Transcript

We are live.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and I'm here to have a cup of Joe with my friend Isaac Hess.

Isaac, thanks for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Isaac, uh, we're gonna talk a little bit about Mormonism, which, uh, I thought I might You know, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, thought you might be a, a good person to talk to to sort of translate between these two worlds.

You wanna introduce yourself a little bit, and maybe give a bit of a clue as to why I might think that's the case?

Uh, sure.

So my name's Isaac, and um, I wanna apologize right up front, I'm recovering from a cough, so I'll try to mute myself whenever I cough, but if you hear me cough or clear my throat, that's why.

Um, yeah.

So I was raised a Latter-day Saint.

I was, I just grew up through the '80s and the '90s and the early 2000s.

I went on a mission.

I attended BYU. Um, so I was a Latter-day Saint for about 35 years, and then about five years ago, I was, I converted to Catholicism and was baptized into the Catholic Church.

And I've shared my story on some other platforms before.

I've been on Matt Fradd's channel, and Laila Rose, and so if people want like a deep dive on my conversion story, they can kinda go there.

But yeah, I still have a lot of connections to the Latter-day Saint community as well.

I have close family and friends who are still LDS, so

Yeah

I think-

I was gonna say, it seems like you still have a lot of I mean, sometimes you have like the bitter ex-member, and that doesn't seem to be your case.

You seem to have a great deal of love for the LDS community, maybe certain members in particular that you're, you know, related to, and f- friends and all that with.

But yeah, so you're ex-Mo, I think is the, the term, but you're not like a bitter ex-Mo, um-

I, I, I, in internet parlance, I am ex-Mo.

Okay.

I, I just showing I'm, I'm cool.

I'm a 40-year-old man being hip to the slang.

Uh-

Super hip

you also So this, for those who are just tuning in, this is called Cup of Joe, both because my name is Joe, but also because, uh, we drink coffee together.

And I thought it was only fitting to use my, uh, Pints with Aquinas mug today, and I've got, uh, some Trader Joe's roast, and, uh, so I'm gonna pour myself a cup of coffee.

Isaac, you have a little bit of a background with coffee.

Now, I wanna For those of you who may be tuning in for the first time from an LDS background and saying, Hey, this seems like a slap in the face 'cause the Word of Wisdom, this is what we do every week.

This is not some sort of joke at your expense.

So Isaac, a- that said, you have a story about, um, the siren song of coffee as, as- Aquinas claimed.

Well, so I wanna just point out that I am drinking from a new local coffee shop in my area that opened recently.

So I'm from, uh, the town of Gilbert, Arizona.

So if you're here, look this place up.

It's '90s themed, which is hilarious to me.

Nice.

Um, but I've had to remind myself that when I was a kid, things were '70s themed, uh, and that's just-

Well, that was a different era

how things go.

That was like 20 years before.

I know, right?

This is Oh.

So if you wanna go and, uh, watch Saved by the Bell on the TV they have playing.

They have a working payphone, um- and, uh, wonderful people who run the shop, and excellent coffee.

So it's, uh, The Nook.

I'm, I'm, I'm promoting them today 'cause they're my-

There's-

new favorite coffee shop

there's a place like that in the suburbs of Kansas City that actually had Like, you can play old video games, like Mortal Kombat, which is just crazy.

Yeah, amazing.

Amazing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

People are cashing in on my childhood.

So, um, anyway, yeah.

So you know, you were joking about coffee.

So I've always loved the smell of coffee.

Growing up as a Latter-day Saint kid, I used to When I would walk through my local Smith's grocery store in Orem, Utah, they would have an aisle with fresh coffee beans, right?

Bulk, the bulk aisle, and I would linger in the aisle smelling the coffee.

Thought it smelled quite delicious.

So, uh, you know, becoming Catholic, the true reward is the fullness of our Savior, Jesus Christ, but the secondary reward is the enjoyment of delicious coffee.

That's excellent.

I w- I was threatening Isaac beforehand that I was gonna tell everyone, you know, Isaac was faithful, but then he, he sacrificed his, uh, you know, recommend in order to get, you know, good coffee- 'cause he just couldn't resist the siren, the siren song.

Um, okay.

Well, anyway, a little bit of background as to what we're talking about today, uh, as some of you already know, last month, I was on Matt Fradd's show, Pints with, Pints with Aquinas.

That episode just dropped on Monday.

Uh, in it, we talked a lot about Mormonism, and explored some of the problems with the system from a Catholic perspective.

And in particular, we talked about just how big our differences in our conception of God are, and whether what they mean by God even counts as God in kind of a classical theistic, uh, conception.

I'm positive we're gonna talk a lot more about that, uh, pretty shortly.

But as you might imagine, uh, both that section and the interview more broadly generated a lot of response.

I think it's fair to say a lot of backlash from Mormons.

I thought it'd be good to get into the weeds, to be responsive to the critiques, uh, to cover some of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

And some of the responses are really thoughtful.

Some of the questions are well worth answering, and some of the memes are, uh, just glorious.

Uh, Mike, could you put up the, uh, the one meme I was really tickled by?

So the, uh And for those of you who are listening and, and can't see it, it's the famous option me- office meme where it says, Corporate needs you to find the difference between these two pictures.

And then the response is, They're the same picture.

But in this case, it's me as Pam, and, uh, the I think it's Pam who's in that.

I'm, I'm actually blanking on that.

That's Pam.

But it's Okay.

But then it's like, I think it's Atheists United or whatever, some atheist group, and then Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and it's just like, Oh, yeah, Joe doesn't know the difference between these two.

As a representation of my position, it's like comically wrong.

As a meme, I thought it was hilarious, and I thought they did a really disturbingly good job of like plugging me into the meme in a pretty realistic Like, they got my suit and everything.

I was, I was really impressed.

Not all of the memes were quite so, uh-

No

charitable.

There were some memes, like there were– so I, I was critical in the same episode of both Mormons and Gropers, and both groups can be a little defensive about any criticism and so I was simultaneously accused of being a Nazi and a Jew for the same episode and I'm, I'm a third secret thing that is neither of those two.

Uh, so I thought it'd be good, though, not to just feed the trolls, but to actually cover some of the thoughtful, meaningful replies.

And I wanna say at the outset, we are absolutely not gonna get to everything and I haven't even seen everything produced.

I've tried to watch a lot of it, but there's hours of stuff.

So just to give you a sense of some of the stuff we're gonna try to cover, Ward Radio did a two-hour stream with, uh, Jasmine Rappley, Luke Hansen, Jacob Hansen, who I realized spell their name differently and are not, as I assumed, related, and of course Garden Ellis.

Uh, Kaden Baylor, all those in favor had a fascinating 80-minute rebuttal with Joseph Lowell and Tarak Lacour, who I believe is an LDS convert to Catholicism, uh, looking at more of a philosophical perspective, so we're definitely gonna wanna cover that.

Uh, at the other end of the spectrum, a guy named Shad Brooks said he was gonna do, like, an autistic level deep dive, but then ended up producing what appeared to be a kinda crazy three-hour long rant where there's I mean, he it mostly was him kinda crashing out, but there were a few things that he said that I thought would be worth replying to.

And I know we're just scratching the surface.

There's another, uh, episode from a Mormon response perspective coming out, I think, this Saturday.

Uh, I know Emerson Green had an 80-minute long response, not to me, but to, uh, one of the guys from Inspiring Philosophy when he made the same point that Mormonism from a theological perspective is actually atheistic, and we'll explain what that means.

I haven't even tried to watch that one.

The other ones I've at least tried to watch and pull.

I haven't watched every moment, but tried to find the major points to respond to, uh-

Can I add a quick, uh-

Yes

thing about Shad really fast?

Yeah.

So I was watching Shad's content before he started doing all this crazy commentary stuff years ago, and he really started and found his bones as being, like, a medieval knight kind of YouTuber where it's all about, like, swords and armor and how people lived way back in medieval times.

And it was really-

Good

good stuff, really fun, and, um, it seems like when he started this commentary channel, which I'm sure started out as, like, a vent-

Mm-hmm

but then once you start going down, like, rage commentary, it becomes a drug.

Just, like, you get addicted to it.

Um

Yeah, I-

So, so to the-

I don't want that to be this kind of in the other direction.

Like, I don't wanna just crash out or rage or, or do whatever because I don't think-

Yeah

that's helpful.

I don't think that brings people closer to the truth.

I mean, it, it can be really cathartic.

You know?

They're like this is very big in politics, just, like, yell at the other side, and I don't think that's good or helpful, which actually I think is a maybe a good segue to the first topic I think we should cover, Isaac.

Uh, you can take the, the meme down there if you want.

One of the critiques people had wasn't so much of anything that I said, but just the fact that I was the one saying it, that there is this question of whether a non-LDS person should have been on the show to critique or discuss LDS theology in the first place, and I tried to be very clear up front.

Like, I have I did not grow up Mormon, and any time I'm talking about any system I didn't grow up in, I'm well aware that things often look different from the inside than from the outside, which can sometimes be an important reason to have an outsider's perspective, but also means that we can just completely talk past each other, that, you know, that maybe you have a completely skewed vision.

And y- I'm sure every person on here knows what I'm talking about.

You've heard people who aren't of your political affiliation talk about your party and your values and why you believe what you believe.

If you're Catholic, you've probably seen a gazillion episodes, I literally had one come out Tuesday, of, uh, people claiming what the Catholic Church believes and getting stuff wildly wrong.

