The Nehor

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.

K

If I show up to the Final Judgement and find myself using the Nuremberg Defense that might be a cause for some self-reflection.

I don’t buy it. If God’s primary concern was that unpopular teachings could destroy the Church either from within or without why bring in plural marriage? Also why wait until the world was morally further along then the church to rescind it? Doesn’t add up. Also I was taught all through my youth that we had to stand up for what is right and not for what is popular. Yet God doesn’t do that….really?

That is way too optimistic. When the venture capitalists take over they don’t rebuild from the ground up. They typically burn everything down for short-term gains, cannibalize the acquisition for parts, and then move on to the next acquisition. “…sustainable way for long term gains….” Yeah, that is naive.

That is still God’s fault. God could act whether their hearts were hardened or not.

By judging what they say the same way you would judge what anyone else says.

90%+ of the content out there isn’t there to persuade the unconvinced or help people with genuine doubts. Most of it is there to reinforce the convictions of those that already agree with them and give them a dopamine hit. Then it becomes less about being convincing on any kind of academic or intellectual level and more about emotion and conveying a strong sense of conviction and reassurance.

Listen. Flying chariots buzzing around distributing cloaks is no basis for a system of prophetic authority. Supreme religious power derives from a mandate from the divine, not from some farcical mountaintop ceremony. Elisha can’t expect to wield supreme prophetic power just ’cause some steampunk-style crop duster threw a mantle at him! I mean, if I went around saying I was conveying the word of God just because some burning cart had lobbed a rag at me, they’d put me away! Shame about how often they got it wrong. Ezekiel getting the whole Tyre thing wrong was particularly embarrassing. Yeah, I find that metaphor more and more disturbing the more I read. When Jeremiah uses it he talks about how God will yank up his wife’s skirts to expose her to the world to make sure she is sufficiently humiliated. Then after tormenting her enough and humiliating her and breaking her he will ‘lovingly’ take her back. God comes across as a pretty abusive husband. I also find it scary that this metaphor worked so well at the time as if yeah, this kind of breaking of a wife is something they would nod along with. I am even more worried that some think it is an appropriate metaphor for God’s love now. And gloat over the prophesied destruction of everyone else of course. Don’t forget. God was perfectly willing to torture his bride. But her false lovers of all those other nations. Oh, God is gonna make sure they learn how the alpha male is in this neighborhood. He is gonna punish everyone who crossed him. EVERYONE is gonna get it in His merciful loving kindness of course. To quote Peter Venkman: “He slimed me.” ”That’s great! Actual physical contact! Can you move?” No, the prophets usually needed an institution to support them which was the monarchy or the local government or whatever. Once the Kingdom of Judah fell prophets and prophecy began to taper off. There were still some but within a few centuries it stopped. There wasn’t “diminishing” support from government. The government was just gone. The monarchy fell when Babylon moved in. Kaput. Gone. Vanished. Buh-bye. If you are trying to pull in one of your political hobbyhorses in to beat to death please don’t. Also the reported wickedness was amongst the elite. The subsistence farmers that made up about 85% of the populace didn’t have much of a chance to do any of the crimes or sins that the prophets were constantly lamenting about.

It is unclear. We know there were “schools of the prophets”. There were likely prophets that worked for the monarch and some who were rogue. Someone like Elijah would probably count as a rogue prophet. In what we have in the story of Jeremiah he seems to have been somehow beholden to the King. He was out of favor with the court though and got thrown in prison. The King would still visit him secretly though. Ezekiel and Zechariah are probably the best examples of ecstatic prophecy. Very poetic and quite bizarre. If Ezekiel was actually laying immobile for months on end to represent prophecy there is a good chance he was also neurodivergent in some way. Also Hosea marrying prostitutes is kind of odd. These weren’t prim and proper people who delivered clear messages like how we expect prophets to act. They are more like what Plato exalted in the divine madness that could reveal secret truths or his belief that poets could utter deep and sublime things that the poet didn’t even understand. During and perhaps after the reign of King Josiah it is likely they centered the prophets in Jerusalem to at least some extent the same way they centralized religious sacrifice. Before that communities might have had a local prophet that would explain why things were going wrong. What sins against the Lord or the gods caused the substandard harvest or that sudden hail storm or whatever. Functioning as a kind of shamanistic intermediary to help keep the cosmic order correct to prevent disasters. After the monarchy failed prophets would likely be much more independent and it faded away. The institution probably needed government support to flourish widely. Later prophets slipped more and more into apocalypticism. John the Baptist and Jesus and Paul could be categorized as being apocalyptic. The Preacher of Righteousness as Qumran taught apocalypticism. By the time of the last major Jewish revolt against Rome the rabbis were sick and tired of apocalypticism. It seemed to get a lot of people killed. Or as one of my favorite Jewish academics said (paraphrasing) “If your military plan relies on a deus ex machina to win, stay home.”

Ah, the quad I was in back in my days of sin and vice. Good times.

If I leave it won’t be primarily for that. It is also not limited to the Old Testament. You can find some weird stuff God does in the New Testament, Book of Mormon, and the D&C.

Also there can be many different ways to “win”. Producing the best arguments is one and I try to make that one my favorite. Convincing those on the sidelines or converting people on the other side is another. Reinforcing the convictions of those that already agree with you is probably what everyone involved is most successful at.

There is no evidence to suggest that prophets were called exclusively from the Levite tribe. Also the prophets of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah were conduits for God’s word. They were not leaders in the sense that modern prophets are nor did they preside over things. Prophets were usually supported by the state and were usually not liked. Prophets tended to have bad news. Plus they were weird. They went into ecstatic states, inflicted pain on themselves, did weird performative things, and probably used hallucinogenics. Not much like what we think of as a prophet.

