The Nehor

The word you are looking for is slave. Zoram was a slave. I completely disagree. If we can’t analyze the Book of Mormon and the choices the people in it made then Mormon and Moroni really screwed up with their admonitions about the plates. ”Learn to be wiser than us but don’t even think that we could have made other choices. There is a too big a time gap. Don’t even try!” It wasn’t a moral quandary according to the text. God gave Nephi a cheat sheet and told him which option to take. He told Nephi to violate the letter of the law and probably the spirit of the law too. That is a very good question. So we will never understand and we just have to trust God no matter how irrational and insane his plans and thoughts are. The secret to becoming like God is descending into insanity. God is kind of like Cthulhu I suppose. The more you understand reality the more you know humanity has no moral judgement at all and what we view as good is evil and what we see as evil and predatory is actually good. Yeah, I don’t buy the whole God is so far above us that we cannot hope to understand his plans. The scriptures are chock full of prophets explaining God’s plans and they don’t share Machiavellian schemes designed to bring about hidden purposes. They are usually pretty banal and straightforward.

Laban was a violent jerk. Probably a power tripping little tinpot dictator too. I don’t think step 5 is a fair take though. A bunch of kids wander in and tell you that God wants you to give them the prized plates. They are probably a prestige thing. Based on the estimated dates of the composition of the Torah they would probably be a pretty new thing. Possibly a prestige piece he custom ordered. Yeah, I wouldn’t consider it God telling me to give something if a kid (son of a local criminal) showed up bearing testimony that they needed my prize item.

No, I’m saying that people that concoct the narrative that Laban was a criminal mastermind and serial killer are writing fanfic. That is not in the text. As crazy as some of the statutes in the Torah are murder is generally frowned on. Now the Hebrew Bible as a whole gets weird about it when the victim isn’t an Israelite of course. Yes. For example if we found out that Laban was a fascist then Nephi would have been morally justified in punching him a few times and killing him…..meh, I’ll allow it. I am not trusting Grok’s summary so I skimmed it. I think the article relies way too much on thinking that 1st Nephi uses technical language to exonerate Nephi. If it was the original text it might be persuasive but in translation that is a stretch. I have doubts about some of the readings of the Torah. I have read quite a bit from biblical scholars and don’t think many of them would agree with this take on the Law. Also most biblical scholars agree that the Torah wasn’t law in the sense of being the rules as they were enforce on the ground. It is religious writing, not a law text. I suspect the two were similar but not identical. Seems like an ad hoc justification piece. It is apologetic. It is not looking at everything in order to discover connections and get at some underlying reality. It is an exercise in justifying Nephi on moral grounds because Nephi’s character must be protected. I also found it ironic that Welch argues that this episode was included to show Nephi was following the Law and was thus the legitimate inheritor of the plates and family leadership despite the Torah having strict laws against passing over elder sons for leadership because you prefer the younger ones. Then again the three patriarchs ALL did this so it is a confusing mess.

Based on “trust me bro”. So…..all I have to do to kill someone is make up some fan fiction about the person first.

That is not in the text. God could have just had Laban break his neck in the fall. Yeah, that is not what happened. The Jews weren’t mass enslaved. To end their perpetual revolts Babylon deported a large portion of the population to Babylon itself including most of the elites. They weren’t enslaved. They owned land. They prospered. They had their own leadership. Babylon remained the major center of Jewish life for about a thousand years. While some longed for a return to their homeland many did not. It is easy to see why. Jerusalem was a hick town compared to Babylon. Only a minority of the people went home when they were allowed to. Yet somehow these people were all the devil’s servants who deserved mass genocide and mass enslavement for some reason which they didn’t actually get. They needed to suffer even though historically they just didn’t suffer that much. The Bible (and lots of other ancient records) love to play up how cities and populations were “utterly destroyed” when they just weren’t. It was propaganda. Your ideas of wrong are mostly made up delusions and fantasizing about how evil some people are and I am not convinced you know much about virtue either.

How was killing Laban necessary for obtaining the plates? Also God suggests that Laban’s death is the only thing that will allow the plates to be taken. God seriously has no other options? God who can turn the oceans to sand can’t come up with an alternate plan? Really? God could have just pinched off his throat or a vital artery after Laban fell down drunk in the street. Same impact. No moral dilemma for Nephi.

The hard part in a lot of these stories is that we can’t fall back on the defense of ‘we don’t know why’ God commanded these things. The text is almost embarrassingly liberal in giving reasons. Vengeance for ancestral sins. Polemics about how evil they are and how they REALLY deserve it. Warnings that if you don’t kill them they will destroy you. This is also a bit of presentism. The xenophobic paranoia of the time made killing the ‘other’ a little easier. When your national war/storm deity was backing up those calls for eliminating the enemy it is a lot easier. I also don’t get how killing Laban would prevent pursuit. Laban sent men to kill the brothers. Then Laban is dead so no pursuit? Yeah…..not sure that is how it would work. I think it is more that everything could have been more ideal.

This is a nice fantasy story that you just made up.

