The Nehor

That is what I see a lot of. Combined with talk of Jesus grabbing up illiterate peasants to be his disciples/apostles. Then again historically the apostle that appears to have moved the needle the most and probably ensured Christianity thrived was Paul who was from the privileged elite. Trained as a pharisee, fluent and literate in Greek, Roman citizenship, pretty much the whole elite package. Paul didn’t seem to think much of Peter either. So are the Clark Gilberts of the world the ideal apostles and Jesus just worked with those that weren’t ideal because that is all he had? I dunno.

It takes real guts to go against the grain and act morally by *checks notes* rooting out people not conforming to orthodoxy. Really standing up against conformity there.

Spent time reading some of his speeches. Some were good. This bit irked me a little: Yeah, I am not willing to compare giving up a promotion to take a less lucrative but still very lucrative job most people won’t ever have a chance of getting as the equivalent of selling all you have and giving it to the poor. He used this example a lot: Ummmm…..that wasn’t a parable.

He is the first Gen X apostle so there’s that. With his relative youth he has a statistically high chance of being prophet at some point.

If you want a list of why he would be considered controversial here are some of the highlights I found digging around various reports: Strictly orthodox when operating in academia which has some faculty concerned of what he might do with even more power Described as a “culture warrior”, the most extreme one since J. Reuben Clark and Ezra Taft Benson Some say he is paranoid about secular groups in academia supposedly out to harm the Church Reports that women disproportionately did not get promotions or advancements in CES under his administration when he had the final decision. I have no idea if these are true, exaggerated, or wrong. Hard to fact check these. The third bullet is probably the strongest from skimming some of his published addresses. Has a very us vs the world mentality. I could see that be a hindrance in some ways but it wouldn’t have to be depending on approach. I found some of his papers on disruptive innovation which is what he wrote quite a bit about when at Harvard. Nothing there that I think would heavily influence an approach to being an apostle.

Yeah, you would generally need two corrupt people to pull it off. This is all true but the Bishop or Clerk just doesn’t disclose their interest in the company they own or have a stake in. Or use a third party business. It is also incredibly easy to gin up a fake contract or receipt. I am not saying that fraud is pervasive. It is just not as hard as some might think. The return on investment is generally not worth the risk, especially in the United States. Then again most criminals assume they won’t get caught or can talk their way out of it if they are.

You can do it in a couple of ways. Car repairs to a business owned by the Bishop or clerk or (better for them) owned by a third party that funnels most of the money back to them. You can do the same thing with a pharmacy cost or rent payment or something of that nature. You can even do it without the knowledge of the member being “helped” if you set it up right and the member would never know about it so the money isn’t actually paying for anything. You definitely aren’t going to get mega-rich doing this. There are caps on spending that trigger oversight. Still, you could pretty easily embezzle a five figure sum over a year if you are careful. In poorer areas of the world it can be much more lucrative/tempting.

