The Nehor

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.

Okay, then I will go ahead and call the church and its leaders homophobic. Elder Renlund’s statement is ridiculous from a historical point of view. Sexual relations must respect the agency of both partners? Has he not read the Bible at all? Sex then was something one person did to another person. One acted. One was the object of that action. Consent of the object was not really a consideration. I think this is a good aspirational concept but acting like that is God’s intended plan is a stretch unless you are willing to toss most of the Bible. The idea of the ‘submissive’ partner, usually a woman, getting a say is a very modern concept. Also not something you will find in the Bible. The idea of it strengthening the relationship……meh…..the Greco-Roman sexual ethic that Christianity latched onto said sex was for procreation only and having sex for other purposes is a bad thing. People did it anyway but again, this is modern sexual ethics. Acting like this is God’s plan suggests God only very recently got around to announcing it. And those come from the same texts we now ignore. Hooray for inconsistency. Reasoned or revealed? The difference matters. The Church has the habit of copying the sexual ethic of apostate Christianity. Not exactly a reliable source. You don’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about. No one who understands things says that sexual fluidity supersedes sexual identities. Sexual fluidity does happen but it is rare and most people don’t experience it. You aren’t judging based on evidence. You are just throwing a bunch of things you read a wikipedia article about together in a manner that gratifies your own desires for how you would like things to be. Bisexual chic died decades ago. I haven’t once heard the term in the wild and I hang out around a fair number of bisexual and pansexual people. I only know of it because I am familiar with LGBT history. It hasn’t been a thing since at least the 80s, it barely limped on after the 70s. Using it a ‘flash in the pan’ temporary trend as a way of understanding sexuality is silly. Also what you are talking about is faux sexuality. Which is not what Paul said at all. You may have thought that is what Paul means but that is only because you brought your preconceptions to the text. If you take the text as written that is not what it says. If I thought it was revealed and not the Church just adapting to new data about sexuality I might think it was revealed. I don’t though. I do not. No, but I would applaud their courage in taking a solid stand and would know I am not welcome. Problem solved. The foreigner, other religions, and gross gay stuff. The Bible loves to ascribe all kinds of “deviant” sexual practices to the peoples that oppress them or that they want to genocide. Lot and his daughters was a polemic against two ethnic groups. Welp, he has the omniscience to know that is not going to work for many people so I guess that is God’s call. Again, that is not some longstanding truth. Have homosexual desires was considered sinful for most of the Church’s history. The tendency to backdate current views to forever in the past has solid 1984 vibes. “We have always only said behavior is sinful, also we have always been at war with Eastasia.” Also the Book of Mormon is standing in the background talking about how even our thoughts will condemn us so………yeah. And that man was Albert Einstein. Then why not give this new instruction actual scriptural status to counter all the wrong scripture? I cynically suspect that Church leadership likes the ambiguity. It allows them to shift if things change.

I knew being gay was bad before I knew what it even was and when I only had a vague idea of what sex was. We played “Smear the Queer” when I was a kid. It is a shame about the name. It was actually a fun game.

The old LDS explanation was that he married a black woman who bore the Mark and Curse of Cain. Thus he had the right to the Priesthood but his children did not. The idea that the Mark of Cain was dark skin is a pretty recent one in Christianity as a whole. The justification for slavery for black people was argued to also be tied to the really weird scene in Genesis where Ham saw his naked father and then Noah curses Ham’s son for it. The idea that Ham married someone and preserved Cain’s curse was not unknown in Joseph Smith’s time. It is possible he copied this idea from them. Joseph Smith weirdly blessed them with things of the Earth and wisdom whereas Noah states that they are good to be nothing but slaves and slaves of slaves. The Genesis account was probably supposed to be part of the justification for the Israelite genocidal conquest of the promised land. I suspect that whomever was compiling Genesis had two accounts. In one Cainan was a son of Noah but in the other the three sons were different. The compiler put Ham in as the son but then needed to fit Cainan in to make the episode make some sense and put him in as Ham’s son without also revising the bit about Cainan serving his brothers (where he was not serving his uncles).