And it's tempting to just say, like, non-X people shouldn't talk about X political group, religious group, whatever.

I think that's a mistake, and I'm, I'm happy to talk to you about why I think that.

I'm, I'm curious your take, Isaac.

But yeah, so an- anyway, tried to be very clear.

I'm gonna do my best to charitably, accurately present the Mormon view before critiquing it, uh, but I'm obviously not coming from an insider's perspective.

So some people seem to appreciate that.

Luke Hansen, Jasmine were very kind about that.

On the other hand, if you wanna pull up clip one, Shad thought that me trying to fairly and charitably present the Mormon position, uh, should be marked as a malicious lie.

do my best to fairly and charitably present the Mormon position.

A- a- again, he, he, he's not, right?

He, his intention If his intention was to fairly and charity, charitably present, present our position, he would have a Latter-day Saint there to help him or to actually present what it, it is.

All right?

This is all coming through a biased source with the intent to l- belittle and present it as literally the title, incoherent.

And so this is, again, he repeats the, the lie of intent here, and so this is another lie, and it is a malicious lie.

Okay.

So that's, uh, one take.

You know, as, as somebody said, uh, the guy seems very passionate.

I think that's very passionate.

So is it the standard, should it be the standard that you can only talk about Mormonism if there's a Mormon present with you, Isaac?

What, what would your take be on, you know, people making this, this kind of claim?

'Cause I'm sure there are people who are upset that I'm talking to a Catholic who used to be Mormon, uh-

Yeah, I was about to say, you just did it again, Joe.

I know.

You clearly don't learn from your mistakes.

Um-

I think it just depends.

I think there's room for all sorts of different kinds of conversations.

Um, it's, I think, absurd on its face if someone And I'm not saying, I'm not trying to attribute this to any particular person, but if you were to say basically every conversation about Mormonism on YouTube, say, has to have a practicing, believing Latter-day Saint present that just seems kind of silly.

It's okay for there to be people discussing their understanding of what the LDS Church teaches and believes, just as it is vice versa.

If, if a group of Protestants or Latter-day Saints are having a conversation about Catholicism, I don't think that there's anything that requires that you have a practicing, believing Catholic present.

Um-

Right.

Like if you, if you're preaching in an LDS temple about the great apostasy, I don't think you need to invite a Catholic in to give the counter to that.

See, you're just showing your ignorance there, Joe, 'cause they don't preach in their temples.

Oh, okay.

Um, yeah.

No, I'm just teasing you.

But, um, but also what I said was accurate.

Um,

Yeah, fair.

The, uh So if that's all you did though, if you never spoke to a practicing Latter-day Saint, if you never spoke to practicing Catholics, if there wasn't engagement interaction between the two, if you just sort of like shut yourself off from the other side, that's also really bad.

That's just not Intellectually, it's not a good way of pursuing.

So you know, when people They'll say, people will say things like, If you really wanna know the truth about what Latter-day Saints believe and think and what our doctrine is and what our history is, you should talk to a, a believing Latter-day Saint.

Mm-hmm.

And there's truth to that.

Like that is-

Yeah

going to be a crucial part of the process.

It's not the exclusive part of the process, though.

Like, if for any position, if you want to know the fullness of the position, it's actually very helpful to encounter both the defenders and the critics of the position, because they all offer different perspectives.

Right.

Like, I mean, I'll just use a political example.

Like, if you wanna know how to think about a conservative policy, you should talk to conservatives.

You should also talk to liberals or people who are critic- libertarians or You know, you should talk to insiders and outsiders, and people who were one and then became the other.

I, I think the echo chamber's not good, and I'd say that in, in both directions.

Like, I think it's bad if it's just Catholics talking to other Catholics about other groups, and I've been critical of that in the past.

And I, actually I, I hope one thing people take from this, if you're a Catholic and your knee-jerk response to seeing someone criticize the Catholic Church is like, We're being persecuted.

You guys are being so unfair, and you can't substantively say what they're getting wrong, it looks like whining and it looks like you just are, are really thin-skinned.

And so you should learn from that.

Like, as a Catholic, don't do that.

Because I think there are people who had legitimate grievances.

They said, It sounds like you're saying X and that's wrong, or, You got this detail wrong, and all of that.

Like, I wanna talk about all of that stuff.

Well-

But then there were a lot of people who were just upset literally.

Like, I mean, the comments on Twitter, it seemed to be mostly people who literally wouldn't even watch it because it was like, How dare a non-Mormon talk about Mormonism?

And to make it, you know, more absurd, Jacob Hansen's been on Pints.

I did a dialogue with Jacob Hansen and a Protestant pastor.

We had a debate.

We've been on Capturing Christianity together.

So it isn't as if like I'm not willing to talk to, you know, LDS apologists-

Yeah

or people who represent that perspective.

I'm, I'm happy to.

But if, if-

We have a comment from a viewer-

Yeah

that I think is actually relevant to this.

Yeah.

The Great Wall asks, Why not just read the documents and articles of faith?

Speaking to general followers of a faith is hit or miss on actually getting good information.

That's been my experience at least.

And you address some of this in your interview on Pints.

Yeah.

I think Well, 'cause one of the things I was particularly trying to do is to say this historic belief, there's been a reversal on it.

And so looking just at the present documents without saying, Here's this earlier bit of preaching, or, Here's this earlier lecture at the veil, or, Here's this earlier, you know, removed part of doctrines and covenants.

Like, uh, you know, even the name doctrines and covenants no longer makes sense 'cause that whole section got removed.

Comparing those two things is impossible if you're just going from like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints website, where all of that stuff is kind of downplayed or scrubbed completely.

Uh, and also like for all the reasons sola scriptura doesn't work, just expecting people to read the articles of confession or the documents of your faith and come away accurately understanding everything about it.

Like, to just say like, Here's a Book of Mormon, now you understand Mor- and of everything Mormonism teaches, or, Here are the standard works, now you've got everything, that's not as workable as I think people imagine it to be.

Like, it's great to say, I heard somebody claim that you guys believe this, and I'm gonna cross-reference that with official sources.

But I do think if you want a sense of the lived reality of the thing, you sort of have to talk to the people living that reality.

Yep.

I agree.

And w- if you The last, maybe the last comment I'll make on this, and maybe we should go on to, to some of the other critiques that people have made.

But, um, uh, there's different types of conversations as well.

So the conversation you were having with Matt would've, it would've been a very different conversation if a, a, if a practicing Latter-day Saint had been there.

It would have turned more into like a It would've been inevitably sort of turned into some kind of debate or something like that.

Um-

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's-

And, and I'm, I'm happy to do that.

But that's good.

That's fine.

But you're right, it's a different conversation.

Right.

But there's also conversat- It's also good and fine also to have conversations between people who maybe agree and they're discussing a different topic and, I don't know.

So I, I, I agree that no one should silo themselves from criticism-

Yeah

or from trying to really And but I think that it's hard to make that charge against you.

Um, it's true that Catholics and Latter-day Saints have their own lingo, and so, uh, certainly there are times when you and Matt would say something I think that I understood what you meant, but I think wouldn't necessarily translate well.

I can't think of a specific example right now.

Well, I mean-

I can think of one where I, I got confused by something in a Latter-day Saint source that I referenced and, and was corrected on.

I'll, I'll, I'll get to that in a little bit.

But when we talk about, uh, the protection from error in the temple-When it talks about the elders of Israel being protected from falling into error in the temple, Brigham Young teaches-

You mean the tabernacle.

You're talking about the tabernacle

the ta- I'm sorry, tabernacle.

I- there it is.

Yeah.

This is exactly what I'm talking about.

Yes, I, I did mean to say tabernacle.

Um, that, I read that, and it's like, yeah, okay, so he's gonna preach something in the tabernacle, and it's basically ex cathedra.

And, and the Word Radio guys just laughed at that.

Like, you're importing a Catholic idea of infallibility, that it's rather a protection of, of the people rather than a protection of, of the individual leader.

Um, d- uh, you know what I'm talking about there?

Yes.

I can Okay.

Yep.

I do know what you're talking about.

So-

Yeah

we can And I'm sure we can talk more about that kinda as we go because that's relevant for Adam-God, and it's relevant for some of the stuff about the Curse of Cain that Brigham Young said, where he would preach these things that actually were errors in the tabernacle, and they weren't corrected.

Uh, but how, how that kind of works out in terms of what it means for his authority and status as a prophet is something that obviously people are gonna disagree.

Um, okay.

All right.

Uh, so let's get into a few of these clips here.

Oh, yeah.

We, we kind of have a bunch of-

Well, actually, there is, uh, one, one good joke that I wanted to make sure people saw.

Oh, sure.

The Isaac, You're a Latte Day Saint.

Uh, yeah, I saw that.

Yeah, I thought that was pretty good.

Um, okay, so yeah.

Actually, there was one, one other question I wanted to ask you real quick, Isaac.

How can non-Mormons navigate this?

'Cause I think the danger on the Mormon side is that it, it honestly looks a little culty.

Now, I don't think Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a cult.

But I do think when you say, like, Don't talk to outsiders, don't listen to them when they talk about your religion, don't receive criticism from them, or when that's the impression you give to the outside world, that gives, I think, a false impression of, of being cult-like, um, where I think it's just kind of a bubble.

I think all of us can, can really fall into that.

But on the non-Mormon side, knowing that any critique, any question might run into that sort of response, do you have any tips for how to navigate that?

Uh, that's a good question.

Uh, and, and, and again, I think the way to navigate it would depend again on the style of conversation that you're having, right?