In one comical rabbinical discussion it was theorized that one of the giants held on to the side off the ark and survived.

Since you have suggested you think biology is the sole indicator of gender what if one (or both) of the parents is transgender?

Mostly I agree with this. I actually find the atheist vs. general Christian back and forths more interesting as there is often more to discuss there. Even there though it can be dull depending on the creator and the content. Still I can often learn a lot about archaeology and textual criticism and the like. LDS vs ex-LDS discussions tend to be less evidential.

Then you are just guessing that it was extensively taught by ancient prophets. It is not in the Bible or the Book of Mormon or the Pearl of Great Price. Are there other sources we have that prove it was taught anciently? No. So you are asserting it with the evidence being “trust me bro”. Oh boy, here we go. That’s not about marriage. That is not about marriage either. It is part of a chain of logic that Paul constructed as to why women should always have their head covered while praying. Also the whole thing is about women submitting to their husband so importing the idea of some kind of equal eternal marriage being hinted at there is a stretch that would snap Stretch Armstrong himself. Seriously? That is an even greater stretch. I can see why you didn’t include the quote there. That is even less relevant. So again, it falls under “trust me bro”. Also the sealing power Elijah used was about sealing the heavens so it wouldn’t rain. If Elijah was performing sealing marriages the writers of the Old Testament considered that to be comparatively unimportant to the point they didn’t mention it. It was entirely revealed/restored that way. Not mostly. Which makes Jesus into a ‘cross his fingers behind his back’ dissembler. Not exactly a good look. And this kind of reasoning is insane. It suggests that God was not teaching truths but was instead dropping weird divine hints that are not meant to be picked up for millenia. It is a weird way of teaching. That is not what I said. They understood the angels to be sexless and genderless and used male pronouns as a convention since when they manifested in a humanoid form they appeared male. The idea of gendered angels is mostly an LDS thing. If Jesus was hinting at eternal marriage being a higher role in the heavens he used a terrible method of hinting at that. No, I am only agreeable to thinking you are completely and utterly wrong. Again, NOT extensively addressed by ancient prophets. No evidence of that anywhere. Just vibes. Will you give me credit for reading all the divine hints in advance that this is coming and hail me as a prophet for it? Again, nothing to back up what the primary purpose is. Just vibes. You also neatly dodged how badly designed the human body is if the primary purpose is to avoid same sex sexual activity since the human body incentivizes it. A LOT. This is also a modern teaching. Paul preached celibacy as the ideal but was okay with married sex to have children or to prevent ‘burning with lust’ as a kind of prophylactic for those who didn’t have Paul’s gift for embracing celibacy. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of it strengthening a relationship. The idea of it being a bonding method came much later. Its strongest proponent in history was (ironically) the Puritans.

If it is then I sin a lot. I also sin a lot in other ways too though.

I don’t find it cynical or sarcastic. I am trying to take the writers of scripture seriously at their word. I found scripture much more interesting when I stopped making excuses for the bad behaviors of God and man in them. People will wrap themselves into pretzels to justify horrific actions without even realizing it and all too often the flimsiest excuses will do. I don’t think this is harmless either. I have seen many Christians (and some LDS) justify horrible things in the modern world based on passages of scripture. Many like the vengeful tempestuous tribal deity that will brutally murder their enemies.

Yeah, but it is not extensively addressed by ancient prophets. You won’t find the doctrine of eternal marriage in the Bible. You find Jesus saying there is no marriage in heaven and that the people there will be like the angels suggesting to the listeners a lack of reproduction. To a 1st CE Jewish listener this is also teaching that there is no sexual differentiation in heaven either. Angels use masculine pronouns in the Bible but they weren’t assumed to actually be male. This is a modern reinterpretation along with the weird attempts to make Jesus deceptive and somehow hide the doctrine of eternal marriage while not technically being wrong.. Again, the weird need to backdate everything to previous dispensations when there is no evidence it was there does violence to both modern teachings and ancient scripture. Not really, no. The “biologically intended purposes”? Then God REALLY screwed up with the placement of some erogenous zones. Generally speaking a lot of people have sex for reasons other than having children. Including many married people. Even many sealed people. There are depraved perverts who even have sex after menopause. Disgusting!!!!!! I also had a good laugh at your worry about birth rates falling. As if the Earth is somehow facing an impending underpopulation crisis.

The irony is that in terms of what he was teaching about the law in Matthew Jesus pretty much was a Pharisee.

Also on a historical level that is not what the scriptures as a whole say. The Old Testament doesn’t forbid unmarried men from having sex with women unless those women “belonged” to someone else. The idea that the Law of Chastity is some kind of hallowed principle that all of scripture and every dispensation accepted as we follow it today is just projecting our beliefs into the past. The Rabbis expanded the Torah to make this wrong. Yeah, the best we can tell it was the Pharisees that made that happen.

No, I didn’t even remember the author’s name.

A lot of the stuff that prophets teach are part of Heavenly Father’s Plan are very modern. Exalting our current concept of the nuclear family, elevating romantic feelings in marriage as desirable and something that will continue in the next world, thinking women’s consent to have sex matters, the idea that men and women are equal, etc. And that is just in that one area. In modern scripture God talks up the value of liberal democracy but somehow waited until the last days to bring it about. God is supposedly opposed to slavery but only recently started making that clear. Trying to put together a coherent and logical history of God’s dealings with humanity and trying to understand what God wants is a monumental task. God cannot lie but also God did lie. God hates those who lust after death but also commands genocide. God tells people in the First Century CE that Jesus will return shortly but still hasn’t come.