Yeah, I am not sure exactly how this is mentally supposed to work. On one hand we are told to expect miracles but on the other expect nothing except what God wants and we have no idea what that is so what does it mean to have faith that things will somehow work out. Maybe God doesn’t want this situation to work out. This was a plague in missionary culture when I was out. In hindsight it was really more like a salesman’s zeal and dedication to hitting their bonus numbers dressed up in religious language. And with no actual bonuses.

I figured there was a bit of snark but it would be kind of ironic for me to complain about someone else being snarky.

And the mechanism God uses to maintain that equilibrium is *checks notes* killing his children. Even if this is true I am not going to judge my past self for judging as best it can with the facts in evidence. That we don’t know why God is doing all this stuff is because God won’t tell us. That is really on God. Your approach to this is that God will vindicate Himself and then scorn will be heaped on those who didn’t understand because God *checks notes* didn’t tell them what was going on. Why does God play with His cards close to his chest and just expect us to trust him that all the pain and misery his game inflicted will be worth it when he could just, you know, tell us how it will be worth it now. So God created the laws that require people be sacrificed? That is not a good look. The Book of Revelation only barely made it into the Bible due to some shenanigans. Even then the Church fathers could see that it was a thinly veiled revenge fantasy where God will finally deal with all those horrible people hurting the Christians. Don’t get me wrong. Some Christians suffered a lot but this kind of triumphal gloating is unseemly at best and malicious and devilish at worst. And yet it is still incredibly popular!

Because they want to look good. Poor God. At the mercy of the laws of the Universe so even He has to practice child sacrifice to get anything done at all.

And why must they suffer? Because the cosmos is a horrible horrific place.

I would say it is pro-Christian and not pro-religion in general and Mormons are currently useful even if there is little love there so yeah, no real desire to open this up. Also would open up a can of worms if other Christians thought they could get donations back if they find out the gospels are likely not written by the named authors or something along those lines.

I don’t even think this Supreme Court is dumb enough to take this up.

What if they had exercised faith that this was the right road despite all indications to the contrary? Maybe with faith you can drive on water?

ChatGPT told me the Book of Mormon was originally written in Reformed English by Simon Spaulding (Solomon’s cousin) and then Sidney Rigdon found the manuscript, cleaned up the text, and buried it. Later Joseph Smith found it on a treasure hunting expedition.

I am not sure which outcome I am rooting for. You can do whatever you want. That is the joy of agency. God might not honor it but that is kind of His problem. If the Spirit that made the promise was unreliable then I am not inclined to trust any other promises from the same source. Most promises are subjective and/or they await the next life for their fulfillment. In either case they are not particularly testable. And yes, you can find scores of people from every Abrahamic monotheistic faith that will talk about getting promised blessings. You can also find legions of people that have left their faith over what they felt were broken promises or insufficient blessings or lack of evidence the faith works or whatever. I am not an exception. I am just being more blatant about it than most.

That letter wasn’t written by Peter and from the one interaction we know they had Peter and Paul did not get along according to the only first-hand account of it we have.

I was hoping AI would do menial jobs for me so I didn’t have to clean, cook, and run errands and would have more time to study and learn and talk to interesting people. Instead everyone wants to talk to AI and I still have to clean and cook for myself.

We have gone from banning bots to just posting the words of bots verbatim.

There is a fragmentary inscription called the Deir Alla inscription that tells the story of Balaam the son of Beor from the 9th century BCE.The inscription was found in pieces but parts of it were reconstructed. In it Balaam is a seer of the god (they use the term eloiheim) and predicts the fate of nations but serves a bunch of deities including El who was the head of the pantheon in the area at the time. El and YHWH combined into one deity later on and became the deity Jews worship. The most likely explanation is that a story about Balaam was melded into the texts that became the Torah. They turn him into a kind of anti-Moses who worships YHWH and uses divination and prophecy and has these gifts despite being a greedy jerk. Kind of an equivalent of Simon Magus being a kind of anti-Peter.

All this is after the fact rationalizations coming from societies that culturally and religiously practiced monogamy. They needed a system where monogamy is the religious norm while having exceptions that made it so you didn’t have to condemn the patrirarchs. It lets them off the hook while allows the reader to assume the patriarchs would have preferred monogamy. It is comically similar to the way current LDS rationalize plural marriage.

I really don’t want to live to be 100 let alone try to raise a child at that point. At over 100 years old climbing to the top of the mountain to sacrifice that child was probably harder than actually sacrificing him.

Probably lots of carnal, sensual, and devilish sinning. No, it is a systemic problem at this point. It didn’t start with LGBT issues. It started with a promise from God that failed. Then I realized that the same spirit of revelation that gave that promise is what convinced me the gospel was true. So all that is unreliable. So I started a deep dive into scripture without making excuses for God to see what was there. And realized how silly a lot of the justifications were that I used to say God was good when God wasn’t being good. I mean, you can do the whole God is working towards some unseen greater good rationale but the scriptures sometimes give reasons for why God acts and that isn’t the reason. So when God has his followers writing his supposedly inspired scriptures and can’t put His best foot forward even there it gets really silly. So now I am waiting for something more from God. I’ve got a clock on this so will find out if God is gonna come up with a method to convince me.