So if you're in dialogue with a Latter-day Saint, then ask them what they think about what you're saying, right?

Like, try to make it Don't tell people, like, this is You know, one thing that is always frustrating to someone, especially if you're talking to them, is if you say, You believe X.

Right.

Like, You believe Y, right?

Um-

Don't even do that in your marriage.

Yeah.

Yes, that's a great Very true.

Instead, what you can say i- from a Catholic point of view, what you can say is, The Catholic Church teaches X. The Catholic Church teaches Y. That can even be difficult within Mormonism as well because there's not a unified doctrine in Mormonism about what constitutes doctrine, and so this can be very frustrating sometimes.

You and Matt spoke about this a little bit about how you're trying to critique and understand LDS teaching and theology, but it seems like anytime you get a grasp on it, someone comes along and says, um, Hey, w- that's not what we believe, or, That's not what we think, or, I don't believe that, whatever, right?

So, uh, if you really wanna get in the weeds, I think the best thing to do is to look up the specific critique that you want.

And you can say something like, Latter-day Saint prophets taught X.

Yes.

That's, that can be a true statement that's easy to defend.

And if you want to engage with a Latter-day Saint, like suppose you're talking about Adam-God theory.

I think you can very defensively and clearly say, Brigham Young taught the Adam-God doctrine.

Um, w- so what are the-

Yeah

what does that mean?

What are the implications?

Was it a church doctrine?

That's a different question.

Was it, uh, was it something that was to be believed on pain of sin or something?

You know, that's a very Catholic terminology, by the way.

Latter-day Saints wouldn't speak that way.

I'm translating this into Catholic speak.

Um, so I, I, I think that it can be difficult, uh, but just trying to do your best charitably, trying to understand the other person, uh, and seeking not to overgeneralize claims and to leap to conclusions.

I think that's a great Actually, let's pivot to Adam-God.

I know it was not the kinda outline we'd originally kicked around, but I, I think because you raised that, this is a source of some confusion.

And, and some of the pushback is like, Oh, you're just quote mining.

You're just taking these misleading quotes from historic sources.

Can you briefly explain Adam-God to people who just assume they know nothing about it and this is their first time hearing about it?

Sure.

I mean, I'll try because it is, um, con- it's a confusing doctrine.

Um, Brigham Young Like, the short version is something like this.

Brigham Young, uh, after the Latter-day Saints had settled Utah, began, uh, at a certain point in his life to preach a doctrine that, uh, the God that, that is our God, and I know this'll sound very loaded and strange to a lot of people, is Adam, that Adam is our God, Adam meaning the first man on the Earth.

So where would he get an idea like this?

Well, prior to this, Joseph Smith had taught a progression that Latter-day S- that humans can become divine and that God himself had once been a man like us or like Jesus Christ.

I mean, there's, there's a lot of different interpretations to what Joseph Smith said, and I wanna put that upfront, right?

Different people read some of Joseph Smith's late teachings in slightly different ways.

But Brigham Young seemed to read it in a very literal sense, that God the Father had been a human, that we are all We, we kind of exist in this great concourse of being, this kind of cycle where there's a constant, uh, ongoing process of humans becoming gods and gods then creating more humans, having more spirit children and things like that, who then go on the same journey, right?

We all kind of go on the same journey over and over again.

We go on the same journey as those that came before us.

There will be s- y- you know, worlds without ends to those who come after us, that sort of thing.

So Brigham Young really caught onto this idea, and-If you have that idea, then you can start cogently asking yourself, Well then, what is the identity of our God?

Like, who is he?

Right?

If there's a sort of a never-ending, ongoing round of this kind of deification going on, uh, who was our God?

Right?

Does that make sense so far?

Yeah, it does.

It does.

So at, at one point in a sermon in Utah, and then several sermons afterwards, Jose- ah, Brigham Young advanced the teaching that the God of this world was Adam, the same person who was in the garden and who was the Not just like the spirit father of all the people, but actually like the physical origin of humanity.

And even said things like that God, uh, Adam God came into the garden as Adam, brought one of his wives, 'cause Mormonism was very entwined with doctrines of polygamy at that time.

Mm-hmm.

Brought one of his wives into the garden with him and used that to populate the earth.

That's, that became the Adam/God doctrine.

It was controversial when he preached it.

Yeah.

Uh, and remained controversial for the rest of his life.

He never stopped preaching it.

He didn't preach it often, but there's a, there's a mistake that sometimes people will be like, Well, he just preached it this one time.

He didn't preach it in every sermon, but you can find sermons throughout basically the rest of his prophetic career where he does preach it.

And then after he died, it kind of lingered a little bit, and then just kind of eventually disappeared, 'cause no one really, no one really had really accepted the teaching, I would say, in a deep way.

Okay, so that, that is going to then lead to this question about how to make sense of that from a non-Mormon perspective.

'Cause one of the apologetic arguments is, okay, uh, you guys reversed course on doctrine, and that gets into this big nuanced question that I think is actually kinda hard to answer of what is doctrine and what was considered doctrine in the 19th century?

And, and did You know, so I guess there's a couple levels to this.

One is, you'll have people who just don't tell the truth about Adam/God, and they're like, Oh, there was a misunderstanding.

There was a misreading.

Like, I saw a lot of people just asserting.

Like, Oh, he didn't actually say that.

He didn't actually mean that.

And I would suggest that's really demonstrably not true, and to see that you can You, you have both multiple eyewitness accounts from, from Latter-day Saints.

Not, not from like hostile witnesses.

You know, Wilfred Woodrow Excuse me, Wilfred Woodf-

Woodruff.

And I don't know why I was having I, well, I keep wanting to say Woodrow Wilson.

Well, you should have grown up singing a song that we sang that recited all of the Latter-day prophets so we could remember them in order.

There you go.

Well, he, he records it in his journal a- and saying, Adam is Michael or God, and all the God that we have anything to do with.

Yeah.

So it's very clear not just from like the, uh, accounts of like the transcripts of his, uh, sermons, you, you, you know, 1854.

Well, not only that, but I mean-

For this

To, to illustrate that it was resisted, another member of the Twelve Apostles, uh, actively resisted this teaching and preached against it.

And so it's very clear that people in Brigham's time understood what he was saying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, and it seemed like he'd been saying variations of this, as you said, for years and years.

And then eventually this kinda becomes enshrined at the Lecture at the Veil, right?

It does get inserted as part of the temple ceremony, yes.

So do you wanna explain that for non-LDS?

So just high level, the, uh, the LDS temple ceremony has a section that's called the endowment, and during the endowment portion of the ceremony, Latter-day Saints make covenants with God, but also receive instruction around like God's plan of salvation and, um, kind of like i- it does tie into this process a bit about sort of like, um, this great course of being that I mentioned, right?

This process of, uh, someone becoming divinized and then populating the world.

You know, that sort of thing.

It was more explicit in Brigham Young's day.

And, um, when, uh, Brigham Young was alive, there was a section of the endowment that doesn't actually exist anymore called the Lecture at the Veil, which was a, a lecture.

It origin- it originated with, I believe, just a lecture Brigham Young would give or did give once at the end of an endowment session explaining to all the people what they had just witnessed, how to interpret it.

It was an interpretive It was like, This is how you should interpret what you just went through.

'Cause it's presented in narrative, in this kind of dramatic form with people acting out parts and that sort of thing.

Um, and this was recorded at some point and somewhat standardized, and so we have the record of Um, the Latter-day Saint temple ceremonies are not public, but what we have is Brigham Young's secretary wrote down He basically said, Hey, we had like an update to the Lecture on the Veil.

This is what it says.

And he wrote down-

Is that John Nuttall?

Or is that-

I can't remember the name.

Okay.

I know there's a-

But-

John Nuttall-

Yeah

transcribed account of the 1877 Lecture on the Veil.

So he's, he's not writing it down word for word.

He's not taking like a dictation.

It's not the official thing, but he's giving the gist.

This is what the Lecture of the Veil says.

And, and-

Right

here's what, here's what it says, at least if, if we're thinking of the same document.

Yeah, yeah.

He said, Adam was an immortal being when he came on the earth.

He lived, he had lived on an earth similar to ours.

He had received the priesthood and keys thereof.

Now notice, w- we should get back to that, 'cause it suggests he's receiving them from someone.

And had been faithful in all things and gained his resurrection and his exultation, and was crowned with glory and mortality and eternal lives, and was numbered with the gods.

For such he came through his faithfulness, and had begotten all the spirits that was to come to this earth.

And Eve, our common mother, who is the mother of all living, bore those spirits in the celestial world.

And when this earth was organized by Elohim, Jehovah, and Michael, who is Adam, our common father.

So I mean, it's, it's handwritten.

You can tell he's, you know Like you said, it's not a word-for-word transcription, but it's also very clear what the gist is.

Yeah.

And the gist is very different than what Latter-day Saints currently believe.

The, the gist is what you would, what you could refer to as the Adam/God doctrine.

Right.

Right.

Right.

And it fits with the content of Brigham Young's other-Sermons and teachings and the journal entries of Wilford Woodruff and others, and things like that.

All of this gives us, I think, a pretty high confidence that Brigham Young taught this doctrine and believed it.

So I think there's three ways to go about approaching the Adam-God doctrine.

I think the bad way is for non-Mormons to say, You guys secretly believe Adam God, or, You guys believe this, and this is false.

I think it's very clear Adam-God doctrine is rejected and even condemned in, you know, language that suggests it's, like, a damnable thing to believe in.