I don’t think that the people who wrote all those scriptures about the seed of Abraham meant all this talk about the spiritual descendants of Abraham nor did they know that if Abraham existed was probably an ancestor to probably everyone on the planet by today so there probably aren’t people who need to have their blood purged. We are all mutts. The most unbelievable part of that awful Da Vinchi code book was that there was exactly ONE survivor that was a descendant of Jesus Christ two millenia later. Sure, Jan. Paul revised the understanding of what it meant to be part of the covenant people but even he seems to have drawn a line between Jews and Gentiles. I also don’t think that the authors of Genesis thought Noah’s line was about priesthood. I have no idea what Joseph Smith meant by this. Maybe he didn’t believe in a global flood? Maybe he was copying talk of Abraham’s seed and backdating it without thinking it through.

I have heard several. I suspect because I grew up in more multi-racial environments. I doubt this. Homophobic banter was endemic in youth culture both inside and outside the church. Unless by “in a church setting” you only mean from the pulpit. Please stop comparing two single men or two single women being interested in each other to unfaithfulness. It is a silly analogy. Yeah, you’re just going on a ‘vibes’ based thing here. Lots of people are uncomfortable with the existence of gay behavior so therefore it must be a sin. Probably why the Torah said some kinds of same-sex sexual behavior was wrong. Why do we ignore about half of the Word of Wisdom and have unofficially added new requirements to it? Also substance abuse was a much bigger problem in Joseph’s day than it is now. Do you know how much alcohol they were drinking? It was also a “problem” in most cultures. Really these days we are doing a relatively good job. Also you gave out the standard bit about same-sex desire not being a sin but that acting on it is. That is a very recent change. The Bible says the opposite. Good old Romans 1 lays out where Paul thinks same sex lust comes from: Paul states that the existence of the Abrahamic God is obvious to all since the creation of the world (lol). Then although everyone knows God exists intuitively some are just perverse and reject him. Therefore God gives them over to shameful lusts so they worship idols and turn gay. God uses gayness as an affliction to punish the wicked. Then Pauls continues on to a litany of other sins. Who knew that anyone who gossips in your ward are all secretly gay? Better keep an eye on them. Many Evangelicals still hold on to this tripe. It is why their worldview is so warped and there is a strange assumption that everyone secretly knows that they are right but just want to sin so bad that they reject it. It is also why a lot of their missionary efforts are so bizarre. LDS don’t generally teach these verses much. At least not anymore. They did hold on to the idea that the main reason for disbelief in the gospel is a desire for sin for a long time and the apostles have recently been beating down that idea. These are all recent changes though. The teachings about where homosexuality came from were baked in with Paul’s reasoning. Of course we know now that Paul was absolutely wrong. The existence of an all-powerful God is not intuitively obvious and history backs that up. Devout believers in the Abrahamic God and Christians specifically are not immune to having same-sex desires. It is not something that belongs to the pagan others that Paul (and other biblical writers) play up as evidence of depravity. This is the same supposed depravity that other biblical writers used to justify genocide of other peoples. Play up them being a bunch of incestuous depraved orgy-havers and you can justify killing them. So what Paul says is factually wrong and those facts are used to justify moral evils. This is why I want a clear-cut revelation. The scriptural references about gay behavior are tainted by hatred, are often tied to fallacious reasoning that has been proved wrong again and again, and is often used as a rhetorical weapon to justify oppression and/or ethnic cleansing. Yet Christianity as a whole and the LDS Church hold on to the part they like while disavowing or ignoring the attached parts that are wrong. We can make it go away. Christianity as a whole decided slavery was wrong even though the Bible is pro-slavery from cover to cover. It is more pro-slavery than it is anti-gay. Or God could speak authoritatively and end this discussion. So God chooses to be silent or no one is listening if He does want to speak authoritatively. Church leaders point to the Bible to condemn us while ignoring virtually everything about those condemnations that is objectively wrong. Why are we still doing this?