This is just Pizzagate in a new costume and both are fueled by alt-right “deep state” quackery. And yeah, it comes from the Satanic Panic narratives. Recovered memories. Pseudoscience. Around 12,000 unsubstantiated claims. If you want a slightly deeper dive into the narrative of the Satanic Panic and the harm it caused this video is pretty good: One of the horrors of the whole thing is that the whole thing was absurd on its face if you thought about the accusations and narratives for about five minutes but it didn’t matter. It was telling people what they wanted to believe so they ignored the facts. It put the person in a thrilling battle between good and evil. It required very little to be on the side of good but you got the thrill of belonging to a cosmic war and as a bonus got to punch down at many marginalized people and weirdos which was a bonus to most of the participants. Utah was not immune and had its own version of the Satanic panic. Just like the more generalized one there was a therapist who was suddenly a gold mine of recovered memories using leading questions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic_(Utah) This led to an internal LDS church investigation and the Second Counselor in the Presiding Bishopric wrote up a memorandum. He is a little too credulous in my opinion and spends way too much time going on about Gadiantons. Also taking the talk of covens too much at face value. https://pscdocs.utah.gov/electric/17docs/1703562/298598FilComplaint612-19-2017.pdf Note that only the top portion of that is the memorandum Elder Pace submitted. The rest is commentary by others that is just speculation. Also some of it takes Jack Chick’s cult nonsense way too seriously. Jack Chick is the guy who writes those weird and overwrought Christian comic strips that are delightfully funny in their idiocy. I have done some reading on the Early Modern Period witch panic and this is a lot of the same stuff. Note this is not just the Salem witch trials which were at the tail end of the general panic. The witch hunts in Europe were much more conspiratorial. These kinds of panics involve a bunch of inverted religious ceremonies mixed with the most depraved things the listeners can think of. It is not done for any kind of benefit to the perpetrator except for its sheer vileness. In the Early Modern witch craze the witches were supposedly carried off in supernatural flight to secret ceremonies. These often occurred in synagogues (because anti-semitism has to fit in somewhere) and the witches then had incestuous orgies with the devil and other demons. There was a lot of literal butt kissing and other acts viewed as degrading. Also child murder and forced miscarriages and other craziness. In the anti-Semitic moral panic it took the Jewish passover and made it a literal blood feast on Christian babies. In the LDS panic it was unbaptizing children by baptizing them in blood, human sacrifice, and an infernal mockery of temple ordinances designed to initiate one as a child of perdition along with a lot of sexual abuse. In the QAnon panic it was initiation into a pedophile cult of silence and using the blood of children to provide health to the practitioners. All moral panics make it harder to fight real abuse of the vulnerable. People abuse children all the time. Physically, emotionally, and sexually. Throwing in non-existent cults or satanic rites to make it seem worse doesn’t help anyone and just sensationalizes everything and makes it that much easier for actual abusers to hide. In the Pace Memorandum commentary at the end I laughed at them trying to tie the whole thing to Aleister Crowley and a bunch of other occultists. There are enough conspiracies in the world without having to invent more dramatic ones.

Usually the way you do it is more sneaky. You have the church buy goods or services from some legitimate business entity that the embezzler owns. Or you use Fast Offering funds to pay off bills or expenses owed to such businesses. The latter is easier generally.

It makes as much sense as the bits in early Genesis talking about how this person is the ancestor of all the people that dwell in tents and this one the same for craftwork and this one the same for music. Then they all die in the flood and yet they still have tents and crafts and music. Probably one of those cases where Genesis is mashing different stories together and they don’t all make sense together.

More the idea that the people at the very top are pure but the advisors and staff under them are somehow the real problem.

No.

“Please withhold the floods and don’t kill almost all of us again.” ”Okay” ”Also please come again at the end of days and burn up everyone you would have drowned the first time.” ”Ummmmm……okay?”

Good Tsar. Bad Boyars.

Yes, that is why it makes sense. Everyone I have met in my life has been an electric sheep dressed in a human suit. Many of the human suits were pretty shoddily constructed too.

You might as well just send it unregistered as regular mail. It is going to get screened first and probably never be seen by the intended recipient. If you don’t care if they don’t do anything about it and that “isn’t my problem” then why bother at all?

I might be a robot dreaming it is a human. It would explain a lot really.

Probably the best response.

Bending all the metal folding chairs? Wow, that is kind of impressive. While I agree that those saying this stuff are morally culpable in the US they almost certainly aren’t legally culpable. Stochastic terrorism and indirect incitement has been an ongoing norm for some time now.

Okay bootlicker.

Actually a lot of Scouters I know blame LDS involvement with the Scouts for sending it into a spiral.

So racial integration ruined the Scouts?

And the racism mask slips further. And defending indefensible executions by government thugs.

Something about this was tickling a memory I couldn’t place but it just clicked into place. In the Greco-Roman world the term atheos (godless) was a polemic against those that would not respect the state’s god. It was used against indviduals. For example it was part of the accusation against Socrates and was pretty false in his case. The Jews and later the Christians were also atheos. This was not because they denied the existence of the Roman deities but because they wouldn’t worship them. The Jews mostly got away with it. The Romans mocked their “invisible god” sometimes but they also had a respect for anything ancient and the worship of their god went back a long ways. They got a special dispensation. There was some friction about it. Then you have the Christians show up. First it was seen as just a Jewish splinter religion but then it got popular and was telling lots of people not to worship the state gods or the cult of the emperor. This was unpatriotic. In the US the latter would be seen something like the equivalent of refusing to say the pledge of allegiance. Plus the Christians couldn’t claim their worship was ancient. They worshipped a very recent god that showed up and died via humiliating torturous execution for treason against the Roman state. While the persecution of Christians has been exaggerated as much more pervasive than it was there were some local persecutions of Christians and at least one empire-wide one. Basically saying that this is the modern equivalent of worshipping the wrong kind of deity with a new flavor.