Is that fair to say?

Oh, totally fair.

I, I mean, I So just a quick funny story.

When I was in high school, I grew up in Utah, and I would sometimes go up to attend the church's general conference, which is twice a year, church leaders speak to all the members.

You know, it's a, it's a great spiritual experience for Latter-day Saints.

And there's always Christian protesters out there, u- usually evangelicals and Baptists and things, telling us all that we're going to hell and that, um, we should repent and believe the gospel, that sort of thing.

And I remember one of them handing me a tract, and, as I'm walking in with some of my high school friends, and I open it and I start reading it, and it was all about Adam God.

And I- we were just laughing, 'cause we'd never heard of any of this.

Yeah.

It said So it's saying things like And, and they were somewhat laughable.

Mormons believe that Adam is God, right?

And I remember just turning to my friends and saying, Where do they just, where do they get this stuff?

Right.

They just invent the most random things.

So if you tell a Latter-day Saint today you believe that God is Adam or Adam is God, it sounds nonsensical to them.

It's completely foreign to their experience in the-

Right

church and that sort of thing.

Um, at the same time, it is rooted in something real within history, I think that we can say with confidence.

Oh, okay.

So don't Yeah, so bad form would be doing that.

Better form, I think, would be to say, Here's this obvious contradiction.

You've, you've got this complete reversal.

These two things can't both be true.

You can't say Adam is our God, Adam isn't our God.

Like, just the principle of non-contradiction.

If it means anything, you've got this doctrinal reversal that undermines your credibility as a truth-telling, reliable source of information, religion, particularly when it is the prophet making these false claims and when it's part of the actual induction ceremony.

It isn't, like, an optional belief.

Like, at one point, Brigham Young explicitly s- ties it to salvation.

Is that right?

So Brigham did, I think I, I actually think this is partially evidence that the people weren't receiving the teaching the way he wanted them to.

Yeah.

Right?

He- Joseph Smith, when Joseph Smith taught a doctrine, the people believed it.

When Brigham taught a new doctrine, the people seemed to kind of resist it, right?

Um, so I think, you know, from the, from the LDS perspective, I think that, yeah, there's a f- there's a few things, right?

Um, they don't have a doctrine of prophetic infallibility-

Mm

at all.

By which I mean, you know, we believe in papal infallibility, which means that we believe there are at least some instances that when a pope speaks, you can be confident that what he's saying is true.

Uh, there's not such a doctrine in Mormonism, so there's no clear criteria by which you can say, No, no, no, this should have been Right?

In this instance, he was clearly claiming this or claiming that, right, uh, in terms of infallibility.

Um, so there's that.

They- they're also still kinda I think developing, they're sort of working through this question right now in LDS theology.

It's like, how do we determine what is church doctrine, right?

In recent years, they've settled on this idea that doctrine is You can be confident something is doctrine when it's taught by all of the church's highest leaders simultaneously, the first presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.

That's, that is a more recent sort of theological development within Mormonism.

Some Latter-day Saints want to kind of backdate that, be like, Look, you know?

Yeah.

Like, if you were to ask Brigham Young w- how he thought doctrine was established, he certainly would not have said, uh, When we all speak in, uh, together, right?

So I think the question then becomes something like, what does it mean if you have a prophet who is speaking at a minimum as, as in his role as a prophet-

Yeah

and teaches something as revealed by God that is not true, that now you reject?

What does that mean about whether that church person is a true or false prophet?

Yeah.

I- so this is I t- I tried to make that argument.

Uh, so Deuteronomy 18 gives this standard.

Uh, But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name which I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.

And if you say in your heart, 'How may we know the word which the Lord has not spoken?' When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word the Lord has not spoken.

The prophet has spoken it presumptuously.

You need not be afraid of him.

So it's true, I mean, we don't want to apply a, a standard of just, like, everything a prophet ever says and does is gonna be right.

That's clearly not the standard that either the LDS hold for themselves or their leaders, nor is it the standard that you are gonna get from the Bible, because prophets do all sorts of things that are not good sometimes.

Yeah.

But when they are speaking on behalf of God, if you can't trust that, then this is not a pro- I mean, the, even the term prophet, you're, you're speaking for, that's the pro in prophet.

You know, you're speaking for God.

If, if we can't trust you to speak for God and not speak for a false god or, or invent your own ideas and call them God's ideas, then you're not a prophet.

Now, I wanna make clear what the argument isn't.

So if you can play, Mike, if you can play the clip Luke, uh, says in Ward Radio, uh, that he, he thinks I'm just saying that there's a theological problem and that's the problem.

I sent this to him very late, so hopefully this will work.

It might just be audio.

But, um, to wrap up Adam God real quick.

Okay.

So it- they're just coming from this completely opposite perspective, 'cause the idea, and Joe lays this out a couple different times in the episode, is, like, they got God wrong therefore it's idolatry, therefore bad, wrong, they're going to hell if they believe that.

And- and they're just coming from it from, like, this creedal mindset.

Like, you gotta get God philosophically right and then you're good to go.

Oh, the-

Like, you're there.

Okay.

Like, perfect.

Thank you.

The best part of Uh, I know.

Sorry, Luke, you look like Shad in that.

That was my own fault.

Yeah, I was gonna say, boy, that's quite the transformation for Luke.

Yeah.

Or Shad.

I mean, that's Um, I think I mean, obviously from a creedal perspective, you're getting theology disastrously wrong.

I think that, yeah, sure, that's a problem.

I don't think that you have to go in that direction, because I think it's probably fair to say that just doesn't seem to be perceived as a big problem from the Latter-day Saints perspective.

I would suggest a different thing.

It's not just you got God wrong, therefore it's idolatry.

I don't think that's true.

I think you can have wrong ideas about God and it's not automatically idolatry.

But the Old Testament student manual from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints website says, Idolatry is the worship of false gods, which may or may not involve the manufacturing of images.

So in this case, it seems like from an LDS perspective, not just from a creedal Christian perspective, worshiping Adam, who isn't our God, and saying, This is the only God we have anything to do with, is very clearly idolatry.

And this is un- this isn't, like, a personal moral failing.

Like, he was preaching idolatry in the tabernacle, insisting that you have to become an idolater to, uh, become a member, and that your salvation depends on it.

I think that is a pretty definitive disproof of at least Brigham Young's reliability to be called a prophet of God.

But I- I realize, like, I say all of that and people just kind of shrug it off.

So I'm obviously missing something in how it's received.

Can you translate What, what is going Like, why is that not just game, set, match?

I think that Latter-day Saints are more comfortable living in the tension than you would expect them to be, right?

So Latter-day Saints have lived with a doctrine of having living prophets for almost 200 years.

Yeah.

And when you have that kind of personal experience So I, like Uh, okay.

Let me share just, like, two little anecdotes from my own life.

The first is growing up, uh, Latter-day Saints are led by 15 men that they refer to as prophets.

The f- all of the first presidency and all of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles, uh, first presidency is three people, uh, all 15 of them are sustained as prophets, seers, and revelators by the church.

But just growing up, you- you know that they've all said things that the church doesn't really believe in, right?

It was kind of a There was a really well-known LDS apostle named Bruce R. McConkie-

Mm-hmm

uh, in the '70s and '80s was kind of when he was at his heyday, I believe.

That was just prior to my time.

And when I was growing up, there was kind of this He was kind of thought of as, like, Uncle Bruce.

Like, yeah-

Yeah

Uncle Bruce.

Great guy, sometimes says things.

Do you know what I mean?

Um, and so I really think that in part, it's like when you've lived with this doctrine long enough, and just have the personal experience that, like, you know, for Latter-day Saints, they believe that these are very, very good men who are-

Mm-hmm

in tune with God, but don't always get things right, and they're comfortable with that.

Right?

I was comfortable with that-

Yeah

as a Latter-day Saint.

So I- I- when you're, don't, when you're a Catholic, and you don't, you're not used to believing in prophets, you kind of think, have this vision like, Well, if there is a prophet, this is what they'd look like, this is how they'd be, right?

Latter-day Saints just have a, I think a different model in their mind than we have.

So that's kinda the first thing.

But the second thing is, this is kind of my own personal story too, when I f- really began to grapple with questions like Adam God-

Mm-hmm

or other Or, you know, looking through church history at the times And I know we also have on the list to talk about, like, the church's, uh, history with African Americans and people of African def- descent-

Yeah

in general.

Um, I started to ask myself, they seemed, these l- prophets seemed to be very confident in what they were teaching at that time, that it was the will of God, that it was from God, and now the church basically says it, it's not from God, right?

What they said.

So when they teach me today, you know, if say a Latter-day Saint prophet s- says something that they want me to stand up to be countercultural in some way-

Yeah

maybe whether it's, like, um, uh, to be faithful to Christ's teaching on, uh, on monogamy or, uh, heterosexual marriage-

Mm-hmm

or just anything, gender roles, anything, right?

Just anything that is not, that is a bit countercultural, um, and they're telling me that's from God, how do I know that they're not wrong now in the same way that those prophets were wrong then?

Th- that was the type of thing that made me start to wonder, uh, how I should think about this sort of prophetic fallibility.

But if you feel like there's some independent reason, which most Latter-day Saints do, like, they believe they've had the witness of the Holy Spirit, that the sort of Mormon system is true, then you kind of just abide in the, in the, um, in the tension a bit.

Yeah.

