The Nehor

Not until it stops. So……no. And that wasn’t a vent as your tone seems to imply. I have vented here before. I am much more caustic and biting when I am venting. Edit: If you would like I suppose I could write up a version of that where I am venting but it would probably get me thread banned and possibly the whole thread shut down.

I believe the prophecy in Daniel is ex evintu prophecy about the successor states of Alexander’s empire and were written during the Maccabean Revolt with hopes that the stone cut out would be the new reborn nation of Israel. Then they coded the participants behind imagery and backdated the writing by a few centuries to give plausible deniability about this being in any way treasonous. Just in case. For the same reason Rome became Babylon in the Book of Revelation. The hopes in the prophecy did not come to pass. I find it very clumsy to try to fit the prophecy into a structure where the early parts happened relatively close together and then suddenly the last bit is over two millenia later.

The real nihilists are the ones burning up the world and defending the ones doing it. I also only practice ethical hedonism.

I realize I have been a bit unfair. I keep referring to propagandists fighting against queer and specifically transgender causes without identifying them. So I figured I would share. Around 80% of anti-transgender groups get a large portion of their money from fossil fuel executives and companies. Transgender people did not seek out the spotlight. Someone saw them as a target. So why would fossil fuel groups be pushing this along with other anti-intellectual causes like climate change denialism, white supremacist causes, Evangelical Christian prosperity gospel stuff, and anti-abortion groups and the like. Well, when you are doing things that are likely to cause huge damage to the biosphere of the planet it makes sense to make people look anywhere but at you. So creating cultural rifts and finding minority groups to scapegoat works at keeping all the little people fighting each other so you can do whatever you want. This is a tried and true strategy as any deep student of history knows. In the late 1940s and 1950s big businesses HATED the New Deal and other policies that hampered their profits. So they funded a big Christian revival movement that tried to make Christianity (and by that I mean Protestant Christianity) into a force opposed to things like social safety nets for the poor, government initiatives to help people in general, and the like. So they hired some preachers and got to it. From that spawned “one nation under God” being added to the pledge of allegiance, “In God We Trust” being a national motto and somewhat laughably being printed on our money, and the idea that America was a Christian nation. This was also tied quite a bit to the last version of the KKK that would fight the Civil Rights Movment. It also called any kind of help for the poor a kind of “pagan statism” and a godless form of socialism. Sounds familiar right? Well, it worked pretty well. Church attendance went up and many of the preachers were saying the things the wealthy wanted and some of the others were picking up the talking points via osmosis. Then in the 1980s things were going better but they needed more. More money was spent hiring and training preachers and this time the cause was abortion which most of Protestant Christianity was previously indifferent to. Suddenly it was the vilest form of murder. The real cause behind a lot of that was government pressure to desegregate some of the religious schools but you couldn’t get the same enthusiasm about racism as you used to so abortion was a nice wedge issue. Throw in gay people as well of course because why not? AIDS you know. The prosperity gospel appeared and it tied neatly into a simplistic Christianity. If you are good you go to heaven and get rich. If you are bad or just aren’t trying hard enough you go to hell and you stay poor. It was a divine order and “socialism” was a satanic attempt to give the rewards of heaven to the unworthy. Yuck. So full court press on this. Again anything that helped promote any kind of equality was socialism. The religious revival worked. Church attendance went up. Then we come to the late 2010s. A lot of the people from the last movement are old or are dead. So lets start another revival and that is what they did. This time transgender.people were thrown into the mix along with a lot of the old classics. There was always more than a bit of misogyny in the older movements but now being insufficiently feminine or masculine could also be policed and you could terrorize cis women who appeared or acted too masculine. Turning Point USA was supposed to be the big religious revival along with a bunch of other movements. The culture war was a perfect cover to teach people to be skeptical of the intellectuals who often know what they are talking about and to pit people along lines that didn’t threaten business interests. Of course this most recent movement has a flaw in it. It is not working. Church attendance isn’t shooting up like last time. The “Gen Z Revival” that was recently pushed is laughably non-existent. If you trace the origin of this myth to the data that is supposed to back it up it is ridiculous to suggest it is a revival of any kind. I suspect the myth isn’t for regular people. I suspect it is the grifters who spent all this money they were given and the results are pretty underwhelming. Far from falling into line the younger generations are getting more skeptical of all the anti-intellectualism and the witch hunting for queers, commies, and non-conformists. So they need to hide their failure and stall for time. Anyways, this is where the “drag queens and transgender people” are the scourge of modern society is coming from. The fossil fuel industry is running a distraction campaign and the blood and pain they inflict is irrelevant as long as the goal of letting them do whatever they like is achieved. And as to what their achievement is well, as Bill Nye said: “The world is on f&%!ing fire!” I for one am tired of many of my friends facing all kinds of humiliation and danger because we have a bunch of dupes in love with this propaganda.

