get a prescription for hormones but it doesn’t help with the underlying issue. You are suggesting people stop pursuing a treatment that works in favor of a treatment that doesn’t actually work and has been shown not to work. That is not compassion. You think it is icky and transgressive and sinful in one case and not in the other…despite scripture being silent about it. The distinction you are trying to make is an ad hoc justification for a religious conviction, not a serious distinction.

I don’t think you know what a caricature is.