I mean, for the record, I have the same maybe just difficulty empathizing with or understanding at an experiential level, uh, the vision of kind of what we might call liberal Catholicism of thinking, like, Oh, we could just reverse doctrine on something like women's ordination.

And it's like, well, no, if, if you think that can happen, like, what do you think is actually true in a trustworthy way?

You know, if, if we can't know which things we actually know with certainty and which things are just guesses or speculation or theological opinion, that's a much bigger problem than one particular doctrine.

That creates this whole system of, well, what do you know?

What, what can you actually place your, your trust in?

Yeah.

Um, well, okay, well, there's two ways we could go right now.

We could talk about the, the big heat and all the smoke about, you know, in what sense we can and can't talk about Mormonism as atheistic-Or we can talk about, you, you referenced Curse of Cain and, and the treatment of people of African descent.

Let's talk, let's talk about Mormon atheism.

Okay.

Or, well, I, I'm gonna backtrack.

Let's talk about the topic of whether Mormons are atheists.

Yes, thank you.

That's, that's a good distinction.

Yeah.

Okay, so, um, I'm not gonna play the clip just 'cause I wanna be kind of respectful of time.

I was asked by Matt on, on the show in what sense we, you know, would say Mormonism is or is not atheistic.

You can watch that clip for, for kind of the nuanced answer, but I said experientially, like psychologically it would be, you know, wrong to say Mormons are atheists.

They were like, No, no, I, you know, I talk to Heavenly Father every day.

Or, you know, My entire life is built around him, et cetera, et cetera.

And all of that can be true.

We'll put that in one category.

But then from a philosophical perspective, if you say, Okay, when we use the term god, we don't mean it here as a proper name.

Like, there's this character in the Bible called God.

We mean broad level, philosophically, is there a God who made everything or not?

Or is there, you know, just an uncreated universe or just matter?

Atheists and Mormons are going to say it's, there is not a god who created the entire universe.

It's, it's just matter.

Is that a fair thing to say at, at the outset?

You brought up a lot there.

I did.

So the last thing, I would say no, I don't think that's fair to say.

Tell me more.

But, because of Well, I'm gonna be a little technical on you, right?

You said there's not a god who created the entire universe.

Mm-hmm.

But, uh, it's perfectly possible for a Mormon to believe in multiple universes, right?

Like, even holding, like, a sort of, like, aut- So I will just speak autobiographically.

Mm-hmm.

When I was a Mormon, my sort of own, um, my own belief around this, 'cause I had received this teaching that there are many gods, right?

That's very explicit in Mormon teaching.

Mm-hmm.

Um, uh, but there's on- we have one father, our God, right?

Yeah.

We're sort of monotheistic in that sense.

Uh, I did not believe that the s- that Mormon teachings about, like, God living by a planet Kolob or a star, I think Kolob is a star, um, I didn't think that was literal.

I thought that was figurative speech.

Okay.

Right?

And I think there's plenty of reason you can take that figuratively within the LDS system, in the same way that we can take lots of Old Testament passages about cosmology figuratively, right?

Um, and I thought of God as the creator of this universe.

Mm-hmm.

That this whole, everything, everything you could possibly see or find or whatever, o- there's only one source of it, you know?

One who had made it, and that's God the Father, right?

Can I, can I question that?

So I'm thinking about, like, Doctrines and Covenants 93.

Yeah.

Says, Man was also in the beginning with God.

Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.

So-

Yeah

how does that work with what you just said?

When I say made, I don't mean made ex nihilo.

That's not what I thought-

Mm-hmm

as a Latter-day Saint.

I thought that-

So what do you mean by made?

Like, what, what existed before God stepped in, and then how does that kind of change?

I, I didn't have And again, this is just autobiographical, right?

I'm not even claiming there's other Latter-day Saints-

Sure, sure

who had the same view as me.

Um, I don't think I had thought about it so deeply.

But, um, well, I, so one point I'll make is that, like, early LDS teacher, prophets definitely thought and b- taught that there was one universe, that our world was Like, God was the God of this world, and there were other-

Yeah

worlds that God, within the same universe, right?

But i- you know, you could also say something like, well, the early Christians had, uh, incorrect beliefs about cosmology.

Sure.

You know what I mean?

That sort of thing.

So like-

I don't think that's, like, game, set, match against Mormon-

Yeah.

You kind of re-

though.

You reinterpret as you understand better the physical world that you live in, and you're kind of like, How do I understand these scriptures within these other things that I know?

Right?

So I sort of had this idea, you know, the Big Bang, a lot of times, you know, if you're really, uh, love the Kalam argument, what I'm gonna say might bother you.

But the Big Bang is actually not necessarily proof that the universe be- had a, began to exist, right?

All it proves is that there was some moment when all the matter in the universe was condensed into an extremely small-

True

space, right?

Which then expanded afterwards.

So why couldn't God have taken material from something else, started with the Big Bang?

Do you know what I mean?

2,000 years ago.

Oh, yeah, I do.

Like, something I, I didn't have a clear sense.

I'm not saying I had a well-thought-out idea of what it was.

I'm just saying there were options open to me, right?

It was just kind of like, it didn't, it wasn't something that totally didn't sit with me w- uh, that, like, there was no way for me to incorporate.

So that's why I'm saying when you say that long thing that you said and you ended it with, like, the God of this universe, I was kind of like, Well, you know, it's complicated.

Yeah, yeah.

Can I interrupt with a viewer comment here?

Sure.

Yeah.

So we have a few LDS in chat.

Hello, and, uh, God bless you all.

Thank you guys for joining.

Thank you for showing up.

Um, one of them has sent in a super chat, but also had a comment here that I thought was worth addressing.

Um, this is ZBladeGrayson, who says, Look up the definition of theist and atheist.

He's replying to a different commenter.

Yeah.

God meaning eternal and supreme being of the universe, which we do believe.

Saying that Mormons do believe in a supreme being of the universe, which, which, um, that created everything, it seems.

It seems though.

Yeah.

Okay, I think, I think this is really important to set straight.

Like, the difference between God as, like, the biggest being in the universe or the, the supreme being within the universe compared to God as what, you know, uh, Paul Tillich and others have called the ground of being-

Mm-hmm

this source of being itself, is actually a, a huge and important difference.

If you, if you could play clip two, Tarek LaCour, uh, uh, understood my argument, I think, better than a lot of the people responding to it, which I, I think it probably points to me not presenting the argument well.

You said clip two, correct?

Yeah, clip two.

Let's go.

Say that not only in, like, the-

It's just gonna be sad pictures of him

let's say Nicene Christian-

Oh, there we go

tradition, but also the Jewish tradition, the-Muslim tradition and also kind of certain res- versions of the Hindu and Buddhist Eastern tradition.

Um, David Bentley Hart in his book The Experience of God, he talks about this.

They all kind of share a classical view, so it's easier for them, even though they're across religious traditions, to talk about God, 'cause their tradition does kind of converge on that, where the Latter-day Saint tradition is different.

So that might be what they're getting at, too, that, that they're not enunciating it as much as I have here.

Yeah, I, I think that is He's, he's pointing in exactly the right direction.

If you wanna understand this argument, uh, read David Bentley Hart's book, The Experience of God.

Really, like, pages 20 to 30 will cover this.

That he explains that there's two ways that the term God or god, uh, lowercase G, can be used.

Y- so we can talk about the gods as just spiritual beings.

Y- you know, Elohim can refer to angels and, and spirits if you wanna talk about genies or demons or anything like that.

Powerful spiritual beings could exist in the universe, uh, and then from an LDS perspective, you've got the whole other issue of spirit matter, where there What, what do we even mean by spirit?

I'm gonna leave that aside.

You can have powerful spiritual beings in the universe.

You can talk about a god in that sense.

But as he goes on to say, to speak of God properly, and this is in the sense in which Orthodox Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, Baha'i, a lot of ancient paganism and so on uses it, we mean the same thing by God.

We mean, as he puts it, an eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things, and for that reason, absolutely immanent to all things.

Those are the common understandings.

So when we're talking just in general, Hey, do you believe in God?

What we mean is that.

There are other ways you can use the term God, but w- in the particular, w- we might say the philosophical sense, that's what we mean.

There is also I mean, you could say, hey Uh, I guess, let me put it this way.

Can you hear me, Mike?

You're muted.

Sorry about that.

I s- was starting to say, let me put it this way.

Um, let's say you believe there was a, a guy named Jehovah who was friends with Moses, and he, he played a trick on him by speaking to him from the burning bush.

Now, if you said to a believer, Do you believe Jehovah really spoke to Moses from a burning bush?

Both you and that believer might say yes to that question, but you mean such radically different things by it that in one sense, it's like, okay, well, we wouldn't call you atheist just because you think Jehovah talked to Moses.

So what I'm trying to say is, yes, absolutely, there is very clearly a belief in the reality and identity of Jehovah as the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Moses, and, and Joseph, and so on.

What, what I'm suggesting is, what is meant by that doesn't automatically translate to what the rest of the world means by theism.

Is that I mean, I guess, t- two questions for you, Isaac.

I know I gave you a ton to work with again.

Does that distinction make sense, and is that a fair presentation of things?

The distinction does make sense.

Um, uh, whether I don't know whether it's a fair presentation of thing.

I don't know.

I'm not sure what you mean by that in terms of like, is it fair for the LDS position.

I t- I've told you over text since, you know, your pints-

Yeah

video dropped that I'm not, I'm not a fan of this argument.

Yeah.

Um, because I don't think that it It seems like one of those things that could be classified as, like, technically true but not useful in any way.

