Balrogs, oxymorons, and secret Jew tunnels

In the course of writing yesterday's post "Thoughts on the murder of Laban," I looked up an old Corbin Volluz essay on the topic from 2013. The essay is hosted on the Rational Faiths website and prominently features this image:

A balrog is an odd choice of illustrations. The Hamlet quote in the title refers to a spirit which appears to be the prince's father but may in fact be the devil in disguise. Its relevance to the Nephi story is that the spirit that tells Nephi to kill Laban, which Nephi apparently takes to be the Spirit of the Lord, may similarly be the devil in disguise. Well, there's nothing "in disguise" about that balrog! No one's going to look at that and say, "Hmmm, upon careful consideration, I think there's a possibility that this may actually be a devil."

Since I'm not really familiar with Rational Faiths, I clicked their "About" page -- which was not written by Corbin Volluz -- while I was there. It’s a FAQ in which most of the answers are meme images, including this one:

What had reminded me of Corbin Volluz's existence was a recent Ward Radio video complaining about his "Mormon Sunday School" podcast. This led me to said podcast, of which I had been unaware, and I found that in one of the episodes he reads out his whole 2013 Nephi and Laban essay:

Oddly, this episode also includes a fairly lengthy bit about oxymorons, in which he feels it necessary to explain what an oxymoron is:

So the lesson manual itself ended up giving what I think may be the oxymoron of the year, and if this holds that would be amazing to hit oxymoron of the year when you're still in January and you're only on lesson two. We'll see if it remains oxymoron of the year in the manual. . . . As you probably know, the definition of an oxymoron is a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction, and this is what I'm talking about and referring to.

This language -- oxymoron of the year already, and it's only January -- reminded me of similar statements that appeared on /pol/ this January about the secret Jew tunnel story. Several people said that the video clip of an Orthodox Jew emerging from a sewer like a Ninja Turtle was a strong contender for meme of the year even though it was only January.

Then last night I did some reading in Courtney Brown's Remote Viewing. On page 615 I read, "Nothing is 'set in stone,' so to speak" -- very close to the oxymoron meme from Rational Faiths -- which was followed a few pages later by an oxymoron, highlighted with scare quotes, about how "a lively debate 'quietly rages' in academia."

Then this morning I checked the Babylon Bee and found this:

See, that secret Jew tunnel story is so inherently funny that even the Babylon Bee, which has a Jewish CEO, is still using it months later. And that balrog image is extremely similar to the one used in the Corbin Volluz essay.

Balrogs of course come from the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. The name Tolkien -- related to the modern English dull-keen -- has the same etymological meaning as oxymoron ("sharp-stupid"), and it is for this reason that Tolkien once signed a poem with the pseudonym Oxymore.