Yes, that follows. Where it gets evidentially weak is when you go with the reverse and say that the Gospel of John and the Book of Acts are evidence of the Resurrection.

Hey! Unfair! That only happened three or maybe four times.

The problem is that the Book of Acts and the Gospel of John came very late so their historicity is questionable at best. Acts is probably more a collection of legends rather than an eye witness account.

Yeah, when I first saw that I rolled my eyes at how the divine instruments of God’s will are trying to figure out who is gay and seem open to the idea that all of journalism is somehow covering up whether people are gay if it would look bad in any way. It is gross. I wanted to believe the leaders weren’t falling for this conspiracy nonsense and it was just many of the members but nope, they will dig right in. I am assured though that the Church has always treated gay people with kindness and a desire to help though so…..ummmm……what?

Without the resurrection Jesus (and possibly John the Baptist too) was just one more failed Jewish messiah. There are quite a few of them. Without the Book of Mormon being historical it is a lot like Kaballah. The Sefer Zohar that really got Kaballah started was purported to be a translation of an ancient text but was definitely not. Even some who knew that it was not a translated ancient text still accepted it as important. The Book of Mormon probably wouldn’t survive that treatment though. It would be like Lord of the Rings which is (with tongue firmly in cheek) purported to be a translation of ancient documents Tolkien found. Except the Book of Mormon is nowhere near as good a story.

Only because those evil bisexuals transmitted it to the poor unsuspecting and godly straight people having their divine affairs and holy one night stands.

I think you’ll find that the Church and its members have always treated gay and other queer people with nothing but love and concern for their wellbeing. Also respect. Lots of respect. Oodles of respect. And that AIDS was deserved for their sinful lifestyle and that they chose to be perverts of their own accord. And respect. Did I mention respect?

I don’t believe you. Henry was never right. Edit: Also, who is Henry?

So if I am following correctly….. Smac strongly believes in a parent’s rights to decide what events their children will attend. Smac believes he should get a blanket veto for events in general about what events other parents will take their kids to attend because events that he will never attend might still exist and thus live rent-free in his head forever. Smac believes the rights of other parents are supreme except when Smac’s own morality determine that some events shouldn’t exist at all for the safety of the children.

There is a double standard. All those things you listed above that are heterosexual events that children often attend or participate in ARE NOT being persecuted like queer people and transgender people and crossdressers are. You act like pride parades get a pass when there is a huge media machine dedicated to not giving them a pass. To the point that transgender people are being singled out and vilified and are scared to exist in public. The double standard is the exact opposite of what you say it is and I think on some level you know this which is why you dance around and use doublespeak and obfuscation. Stop it.

Yeah, I should probably have a threesome tonight or an orgy or something as a wholesome palette cleanser after reading about all this Church-sponsored deviancy and after reading smac’s imagined lurid deviancies he and his propagandist friends cook up that he is shamelessly sharing and projecting onto other groups. Bunch of deviant weirdos.

I have no difficulty believing that the people involved in this project were that stupid. I also suspect that they were stupid enough to use child porn. Both of these seem like plausible scenarios.

They do but they do it in defiance of the text and not due to any nuanced textual reading. This reading is due to people bringing their conception of who and what God is to the text and then selectively editing it to fit with their worldview. This is helpful in resolving the inconsistencies in the Bible to the advantage of the reader but it also means the reader is unlikely to gain much from the text or understand what the original writers were actually saying.