You know what I mean?

Right.

Um, yeah.

Yeah, I, I think it is useful in one sense, but I actually largely agree with you.

Like, I-

Like, I, I shouldn't say not in any way-

If you're having a discussion with a Mormon, like, don't start with-

but only useful Yeah, yeah.

N- useful in a narrow set, a narrow context, right?

So philosophically, words, words often have a technical meaning in an everyday usage, right?

I think that that's pretty clear, and so even philosophically, there's not a single definition that's accepted for what theism means, right?

Like, there's different schools of thought within the philosophy of religion.

There is a particular classical view that is exactly what you described-

Yeah

where what is meant by theism is a metaphysics b- in which God is the ground of all explanation, right?

That, like, all explanation bottoms out in God, uh, in the metaphysics of theism, whereas atheism is a metaphysics where, um, the explanation bottoms out in something else, right?

There's different species of atheism.

There's materialism, there's non-material atheism, that sort of thing, right?

Uh, non-materialist atheism.

So i- i- that's, that There's, like, this very sort of technical philosophical debate you can have then.

In everyday usage, what people mean If you were to just go and ask You know, go poll 1,000 people, Joe, off the street, and ask them-

Mm-hmm

if Mormons are atheists, and I will get, bet you get 1,000 nos-

Right

and a fal- You know what I mean?

Unless I happen to get, like, Than from Inspiring Philosophy or I know there was a-

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah

um, uh, there's a religious studies journal article called Are Mormons Theists?

from A. Hall-

Yeah

Hall Sepien.

So yeah, but absolutely.

Like, I-

Yeah

I agree with you.

The, the reason I tried to couch it in, in the terms of putting it in philosophy particularly, and I wanna respond to some of the other philosophical critiques that it got, is that if the arguments for God, the classical arguments for God, like the, the five ways, kalam, et cetera, work-A lot of those arguments are going to disprove both an atheist materialist who says matter's always existed and it's not created by anyone they're also gonna disprove Mormonism, which also, as I understand it, teaches that matter always existed and it wasn't created by anyone

Correct

That actually on, on those points an atheist and a Mormon, maybe a, a less controversial way to put it would be on the major points that Christians disagree with atheists, on a lot of those points Mormons line up with the atheist side of the equation on things like-

I think that depends on what, what you classify as the major points, right?

Yes.

I think that's-

Can I quickly interject with a comment?

If you look at, if you look at how Latter-day Saints- Oh yeah, please.

Sorry.

We, we have a, we have a viewer comment here from someone who I think was, uh, in one of the clips-

Yes

that you showed.

Uh, this is LDS Philosophy saying, It's not even technically true.

You showed a clip of Tariq from that video.

Is that Joseph Lowel?

I'm sorry?

It's I think that's Joseph Lowell.

If it's not, let It, it Guess LDS Philosophy, let me know.

Okay.

Sorry, go ahead.

Uh, it says, It's not even technically true.

You showed a clip of Tariq from that video-

Yeah

but none of the sections where I explained in the philosophy of language why the argument doesn't make any sense.

Here.

Yeah.

So, okay.

Real quick.

I-

Real quick.

Before you jump in on that-

Okay

can I just finish my quick thought?

I'll be very quick.

Yeah, please.

Do it.

Just, like, it depends on what you ma- mean by the major points between atheists.

Oh, yeah.

Like, if you were to, like, track the lives, like, look at how Latter-day Saints live versus how atheists live-

Mm

and you were to try to just, like, classify people like that, you would absolutely put them in the theist camp.

Yeah.

Right?

They're praying, they're living-

Right

moral lives, they're striving to repent.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, so-

Yeah

it, it, there's a lot of assumptions baked in if you say something like, Well, you know, the o- if you in the major points they agree with atheists.

I think that that's a pretty loaded, feels like a loaded thing to say to me.

That's, that's fair.

I was saying the major points of dispute, not the major points of, like, how life is lived.

Like, I, I agree with you there.

Yeah.

Like, if you're saying kind of a phenomenological plan of life, the way they're trying to live their life looks much more like the way a creedal Christian is gonna try to live their life.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I, I think that's completely fair.

And maybe the point that I was making takes too many caveats to even be kind of helpful or useful.

I was trying to point out, like, the conception of God difference is not just, Hey, we both believe in this transcendent God, we just understand his properties differently.

That's how a, a lot of people received it.

It's rather that even what ordinary people regardless of religion mean by God from a philosophical sense is, is something that this is actually a point of divergence.

So I wanna respond to, as I understand, Joseph Lowell's, uh, clip.

I actually, clip four, I'm just gonna let him speak for himself.

'Cause my view is right and yours is wrong and we disagree, that doesn't mean we're not talking about the same thing.

Yeah.

And so you just take that same view about Chris- Christopher Columbus, the same thing I just said about water, and you apply that to God.

It doesn't matter if Latter-day Saints are wrong, which we might well be.

Even if we have radically false views about God, given some of the details about the way the word God is used in our community and the historical uses of it, I think it's straightforwardly true that we are still talking about God.

And, and, and notice that if we're not, we're not actually disagreeing with Catholics.

If we're not talking about God, Catholics don't disagree with us about God, 'cause we're not talking about the same thing, right?

Okay.

So I think that's a, a perfectly legitimate critique from, from one perspective, and I actually teed that up in the interview itself, uh, by pointing to Phil-

If I can also add in there-

Yeah

you use a similar idea of the referent in your own video on, uh, the Muslims believe in the same God.

That's right.

I do.

And I, I actually use this same argument about referent in the conversation with Matt Fradd.

Like, there is one sense, and if, if you say there is this character, I'm just gonna I'm using Jehovah instead of God just for clarity's sake.

There's this character called Jehovah in the Bible.

We think he really exists.

We think he, you know, is powerful and he loves us and he has a plan for us.

Mormons and creedal Christians are gonna say, Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, across the board.

We understand his character, properties of him differently, but we, we both believe in him, we just understand him differently.

That's Lowell's argument as I understand it.

I completely agree with that, if you're saying Jehovah in the Bible.

But the problem is that, uh, from the question of is atheism or theism true, again, this is why I tried to give the example of let's say somebody thought Jehovah was just a, a friend of Moses, and so he really does exist, but he's just, like, another guy, and he was pretending to, you know, be the transcendent God of the universe and he was just hiding behind the bush and talking to Moses.

Does that person still believe in Jehovah?

Yeah, in one sense.

Depends on what you mean.

In another important sense, no, they don't think there is a God of the universe, they just think it was Moses' friend tricking him.

That Like, so to say, Well, we're obviously both talking about Jehovah, is, again, true in one sense within the narrative, but it's not true in the deeper sense of do we both believe that there is this God who spoke to Moses?

Like, no.

One of them thinks God spoke to Moses, the other one thinks Moses' friend spokes to, spoke to Moses.

So they actually It's not just a disagreement about, uh, properties of God, it's actually a disagreement about whether it's God or not.

And, and so similarly, if they say, Well, it wasn't Moses' friend, it was an alien.

And, you know, uh, Jehovah put things here on this planet, but it wasn't the transcendent God, it was just an alien from another planet who put things on the planet.

Like, you can find atheists who believe that, right?

Like, you, you can find atheists who believe life on this planet started because aliens populated it from another world.

My argument is the Mormon view looks closer to that, at least the historic Mormon view of, uh, beings from another world, Adam and Eve, uh, or God or whatever, populated the planet.

That looks more like the ancient aliens atheist than it does classical theism.I don't know.

Yeah, I know Isaac, you're, you're gonna wanna-

Yeah

push back on that, so please.

Well, I, I'll This is reminding me a lot I wanna read a verse from scripture, if I may.

Yeah.

Please.

Re- remind them of this, and charge them before the Lord to avoid disputing about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers.

And this reminds me a lot of like, say, the, our, uh, LDS Christians debate, uh, we're now arguing, or Latter-day Saints theists, right?

Um, you end up spending an, an, a, a disproportionate amount of time just arguing about what the proper understanding of a certain term should be, right?

Ri- 'cause, 'cause your critiques about Latter-day Saint theology of God, I think are largely correct, and I would largely share them, right?

When I converted to Catholicism, I went, underwent, um, what I think of as a, as a type of conversion of my view of what it meant to believe in God, right?

Um, but I certainly but, you know, I'll just tell you, it did not at all feel to me like I was going from being an atheist to a theist, right?

Right.

Like, it, it very much felt more like, um, I was receiving more truth, more light, more understanding to expand upon what I already believed.

And so I think that my general view in all these types of discussions is I'm just not that interested in having a huge argument with people about whether or not Latter-day Saints are atheists.

It, it strikes them as farcical on its face.

Right.

It would strike the average person as being farcical on its face, on its face.

Therefore, um, it's inevitably going to just end up getting into these weeds of like, Well, what I mean by atheism, and what I mean by theism, and the philosophical meaning is this, and the Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, I do.

Rather than now we're not really discussing the actual doctrine or what the problems are or why it should be a problem.

I think that's, that's-

Yeah

a completely legitimate pushback from both you and, and from several people who, who saw it.

And I, I take that point.

I actually think, um, there's a comment, The Good Fight, Tony made, 9:59.

He said, Maybe just rephrase, LDS doesn't hold to or teach classical theism.

Like, that's a very uncontroversial way of putting-

Not only is that uncontroversial-

putting things.

They would agree.

Right.

And they, they would agree enthusiastically, right?

