The Nehor

[ajax18]

Why, sometimes it sounds like some kind of a sales pitch to get people signed up as Mormons, doesn't it?

I'm grateful to be signed up as a Mormon.

[Chap]

Jesus did say to lay up treasure in heaven. Whether or not I can even imagine what that might be, I take His word for it. ...

Well that is in line with the classic Christian view enunciated by Paul:

1 Corinthians, 2:

9 But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

That seems to make fairly good sense, theologically speaking.

But that being so, why did Joseph Smith and his successors find it necessary to go into all those details about the privileges, pleasures and pains attached to each of the elaborately described grades of their view of the after life? Why, sometimes it sounds like some kind of a sales pitch to get people signed up as Mormons, doesn't it?

I'm grateful to be signed up as a Mormon.

Well, according to what the professional con-men tell us, in a really successful conducted sting it is the mark who is the most enthusiastic advocate of carrying through the scam, and protests strongly against all those who try to persuade him that it might not be all he believes it to be.

[Brack]

Moses probably believed that and yet He is a god now.

This reminds me of the changes in Exodus 7:1 from the King James Version to the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible.

"And the Lord said unto Moses, See, I have made thee a god to Pharaoh: and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet." (KJV)

"And the Lord said unto Moses, See, I have made thee a prophet to Pharaoh; and Aaron, thy brother, shall be thy spokesman." (JST)

[Kishkumen]

I was once told by one of my SO’s parents that Earth will someday be (for lack of a better way to put it) baptized and converted into its as-yet-unrealized full perfected glory, that being a solid diamond sphere. My first thought was that this end result may seem appealing to people who value the relative wealth conferred by diamonds, but it would be a horribly boring transformation that would strip the planet of every amazing feature and characteristic that could point to a god of unbound creative power.

I didn’t share that opinion with them, of course. Gotta keep the peace. : )

I think this kind of thing is building on the heavenly Jerusalem described in Revelation 21:

Rev 21:11 It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.

Rev 21:18 The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass.
19 The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald,
20 the fifth onyx, the sixth ruby, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth turquoise, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst.
21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass.

The first verse of 21 mentions a "new heaven and a new earth."

[canpakes]

I was once told by one of my SO’s parents that Earth will someday be (for lack of a better way to put it) baptized and converted into its as-yet-unrealized full perfected glory, that being a solid diamond sphere. My first thought was that this end result may seem appealing to people who value the relative wealth conferred by diamonds, but it would be a horribly boring transformation that would strip the planet of every amazing feature and characteristic that could point to a god of unbound creative power.

I didn’t share that opinion with them, of course. Gotta keep the peace. : )

I think this kind of thing is building on the heavenly Jerusalem described in Revelation 21:

Rev 21:11 It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.

Rev 21:18 The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass.
19 The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald,
20 the fifth onyx, the sixth ruby, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth turquoise, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst.
21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass.

The first verse of 21 mentions a "new heaven and a new earth."

Kish, I was not aware of this; thank you.

Just another reason why I enjoy this place, and the smart minds that post here.

[Chap]

A city (which is an artificial thing) made of gold and jewels might be said, at worst, not to be to everybody's taste.

But the idea of the transformation of the rich variety of the natural world, in which the deity who created it proclaimed his delight at each stage of his creative act, into a sterile mass of crystallised carbon seems both laughable and repellently vulgar.

Well, that's how it seems to me. Your mileage may differ.

[Kishkumen]

A city (which is an artificial thing) made of gold and jewels might be said, at worst, not to be to everybody's taste.

But the idea of the transformation of the rich variety of the natural world, in which the deity who created it proclaimed his delight at each stage of his creative act, into a sterile mass of crystallised carbon seems both laughable and repellently vulgar.

Well, that's how it seems to me. Your mileage may differ.

Yeah. I think it is fair to say that people differ greatly in their views and tastes. For the record, I would not want to live on a diamond, but then I also don’t take this stuff literally.

[Physics Guy]

... gold, as pure as transparent glass.

I've wondered about this detail, not as a vision of the New Jerusalem but as a possible indication of an ancient understanding of physics.

The verse seems to imply an expectation, on the part of the writer and of the writer's expected audience, that gold would become transparent if it were sufficiently pure. Is this just an awkward English translation? I don't know much at all about ancient materials science, but people must have wondered for millennia why some materials are shiny, some are dull, and some are transparent. It's still a good question today; we now have a good answer, but it's a surprisingly long answer. This tangential aspect of this verse happens to jump out at me now because I'm preparing a lecture about that long answer.

It seems plausible to me that ancient people might have considered transparency, shininess, and dullness to be due to differing degrees of something they might have called "purity". They could have noticed you can make glass cloudy or spotty by mixing bad stuff into it, and they might likewise have found that precious metals could be marred by bits of grit that didn't polish properly. So from those examples in which the dullness or opacity really and clearly is due to impurity, they might quite intelligently have guessed that everything would be transparent if it were fully free of even subtle impurities, and that dull surfaces were always due to impurity of some kind even if you couldn't actually see any bits of foreign substance in the mixture.

Is there any evidence that ancient people did have such a purity-impurity theory of transparency, opacity, and lustre? Would it have been widely enough known as a theory for the writer of Revelation to have invoked it casually?

Or does the verse not really mean that the gold would be transparent, just that it would be perfectly pure all the way through, the way really clear glass has to be? It has always been easy to coat things in a thin layer of gold, or just to polish up the surface of a lump of mixed metal, but you can't get transparent glass just by polishing the surface—it has to be clear right through. So this might be a more sensible reading of the verse, but it would be an awkward simile because it explicitly compares gold to a less precious material and is apt to get the reader thinking about transparent gold even if that's not the writer's intent. I understand that Revelation is not a literary masterpiece, so maybe it does just include an awkward simile.