They showed up the same way other written accounts show up: the early Christ fandom grew over time, and as the time distance to Christ's life largened, various people independently went "fuck. Someone REALLY needs to go write all this down in one place to help clear some things up."

Afaik, they were redactions of the oral traditions (and/or just the common knowledge) of various early, dispersed, Christian congregations. And then once somebody finally sat down to compile them altogether, many of the apostolic attributions started as a way to smooth-out contradictions.

I mean, the canonical example for people being mad about posthumous baptisms comes from when they were performed on Holocaust victims.

It is very easy for me to get why people would be pissed about that in spite of also believing that Mormon Baptisms don't do anything.

apnews.com/article/992d...

Many are saying

Like, this is a regime entirely built out of conspiracy theories, did we think that building and normalizing a conspiracy theory that countries invading each other for oil is just a normal thing that happens wasn’t gonna lead to some particularly monstrous idiots going “guess it is haha hell yeah”

It's just legitimately so much needless anguish inflicted on generation after generation for the sole purpose of... helping 1st century CE Judeans emotionally cope with imperial occupation by the Romans..?

Brandon Sanderson & Dan McClellan really do be out here singlehandedly upholding the reputation of Mormons writ-large like they're two Atlases side-by-side.

a) "the most moral thing you can do is kill babies en masse so that they never have the opportunity to sin and be condemned to eternal damnation"

b) "Eh. Who cares about genocide? All that matters is whether or not people are going to church."

But ultimately, there's just not many ways you can do eschatology without it naturally devolving into Christian Nihilism where either:

And a small shout out to c) the Mormon position of "yeah, you can baptize people posthumously and save them from hell." Which admittably causes a fuckton of problems, but those problems are WAY WAY WAY better than the ones entailed by alternative afterlife theologies.

I think the only ways to responsibly approach it (besides, y'know, the obvious strat of just admitting it's not real) are:
a) the official Catholic stance of "Maybe Judas IS in heaven? Who's to say?"
or
b) the Rabbinic approach of "I order you to stop talking about it and to go touch grass"

Belief in Hell legit does so much irreparable harm to peoples' psyches.

High barriers-to-entry encourage market concentration and discourage market competition.

Letting people rank their preferences solves ~A~ problem, but it does not solve ~THE~ problem.

Politicians are sellers trying to get you to sell your vote to them. The way they do so is by maximizing outreach. When the number of people they need to reach out to is in the tens of thousands (at least!) and there is no remaining accessible public forum, that creates a natural barrier-to-entry.

We've spent so long trying to tackle this from a consumer behavior end ("let's do RCV! Turnout!") and from the end of limiting corporate investment.

But fundamentally, the issue is that there is not free and open entry into the market of politics, thus there is not abundant competition.