Right.

Like, you take, like, some of the comments that Latter-day Saints like Jacob Hansen has said, and they're just very clear.

They're like, We don't believe in a God who is, you know, simple and unchangeable, and immutable, that sort of thing.

Um-

Right.

Actually, I was gonna i- play that in clip five, but you just summarized it really well.

Jacob Hansen-

Yeah.

So-

is really clear.

They're very-

Perfect theism theology is not the, the Mormon view at all.

Correct.

They're totally willing And the, you know, they, they, the ones who know, really know their doctrine don't dispute that they don't share a classical theist worldview.

Right.

So I guess maybe the I should've talked to you about this beforehand.

The, the way I could have avoided that whole controversy is just say, Look, they don't believe in classical theism.

There's good reasons to believe from reason classical theism is true, and, and those arguments aren't just gonna work against an atheist.

They're also gonna work to anyone not holding classical theism, like Mormons.

So-

Yeah.

This If I could ask you a question, Joe.

Yes, please.

'Cause I wa- I talked to you, I wanted to ask you this, and I hope you think we have time for it.

I don't know how long you wanna go.

I can, I can go longer.

I think people are enjoying the episode.

I can go longer too.

So as long as Okay, good.

Um-

I don't have a ton of time.

Okay.

You, if you let, you let us know when we have to jump off.

Okay.

Okay.

Um, one of the things you said in Matt Fradd's interview was I, I wish I'd pulled up the exact quote, but you said something You were talking about they had Latter-day Saints, they have this, they have that, they have this, they have that, and then you said, What they don't have is philosophy, right?

And, um, I want to ask you both to explain what you meant by that-

Yeah

but also to explain what you think the proper role is of philosophy and revelation.

Because for a Latter-day Saint, if they hear something like that, they'll may- they'll probably think to themselves, s- many of them, Yeah, right.

What do we need philosophy for?

We have God's revelation, right?

Like, are you subjecting the revelation of God to your human, fallible philosophy and logic?

You, you say our doctrine can't be true because you've thought about it and decided, but if God says it, isn't it just true?

Shouldn't we, shouldn't our philosophy follow revelation?

Um, okay, that's a really good question.

I would say this: you need philosophy.

Like, everyone I guess, so I guess two things.

You, you asked two parts in the question.

I'm not saying there aren't good, like, faithful Mormons who are also really into philosophy.

Obviously, there are.

Uh, what I mean is that when you have, like, classical theism, particularly Catholicism has a rich and robust philosophical tradition of how we interpret reality and scripture.

And so we can access that tradition, and people are gonna be critical.

It's, it's too indebted to Greek thought or et cetera, et cetera.

That's a, a very common kind of critique.

The There isn't, as I see it, a similarly robust or universal within LDS kind of system of philosophy or interpretation, which is one of the reasons I think you, you get things like, Well, sometimes prophets just get things wrong about God, and that's okay, and when we move on.

And you, you talk to three different LDS about a certain doctrine, and you might hear three different answers of, This is what we believe.

This is an optional view.

Nobody believes that.

And, and you I mean, a lot of the responses come down to things like that.

Like, if you ask how many gods are there, does Heavenly Father have a father, those kinds of questions, from an outsider's perspective, it is, it is mystifying where the theology can feel very individualized, but also basic philosophical things like the principle of non-contradiction.

You wanna just access that and say, Hey, look, they said this in the 19th century.

They're saying this now.

One of those two things has to be false because reality doesn't just change like that.

And, and, um, I mean, obviously things can change over time in terms of, like, a practice.But it can't just be the case that Adam used to be our God and now isn't, or whatever.

Uh, or that the- the curse of Cain was this and now it's not, and so on.

It- it seems like at least so far-

Yeah

you're answering my question by pointing out philosophical problems, but I haven't heard you, like, explain why you could rule out revelation based on philosophy and why that's not putting philosophy first rather than God's revelation first.

Yeah, so there's basic ways that we know that things are true, and so even, like go back to Deuteronomy 18 where if a prophet tells you something is from God and then it's- it's disproved, you don't believe the prophet.

That we are expected to use reason, uh, to take what we're hearing in terms of alleged revelation and make sense of whether it's true or not.

Now, one of the pushbacks I got on this is, Oh, you- you can't use this Deuteronomy 18 example because you don't have prophets anymore.

That was, uh, in, I think that was Word Radio, and that's actually mistaken but in a technical way.

We don't have public revelation.

People still claim things are coming from God, or you pray and- and you think God is telling you to do something.

If it objectively violates Uh, yeah, I'll give you an example.

If God tells you to do something immoral, you're praying and you- you- you get a strong sense like God is telling me to go do this thing that is sinful and wicked.

We would know from reason, from the rest of the way God has revealed himself, that's clearly not the voice of God, and you should reject that.

One of the ways that we rise above the level of subjective experience is by having something objective to hold on to because subjective experience is valuable.

I don't wanna denigrate it, but subjective experience has to be tested.

When we talk about test every spirit, you've gotta test it against something.

It can't just be I have a strong sense of X or I feel personally convicted that Y. There needs to be some kind of reference, and one of the tools God has given us is reason to make sense of these things.

Now, God can reveal things beyond our reason, absolutely, but never against reason.

Like, there's a difference between going beyond what we could know on our own and just making contradictory kind of claims.

And so when we're talking about the theology of God, there's- we believe in what's called natural theology, that in addition to God revealing himself in scripture and through the prophets, he's also spoken to- at the level of every human heart.

This is clearest in places like Romans chapter 1. St. Paul is critical of the Gentiles, pagans, for not believing in God, and he says in Romans 1:19, For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.

Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.

So they are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.

So we're told two things.

One, there's a lot about God and about the properties of God that are knowable from reason.

And two, that is nevertheless difficult because of the burden of sin, which is one of the reasons God reveals even things that are knowable.

Like, the Ten Commandments are all knowable by reason.

Maybe you could quibble about keeping the Sabbath holy.

Everything else is- is clearly knowable by reason.

That's not gonna be, um But nevertheless, God still reveals it.

I don't know.

Does that, does that answer your question, Isaac?

It does.

I, I mean, I think that's a good, I think that's a good answer.

Like, the way I would answer it very briefly would be something like, like what you pointed out.

In scripture, we're told to evaluate prophets.

Jesus tells us to evaluate them by their fruits.

We're told to test the spirits, and in all of these, uh, ways, in a- in all of these things, it requires some kind of reasoning within ourselves, right-

Mm-hmm

uh, to think about what's being presented to us.

And philosophy is just thinking really hard.

Uh, that's my favorite definition of philosophy, by the way.

Philosophy is just thinking about something really hard.

Yeah.

And, um, y- you can be wrong about your philosophy, just as you can judge the fruits incorrectly, but there does I- in order for our human understanding to understand anything, right, we have to have some ways of, of not just receiving information, but reflecting upon the information.

And the scriptures are abundantly clear that it is possible upon reflection to take, um, our subjective experience and reject it based, by preferring something else, like God's previous revelation or, uh, you know, or, or just being asked, being told something that's just obviously untrue to us, because how else could we judge that what a prophet said was not true, right?

Like, if a prophet said, Nineveh will be destroyed, and it wasn't, and then the prophet said, No, it was destroyed, right?

That- that's gonna require some kind of epistemology for me to go back to him and say, It's not, though.

I'm looking at it right now-

Yeah, right

and it's not destroyed, right?

So.

Yeah, I think that that's a good answer, and, and other people in the chat have kinda given some other ones.

Like, if, if you thought you heard a voice from heaven telling you that grass is red, you probably are talking to, like, a colorblind demon.

Yeah.

I'm I'm paraphrasing heavily.

Um, okay, I know that Mike has to jump off in, like, seven minutes-ish, but I'm hoping we can at least very briefly, and I apologize for how brief this is gonna have to be, talk about curse of Cain, because this came up, and I think it's an area where there's some confusion both about the argument and about the history.

So if you could play, Mike, could you play clip seven?

Freaking lie.

Uh, when I say lie, we never believed being Black was a curse, okay?

Well, we believe that there was a, uh, a, like, a curse that was aligned to certain lineage, like the curse of Cain, but the curse of Cain was not barring from the priesthood, and even that, um, uh, is more opinion shared by past, uh, not f- by past Christians.

The ma- uh, like, the ma- curse of Cain is a Christian belief that was very prominent in Joseph Smith's day.

At no point did we believe everyone who had dark skin was cursed, and the fact that he is trying to spout that it i- that we do is a lie, an absolute bloody lie.

Okay.

So again, kinda, kinda crashing out I thought it would be good to at least set the record straight in terms of the history there.

Do you wanna give a brief recap of that or I can, I can just jump into what Brigham Young said?

No, I, I can I'm happy to do it, and I'll read some quotes.

So-

Yeah

there may be a technical sense in which one of the things he said was true, which is that most Latter-day Saints would say that the, uh, historically at least, would say that the, the their doctrine on the skin color change or the curses, you know, the Black skin was the mark of the curse, but the curse itself was something more spiritual, right?

Right.

So the Black skin was In fact, I'll Let me just read you a quote.

Yeah.

Um, this is from a LDS prophet, Joseph Fielding Smith, in a book he published while he, uh, was, I, I don't know if he pu- published it while he was the prophet or one of the apostles, but I think he was the prophet, and he says, Was Cain cursed with a black skin?

Technically, the black skin was not the curse, but the mark of the curse.

The scriptures do not say that Cain was made black, but we read that his descendants were.