And you still won’t define what you mean by that. In common use “sexualizing children” is a phrase used where you make children into a kind of sex object in some way. Some forms of child beauty pageants, having them dress or act provocatively, etc. This isn’t happening. A child being exposed to something sexy is not “sexualizing children”. It would be children viewing something sexually explicit or being exposed to something. I am not even conceding that that is what is happening. I think this is mostly a lot of pearl clutching. There are real sexual crimes against children. Fixating on queer people being a particularly dangerous threat is ridiculous if this actually involves worry about the safety of children. Considering the people in hysterics about this typically show indifference to school shooting, refuse to adequately fund CPS agencies, and the like I don’t believe this concern for “the children” is sincere. And of course there is the gutting of USAID which is killing over a thousand children a day and has killed hundreds of thousands of children. I don’t think this is about children. I think this is about adults being uncomfortable and not being willing to come to grips with that. And just plain old bigotry since “protect the children” has always been a cover story for bigotry. See blood libel, the Satanic panic, and the gays grooming the kids. But this time with transgender people it suddenly is actually about children in danger? Nope. People who genuinely care about children get involved in fixing the problems that are causing huge amounts of suffering for children. I don’t believe in this rhetorical smokescreen. In time it will be seen as just another foolish moral panic that people will shake their heads over and wonder how those idiots in the past could have possibly believed this tripe. Hopefully not while simultaneously talking about how the aliens on Beta Centauri are secretly eating babies and thus we should make sure that children never learn about those deviants existing. Oh, and we should fund a Death Star JUST IN CASE they get uppity.

It described teen pics only so in fairness they could have meant teenagers who are legal, meaning 18 and 19 year olds.

In addition there are many who support gay marriage and transgender people in the abstract but then fall apart when it is a child or a sibling that is queer and try to “fix” them or talk them out of it. Being fashionably open-minded in the abstract but rejecting it when it comes too close to home.

Any interaction with anything sexy anywhere will warp them forever? Oh please. So the weirdos giving their ten year old son a birthday party at Hooter’s were warping him forever? Or showing him a PG-13 movie? Being propositioned or assaulted or coerced into sex WILL do everything you said but transgender people aren’t the primary culprits in that sense. It is the cishet men doing most of that. You should go after them. Or are they not an easy enough target?

[citation needed]

Yet you insist they “sexualize children” which is a term you won’t define because it is useful rhetorically but doesn’t commonly mean what you keep trying to make it mean. Also drag reading hours are not deliberately sexualized because obviously. Also why no mention of drag kings? Boo to drag king erasure!!!!! Nope. By your weird standards any movie ot TV show with sexual innuendo would be ‘sexualizing children’. You have made this concept so broad it is useless. This is a common rhetorical trick you learned from propagandists. See also “grooming”. Bur not refute it? Do you know all this is happening or are you just guessing? They read a story about two married male penguins and this is “sexualizing children”? So mentioning marriage to a child is “sexualizing” them? Uh-oh, the church’s Primary program is GROOMING CHILDREN!!!!!!!!

Okay, so I ask why you think something is sexualizing children and you take that to mean I am a predator. You also continually misrepresent what I said throughout your response even when I said the exact opposite. You’re also denying that your responses had anything to do with what you were responding to and deliberately misunderstanding, and assume knowledge of queer culture you don’t have. And we’re also back to the generic “grooming” accusations and misuse that word yet again. And one important point. No one is scaring these kids. They are already scared. If anything we are trying to tell them things will (eventually) be okay. If your whole premise is that helping children trapped in potentially dangerous situations is grooming then you are beyond hopeless. I really hope none of your children are going through this right now. They would be scared to say anything and they would be right to be scared to do so. And we aren’t seeking these teens out. They show up on queer websites and subreddits and forums and ask or beg for help. Characterizing this as manipulation is just you being malicious and viewing us all as sexual deviants which is not surprising at all considering how you talk about us.

Yeah, and then when the minor that suddenly loses the people that are supposed to care for them and are homeless and dealing with all kinds of emotions they very often turn to drugs to cope and then using drugs is blasted as “the gay lifestyle”.