The verbal derogatory racist and homophobic comments have mostly left the Church. Treating black people and queer people as an “other” still persists.

So your first point is that I support all this gobbledygook you just made up because I want everyone, including myself, to be as miserable as possible. So I am not human? I have no desire for happiness and desire perpetual misery for myself and everyone I love? Do you realize how insane what you are saying is? Yes, I was born into the world desiring misery and so are all over people fighting for “Marxist” ideas like social justice and equality. Lunacy. A desire for justice and fairness is a desire for misery? So justice and fairness leads to misery? That is a radical take. So the United States was a big mistake? And now I am somehow envious of someone else’s unseen heavenly rewards? What? I don’t envy you. At all. So now not only was I born without any desire for happiness and a lust for perpetual misery I now desire a perpetual safe space where I will never experience any negative emotions ever? Oh, and I lack all ambition for anything. No wonder you live in perpetual fear of these imagined enemies you dream up? They sound monstrous. I could see how this would lead to xenophobia, homophobia, racism, and all the other fun fears about the ‘other’. I would grow up and realize that people actually experience the same emotions you do and have the same desires that you do. This fantasy world is toxic. So really you’re mad about those hellspawned ‘vidya games’ that make people deny Jesus and sap all their ambition somehow. There are no larger structural problems that make people unwilling to struggle to succeed as much as you think they should? It is just the vidya games. You realize this contempt you have for a lot of the people in the world that dehumanizes them to the point that they are just pursuing evil for its own sake is pretty much the polar opposite of charity right?

And it is not working that well. Which is exactly why using AI in a discussion is stupid.

But do you think Grok was correct when it said the LDS Church is generally characterized as a “small tent”? Grok did that because the predictive text shows that is the most popular characterization.

Now try it again while asking Grok questions while implying you think the big tent/little tent dichotomy is useful. I’d bet money Grok won’t call it subjective but will be agreeable and flatter what you seem to like. AI chatbots are designed to be agreeable. One reason they are pretty useless. Two people can hold a discussion and outsource all their thinking to Grok or any AI and it will generally tell each what they want to hear outside of a few limits put in to keep it from going openly fascist or full anti-Semite or whatever. I went ahead and asked Grok if the LDS Church is a big tent or a small tent. So it is not an empirical fact but Grok has an opinion on where it falls. Why are we holding discussions via AI?

Well, that was the stupidest thing I’ve read today. And I wasted time earlier reading about how pyramids are powered by ley lines.

True, I have never met any member of the church that is that pixellated in real life. I for one would like to welcome our new blocky overlords…..

The thing is the 50s are not that similar to the 30s or the 20s or the 10s. There is a tendency by many to pick some golden age and project it backwards as (mostly) contiguous. It is worth noting that religious fundamentalism was created primarily by rationalism and darwinism. No longer needing a higher power to explain reality ironically led to an attempt at a hyper-literalist take on scripture. A failed attempt. It is not a coincidence that fundamentalist Islam showed up at the same time fighting the same thing (plus understandably throwing in a lot of anti-colonialism). The LDS versions tend to come from a similar place. Reactionary and extreme.

“There is a cabal of satanic pedophiles abusing children.” ”There are pedophiles abusing children.” The second is true and has pretty much always been true. The first is not true. We shouldn’t give credit to those saying the first sentence because part of it are correct when everyone knew those parts are correct. They didn’t add anything to actively fighting pedophilia. In fact they distracted from it with their false claims. Hitler claiming the corrupt Jews were controlling everything and only he could stop them. Netanyahu claims that there is a conspiracy behind all of his own legal troubles. There are still conspiracy theories about a cabal within the government that manufactured Watergate to bring down Nixon. Claims like this require evidence. I very much doubt there is anything to this.

Considering Judas Iscariot supposedly made the cut maybe the standard is malleable.