We may well suppose that Cain was also black and that this was the mark the Lord placed upon him.

So if you wanna make a distinguishing, uh, like, a distinction between the curse a- and the mark But let me back up.

I'm, I'm sorry.

I jumped right into that.

You asked me to explain the history.

A- after the LDS, after the Latter-day Saints arrived in Utah, Brigham Young announced a church policy that, uh, people of African in descent could not hold the priesthood or enter LDS temples.

And he explained very explicitly the reason that he, for this policy was because they bore a curse, a cursed lineage, which I can't remember.

His name was Shaw.

What was that guy's name?

Shad.

Shad.

Sha- Shad mentioned, like, Oh, we believe in cursed lineages.

Well, uh, the, the church used to very strongly believe that those bearing African descent ho- those who are of African descent bear a cursed lineage-

Mm-hmm

that was cursed by God, and that meant that they could not hold the priesthood nor could they enter the temples.

Um-

Yeah

go ahead.

Yeah.

So I think, right.

So Black in the sense of African lineage, not just anyone with dark skin.

Correct.

That's what-

This was very particularly people of African-

Right

descent.

Um, Brigham Young said in, uh, Journal of Discourses, Volume 10, Discourse 25, Persecution of the Saints, et cetera, uh, preached in the Tabernacle 1863, he, uh, there's a couple quotes I wanna give very quickly.

He says, Should I, should I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race?

If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty under the law of God is death on the spot.

This will always be so.

The nations of the earth have transgressed every law that God has given.

They have changed the ordinances and broken every covenant made with the fathers, and they're like a hungry man that dreameth that he eateth, and he awaketh, and behold, he is empty.

So he was very clear that forever, um, the law of God, according to this alleged prophet, was against m- intermarriage with anyone of African descent and a white man belonging to the chosen seed because of this seed of Cain.

Uh, he also said in an 1859, uh, discourse, he, as you say, he talks of the mark of the curse.

He said, Cain slew his brother.

Cain might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings.

This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is a flat nose and black skin.

Trace mankind down to after the flood, and then another curse is pronounced upon the same race, that they should be the servant of servants.

And they will be until that curse is removed.

And the abolitionist cannot help it, nor in the least alter that decree.

How long is that race to endure the dreadful curse that is upon them?

That curse will remain upon them, and they never can hold the priesthood or share in it until all other descendants of Adam have received the promises and enjoyed the blessings of the priesthood and the keys thereof.

Until the last ones of the residue of Adam's children are brought up to that favorable position, the children of Cain cannot receive the first ordinances of the priesthood.

Is that contradicted by official declaration too, or is that just the fulfillment of what Young said?

Well, let me, let me read Can I read one more quote?

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

'Cause I think, like, you read a few from the very early church-

Yeah

period.

From about 100 years later in 1949, the first presidency, so this is the highest governing body of the church, the president prophet of the church, plus his two counselors who are also president prophets, uh, according to LDS belief, um, they issued this, uh, first presidency statement that says, The attitude of the church with reference to the Negroes, that's their terminology-

Yeah

uh, the attitude of the church with reference remains as it has always stood.

It is not a matter of a declaration of a policy, but of direct commandment from the Lord, on which is founded the doctrine of the church from the days of its organization to the effect that Negroes may become members of the church, but they are not entitled to the priesthood at the present time.

The prophets of the Lord have made several statements as to the operation of this principle.

President Brigham Young said, so now they're quoting Brigham Young, 'Why are so many of the inhabitants of the earth cursed with a skin of blackness?

So here, there, he directly mentions the skin as a curse.

It comes in consequence of their fathers rejecting the power of the holy priesthood and the law of God.

They will go down to death, and when all the rest of the children have received their blessings in the holy priesthood, then that curse will be removed from the seed of Cain and receive all the blessings we are entitled to.

So a few things I just wanna point out there.

Um, so in 1978, the church ended the policy of no longer allowing, uh, those of African descent to hold the priesthood.

And the church today s- explicitly says that while they used to restrict, uh, people from holding the priesthood and while past church leaders-Gave reasons f- for why.

They, you know, past-

Yeah

church leaders were not shy about giving reasons why, as we just read in those quotes, right?

Yeah.

They explicitly denounce or disavow, I think is their word, um, all of those theories.

So it is no longer the LDS Church belief today that the reason that they were restricted from holding the priesthood and entering the temple was because they were descended from Cain or that they were accursed, et cetera.

I would say at this point there's not an official church belief as to the why.

Um, some believe it was just a mistake, right?

I think that's becoming more and more common.

It's clear that the policy did not originate with Joseph Smith, but originated with Brigham Young.

And so-

That's a point Carden made, and I wanna actually-

Yeah

shout that out 'cause, you know, they, but this, from our perspective, I think actually makes the problem worse.

Like, Carden, this is, if you watch-

Yeah

the word radio response, we don't have time for the clip now, like 46, 47 minutes in, Carden says like, Yeah, there is a switcheroo, but Joseph Smith originally baptized Black freedmen, and so, you know, they were invited into the priesthood.

And ordained some of them to the priesthood.

Right, and then that gets reversed by Brigham Young, who it seems like is just, like way more racist than Smith was.

And then that gets-

Definitely true

switched back in the 20th century.

Yeah.

So we would say, look, Joseph Smith was better than Young.

The policy ends up in a better place.

The point here isn't, Hey, you guys used to do some racist stuff.

You can find plenty of racist Christians in history.

The point there is you defended these racist attitudes by making false claims about God, and that seems like a bigger problem from the perspective of, of someone claiming to be a prophet.

Right.

Shad, Shad said in his clip, Well, uh, they got this from other Christians, right?

Like, they didn't come up with the idea that Black people were cursed from Cain or Ham or wherever you believe the curse comes from.

That's true.

There w- they, they did kind of absorb this idea from the broader They, there was an LDS spin on it, but they did absorb the idea.

But the point is that if, if someone's claiming to be a prophet and speak for God, it's a strange defense at least to sort of say, Yeah, yeah, they're a prophet, they speak for God, but they just sort of imbibed this evil, racist- uh, uh, teaching that they around and then taught it as though it was doctrine from God for 120 years.

Yeah, exactly.

So the point is not someone from the 19th century was racist.

That's not a shocking point.

You can find that cross-denominationally.

That's not it at all.

The point is, these are people who are listening to the racism of their age and claiming it's coming from God.

And if once you say that about the prophet, that yeah, sometimes they lie or get things wrong about God and claim it's coming from God when it's not, that changes what we under- at least from a non-LDS perspective, that would usually just be disqualifying of like, okay-

And-

then clearly you're, you're not a real prophet.

I know we have to stop.

Yeah.

So this will be my last comment-

Okay

and I'll be quiet after this.

And then we'll, we'll close it out.

Um, 'cause I wanna end with like an olive branch to-

Mm-hmm

Latter-day Saints on this topic.

You can go back and see times when popes have spoken and it, and, uh, it, have parroted the wisdom of their own age.

Yeah.

Um, even sometimes saying things that we would disagree with now, and we'd say, That's not right.

They're just saying what people generally thought back then.

So I, I don't want to claim that, uh W- what I, what I'm going to say is that this has required us as Catholics to work out and understand and develop the doctrine of the papacy to understand better and have a system to understand better when the pope is speaking doctrine that we should believe, must believe, doctrine that's true, and when he might be saying things that just are, um, the wisdom of his own age.

Do you know what I mean?

Sort of reflecting the times he's speaking from.

Yeah.

We, we, I mean, we've said we've got objective criteria where it isn't just, do we agree-

Yeah, yeah

with it or not.

But there, there are ways that, you know-

We, we have had to develop that criteria over time.

Sure.

Like, it wasn't obvious what those criteria were necessarily in the year 400 or something like that.

I mean, even Saint Peter, we would s- you know, uh, uh, the ordinary Christian reception is First and Second Peter are divinely inspired.

Peter's sinful actions, whether it's denying Christ or treating-

Right

Gentiles as second-class Christians, you know, in Galatians 2-

Yeah

those ac- we, we can draw clear distinctions between those things.

Yeah.

But those lines do need to be drawn.

Yeah.

So anyone who's hearing this as there were moral failings of the prophets, therefore LDS false, that's not the argument.

The moral failings are expected.

We get it.

We appreciate that.

That's not disqualifying.

The deeper problem is if they're teaching false doctrine as, uh, in, in this capacity as prophets, it is a much more specific kind of critique.

Yeah.

Isaac-

It's, yeah

I really appreciate you being on.

I really appreciate you doing this.

I would love to go longer, but Mike is ruining everyone's day, and so.

No, in all seriousness, Mike, thank you so much for, for doing everything behind the scenes.

I know it's a lot harder than it looks.

And thank you to everybody who chimed in.

Thank you to all the LDS and everyone who responded, and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to cover maybe more of the, uh, responses, critiques, uh, and so on.

And happy to-

Maybe it might be worth doing a part two in, in the near future?

I'm, if people are interested in it, I'd, I'd be open to it for sure.

If, uh, if, if Isaac wants to come back.

I'm open if people are interested.

Yeah.

I'd, I'd say I'm not gonna force it.

If people are saying this is kind of run its course, we, we get what you mean now, uh, or whatever, great.

If, if people want more, happy to do it.

All right.

Thank you, everybody.

You have a-

Yeah

fantastic day, and God bless.

Yeah.

For Shameless Popery, Joe Heschmeyer.

Thank you, Isaac.

God bless you.